Mewgenics, House of Necrosis, Absolum | Noclip Crewcast

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Hello, friends.

Welcome to episode 248 of the Noclip podcast.

Coming at you live.

Do I sound okay?

Do I sound okay, guys?

Do I sound good?

You sound like you're in a hotel.

Yeah well, that's the thing.

If you're watching this on beautiful youtube, then you are wondering where am i?

I mean, this is coming at you live from the beautiful hilton it's sweets or something in san rafael a hotel i'm not in.

I'm not in um australia, yet i will be by the time this podcast goes up, or at least i'll be flying there um uh, the xfinity just texted my wife last night and we're like your internet's gonna be down tomorrow, which is podcast day in my household and in yours is too, I guess.

So yeah, I'm in a hotel like 20 minutes from my house so I can use the internet.

So it's great.

It's a good time.

Sponsored by Hilton.

I wish.

It was 100 bucks for a day pass.

This is like a thing you can do.

If you want to just like hang out at a pool at a local hotel, you can get like a resort pass, day pass thing um, which i did not know about.

My wife was like, why don't you just get a hotel?

I was like yeah, but the problem is i couldn't book a hotel last night because then they kick you out, you know, at 11 and we record this at 10, and then but i was like that'd be good for shift f1, because i record that at 7 in the.

So I was like, do I have to book a hotel for two days to have access for it for this four-hour window?

Because we're also recording our Noclip 2 patron-exclusive podcast later today.

Oh sorry, we're recording our Noclip Prime, Noclip 1 patron-exclusive podcast later today, right after this, which is, of course, a review of Final Fantasy, The Spirits Within, the greatest movie of all time.

Can't wait to talk to you guys about that later.

Um, so yeah, anyway, I'm in this room.

I've just realized how hot it is in this room.

I have the air conditioning off.

But as long as the soundproofing is feels good, then they were in a happy place.

Every time I've ever gone to a hotel for work with all my camera gear, there's at least one person on the hotel staff who jokes that I'm making pornography in the hotel room.

I wonder what the, what the impression is when you walk in with a giant microphone arm and a microphone and a mixer.

I really tried to hide the the mic arm.

This is the big everything.

It's just laptop and mic arm, basically.

But yeah, I did.

Yeah, I don't know.

I don't know.

Post COVID, I feel like we've the world has been sort of we've normalized.

Everyone has a podcast now.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, true.

You know, our parents have podcasts now.

Our, our, our kids have podcasts.

It's just.

It's the way you just get your social security number and you get your fucking iTunes media login and that's it.

Yeah.

That's child support.

Now they just give you a blue Yeti.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

They say, yeah, go make some content.

Send your kid out to the content farms.

Dear Lord.

Frank Howley, how you doing, my friend?

If you had to send your children out to the content farm, what type of content would you like them to make to bring home?

Joshi Pro Wrestling.

There was a new music video that dropped today and Starlight Kid is featured in it from some pop star I've never heard of, but this is a big, big win for us today.

More people are finding out.

Ash Nico put a new music video out called Smoochie Girl, and Starlight Kid is featured, and they shot it at Shinkiba First Ring.

So I've already I've yeah, I've researched how to shoot stuff at that location.

It's like less than less than like maybe like a thousand dollars for a day shoot.

You can rent the ring and everything.

So nice.

Yeah.

So people are encroaching on it and they might blow up the spot, but it is still cool to see.

That's amazing to see.

I was trying to see if there was a way I could get my daughter to watch like there's.

There's no easy way to get her to expose her to Joshi pro wrestling.

Cause there was like somebody was on Twitter or blue sky or something was chatting about um, that there was like a book signing happening, with a bunch of or not book signing, a book readings, that a bunch of Joshi Po wrestlers were going to like libraries and going to be reading books and stuff to kids.

I was like, that'd be cool because you walked in on me watching like WWE one time.

I think it was WrestleMania.

And she was like, what is this?

I was like, oh, shit, maybe she could get into it.

But I guess it's tough with the language barrier, to say nothing of the cultural barrier, for this little six year old.

What do you think, Frank?

Any tips?

No, I mean, I was going to say like honestly TJPW, our stardom.

They throw a lot of stuff on YouTube.

And that's the fun thing about wrestling is like it's a universal language.

There is the language doesn't matter.

People are just doing moves and stunts like that.

Eddie Guerrero when he was working in New Japan for wrestling.

He grew up like wrestling in Texas but also doing shows in like Tijuana.

But he called the language locker room like locker room language, or locker room Japanese, locker room English, where it's like Oh, it's like chokehold, like it's universal.

So I don't know, things like that.

So but no, Stardom does stream their live shows on YouTube.

So if you go to Stardom, click the live tab, you can see all their Cork and Hall shows.

TJPW is the.

Is the promotion that's going to be doing a.

There's two things they're doing at this bookstore.

One is going to be reading storybooks to audiences.

I am at, I don't know, like, I feel like most hardcore Joshi wrestling fans don't have children.

It's why they get latched into this is so they can support the idol culture.

They might have kids also there too.

So first they're going to read the storybooks and then they're going to do a wrestling match in the bookstore.

Oh, you're kidding.

Yeah.

So that's Tokyo Joshi pro wrestling.

I think that's in November.

Um, they've also done.

Where is this?

It's somewhere—it's in Tokyo, so it's—yeah, yeah.

But they've also done matches on speeding trains, like on the Shinkansen.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, so TJPW is, like, notorious for doing, like, fun gimmick matches.

But they do tour, and they will be in Vegas again next WrestleMania weekend.

So, yeah, you have a chance to see them.

Where else should they do it?

What are other like— japanese culture, a submarine, a submarine okay, do you want?

That's actually underwater, submerged in water.

Um, in space station?

Yeah, zero gravity would be off the turnbuckle, but you never come down.

Like you do, like the people's elbow or whatever, but you just never land.

You do the infinite swanton bomb, you just that'll be a frog splash.

It never ends.

I love it.

That sounds great, jeremy.

What's your favorite wrestling move of all time?

Oh, I don't know that much about wrestling.

I would say anytime someone's older brother throws them off of the arm of a couch like it's a turnbuckle.

That's my favorite wrestling move.

Hey, you know what the word turnbuckle is?

I feel like there's a, there's a couple of like words that the WWF gave us when we were growing up that we otherwise could have lived long and prosperous lives without.

It hasn't come up a lot.

Hasn't earned me a lot of points in other spheres of life.

Yeah, I'm trying to think what other ones.

Jesse, any wrestling terminology you've always wanted to know about?

This is, by the way, a video game podcast, everyone.

Yeah, we shift to wrestling every once in a while.

Shift F1 is the racing one.

Right.

Sorry.

My bad.

We turn buckle into wrestling every once in a while.

Yeah, I grew up growing up.

I watched some wrestling and I remember thinking the tombstone was the coolest thing you could do.

Because how do you come back from that?

That's that's broken neck.

And then people kept coming back.

Sometimes that was the only thing I can remember, really, from wrestling.

I did watch Lucha Libre one time that we were in London Ontario, and there was a Mexican food festival.

Warframe's digital festival.

Digital Extremes.

Yeah, Digital Extremes and also apparently an annual Lucha Libre wrestling event.

We just were there because there was a market that we like going to that had, like apple pastries.

And we walked outside and there were these guys in Lucha outfits and they were just – they were throwing down.

It was a real event, man.

We got some horchata and some chicharron and there's just like – was it body slamming each other?

It was outdoors, yeah.

Yeah, they were like it was the middle of summer so there were hornets everywhere.

It was the worst, but uh, it was still a good time.

Like you see, these wrestlers are really getting into it.

Man, they were like slapping their chests and i was like i think i get where frank's coming from now i might have to get into lucha libre.

That might be my thing.

You got your japanese wrestling.

I'll watch mexican wrestling.

I could see the hornets being like a uh, you know how, like wrestling, they'll like break lights on each other like flashing bulbs.

Yeah, i could see a dude like a handful of hornets, like putting them on his chest As a booze.

Instead of tables, ladders and chairs, we're going to do Canadians, Hornets and I don't even know what else is.

I don't know.

Jean Jackets.

Yeah, there we go.

We were in London Ontario, in the winter, so I've only ever seen the snowy, cold version of that place.

It's nice.

You should come back for the summer.

It's because all the kids are off.

Well, you just said it's fucking Hornets are everywhere, so I don't know.

Well, that's all right.

As long as there's not a bunch of poured horchata on the ground, you should be okay.

Well, more likely than not, if I'm somewhere, there's some horchata poured somewhere.

I'll be honest.

Everywhere you go is sticky, Danny.

What's up with that?

No, it's terrible.

This hotel room is going to be a fucking disaster once I get out of here.

It is cool to know that you can rent hotel rooms for a couple of hours during the day without a prostitute.

You know what I mean?

I thought that was just traditionally the only circumstance where you're allowed to do this.

And it was, you know, usually like a Motel 6 or something.

Not like a big...

I'm in a huge, it is a huge room.

I don't know.

I think they only have big rooms in this place.

It's like, I think it's a hundred percent empty at this hotel.

There's like no one at that park.

So this is like a regular room you're in that you could sleep in right now.

Yeah.

There's a bed behind me.

You see the bed?

Okay.

No, I'm not in like a conference room.

No.

See, that's what I was thinking you would be in.

It's like you got this day pass and you could just be in like a conference room or something, but you're in a real room.

The conference rooms cost, costed more.

It was like 250 for them.

And they were like, Oh, we have like, Fucking 10 seats.

And I'm like, great.

Do you have a toilet I can use?

Or, you know, tiny, tiny glasses I can.

Do you have a room that probably has good audio?

And I'm like, no, conference room is going to be awful and it's going to cost more.

I might take a nap, you know?

Hey, why not?

You got the day pass.

Do what you want.

Just hang out.

The idea of, like, leaving your family and being like, I'm going out.

They're like, where does he go?

And you're just wrecking a day pass at a hotel.

Sick naps.

Going to a hotel.

Is he, like, shooting heroin, like, under a bridge somewhere?

You're just, like, taking the best nap of your life for $100.

Oh, man.

Like, I feel like traditionally Noclip is a crew.

Like, we have...

We are often staying in hotels in weird places for weird reasons.

So, like I'm sort of used to this, but staying in a hotel, like off a highway, you drive past all the time just for like four hours during the day.

It does feel a bit like I'm committing a crime or, like, doing something devious.

Like, what does everyone else think I'm doing?

I didn't turn up with, like, you know, swimming shorts for the indoor swimming pool they have here.

You know, restaurants are open.

What audio does he need to record that he can't record at home?

What sort of black market audio book?

I had to squeeze it into the conversation that the reason why I was here is because the internet was out.

You know what I mean?

You had to squeeze it in?

Yeah.

Maybe I did it too.

Maybe I forced it.

I forced it in.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

That'll do it.

Speaking of forcing things in, shout out to our Battle Pass holders.

Lovepreet.

Yush.

Tiny Tal.

Dwayne the Rock Lobster.

Anthony Thomas.

Nico Passateri.

It's a me, Ferrario.

Senator Armstrong.

He turned into a vampire there.

It's a me, Ferrario.

I'm here to drink your blood.

Senator Armstrong.

Reed Reg.

Harry Flanagan.

Joosh.

Arno.

Matt Pearson.

James Brown.

Mark Rojas.

Quote.

Tucker Morgan.

David McGarry.

Thank you all so much.

And thank you to anyone else who signed up in the past week.

48 hours to who I did not get yet, because the internet was out and now I'm stuck in a hotel and I can't log into my Patreon for some reasons.

Thank you all so much for supporting our work.

You're the best.

I think it's a funny week this week.

I can't tell.

I was sick for a lot of the weekend, so I didn't get to play all that much that I can talk about.

You guys have played some cool stuff.

House of Necrosis, I'm definitely interested to hear about from Jeremy.

Is that out now?

It came out yesterday, I believe.

Yesterday, okay.

At time of recording.

It's also like pre next fest week and we have access to a bunch of demos and obviously there are a bunch of demos kind of up already.

So i think we're going through some of those.

We're probably.

Some of those games are not ones that we're quite yet ready to talk about.

We're also going to be doing a next fest video on noclip2 yada, yada yada.

So we're in a bit of a uh, a sort of mid midweek this week.

I'm going to talk a little bit about Mugenics at some stage as well, because we put that video up on Noclip too.

Jesse's got a bunch of games too and Frank, you actually played the new Final Fantasy Tactics and that new Sonic Racing game finally.

So we'll talk about that and some other madness.

Jeremy, let's start with House of Necrosis, because I've got the feeling from you that it's pretty good because you wrote in brackets in this document.

It's incredible.

So without spoiling how you feel about the game, tell us what it is.

What is House of Necrosis and why did you feel the need to put that very subtle note in the document?

Because I needed it to be early in the episode so that it would end up in the thumbnail and the title.

Grace, call.

You nailed it.

I'm just psychologically engineering the podcast from the back end.

House of Necrosis.

This is a mystery dungeon that is themed like a retro survival horror game.

It is a Resident Evil mystery dungeon.

It's sort of the reductive version of it.

It's very clearly wearing its influences on its sleeve.

It feels directly influenced by resident evil.

Um, the hub world is sort of like a spencer mansion off-brand spencer mansion um, but it's got like.

It feels more like uh, it feels like a golden age squaresoft game in a lot of ways.

It's a lot of sort of like subtle things that accrue to make that feeling.

It's ui, it's sound design, it's systems design.

Um, i often feel like i'm playing parasite eve more than i'm playing resident evil in some weird way, But uh, so I'm not super familiar with the mystery dungeon genre.

So some of the things I'm going to talk about are probably things that if people have played a lot of mystery dungeon games, they're gonna be like yeah, that's just like what these games are.

Well, I don't think I've even heard of the term mystery dungeon.

So mystery dungeon games are sort of like, I think they're typically procedurally generated levels.

And I think they're typically like a sort of rogue light structure.

Um, but you're going into descending levels of a dungeon and uh and sort of just like exploring and gathering gear and defeating enemies.

Um, there's like a.

I think it's like Chiron the wanderer, one of.

Uh, there's that.

There's like the Pokemon mystery dungeon.

There is the side game and air geese, the fighting game, I believe has a mystery dungeon mode in it.

Um, So this is an incredibly like well-trod popular genre that I've just never gotten into.

Uh, who would have thought that, making one that looks like a retro survival horror game, you're such a mark in the door.

They just had to put a little sugar in the medicine for me.

Um, but uh yeah, so this is uh.

I played the demo for this a while ago and then work is the developer.

Um, sent me a code the other day and thanked me for covering it.

Uh, I just wanted to say that I got a code early for this.

I've been playing a lot of this, even though it just came out yesterday.

And, uh, I absolutely adore it.

So what you do is you go from the there's a hub world where you can store gear.

This kind of functions like an extraction shooter.

You can take gear in on a run, but if you die, it's just fucking gone.

So unless you beat the game or extract with like a I think it's called a rescue crystal, you just lose everything.

And it's like I don't.

I don't really like extraction shooters because I hate the feeling of losing like my favorite pair of shoes.

Like it sucks so much.

But there's something about it that is way more palatable to me in this context, because it's not like because it's turn based and I'll talk more about the gameplay in a second but because it's turn based and because I'm not playing against other people, it feels like I have control of most of the factors.

I can pop the rescue crystal and then it takes three turns to extract.

And I can always kind of like roughly anticipate if three turns in the future, I'm going to be dead or not.

The the roughly is important there because you know you run into trouble and you're like holy shit, I like backed into a corner and now I'm dead and I lost my favorite shoes.

But but anyway, I just it works better for my brain in this context.

But so the way the game works is basically you go into the dungeon and it is a a series of rooms that are procedurally generated that you're.

It's basically like grid based.

You're moving one grid square at a time.

And when you move everything else on the map moves.

So nothing progresses unless you are acting.

And all of the enemies have different sort of patterns.

So, you know, like there are some that'll just move towards you every time you move.

If you're within range of them there are some like the zombies will move towards you, but sometimes they'll like stagger a step and wait behind.

And so it's kind of like you're not only exploring and getting gear and progressing through the dungeon, but you're also sort of like learning all of the rules of the world.

So like zombies, I mentioned, for example, will follow you.

But sometimes they'll like if they're staggered forward, they're not going to follow you.

So you can take a step backwards.

They won't be directly following you.

So you could take a step back, shoot them, then they'll move.

And it's learning all of these rules together.

That allows you to look at the game board and kind of like read the play in a room, and that's what i really enjoy about this is that it's like initially i felt very overwhelmed because i don't know the genre that well and i you know, like i said, extraction shooter, like the stakes are very, very high here.

I just felt like i was gonna run in and like constantly lose all my rare loot that i got, um.

But then you start like And yeah, is is the combat?

Like, are you, is it?

Because some of this sounds like like a turn based strategy game?

You know what I mean.

Or you know you have.

Is that kind of how it works, or is it more you move, they move, and then you're like, are you casting spells that go far?

Are you shooting that?

Like, how does all that sort of work?

Yeah.

So, um, one like move, let's say like one move is one turn.

One attack is also one turn.

So you get, like everyone progresses one turn at a time and your turn can either be a moving a single square or um, you get spells to cast which have a very nice like final fantasy seven uh, animation that plays, which is hilarious.

Um, uh, or like shooting or swinging a melee weapon.

These, these things all consume one turn.

Um.

So it's sort of about like reading the play and understanding, like creating the safest possible space to attack, but also knowing that, like in a crowded room, if there's, you know, two spiders and a zombie around you and they're all crowded around you that you probably aren't going to be able to get to a position where you take zero damage.

So it's often about like mitigating damage.

It's often about knowing that there will be healing items later and that you have enough health to sort of like tank a few hits to make an advantageous play now or something.

Um, But it's really good and it's got like the.

I think the RPG systems in it are what make it work so well.

I like.

There's a leveling system for the player that increases your stats, but there's also a leveling system for gear.

So if you take the same rifle in over and over and over, it'll become the sticky rifle plus five or something.

And the modifiers on these weapons are also really interesting, too.

I kind of have a distaste for when games do modifiers on gear, but they're like just like plus two strength.

Like, I think it's kind of an uninteresting... I mean, you know... 5% headshot damage increase.

It's always like the most marginal bullshit sometimes of these RPGs, but in this it's like like things that really drastically change your play style.

So I found a jacket early on that doubles incoming and outgoing damage.

And it was awesome.

And like, not only does it like speed up the rate of play, but also because you can one shot a bunch of enemies.

Now it completely changed my strategy around everything.

So now I'm like terrified to lose the double damage jacket, uh.

But but then once i got later into a run having double damage towards me where i had to tank more hits that i just ran into like a big tree enemy that would just do half of my health with a single hit um, but yeah, so anyway, this is, it's got like it.

It it's funny that it's themed like a survival horror game, because it it's That's sort of just like the aesthetic layer on top of everything, because underneath this is instead a very rich sort of like systems driven mystery dungeon RPG game.

I like kind of forgot I was playing a survival horror themed game after a while.

I just was like driven by these systems and stuff and constantly looping and filling my storage box with weird blue rifles.

So I think that's you're probably right.

Like I was thinking this is probably just what playing a mystery dungeon is like.

It is a little bit tense and stressful.

But, like you described the gameplay moment of like trying to avoid combat, tanking a couple of hits and getting out of the way.

When you described this, probably a year ago, I think you talked about House of Necrosis, maybe two years now.

I was confused because I feel like survival horror, especially Resident Evil, doesn't lean too hard on combat.

Like the way I play those games anyway is like trying to minimize how much combat you can do so you have your resources and you're not worried about things, or like accidentally getting into fights and losing a bunch of health.

But it sounds like this is actually because of the genre that it's in.

It's still capturing that feeling of like trying to resource, manage but turning it into a turn based thing instead of a you know live, dodging the zombies, getting out of the way of the crimson heads and all that.

Is that still?

Does that hold true, or does that sort of go away with the builds that you get over time?

Yeah, no, I think that's largely true.

The ammunition is relatively scarce as well.

So when you find ammo, you really want to save it for... There are bosses in this game.

And so if you can one-shot a spider, you don't want to waste a bullet on it.

You want to save all your bullets for a giant dude who does 6,000 damage per hit.

But yeah, I would say...

In some regards it's similar.

In that you're, it's like the resource management stuff is very survival horror.

But in terms of like you're not usually running by enemies and then just kind of like ignoring them, because then they'll all like Scooby Doo into a hallway behind you.

And now you have like six thousand zombies in the room with you.

And the, the AI will like corner you.

So if you back into a corner they'll shuffle around, they'll form like a barrier around you and then you have to fight your way out and it just gets fucking.

It's like water.

They like follow you and will fill the space around you.

Yeah yeah, exactly.

Can i ask about the, about the um guess, like we call it meta progression, but like like the, the run to run progression.

Like what are you?

Because you said like you lose everything if you don't either complete it or if you get out.

So have you completed what, like it?

Does complete mean complete the game and what would be like, what would be the?

Is getting out of a run something that you sort of strategically want to do sometimes, or is it sort of like oh i'm, i'm gonna die anyway, so i might as well just get out of here with some stuff?

Like how does that sort of work?

Yeah, it's um, so i have not completed a run.

Uh, there there are basically like like many roguelikes, there are sort of biomes um, and then at some point there i i won't spoil the way it functions, but you know how often roguelikes will have uh, you'll get to like the tunnel biome.

Yeah, there's like an elevator man and you're like okay, now i can start at the third biome.

They've got a thing like that basically okay cool awesome, Which is?

It's very clever, especially in a game like this.

That is so sort of It has roguelite elements.

You can upgrade your inventory and have more spaces progressively, but largely the only real roguelite element is that you're going in with better gear, which is completely.

You can just lose that on any given run.

So I felt like when I unlocked the warp mechanic, I...

I've only used it once to kind of just explore that new biome.

But I went in with shitty gear because I did not anticipate that going in with sort of like middling you know greens and one blue would get me far enough that I would be able to reliably extract again.

So you're like building momentum.

I feel like I'm not going to be using the elevator system until I'm, like you know, got some pretty crazy gear in my storage.

Yeah, I also haven't checked, because you do level up and get more health and stuff as you're killing enemies.

And I haven't checked if I went at the one run I did where I took the warp.

I didn't check if it started me at level one, but I assume it does, which I anticipate you'd need even like better gear to survive with, you know, starting stats in the new biome or whatever.

But yeah, so it's very sort of like.

You know it's what you'd expect from roguelike structure, but I there's something about it that just feels like a weird sort of like.

Uh, I don't know.

Tactics RPG is the wrong word.

Have you played gloom Haven?

Oh, like the board game.

There is, it is a board game, but there's also a very good video game adaptation.

Oh, okay.

I've played the board game version of it.

Yeah, this that is more of a tactics RPG than this, but this reminded me at times of sort of like a one character gloom Haven uh, Jason game.

Okay.

Um, Again, this might just be everyone who has played a thousand mystery dungeons.

All the Sheeran the Wanderer fans are like, you idiot.

We've been doing this for decades.

You're just describing the genre.

Yeah.

It's like if I heard a metal song for the first time.

I'm like, and sometimes like the kick drum does, like this crazy thing.

Like yeah, that's like every metal song does.

That, isn't it like?

Isn't it lovely though that, like we you know four sickos who have been playing games for our entire adult lives can still stumble into a subgenre that we feel like we don't really understand.

Like that's, it's something really cool about games.

You know what I mean?

There's just so much of this stuff in here that yeah, like it's it's, I think that's pretty neat.

Yeah, I felt the same way when I played Void Stranger, because I hadn't played that many Sokoban games and so all of a sudden, it was.

You know, all these sort of like.

I'm sure there were elements of Void Stranger, despite the fact that it's such a unique game that people who are Sokoban fiends were like ah, this old chestnut.

Like, I've seen this type of Sokoban puzzle before.

But for me, it was just like, oh, this is a completely new genre experience.

Yeah, it's pretty cool.

House of Necrosis, then.

We're going to do an indie recommendation video, presumably, for this one?

Yes, yeah, definitely.

Okay, cool.

So yeah, if anyone wants to check that out or learn a little bit more about head over to uh and noclip2.

Later, or presumably by the time this is up, that will also, um be up.

Any final thoughts on it?

Jeremy, do you have a price on all that stuff?

I can't open steam on this hotel internet.

It just completely kills the call.

So i'm gonna rely on you guys for that stuff.

Check the price.

It is 1199 currently.

It is 10 off until october 13th, so it's 1079 us dollars.

Controller, ms and keyboard I have played with.

I think I played the demo exclusively with controller and I played this version exclusively on my mouse and keyboard, and both have been fine.

Yeah, it's a.

This is a great game for like it's if you're You know how, there's like games where you want to play when you're full of energy and it's like your day off and you're like, I want like a fulfilling experience.

And then there's games where you're like, I'm too tired to do anything meaningful.

I feel like this is a game that I could play when I'm exhausted after work and still have like a meaningful experience.

It feels like it's very easy to play.

You can pause at any time.

You can just like sit back in your chair and slump and leave it for 30 minutes and and just kind of like resume.

So I don't know.

It's very easy to play, but it has a lot of depth to it.

Excellent.

Decent price as well.

Sounds like it.

House of Necrosis.

Available now.

I'm going to talk about briefly about a game.

That is not available and will not be available until February of 2026.

Why are you going to tease us like this?

I know.

We just put up a 35-minute preview of Mugenics over on Noclip2, featuring Tyler Glale and Edmund McMillan.

Interviews with the two of them. i have basically and the reason why i'm not going to talk too much about that i want to talk a little bit about it uh you know most of what i have to say i guess is in the preview um i'm being weird about this because obviously i uh edmund gave me access to like basically the final build of the game like as it was in development uh like their their dev build basically uh like three months ago so i've played a lot of me gen x and I've played a lot more that's in the video which you know I don't want to spoil stuff and all that sort of thing and I also don't want to just give you a review of Mugenics now four months before the game comes out that doesn't seem appropriate but since we put the video up I thought it would be cool to talk about it a little bit have you guys had a chance to watch the video yet because I know we just published it like maybe it was only an hour ago I think so probably not no I haven't seen it yet no I watched a little bit of it it was awesome you did a really good job um yeah so it was let me just give you the skivvy then so actually here's the question how much do you know about eugenics when i say the word eugenics what does that does that conjure up anything to you aside from your love there you go i know a decent bit about it it's a uh strategy rpg roguelike grid-based turn-based uh building a team of cats that you are uh genetically engineering breeding oh genix that's what it is Yeah.

So, so this is from, uh, you know, this was originally a team meat project.

So Tommy Raffinez and Edmund McMillan, when they made super meat boy um, this was a project that they wanted to work on.

Then it sort of got an, it got an announcement trailer like 13 years ago.

Um, and has since got, obviously Ed left team meat, um, has done his own thing.

He took the IP with him uh, when he left uh, And then he was tinkering on it for a while and there was lots of different versions of it.

But the version that he's been working on now with Tyler Glale, who he worked on a bunch of stuff like The End is Nigh with and games going back as far as Ether back on Newgrounds.

It's one that they've been working on for five, six years and it's super, super deep.

So yeah, like Jeremy said, it is sort of, at its heart, a turn-based, grid-based game strategy game like into the breach let's say uh but you have four cats uh against any number of different enemies from different biomes it could be other cats could be other you know could be spiders could be whatever right this game is so big it's hard to sort of explain uh what any one level might be but basically you're taking these four cats on a run through the levels similar to what you were saying about house of necrosis and just rogue lights there are times to get back to leave the run or there are times where the game kicks you out of the run back to your house but you're basically it says at the start you were basically attempting to go into the world to find money and food so you can improve your house and feed your cats because the four cats that go out on a run they come back to this house that you have um and the house is full of cats and there's like maybe one or two rooms in this house and every night you hit end day they eat food and they either fight or have sex and make kittens and so what you're basically doing is trying to this is the this is what puts the eugenics in eugenics you are trying to get certain cats to breed because the cats that you bring out on the on the run they can't go out on another run they they get real fucked up every cat gets one run they can't go out on another one so what you do is you get those cats or other cats that have been on runs that have had their stats improve and have like gotten all of these uh new abilities or better stats and sometimes have gotten all these disorders um You get them to breed with other cats and make new kittens that are stronger and better and more fucked up in many ways.

But the thing... And then you go on the next run and yada, yada, yada, yada.

The thing that makes this great is... Have you guys played much Binding of Isaac?

Are you... Any big Binding of Isaac heads?

Tons.

Tons, right?

So you know the way you like.

Binding of Isaac is like an incredibly simple game when you start playing it.

And then it's the layers of depth are slowly peeled away.

You know what I mean?

There's like all the different enemies and items and your eyes are your, your tears are bombs now and the bombs explode and heal you and they spawn money and yeah yeah, 100.

So imagine that, except he i think he made binding of isaac, like four months originally and now it has like a million and one different expansion packs.

Right, but he made it on a.

It comes up in the in the interview.

It came up in our other interview we did years ago.

I think he made it when they had time off after meat boy.

Um, imagine that.

But he's been working on it for six years.

Like this is layers of like systemic complexity and depth that are just like constantly enjoyable.

Like your your cats like from from the items you pick up that like buff your your cats have different classes.

So you can like spec them into different.

You know, it's the, the meathead who punches people, fighter guy, there's the ranged person, there's a cleric, there's a mage, but then there's like thieves and necromancers.

You just keep unlocking loads and loads and loads of ones that like totally changed the way you play.

You're still just describing cats.

You're not like.

They're not like people who show up who are necromancers.

It's just a no, it's all.

Now that sounds right.

You can have cats that have autism, which means that, like their base, skills they had at the start are incredibly high, but they have a tough time adapting to new skills.

Okay.

You can have, you can have ones that have ADHD that just automatically do a turn after five seconds.

If you don't quickly pick something.

Um like you have ones that like every time, you know you just get like a perk that like Oh, this one now actually has like a bowel problem.

So every time it moves um And it's going to like shit itself and make like a toxic shit beside it or like oh, it's like it's really it gets scared of ghosts.

And every time a ghost appears or whatever like it'll, every time it doesn't move, it'll accidentally automatically shock everyone with electricity around it.

Like it's just like some of it is like traits that they get from items or from like they just like broke their leg in a fight or some of it is like. genetic stuff or or disorders that they that they get but every disorder has a silver lining like it's very it's very like um yeah it's it's just there's no simple answer to anything and what's fun is like everyone i know they'd say when you play these games like everyone's different everyone in this game is like yeah so really it's so much fun because you're just like what weird nonsense am i going to have to adapt to this time around or like what weird boss strategy like there was one boss i fought that would just avoid everything would avoid every single time you attacked it like that it didn't have the highest health had like 100 health and some of the bosses of like 250 or whatever but like every single time so if i brought my fighter over to punch it and try and hit it Um, it would just jump out of the way.

And every, if I used rain stuff, it would just jump out of the way.

And I was like, how do you, how do you kill this thing?

Like I was like scrambling my head, trying to figure out how to do this.

And it was also like the end boss of like the third thing.

Like I really needed to kill this thing.

It was the first time I got to it.

My cats were destroyed.

They came in with like just totally fucked up, not really specced properly.

Health was halfway down by the time i got into the thing.

I didn't have my my my, uh healer got killed.

So i had this like random fourth cat that joined the party.

That was terrible.

That couldn't do anything.

He had the coat of shame on his fur was all matted.

It's like.

It's like someone cut the poop out of that cat, fix him, It was.

It was like a disaster.

And what I figured out was the only way to beat this thing was I had one of my was.

I had a mage who had this one spell that it had to like charge up two turns to use.

That was basically like a like a, like a comet strike that would hit like an AOE, like an area of like six by six or something.

So basically what i was doing was just getting all my cats to avoid this boss as much as possible and then get him in a corner where i could just bombard him with comet shit and then try and get him to run, because the comet would also set things on fire.

Okay, when it's it might not even hit him.

It's like a like a bunch of comets come down so it might has to hit his spot, mightn't even hit him.

You might just like avoid that time and it would set things on fire.

And then I would basically just put the other cats in positions where he would run through fire to get to them.

That would like add the amount of fire he had.

So like at a certain stage he had like 7 fire damage.

So every time he had a turn he would immediately take 7 fire damage.

So I was just like running around in circles, occasionally throwing comets at this fucker and like it took like 20 minutes and at the end I was down to.

At the end I actually died.

I, my character died uh, And then the boss goes through a metamorphosis and died.

But because there was something weird, like because I had a cat whose last thing was, if it died, it would possess the previously killed cat.

When that cat died, for some reason it died. it spawned back into its old body with one health.

And that was the only reason I want it right at the end.

And it was just like, this is the craziest game.

I was like screaming with delight.

It was see, that's fantastic.

That's what I love about binding of Isaac.

And what I love about any tactics game like this is is they turn into sort of like Rube Goldberg machines of gaming of like these different levers and pulleys and marbles falling into the right spot that just like, result in weird, uh idiosyncratic gameplay moments that make no sense.

Like when you're playing Binding of Isaac, you can brick your run by accidentally picking up two items that negate each other.

And then you just can't shoot at all, which is a frustrating experience, but also is novel.

It allows you to tell these stories where, like Danny, you're talking about running around and dodging an enemy for 20 minutes, which is, like dude awful.

That's a terrible experience.

But it's funny and it gives you a story and it like creates these experiences that that are so rare and then also hilarious.

And like then your next run is perfectly fine and you have a really cool run where you do something totally different and new and strange.

I had no idea that this is what Mugenics was.

I am incredibly excited for this now.

I have to go watch that preview.

This sounds so cool.

It's like this will be, I'm sure, an early game of the year contender next year.

Like it's it's it's it's a very, very enjoyable video game.

I'll just say that I can't I can't.

It's also very big.

Like he's I we talk about everything up and up until the first chapter of this game.

But like in the same way that like Isaac sort of. flips expectation especially in some of the expansion packs like it starts being really weird with the format and doing interesting things like that this game does that like you kind of feel like you're playing like it's like if you imagine you're playing spelunky right and then spelunky is like spelunky is a similar kind of thing where it's like it's it's especially spooky too it's not necessarily linear you know what i mean like you can kind of go in different ways and there are areas that are not even necessary to completing a run that you can go down all this sort of stuff it's imagine if you killed omek at the end of spelunky one that was the final boss in one was it i forget what final boss was so yeah imagine you did that and then you like got out of the cave in spelunky and then it was like okay now we're up here now there's this thing we're gonna do like meugenics keeps doing that where you're like oh meugenics is a game where you take cats on runs they do things and then it's like okay so now this is going to happen and then eugenics is like this so you're like oh fuck okay okay i'll guess we'll i'll do that and and apparently the reason why this is and we talk about in the video is because i guess they play a lot of magic these guys and like they sort of realized that what they had built was a like a tool set like that this game was the items and it was the classes and it was all that stuff and actually because all that stuff works and they can add stuff into it relatively easy it's not like the dwarf fortress problem what kind of is the door for each problem where you add something in you have to make sure it doesn't break everything else but it seems like they have a good system for getting that stuff in that basically they can really fuck around with the rules and it still kind of works and it makes it novel and interesting and weird and systemic and cool.

So, yeah, it's I yeah, it's a. ed says he thinks it's his best game he's ever made and i think i agree uh it's it's it's it's really a lot of fun and very silly and the humor is great and the music is great and the like the fucking i didn't even talk about the music in the preview like they'll they'll have this like really great like sort of i don't even know what you call it it's like a guitar-y jazzy kind of kind of swing vibe to the music and it'll all be shoegaze in in eugenics no it's like it's really kind of a little bit boppy like kind of like I don't know, like turning tuning into like a like a like a radio in the desert in the 70s or something.

It has like a sort of a weird like swing to it, like cigarette smoke.

I can smell when I'm when I'm hearing it.

But you'll be hearing the music in the level and then you'll get to a boss fight and then the lyrics kick in and it's the boss singing about the fucking level. oh that's incredible that's awesome like it just does cool shit like that all the time like it's it's super slick and stylish yeah do you guys have any questions i kind of don't want to say anymore because again i've not like i don't know overstep the bounds of of preview content here i'm not saying anything that wasn't in the video but um i'm just kind of maybe more expressing my own personal love of this game but um do you guys have any questions about it i i just need to address the literally a thing that we joked about i think you played it might have been metal hellsinger or the other game that was similar to it at the time but when we were talking about it i i jokingly asked you if in the songs there were like lyrics alluding to the things that were happening like telling you that there's like a door ahead that's locked and you need a blue key uh I was joking about it at the time, but the more I thought about it, the more I was like, oh, like semi diegetic lyrics in the music.

That's like addressing what's happening in the game is actually a great idea.

I love the idea of using it as like a, like a place for because, like the other place you would do, that is, you walk into the boss room and the boss is like I'm like the big bad cat.

You know what I mean?

Right.

If you just like, insert it into the lyrics.

It's like passive lore, that's just like happening in the background.

Yeah, it's like one of them is like he's the king of cats, he's the king of cats, and i'm like it's like yeah yeah yeah totally, it's like the music is fucking brilliant like, oh man, it's very, very good.

I'm so excited for this game.

Now, god damn not to bring the the.

Yeah, the outsiders got closed, exactly.

Yeah, you mentioned hell's metal hell singer, obviously.

Um, you know, david go far.

We interviewed for a battlefield 3 video recently as well.

Um yeah, sweden has been absolutely decimated uh, over the past uh week or so.

Um, when i come, especially the malmo and um uh, i think, stockholm areas.

So uh yeah, our our thoughts and uh, love to all the folks at the outsiders and everyone else who was affected by all the layoffs over there.

Um okay sorry, you mean you meant layoffs.

You just said sweden has been decimated and then oh sorry no, i wasn't saying.

It was like you didn't hear.

You didn't hear.

The Russians finally did it.

No, actually, the Pats played last night.

I wasn't paying attention um, but yeah yeah, that was.

That was an absolute bummer to hear.

Um, do you uh, have any other any?

Yeah yeah, i was curious about because you said into the breach.

And i think the thing that makes that game stand out as a tactics game is that it communicates everything really clearly um, without being overly complex, like it doesn't have a bunch of numbers and big lines, it's just like here's what it's going to do.

How many times is that same level of clarity here in eugenics, or is it sort of leaving you up to be confused?

Cause that was a thing in binding of Isaac was like you don't know what these abilities are until you use them.

Is that what's happening here?

Like it's just a symbol.

You don't know what that means until they've done it.

Or is it clear?

That's a fantastic question.

And, I think, probably the thing that I am most happy about this game over Isaac, because I think that is one of Isaac's strengths and weaknesses.

Cause it's like it's strength because it's um part of the mystery of that game is, is and spelunky, is kind of like fuck around and find out right.

It's like what does this object do?

Like i'm not quite sure, and you can look it up on a guide and that's cool, or you can mess around with it.

Um, this game is not like that.

Um, there is very little.

I don't think there's ever.

I don't know what this thing does.

Sometimes there are like things like um, There are some objects you use that say like it'll do this, but there will be a cost.

It will give you a little something there.

But for the most part, everything is told.

The UI is really well designed.

I'm interested to see how they'll figure out how to use it for controllers, because it's very mouse and keyboard sort of friendly.

And everything has like a mouse over and a thing.

And, you know, it's the font is nice and the language is simplistic and all that.

What I will say is that it has a protracted onboarding experience because this game is deep and uh, you know there's a couple of things that didn't get into the preview.

But like um, tyler even at one stage was saying that like they have bunches and bunches of spells that are just flagged as um, as like expert, and they don't just they don't appear for a while because, like we want you to get good at using the basic stuff, like at the start, you only have four classes of cats at the start.

The um experience in the house is sort of less complicated or has less variables in it.

Um, There's a lot of things that get unlocked through the story.

There's a story like there is a campaign.

There are things that are happening in this town.

The house is in.

There are loads of biomes.

There are loads more biomes than we show in the video.

I think we show the first five or something, but there's there's loads more than that.

And yeah, I said the classes.

I'm trying to think what else was the. what was your question again?

I'm coming off of a fever.

So my head is a little bit scrambled.

I was just asking about the different elements and how they they which I think you answered my question of like whether or not they clarify things.

That's what I was getting to.

Sorry.

So at the start, yeah.

Yeah.

So they're very, it's very like, um, it's peeling back its layers as you play.

So, like you're playing the game for, like literally, I'm playing the game for eight, nine hours and it's still like peeling back the layers.

And that's why it's.

I think it's so enjoyable now that I've played 30, because it's like Now I can enjoy each little sort of micro game piece of gameplay in it.

There is a back at the house part because you're either on a run or you're back at the house.

The house is actually part of like a town and there is a map that you go to that just like shows you other houses and you click on them and there's a bunch of like.

Edmund Macmillan, ass people like going blah blah blah blah blah, blah and the text coming up telling you stuff about them and they're all interesting, weird characters, right.

But actually what you're supposed to do with them is there is like a almost Mario style sewer pipe outside of your house that you can put cats into and so you can discard cats like cats that got killed.

There's there's one guy in the town who really wants dead cats.

There's another guy in the town who wants kittens.

So if you have a cat under one year old, you can't bring them out anyway.

I think they need to be three to go on a run.

Um, you can, and each day is a year basically, or whatever.

Um uh, each day just makes them pass an age.

Um, You can donate to them and you're donating these cats to these people and they're giving you extra things, like they're giving you sometimes information that you can use to breed them more, or you know, tool tip for your menu, or we sell more cat food in the shop now, or whatever.

And then you're also going to you're using your money to buy like furniture for the house because the more furniture. you know furniture that'll basically like increase comfort or increase whatever all these stats to basically so you basically make the sex room you make one room that's really comfortable and really good they will guarantee to any cats that go in there will bone and then you put two of the cats in there and you keep the rest in the other room sex room the shittier sex room where if they want to people are going to be watching it's you know and you have no control you hit end day and it goes all right these two cats had sex but one of them wasn't into it so they didn't nothing happened this one they're they they they got got at it and they had two kittens and it shows like two kittens sliding out of one of the cats in in like perfect mcmillan way you know and there's a uh there's a hilton employee outside of the room right now they're like this is why yeah this is why he could dad so i guess i could i could talk about this game all day because it's so it's so complicated and um or complex and interesting but uh yeah it's it's sort of an interesting thing that like an emergent game design thing that in games like spelunky or isaac um because they're real time i feel like it's more allowable to have these esoteric elements that are not telegraphed where it's just like you got the weird symbol and you're like oh now everything like bursts into flames when i shoot it versus i feel like there's a there's a genre expectation in turn-based games in general but also like i guess just like strategy rpgs they're the the fantasy of that genre is much more about control and like mastery outcome like understanding the outcome yeah it's it's more fun in a game like spelunky when things go wrong i feel like in a strategy rpg if it's like oh what you didn't know what that did and it killed everyone you'd be like well that sucks i've been playing for like 35 fucking minutes yeah exactly it's cool that they kept a little bit of that intact with the like this will have unintended unintended consequences or whatever however they phrased it but um but yeah i could i could see a world in which it's just like you the spell is just like a water droplet and you're like is this gonna kill everyone when i use it and totally and i think like one of the things that it does well is that it obviously explains all those things but there are still elements that you have to figure out yourself as a player like i think the number one of that is like Like, there's loads of different types of enemies in this game.

It's not just, like, other cats.

Like, there are, like, loads of different types of cats.

Tomcats that are like big, beefy ones, that like walk incredibly slow, but once they get to you are going to like take off half your health in one shot.

There are, like you know, There's like ghost things that like can, uh like appear behind you.

There's like uh, water creatures that like will be on one side of the map but then their tentacle will pop up in a different spot and smack you if you're beside water, and so learning all them is fun like, and the game, if you mouse over them, will give you a little bit of information about what they are, but it's not going to tell you like oh, they do this, they do this, they do this.

You have to, you have to fight them and see, and a lot of them are really interesting, like when i got to the caves, like the bats were really good at dodging shots and i could not, you know, i was trying to figure out how.

So there's there's still like a great layers of of trying to figure stuff out outside of just how should i best use my spells.

It's there's also like mystery in the world about sort of how all this works um, which i think really works as well.

Yeah, that's that's an interesting design distinction as well is that, like in this genre you want to have the mystery be around, thing around like reactivity as opposed to like activity.

Like the, the things that the player is doing should be calculated and then the things outside of their influence can be esoteric and mysterious, because then that's like that's the input, like the output should be discreet and clear and understandable to some extent, but the input is like where you can hide esoteric bullshit.

I'm going to leave with one anecdote, and it's not mine, it's Ed's and it's in the video, but I think it's a really good example of what's interesting about this game is that he had some.

So there's like lots of spells and passives and objects you can get and abilities that will like spawn other creatures that can help you, like little grubs and spiders, and or you can just have, like there's a class that's just good at you know, insect husbandry or whatever right, so you can have all these like little mobs helping you around.

Often by the end of a run, you know, you might have a couple of them and i i've had a few where it's been like super helpful to have them just like They're doing.

Sometimes you can control them.

Sometimes they're just doing their own thing.

It's really, like I said, systemic.

Everything's interesting and weird.

And he had I think it was a necromancer, I think who had risen a bunch of dead cats like zombie cats, like cats he they had killed.

And then the necromancer had risen them up again to fight for him.

And it was against a boss fight.

And then he ended up getting this spell which basically did it, so that the whatever action I think the cat did, the other cats would do it.

And the thing he wanted to do was like spin around in circles.

It was called synchro spin or something, right?

So it was like a multi-hit attack, right?

That was pretty good.

And he was like, oh, great, it'll work.

I've got like my four cats are here.

If I do it, they'd all do it.

But then he was like wait, but the zombies we resurrected are also cats.

Like, does that mean they'll also like?

He didn't know.

He was like this is his game and he's like well, the way they make the game is that, like you know, the way they code the game is very much like this sort of systemic, you know object-based whatever, a logic-based thing.

And so he just hit it to see what would happen.

And yeah, all of them did it like.

All four cats and all of the other ones that he did did it like.

So that's the game we're talking about, where you're just like Is this going to work?

Because if this works, it's going to be pretty fucking cool.

And then the game does it, you know?

So, yeah, it's a very cool thing.

I'm excited for people to play it.

February of next year.

Sorry, folks.

That's probably my last bit.

It's already October.

That's true, actually.

It's not too far away.

It's true.

Get ready for Valentine's Day with Mugenics.

And go check out our preview over on Noclip2.

You numpty.

Um, i'm gonna let uh frank howley pick one here.

Can you pick one of the last two, one of the new ones first, and we'll get.

We'll get to ufc5, i promise.

Yeah uh, running on the thing of uh covering tactic teams and mystery dungeons.

So i played fun fancy tactics, the evil, the evil, east chronicles, whatever the subtitle they wanted to throw on.

It nailed it.

That was good.

But but this is the, the new, the newest remaster remake.

Actually it is a remake of Final Fantasy Tactics, because I looked that they didn't have the original source code so they had to reprogram it from scratch.

Um, But yeah, so Final Fantasy Tactics.

I had never played Final Fantasy Tactics.

It's constantly said as like one of the best games of all time.

I've always been intimidated by its difficulty.

Like when I was going through all the Final Fantasy games and researching it, everyone was like oh, if you play this, you got to make multiple save states, because this might happen here.

You might get screwed, whatever.

So I was so intimidated.

I tried playing the PSP version and like I think I did a little bit of it.

I was like, ah, this is too much for me.

And then I settled on like Fire Emblem, which is way more simple simpler for like 3DS at the time or whatever, um.

But with this new remaster they announced like oh, it's gonna have an easy difficulty mode, there's gonna be a lot of quality of life features, smooth it out, there's like auto saves and stuff.

So i gave it a shot and uh yeah, i like i haven't dumped a ton of hours into it, but i'm also like intimidated by how many hours one could dump into it.

Um, because it does famously have like an insane job system and part of the fun of tactics is just building an army.

And same thing with like I mean, a lot of these games have this, but it seems like you can customize your play style in any way you want to and break the game.

But yeah, as me trying it out for the very first time, I am very charmed by it.

What I really like about Final Fantasy Tactics, compared to other tactics games I've played, is like I'm used to like XCOM and even like Marvel Midnight Suns, where there's these giant maps and you're traversing them.

Final Fantasy Tactics is like a very small map.

So the battles are like very quick and intense.

There's maybe one prep round of like move your units here.

And then by the next round, it's like dozens of attacks going off at once.

And yeah, so it's like I know Jeremy is a big fan.

They played Tactics before and all that.

But for someone who's never played it, I'm super charmed by it.

And again, it's got extremely cute chibi art style.

And I think the remaster preserves it.

It seems like there's a soft filter on it, but they don't do too much to reinvent the graphics or change it, so it's preserving it.

So you have this very Game of Thrones serious medieval story happening, but it's all these very adorable TV characters just walking in place.

And so what this also has is there's now English voiceover and Japanese voiceover, which wasn't there before.

And then you can also fast-forward battles when other people are taking their turns, things like that.

But yeah, I'm just kind of getting into it and I'm hooked.

And thankfully, yeah, because there's like the easy difficulty, I'm not having issues with it.

So I'm just diving in and enjoying it.

And I think the actual, what it is, I think it's just like damage scaling.

Like I think you do more damage and take less damage, which is great for me because like okay cool, I can learn the game.

If you want to, you can change it anytime.

But yeah, I'm just I'm just kind of getting started with it.

But I know Jeremy has like probably beaten this hundreds of hours.

I don't know.

What's your what's your history with tactics?

No, I've played.

I have beat Final Fantasy Tactics Advance twice in Final Fantasy Tactics.

I have started like four times and never beat.

I don't know why I'm fucking bad at Final Fantasy Tactics like the normal one.

It's hard. yeah it's like a hard game i don't know i've i feel like maybe the multiple save strategy is what i was missing because i i often feel like i've bricked my run in some capacity uh but there is a there is a point that i hit in the story where i always there's like a hard fucking wall um but yeah maybe the remaster is a good way to do it i feel like the the well i guess i was gonna say the fast forward but i guess i could i have emulated it in the past and that has fast forward but um But yeah, no, I also we talked about this briefly on a previous podcast, but I do really like the look of the remaster.

I am you know, I'm on record as a as a remake hater.

But I the the way that they've like softened the pixel art but dirty it up with this sort of like magazine stipple.

The whole remake looks like a like a magazine printout that you're reading about Final Fantasy Tactics.

That's cool.

Which I think it's such a good look too because, like for me as a kid, that was like like that aesthetic is directly tied to a lot of emotionally charged memories I have about video games where, like one summer before Kirby Superstar came out, I had a Nintendo power that had like a four page spread about Kirby Superstar and And it was my most anticipated game.

And I used to go to my grandmother's in upstate New York for like several weeks every summer.

And so I brought that Nintendo Power with me.

And every day I would just like read these four pages about Kirby Super Star and look at the fucking screenshots in the magazine.

And so for me, there's something about, like the weird sort of magazine stippling effect that they put on this that like reminds me about not the aesthetic of video games, but the aesthetic of like being excited about video games to come, or something.

This.

This is a very deeply subjective thing, but I imagine I'm not the only person who has that weird association between magazine stipple and that.

That's class.

Yeah, I'm feeling nostalgic looking at the.

If anyone sees me here on my phone, it's because that's what I'm using to do Steam.

So I'm not just like texting here.

Uh-huh, you like the... Yeah, whatever.

So what were you saying about magazines or something, Jeremy?

You want to come over and see all my fucked up cats?

That could be real or about Mugenics, actually.

We just adopted two barn cats, too.

Yeah, you do have fucked up cats.

Yeah, we got three fucked up cats.

You should breed them and see which one gets like a milk bottle when it's born.

They've all had their...

I believe they chop their penises off.

I think that's what happens.

Okay.

That's the science there.

That's the medical term for it.

Yeah.

That's what Bob Barker says at the end of The Price is Right.

Folks, don't forget to chop all your cat's penises off.

This looks pretty... Yeah, it looks pretty pretty.

I am tempted to give this a roll myself.

It has such a cute little matchbox-y sort of feeling to it.

Yeah, I really want to play this.

I think the Evil East Chronicles, the problem that Final Fantasy Tactics has had...

I probably beat it or like got really close to beating it when I was like 12, 13.

I really liked because I played a Yu-Gi-Oh tactics game.

Wow.

Yu-Gi-Oh as a kid.

Can you tell?

Probably yes is the answer.

Beyblade.

I love Beyblade.

I cried at an episode of Beyblade.

I was a huge loser.

I still am.

I'll cry at it again.

It was good.

His favorite Beyblade broke.

So yeah, I played the Yu-Gi-Oh tactics game and I was like, this is fun.

I wish this was less... annoying because yugioh takes forever to do everything's like overly written for no reason so i heard about final fantasy tactics because i'd never played a final fantasy game before that was probably the first one i played that in dirge of cerberus my taste is ridiculous what is wrong with me um and the story for dirge of cerberus it's final fantasy 7 are you right that's not right um yeah final fantasy tactics the story is really really good like it does have one of the best final fantasy stories like no question of the ones that i've played i mean 15 13 some of 14 that's it one and two um tactic story is really good though i think it just in general it's a really good story like it's it's one about betrayal and and the way that war impacts society on like a on a on a like a deep level on a level that you can't even comprehend and how that fractures out through all these different groups.

Just the way that it's presented is so well done.

I think the tactics gameplay is really good.

Triangle strategy is a modern one that I think almost reaches that level.

I really like the story and triangle strategy but I think it's probably more visual novel than it is tactics game.

Um, but the problem that final fantasy tactics has had is um, there's so many different versions of it, like there's the war of the lions version.

I think there's a psp version of it.

Um, there's like a2 or something.

I don't know if that's a sequel or related to final fantasy tactics advance.

It does have a two in the name.

Two it's like final fantasy tactics advanced too, but i think they just call it a2.

Yeah okay, that would be.

There was a game boy advanced version as well.

So Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is the Game Boy Advance version, but it's not like a remake of Final Fantasy Tactics.

It's like a different Final Fantasy Tactics game.

But then they made a sequel and called it...

Advance 2, and it wasn't on the Game Boy Advance.

It was on the DS, right?

It was on the DS.

That's why they called it Final Fantasy Tactics A2, because they were like well, it's not Advance anymore.

I thought it was A2 screens, A2.

I thought it was A2, like A2, Brutus.

A, we got two screens now.

Yeah, they really wanted to get all the Roman heads in there.

You know, all those Roman gamers.

But now there's a new version.

There's like some version of Tactics doesn't have the translation.

That's this.

But this version has that translation, but it's missing some of the content from this version.

This has the voice acting in the final fantasy 16 uh, imdb like screen thing where you could see what happened and all the characters, but like so this is like the kim king james bible version, is it?

We're saying?

It's like yes, exactly an accepted modern interpretation of us.

Square enix said it's okay, you can have these apostles, but not these ones.

It's all right if you're an orthodox person to get all the spooky shit.

Yeah exactly, they.

They uh they also said um, that they, they like tried to uh re-envision the ps1 version because the psp stuff added like extra jobs, extra story stuff and like that stuff is cool, but we're just gonna try to remake all the ps1 original stuff.

So it's like, which is good?

As someone who's never played any of it, it's like i sometimes it gets so like the most like overwhelming thing in the world is when you buy like a deluxe edition of a game or game of the year thing of an old game.

Like you boot it up and it's like Oh, this DLC, this DLC, this DLC, this DLC.

Finding of Isaac.

Yeah.

And you can't wade through what is like the core game and what's all this advanced stuff.

And I'll, and I've done this before, but I've started like a DLC campaign and something.

And then I'm like, this happened.

I started the most random game, dead Island to whatever.

Like I just picked a mission and all of a sudden I was stuck in some DLC chapter that's meant for post game.

And so I was under level and I was like, this sucks.

What the fuck?

And I did, I dropped the game for like a year.

And then I, came back and bumped the difficulty down, whatever.

But it was like, so thankfully this is like, okay, cool.

So I'm not overwhelmed and I'm playing it.

And like the one thing I think I realized that by bumping the game down to easy mode, you do more damage, which means you're getting through the missions faster, which means you're technically getting less XP.

So that hasn't messed me up yet.

But I'm like, Oh wait, I actually need, I need to grind.

Or maybe now I grind, but then turn the difficulty to normal.

Like, it's like, Oh, I can't, I'm starting to like get more confident in the game.

Cause I realized like that.

So that's the thing, that's the tourist, if I'm has the tactics is like you never want to waste a turn.

So every time, like you care, sorry, you only have a few units per, per mission. if those units don't attack anybody they don't get any xp or job experience points oh so only the units that are actually engaged in combats and doing actions take xp so the optimal way of like min maxing the game is like if your unit isn't doing anything use a potion use use a spell or just hit your teammate so if you just attack your teammate you'll get xp so like so yeah so like you can get an item early on that's like throw rock so it's like you can people do this where they'll just leave one enemy alive and then the other six units are just throwing rocks at each other to like max so like that's that's where you unlock the game and that's where people like grind out stuff before the first mission but you don't want to grind too much because the way this is what i've heard story missions are set at set certain levels but random encounters will, will be scaled to your level.

So, so I think the way I'm supposed to play it, just play it.

And then, once I get to a storm mission, that's too hard, grind a bit and keep going.

But you don't want to overgrind your XP, but job points you do.

So it's like, it's so nuts.

Like I've looked at guys and stuff like that, but it was so nice just now that just all right, play the game on easy mode and i'm not getting lost and messed up and um yeah it's it's uh it's, it's really, really cool and i can see how addictive this game can be.

And this also makes me think of like, oh my god, maybe maybe one day i'll get into disgaea.

So disgaea is like the super anime chibi like, where they, where they like almost make fun of tactics because every damage, everything is like nine nine nine nine nine nine, nine hp.

Like there's insane numbers and very, very over the top anime stuff.

And I'm like Oh, I want to get into this guy now, but let me keep going with tactics a bit.

Um, i there's something you brought up is that like the?

The like appeal of final fantasy tactics and tactics advanced to me is beyond them being like tactics rpgs in the final fantasy world.

I also feel like they're much more sandboxy than typical final fantasy games.

Like it's not just a like combat approach, it's also like sort of a design ethos that reverberates throughout them where, like the fact that you can keep one fucking goomba alive and throw rocks at each other to level up is i, it's like this hilarious emergence.

It reminds me of um, like in kenji, you can capture someone and take them as a prisoner or a slave and then use them to train your units combat, so you can just have a guy that you bring around with you to beat up, so that people get better at beating people up.

Yeah yeah, exactly what are you doing that for that?

But like horrifying um.

But like in tactics advance, it has it sort of like commits even more to the sandbox approach where there is sort of an overarching narrative.

But ultimately, in tactics advance, you're just like a bunch of mercenaries on an open map taking missions and going around and doing whatever you want and using the money to build your party.

But but I like how like tactics and tactics advance sort of embrace this like.

You know, it's like we were saying with Mugenics, like it's fun when you find weird shit where you're like will this work?

Can I get away with this?

And then the game, the road rises to meet your feet there.

And it's like the game facilitates you playing in experimental ways.

Yeah, it's all systems, baby.

It's like Immersive Sims.

Like that's what I find so exciting about that sort of non-genre but like design ethos, I guess, is like you get to do whatever you want and watch.

You get to poke the system and watch it poke back at you to quote the Eggman himself, Northern Lion.

Um, Frank, I had one question about the gameplay.

Cause I feel like tactics.

Tactics can be a lot and it's it's because you're playing on an easier difficulty.

It's a little bit more straightforward but like, do you ever find yourself um, Almost like in a checkmate situation where you're just moving your pawns around, waiting to not get hit, hoping like the AI stops in place?

Because that was a problem I had with tactics a lot and tactic advanced to an extent where, like you would just be in a position where you're constantly moving back into a corner and then like, hoping the AI forgets that they can move forward and uses a spell that does nothing.

And then you can take a pot shot.

Like, is that happening to you?

I had that happen once.

It was like.

This is like when I was still learning the game and I realized none of my units could revive anybody.

Right.

And so I had an enemy like there was like a, not like a cat, like a castle, and there was a doorway and I had my mage die in the doorway, which was blocking all of the units.

So it was like, oh my god, so like, and so i so, but none of my, none of my units could revive the dead mage.

And the way the game works is like if, if your character dies, you lose that party member forever.

Yeah, and so i was like running around checking, like moving, moving all my units, trying to get close to this mage, seeing if i could revive anybody uh, and none of my characters had it, and so eventually i was like okay, let me just.

I think I just like close the game or like whatever.

But then I saw like the game makes auto saves.

I think mid battle, like when you, when you're about to take your first turn, or before you even deploy your troops.

And I think so.

I rebooted the save to like when you start deploying your troops and before you start the actual battle, you can go in like, all right, let me spend my job.

Points learn spells.

So I learned the elixir.

I learned spells like revive and elixir and stuff and like the thing i also didn't realize is, once you learn a spell, you have to equip that spell.

So it's like, oh my, like these are like quality of life things that every game has.

But it's like oh, this is a 1997 game and they have done a lot of quality of life stuff, but something as basic as that like, oh no, i still have to like equip some things and so, um yeah, just learning that, so that's happened once.

So far, out of like maybe my like four or five hours of playing it.

But, um yeah thankfully, like the fact that and i'm still making like two saves just in case every, Every time we have the game, the game's autosave is like kind of nice, which I don't know if they had ever had that before.

So I appreciate that.

Yeah.

Awesome.

Final Fantasy Tactics, the.

Ivalice Chronicles.

Ivalice.

Yeah.

Ivalice is the like world or continent or whatever.

This takes place Final Fantasy 12, I think 14.

I don't know, but it's a shared universe.

So there you go.

Final Fantasy Tactics, the Ivalice Chronicles available there.

50 bucks uh, worth the cost of entry there.

Frank kaoli yeah, i mean, as someone who's never played it, absolutely it's like.

It's like going to a museum or something where i'm like, oh my god, i can appreciate this art finally.

So yeah, 50 bucks for this.

You know absolutely.

Uh, quick little meugenics one, just because you mentioned uh, the mage being down and i it reminded me that one of my favorite things in meugenics is it's awful when it happens you have your four cats.

You've got them through a run.

They level up, level up.

You're like super, super careful about getting these cats home and you know, if you have three cats, you're basically screwed like you need all four of them.

Um, if you're in a fight and one of them gets downed, you you can obviously get them rezzed and stuff if you want, but while they're down they can still get hit And if they get hit too many times, their body will just explode and they're gone.

They do not resurrect.

So like they resurrect at the end of a battle.

But like, yeah, at the end of a battle, everyone resurrects and gets a little bit of health.

And it's like, yeah, you did it.

But if like, they're on the ground there and you, like the boss does like a stomp attack on them, they'll just go.

And then like there's a sound that like oh, like the audience going oh no, happens in the background.

It's like it's heartbreaking when it happens.

You're like, oh, no shit.

It's a good time.

Anyway, stop talking about me, Gen X. Yeah, stop hyping it up.

Now.

Okay.

Jesse, let's talk about Absalom.

So this isn't out at time of recording.

There is a demo.

Have you gotten early access to this, bad boy?

Or have you gotten early code, I should say?

Yes, we did get access to this a little bit early.

It drops on the 9th, so it should be out by the time you're listening to this, unless they make some drastic decision last second.

Uh, Absalom for, or Absalom or Absalom.

I don't know how you say it.

I'm going to say Absalom personally, uh, for people who don't know, probably cause it's, uh, it's, it's not super excited or there's not a ton of excitement around it rather, but, uh, it is a very, very good game.

This is a 2d beat them up side-scrolling sort of roguelike game.

I guess you could uh roguelite, i guess, because there's like progressive progression stuff that comes up later.

Um, what's the difference between those two?

It doesn't really matter.

Uh, this game is fantastic.

It looks amazing like.

It looks like uh, like hellboy, like the mignola.

Is that right?

I think that's right.

Um version of Hellboy.

They actually they've said they're inspired by a bunch of stuff that I've never seen before, but that seems great.

Like one of them was like Head Looper or something like that, like a French comic.

Really, really cool art style.

I've been looking into the inspiration stuff and I'm like this is I need to read these, just because they look pretty.

I want them on my wall.

But the gameplay above Solemn.

The reason that I think I wanted to bring it up here is not just because I played an early version of a game and I feel inclined to talk about it, but also because it's really, really fun.

So this is developed by Guard Crush Games who are doing the gameplay part of it.

They made Streets of Rage 4 and The older version, or the newer version rather, of a Streets of Rage game which plays great I think is a lot of fun.

They also made Streets of Fury EX.

I think that was the game they made before Streets of Rage, which is like live action shots of people.

Like I guess they've made it sort of in the same way they made the original Mortal Kombat and all that.

They like did the shots of people and digitized them, which was cool.

And then the art for the game is done by Super Monks, who have done a couple movies.

And they did the art style and the animation and everything, which looks great.

But the gameplay of it, because it's a 2D beat-em-up, there's a lot of action there.

It's a lot of combos, pressing buttons.

You can call it a button masher if you want.

You play as these two characters.

One's a sort of elf rogue character who does melee punches and then has one special attack that she does, which is a huge sword slash attack.

Uh, and then, uh, there's Arcana you can use as well.

That's like an upward slash is really cool.

And you can change that with, uh, over time you'll unlock more of them.

And then the other character is this dwarf guy who you know what he sounds like.

Uh, it sounds like a dwarf guy.

I'm going to do the murder.

Um, I'm here to save everyone.

Um, He's cool.

Like it's interesting because, like these games, whenever I play a beat him up, I'm really not into this genre that much.

I've played a couple of them and I don't I don't click with them.

I don't find them that enjoyable because it's kind of just beating up the same enemies over and over again.

And the combat, especially for older games, doesn't feel great.

Streets of Rage.

I'm not huge on.

I've played some of Double Dragon.

Again, not really my not my bag.

This one is the only one that has worked for me.

I tried playing Castle Crashers.

I hated that game.

I tried playing so many of these.

This is the one that's finally worked because the combat is so it feels so good.

Like you are so fast.

You dash across the screen with this speed that just feels impossible for the characters you're playing as.

All of the combos are really quick.

So like you have two buttons, like I said, the normal strike and then your special.

The special is slow.

It's very slow.

In fact, to the point that you can't combo with it.

Most of them are just like one. slash and that's it.

Uh, you combo with your regular strikes, you end with a slash enemies die fairly quickly as well.

So it's not like you're beating up the same enemy with the same slow combo forever.

Um, And it's just it's because it's run based.

You, you end up finding new abilities that allow you to have the combat be a little bit more different.

So like, if you feel those two moves are getting a little boring, you'll unlock something where like oh, the last strike in your four combo, your four button combo, which is just one button four times, which is the best way to make combo systems.

It'll surround the enemy in a bubble and now they take damage and they're floating for a little bit.

And like, how long can you keep your combo going?

You know you need to rebuild your mana so that you can use your arcana, because it's really strong and it can do Screen clearing kills.

Like the gameplay alone.

The gameplay, the music, which some of it I think is done by who did the soundtrack for Doom.

Oh, Mick Gordon.

2016.

Yeah, I think Mick Gordon did some of the music here.

It's like a real it's a it's a real fantastic soundtrack overall.

There's a ton of other artists.

I don't think Mick is the main one, but some of the boss music I think is done by him.

Really, really good songs there.

Just visually in gameplay.

I think this is amazing.

And then the structure of it is really good, too.

The structure of Absalom, because it's designed in this way.

Where it's, it's half roguelike, half beat him up.

It's going through a lot of similar areas.

So so you start in the I don't remember the name of it is, but basically just like the hub area.

Every time you die, you respawn and you learn a little bit more about the world.

It's like there's this war going on between a couple of factions and there's this overarching evil presence that you're trying to reach by the end of the game and topple them.

Right.

But along the way you're working with this group of people who are part of like, a tree group family and you, you help them out.

They're not literally trees, but like the spirit is in a tree and all that.

Um, and you, you have this band of characters.

One of them's a frog, which is, you should always play as the frog.

I think, uh, there's four characters you can play as.

I think it's co-op, but I don't think it goes up to four.

Frank, is it just two?

You played this.

I think two.

Yeah.

Cause I saw a demo that Summer Games does.

I think it just had two, two things set up.

That makes sense because you only start with two characters.

It'd be weird if there were like three dwarves and one elf lady.

There's a very straightforward set of abilities.

They all do pretty similar stuff, but they look different and have like this is a launcher.

This is a dash.

It's all that sort of stuff.

And then you just go through.

I thought it was going to be structured like Binding of Isaac or like Hades, where you'd have a couple of doors you could go through and the rooms were similar but like generated a little differently.

No, this is structurally a lot like a beat them up.

You go to the left to right each stage.

Once you get to the right of the stage, there's maybe a fork in the road and you could pick which route you want to take there.

Once you've gone through once, if you die or get to the end or whatever.

Um, you can see on the map what all of the locations are.

If you want to go back to stuff and you'll get similar things.

But if you finished certain stuff, you can create shortcuts.

You can find quick routes between things or unlock new paths that are actually, like narratively, very interesting.

I've met new characters.

I've seen things that I wasn't expecting.

It's, it's very deep.

This is, I think I haven't finished it.

I don't, You know, I don't know if it can hold it all the way through, but just this first area of the game.

I got to the final boss in it and I fought it a couple of times.

It's really hard, actually, but it's an enjoyable challenge.

I think this is fantastic.

I could see myself playing this for like at least 20 hours, like just on the gameplay alone, because it's roguelike.

I thought maybe structurally it would be a little slow because it is that beat him up thing.

But no, like every time I've played, there's been a new story beat.

I've seen a new like upgrade that you get from the sort of roguelike mechanics you can pick up.

It's it's a ton of fun.

It's just the combat system alone is absolutely it just it's exactly what you want.

It's like playing a fighting game in 2D.

Finally, they keep saying that's what Streets of Rage is.

And every time I go to play it, I'm like, that's not what it is.

There's too much Streets of Rage.

I'm having a little too much rage in the streets about Streets of Rage.

Sounds like it.

Listen to the soundtrack and you'll feel fucking great.

Doesn't matter why you're doing that.

That is true.

It's fucking good time.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

That sounds interesting.

So the demo is up as well.

Is the demo good?

Yeah, I guess it's basically the opening of the game.

Yeah.

OK, that's a nice one.

OK, this is an interesting one.

Yeah.

Do you think this is one that's going to struggle to get eyeballs on it?

As you said, I think there's there's hype around it, but it's not like it's not crazy levels of hype.

I think people know about it, are excited about it and they're going to champion it because this feels great.

Like if you've been waiting for a beat them up game.

I get the, I get the feeling that this is the one for a lot of people.

It's not as, it's not as stocky and sticky as the older games are.

It's not like, you know, it's very fast paced, but I think this is, this is the one for me.

If you haven't been able to get into them before, this will be the one.

I think I'm going to be talking about this for probably the next couple of weeks.

Cause I, I couldn't put it down.

Indie recommendation video.

I would love to.

Yeah.

And it's co-op.

So I mean, if anyone wants to jump in there, I don't have this hotel doesn't have um video games, so i'm on a mac here.

Are you stuck in there?

We could record it a different day.

It feels like i'm stuck in here.

I feel like i'm just in like a liminal space here.

I'm just.

It looks like it in the back rooms.

You look like you're hosting a late night show in in 2020.

I thought.

I thought that they had done like a, like a, like a blurry filter, but that's just a blurry painting.

I said to jesse before we recorded that that looked like a uh, like water damage.

Yeah, it does.

Yeah, It looks like you're censoring whatever's in there with a filter on the camera.

It looks like black mold.

Oh, no.

Get out of there.

I'm going to be in a hospital like Jordan Peterson.

He's going to have died from that by the time this gets published, and I'm going to get hounded.

You're going to have to censor that name, and then it's going to be really apparent what we said.

Jesse, have you ever played Turtles in Time?

I have played Turtles in Time.

And you don't like it?

I still don't like it.

He doesn't like Turtles in Time or Streets of Rage.

I might just have bad taste.

Nope, Final Fight also didn't like.

Shit.

The only one I liked actually was the newer Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles one.

Wait, okay.

What about Scott Pilgrim?

That takes place in Canada.

I don't like that either.

Wow.

I know.

The genre does not... Listen.

Beat him up.

Shut your mouth.

Beat him up.

Sorry.

I love fighting games.

I don't know what it is.

I think it's just because I don't like... how it feels to play those games.

The combat to me never felt like it had enough depth, or at least that I wasn't willing to figure it out.

Like, oh, there's combos and juggles that you can do in those kinds of games.

Like I know how they work structurally.

I just never found it to be that enjoyable.

The structure wasn't good.

The story wasn't interesting enough to me.

The music was great.

Most of them have really great music, but I just never really could get into it.

This one is quicker to get to you having a good time with the combat.

My thought could also be the context.

Context because for me it was like beat him ups, were like the game to play at arcades, like X-Men Academy, with like eight players with friends going up dumping quarters, like playing them at home, like by yourself.

Like those are the ultimate co-op games and stuff, too.

So as a kid, Final Fight is like my favorite game.

That's not even enough for me though, because I played Castle Crashers the whole way through with buddies.

I didn't like that.

I played Turtles in Time with buddies.

I remember we played The Simpsons arcade game.

Oh, now you're throwing fucking fighting words out there.

I'm sorry, i didn't like it either.

We played it at uh, at fan expo, the the fake packs that we have up here and uh, they had an arcade game booth and we were like, let's play the simpsons arcade game.

And i just i was like yeah, it's funny, i'd rather be playing anything else.

That's hateful.

There you go.

I know i'm sorry, that's hate speech.

I know i'm glad you found your your one.

Yeah yeah, fair play.

Don't you ever talk shit about you know what?

Or turtles in time.

Give me two weeks in this game.

Maybe I will see the light and I'll go back and I'll play streets of rage and turtles in time.

And maybe I'll become a turtle in time.

I'll have pizza time.

Wow.

I do feel like turtles in time is like, it's like a three hour game.

So I feel like I've never it's never long enough for me to be to to criticize the depth of it, because it's always just like let's fire up fucking turtles in time.

And then just like it'll be over in a couple hours, and you know what i mean, like it's so short and and then i feel like with the arcade experience, it's like you know, you dump in five bucks and quarters and you're like, all right well, we play it for like an hour.

I'm not gonna keep throwing money at this machine.

So that is a fair point.

It's yeah, there's no reason to get all fucking sticky about it.

Who cares?

Oh no, the gameplay is not that fun.

It feels like my experiences with that genre are always so uh, time limited and that I feel like maybe I don't have like a critical lens on them, because I'm just like you know, if you had like one bite of ice cream, even if it was like shitty ice cream, you'd be like oh, that was pretty good.

There's a lot of sugar and milk cream.

Tasty cream.

Laugh it up, folks.

Absalom available now.

How much will it cost?

Any idea?

I'm not sure.

Frank, you got the email on it.

Did the check the email, Frank?

Pull up the tapes.

Do do you pull it up for me, Jamie?

Do do do, oh no, the dev sets another.

I'm not gonna joke about that.

I got the spitting beach ball on my macbook.

Oh classic, all right.

While we're doing that, while we're trying to figure that out jesse, why were you playing the remix of the old moon playstation 1 game that came out a couple of?

Well, the game came out in the 90s.

Explain this to me.

Let's go from the top.

Explain what this thing is.

All right.

So in 1997, no, no, no.

No, really?

Oh, all right.

I mean, I don't know.

I'm not a historian on the game or anything.

Jeremy might be.

I think you've talked about this in the past, Jeremy, if you wanted to give the 101 on Moon.

Yeah, yeah.

The game is called Moon Remix RPG Adventure.

The original game, I believe, is also called that because it is like remixing elements of RPGs.

I might be mistaken on that.

I think it's called something slightly different.

Let me look that up.

Let's pull up the records here.

The price for Absalom, thank you, Frank, was $24.99.

We got it here.

That's a great price.

I mean, the PlayStation box says Moon Remix RPG Adventure.

There you go.

Yes, Moon colon Remix RPG Adventure.

The new one is called Moon a Remix RPG.

I know I'm not.

It's.

Oh, yeah.

See, it's like slightly different.

Wait, the Steam page says Moon Remix RPG Adventure.

Oh, does it really?

Where are you seeing a review?

Is this on Switch?

Moon Remix RPG Adventure.

No, in the document it says... Oh, I might have written it wrong.

Oh, you just wrote it down wrong?

That's just a typo, I think.

Moon Remix RPG Adventure...

Yeah, you're right.

Sorry.

It's the same.

Sorry.

That's OK.

It basically just wasn't in English and there were like fan translations and stuff.

And then the newer version, I believe, is a straight just like translation.

I don't know about any like major changes if there are some.

Um, but just do you want me to?

I can explain what this game is, but also I don't want to steal your thunder.

But the reason that I was playing this game um was because last week I failed to explain what hell is us is uh, effectively.

Cause that game is like it.

There's a lot to it and you are effectively in that uh, learning along the way.

Nothing is satisfyingly concluded until 20 hours in.

So it's a bit like how do you explain, How do you explain the feeling of not understanding anything for 20 hours and then having that eureka moment?

Games criticism is a skill, folks.

I know.

We're all still learning it.

I'm not very good at that part of it.

No, it's fine.

Not not spoiling things.

Not my greatest skill.

Plus, I never know what a spoiler even is until after I've said it.

So it's I'm still working on it.

But, but Moon?

Somebody recommended it to me after hearing what I was saying about Hell is Us, because they were like the thing that you thought this game was based on the marketing of a game that has no direction, that has no clear, explicit.

Check your journal for what you're supposed to do.

Next sort of structure.

It's because if it's not hitting that for you, try playing moon, give it a shot, right.

Plus straight children comes out at the end of the month.

The latest game from some of the team who worked on moon.

Uh, i don't think kenichi nishi is working on straight children.

I don't think he's part of onion games, at least based on their website.

Um, the director of the original, but uh Yeah, I'm excited for that.

I've been looking forward to it.

So I didn't want to look like a poser.

I want to make sure I'm also doing my homework and playing the original game.

It's really it's fantastic.

Moon Remix RPG Adventure is like.

It is just a warm hug of a video game.

It is like an anti RPG almost like it hates RPG.

It doesn't hate RPG.

It loves RPG so much that it knows how to poke fun at the concept of playing one of them.

It presents you with this world where there's a world for somebody else, a world for a hero and a character that's more important than you.

But also you're playing as RPG somewhat of a of a hero or like an inspiration of a hero.

People see you and they, they remember a different person.

That means a lot to this world.

I'm not, i'm not super, super far into it, but like just the way that it's structured is very loose.

You you start as a character who can't interact with the world and eventually you can sort of you're like a ghost wearing clothes basically, and And you have these small interactions with these characters who who, what they're saying makes no sense until you start speaking the language of the world, not in a literal sense, but a metaphorical one.

Like characters will say things to you that make no sense.

They'll say like, oh, you know, we communicate by passing out business cards.

You're like, well, it doesn't make any sense.

Go talk to other people who live in the castle and you can give and then maybe there's something that happens.

Like so many things in the game, are presented in this way where you.

It makes perfect sense to the characters and it can't possibly to you.

There's no structure.

There's no setup that is super clear.

What's the gameplay?

What are we?

I don't know.

I have no concept of like what we're actually doing in this.

Yeah, it's like an isometric or JRPG isometric.

Yeah, you're just walking around.

Visually it looks a bit like maybe Yoshi's Island, I guess, like maybe less, less cartoony and detailed.

Um, low, low quality, almost kind of looks like a, like a Photoshop kit bash of an RPG.

Visually, it looks weird.

Size and scale is always shifting and changing.

It's like your character is way too big for some of the buildings he goes into, and their buildings are huge.

Classic game design thing there.

You maneuver by just walking around different areas.

You can talk to characters and you can also give them items to see how they react to the items that you give them.

They'll teach you more about the world.

It's also structured in a sort of 24 hour sequence, but like you have a limited amount of time you can use, so like this tripped me up at the start too.

It's fucking harsh.

It's actually really harsh, i didn't.

So this is one of those games.

You should probably read the manual uh, which is weird because, like there's no manual, you have to go google for it, uh.

But if you don't look it up, you don't realize.

There's this timer up in the top left with an arrow on it and then a line moving along, a bit like a hand on the clock, and um, I didn't piece together that it was.

Showing you where the arrow is is how long you have until you run out of time.

So the first couple playthroughs of the intro of the game, I'm just walking around, and then eventually your character starts slouching and I'm like okay, I guess he's tired, I should go to sleep.

And then I fell over and died and it was like game over.

I'm like hey, I was just trying to get back to the bed, it just hard boots you to your last save.

Yeah, you go back to the last save.

So everything you lost is uh, or everything you've done up till that point is completely lost, but you retain the information.

So like, Is it that bad?

It can't, you know, you've spent a lot of time learning stuff.

So it also creates a situation where it like, imbues a lot of specialness into pushing a little further to see something and then unlocking a moment.

Like, I remember a moment in Moon where I was like, sure, I was going to die.

And I was like, you know what?

I'm not going to make it all the way back.

I might as well just keep pushing on. and then found a way basically to like avoid death and in so doing discovered like this whole sort of like little narrative pocket with like a weird vision quest thing that happened um so i it is a game that like when you have to repeat things it's often not that punishing because you've already like learned how to do them and where to go and what to present and sort of the the sequence of things whereas like doing it the initial time uh the it takes a lot of time because you don't even know like there's a game where you're just going around and presenting items to people and stuff the core of this game is that you're spreading love which i think is really nice that like that it's an anti-rpg in the sense that the rpg hero who goes around solving things with a sword is kind of like the villain of the game like you'll run into this like knight who is the more sort of stereotypical rpg protagonist and that's the antagonist and um you as the sort of like uh not like i don't know i guess you're the protagonist but like the sort of like side character yeah all you're really doing is like going around and like spreading love like doing nice gestures and that's sort of the only feedback mechanism that this game has is like when you do a thing that spreads love there's like this whole fucking like heart sequence and you have these weird like moments where you're speaking to this entity who's like oh you're like love level is like love level three yeah when you when you travel around the world you get you gain love by like helping people but also there's these dead monsters that are um i think caused by the hero the anti-hero i suppose uh who's going around the world killing things with his big sword and you could find their spirits and bring them back to the they'll just automatically go back to the monster if you touch them um and then a ufo shows up and takes the revived creature I don't know.

And then you get love.

Your character just turns to the camera or I guess the player and just goes, Hey, love heart.

And you're like, all right.

But when you go to bed, your, your heart that you've accumulated is like tallied up.

And this scary queen, disembodied ghost head in your nightmares, is like you're now the arbiter of love and you could stay awake for 45 more minutes.

You need to get three more hearts before I'll let you stay awake longer.

And it's, it's just, but it's so charming.

Like the world is so much fun.

I love the, piecing together what's going on.

I'm obsessed with it.

Like it feels, like the sort of thing it reminded me of playing like outer wilds or playing that, that structure of game where you don't know anything.

You're going to collect a lot of information that's loosely connected, that maybe you can keep track of in your head but might not matter for another two or three hours.

And when it clicks and you see what those pieces were supposed to be for it's like It's such a cool moment.

It's what I love about playing video games is when I, when I'm lost and confused and suddenly everything comes back together.

And it's like, wow, you have a brain.

You're so smart.

Look at you.

Makes me feel proud of myself.

Fun little bit of information as well as that.

The English translation for this version was done by Tim Rogers.

Oh, crazy.

It has a lot of his like sort of sense of humor in it.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

Very cool.

Sorry, I want to get the Moon Remix RPG Adventure.

It's 19 bucks at the moment up on Steam.

This version you played came out in 2021 and is the most recent version.

And what is the name of the game that they're coming out with, the new one?

Stray Children.

It's launching, I want to say, on the 30th of October.

Okay, soon enough.

Yeah.

So keep your eyes peeled for that.

Maybe worth an L wish list there.

Frank Howley, you've got a couple of games left over here.

Tell us all about them.

Yes, UFC 5.

So this is awesome.

So I saw The Smashing Machine, the new film by Benny Safety starring The Rock.

Yes, I'm excited to watch it.

I haven't seen it yet by uh, based on mark kerr, so i knew nothing going into the film other than it would be about mma ufc.

But i love everything the safeties have produced and done and we're getting an extra safety film.

So the brothers split.

So this is the mashing machine.

Um, the the ping pong movie comes out christmas.

Oh, he's doing the ping pong movie with uh chalamet yes, timothy chalamet.

Yeah, marty supreme.

So um, so smash machine.

I watched it.

It's like mad libs over here.

Yeah yeah uh, so smashing machine i, so i going into the film.

I was so delighted because i didn't know this until a friend told me the night before half of the film takes place in japan, because it's all about like, the pride.

I had no idea.

I was like, oh my god, i thought that's why you watched it.

I was like, of course you're gonna watch the smashing machine.

It's a big meathead american being in japan not yeah, So like yeah, I'll see anything.

The safety is, that's why like, yeah, ping pong movie.

Sure.

It's, it's Josh safety.

I'm in.

So I was like, oh my God.

So soon as the movie ended I Googled like okay UFC games, Mark Kerr where.

How can I play as Mark Kerr in any UFC game?

So in the early two thousands, a Japanese company made some UFC games for like Xbox and GameCube.

Mark Kerr is playable in a bunch of Japanese wrestling and fighting games like fire pro wrestling, all this other stuff.

But yeah, google came up because of this movie this weekend.

Uh, ufc 5, which came out in 2023, they added mark kerr as a dlc character and when you look up the like model, it's like it's mark kerr, but i just see the rock as funny.

So it's like because again in the film he has like prosthetics.

It looks great, um and so yeah so, and then the other thing too i came home and then i watched the documentary that the film was based on, because i wanted to see y2k japan footage and also just because like Yeah, it's anytime you see a film like that where you know nothing of the origins.

I always look it up on Wikipedia, but the fact that the documentary footage was there I had to dive in.

So it was cool to see the film, watch the documentary, and then I started UFC 5.

So I looked it up.

It is on Xbox Game Pass, Ultimate or whatever, but I have a bunch of friends who have it on PS5 and we can do multiplayer.

So I got the PS5 edition.

20 bucks.

Right now it's on sale.

I think it's because there was a ufc fight over the weekend, so i don't know if they just put it on sale every time.

That's a big one and it's weird.

The ufc five came out like two years ago, but it is the most recent version.

For people who are wondering yes, and then it's funny in the game every time there's a fight, you can go in the game and bet on, like.

You can make fight picks in the game and if your fight picks are accurate or you get like extra xp and rewards, which i think is really funny.

Gotta start them betting early.

You know what i mean?

They're not sponsored by half the fucking betting companies in the world for no reason.

Um, so yeah.

So so going into this, I'd never played any like MMA game.

The closest thing to this I have played is EA sport fight night, round three, which was nothing like this at all.

Right.

So.

So I would argue like it is the best, even though it's a different sport.

It's to me this is the best boxing game I played since that, in the way that it's similar in terms of the physics and like the actual control scheme.

It almost kind of plays like tekken, where like punches your left fist, you know, triangle is your right fist, x is your left kick, circle is your right kick, and then the way you modify it.

So it's almost like learning skate or anything, the wave and there's tutorials and stuff.

But it's like oh, the way this moves, the physics and combat in this is so fun.

I'm so used to like, you know, like mortal kombat, street fighter, where there's inputs and stuff and it's snap or wwe yeah exactly, which is like a different way of cheesing it.

But here it's like every weight momentum is so it's in blocking all this.

So i started a new career mode and you can import ufc fighters.

So i'm starting a career mode as mark kerr and i've put, i would say, six to eight hours already into it and it is.

It's so fun.

So the way it started, passing his drug tests, Yeah well, there's no drug test involved, thankfully.

So, you know, but it's your marker.

We do too well in 2025.

Anyway, it's so funny because there's like all these dramatic cut scenes and stuff.

And to me this just feels like I'm playing a video game based on a movie, because it's like, oh my God, the coach is talking before the fight.

But the thing I really like about this is So you sign a contract and you have like a fight in five weeks.

So it's almost like persona you know when the big dungeons coming up and you have weeks to train.

You can improve your social links with like other fighters.

You can, you can do, you can get like you can like go on podcasts and talk shows and do interviews to hype up your fight.

The more hype your fight has going to it.

You get a bigger payout, you get more fans, you can post on social media all this stuff.

But the thing where I love about this is like the career mode is also the tutorial, because before the big fights there's like different things you can train.

You can train boxing, Muay Thai, grappling, and then, like, takedowns and stuff.

So, like, freestyle wrestling.

And so...

It also has the Skyrim level up system.

So if you only use punches, you're going to level up your punches.

So things like that.

So you can fight with your trainers.

It'll give you tutorial prompts like, give me five uppercuts and things like that.

But if you knock out your training partner, then you can no longer train with that guy until the next fight sequence.

So I didn't know this.

I was just like doing punches, grinding a punch, and then i knock out my guy.

The thing stops and then when you go to train again it's like oh, the boxing instructor's injured, you can't train boxing anymore, so you're locked out of learning new boxing abilities.

So it's like, all right, let me go to muay thai.

And then i started.

Can i just ask a good question was that a guy holding pads?

No, they have no pads when they're fighting.

It's just legitimate.

But no, no, he wasn't like he wasn't holding like strike pads.

He was like, oh, it was just OK.

Yeah, you can't.

You're sparring.

And you can do fight like a boxing bag.

But the thing that's funny is you have the chance to get injured during training also.

So it's like.

So it says anytime you like.

You don't want to train right before a fight because you can get injured and you lose stat points if you get injured.

So it's like there's all this RPG sim stuff that is genuinely so addictive.

And then you get to the fights and and um, you know you'll spend like 30 minutes in a gameplay loop training and because i've just maxed out my kicks and punches, i kick them in the head like three times, i get an instant ko.

Or maybe because mark kern actually has good stats, i don't know.

So it's just like i'm i'm like sucked into this perfect gameplay loop of like training, trying not to kill my trainers, doing the actual ufc fights, immediately knocking them out, posting on social media about my fight, signing a contract, doing a podcast sponsorship, and it's like it's got all the right.

Like dopamine.

You're hitting, like you're unlocking the stuff, and it's like it's really, really fun and it is really, to me, like the best boxing game i played since.

Yeah, ea fight night, round three, but again there's kickboxing.

If you want to do freestyle wrestling and grappling, you can, but it's, it's so fun just trying to like punch people in the head and knock them out, and when you do it, it's got like mortal combat, like slow motion.

Oh my God.

It's like the sniper elite, like jaw exploding.

Fight nights too, right?

Blood squirts out.

Oh yeah.

And just like fight night in the middle of a match, like the medics can call it, and the doctor will come and inspect the cut.

I think fight night had a mini game where you could like apply wounds.

This is just a cut scene, but there's the cold, cold, cold compress.

Remember you used to put it over the eye.

Can you pay off the doctor?

So like if he, he'll tell you what the numbers he's going to put up is.

So you can spill a bit of water on the way out.

So you've got more time to recover.

Yeah.

Yes.

So like there is a mechanic where, if you get injured, you can spend like time training, time to rest and recover.

One of the things is like visit mom.

Oh, you gain like 10 HP back.

Yeah.

Or, or just like the smashing machine, you can pay out of pocket for drugs.

Like that doesn't say drugs, but like you can, you can pay it.

You can pay money to Dr. Physics, plastic surgery.

If your face gets too messed up. and like, and, and, and spend your money.

And then he can also spend money.

You can also spend money to learn moves with other UFC fighters.

But if you knock out the UFC fighter you're trading with after, you'll start a beef with them and then you have to fight him next.

So it's like, It's the nemesis system.

It really is.

It really, I'm so blown away.

I just wanted to play any UFC game with Mark Kerr.

Now I have this lifelike, like the graphics are so good.

I think it's also the thing.

You see this in WWE games, where the base game came out in 2023, but now, two years later, new DLC the graphics look better than like the original models.

I also have Mike Tyson and, like Bruce Buffer, like all these random goofy DLC characters.

But you can fight as bruce buffer yeah, yeah.

Yeah, he's a dlc character.

Is his brother in us?

Can we have michael buffer versus bruce buffer?

I wish they're just.

They're just standing on microphones calling about each other.

Um so yeah it's, it's.

I'm like shocked how fun this game is and like yeah, i'm coming to it two years later.

It's super cheap, it's patched.

But the fact that you can play as mark, you can go see the smashing machine.

Play as mark curry, you can watch the documentary on youtube.

I've like maxed out mark kerr for now and i've known nothing of usc and mma.

But uh, it's uh.

Honestly, as somebody who's watched a lot of mma over the past decade and has played a lot of these games, hearing you like come in with this, like likening it to persona, is mind blowing to me.

You were like you've come in with this entirely different perspective and it's like now I want to go back and play some more.

It's really good.

I'm like I'm not kidding, like it's so fun, like leveling up and now I can do such ridiculous moves.

And it's funny because I'm playing as Mark Kerr, but here I'm just a kickball, I'm doing like Eddie Gordo moves.

It's insane, amazing.

So that's why I was like yeah, I would love to record anything.

Or Kerr's got some good fundamental wrestling like he was a wrestler.

So, like you know, it works heavyweight though you know, usually those fights get if they either end in the first round or they go the whole way.

So you know uh, when you, if you do an indie rec for this i know it's not an indie game but if you do a video for this, you have to overlay the persona 5 music for it, like the like they're just going around the world music while you're visiting your mom doing a podcast, Good stuff.

I'm so excited for you, Frank UFC five.

What a, what a beautiful, beautiful time for you.

And you also played that new Sonic racing game, right?

Yeah.

So Sonic cross rolls, this came out a few weeks ago.

So I've been playing this since it came out.

Yeah.

So this is this is, I don't know like the fourth or third or fourth cart racer that Sonic has done.

They did Sonic racing, like transform Sonic team racing.

This is the new one Sonic racing cross worlds.

And the new gimmick with this one um is um.

As you're doing your races, like the third lap, every the second or third lap, every time, you'll go through like a portal and you're racing on a brand new map and there's like so, so you'll be on one level.

And then by the second or third thing, there's like literally these portals come up and whoever's in first place can choose which map you're going to next.

So the map will shift and mutate.

So no race is the same.

And so sometimes we'll be doing racing and then, like Diddy Kong racing, all of a sudden you're flying or you're on boats and jet skis.

So you're, you're transforming your craft and, And then also the level is shifting and mutating.

But the initial the team that does all the initial D arcade games worked on this.

So the drifting and racing is actually really good.

But also because it's Sonic Sega, it's just there's so you're collecting coins.

The more coins you collect, the faster you go.

If you get hit or attacked by anything, you lose your coins.

That affects your speed.

There's millions of items.

So it's just as much chaotic as like the latest Mario Kart game.

But what i like this is there's trophies, it's on playstation um, it's got progression.

You can also level, just like ufc5.

You can level up your friendship with other racers um, and so yeah, it's just i haven't tried the online yet, but um, can you go on podcasts in this and like, try to advertise your racing career?

I wish it.

Yeah, it really is good.

Ufc5 it's again.

They got it.

Yeah um, Yeah.

So it's, it's good.

It's snappy.

It works.

And it is generally getting like getting positive reviews.

There's a lot of, um, DLC crossover stuff.

So the base, I think, is I can't remember if it's a DLC or or um part of the base game there's a, there's a season pass like the fuck.

Yeah sorry, go on.

No, there's a lot of weird stuff at the right now.

There's hatsune miku, which was like the main thing i was excited for, and when you're playing as hatsune miku, hatsune miku's like doing all the singing and voicing and like the music has like her filter on it, so you get that little bonus.

Um forthcoming, they're gonna.

I think it's dropping in october as part of like the season passes.

Like all the yakuza characters are going to be there, so ichiban will be in it.

I think there's going to be the other big one.

Minecraft, SpongeBob, Minecraft, Minecraft, Pac-Man.

What?

It's a lot of weird.

Oh, Mega Man got announced for this, too.

It is.

Yeah, it's bizarre.

So it's like TMNT, but the new one, like the new movie.

Yeah, it's uh weird, all right, it's uh, it's almost like the smash brothers of kart racing games without nintendo.

It's just a lot.

They're getting a lot of random stuff.

Persona stuff is going to be there.

So joker from persona, but this is only if you have the season pass right.

I think so.

I think me too is in the base game, but everything else forthcoming yeah okay, so the game it should be mentioned is 70 and the season pass is 32, i think 30.

Oh, So it's 100 of Sonic Racing there available for you if you really want to play Minecraft in your Sonic game.

Brutal.

Oh, my God.

If Shadow the Hedgehog had a podcast, what kind of podcast would it be?

Would it be like an edgy politics podcast or do you think it'd be like a comedy podcast?

New Metal.

I was thinking he'd interview like Curtis Yarvin.

That's a joke for four people.

Who's that?

Let's not get into it.

I'm not smart like you.

Let's not get into it.

Is that your favorite eugenicist or something?

No, definitely not my favorite.

He's hanging out with Sybil Gatto.

Not again.

Not my favorite anything. is this a could could could my kid play this is it because my aircraft's like really good at being you know it has the assist mode and everything and it's is this harder though or there is it does feel a bit more chaotic but a you can shift it to like there's like the 50 cc 100 cc 150 cc so i'm assuming if you played on 50 cc the ai they even have like an ai level like so that's easy.

And then there is steering assist.

So there are some, some levels where you can fall off, but I think, I think if you play on easy, maybe it protects you.

The one interesting neat thing is, um, I forgot what they call it in the game.

Like your gadget wheel, you can customize your your your, your cart or whatever.

Um, but you can get, like uh, perks to it, so you can have a thing where, if you fall off the edge when you respawn, you get a booster not a mushroom, but you know, the equivalent of a mushroom.

Um, things like that, or like your drift, charges up faster.

So i abuse that.

If you have more coins, so as you're playing, you're unlocking more perks, it's.

It's not necessarily a roguelite, because you're you're, you're customizing your thing, but you're getting every time you play, you're unlocking more abilities, So you can fully customize your thing.

And so, and then the other, like for me, I like this.

You can play with all the characters that the Japanese voices, but there's a rival again, a nemesis system, a rivalry.

So every time you start like a grand, like a circuit, you'll have a character that's your rival.

And there's like little one-on-one cut scenes.

So, like Rouge, the bat and egg man are mouthing off at each other, but there's a unique mechanic where, if your rival beats you enough times, regardless of how well you're doing in the thing, you'll be eliminated from, like the grand prix.

So like, So you wanna make sure you beat your rival.

Oh, crazy. you can also systems and everything it really is and like it's funny because you always see where your rival is and as they get close to you they'll start talking to you so it's like oh it's like this weird extra there's just a lot of systems elements into this which is kind of cool so for me it's like oh it is more engaging the mario kart switch to whatever whatever the newest mario kart world which was good this has a lot of stuff so it's uh yeah this seems more like a kart racer sorry to cut you off but it just seems more like a kart racer than than mario kart world to me because like mario kart world is so even if you play the the cups it's like it doesn't feel as, as consistent in its, in its playthrough.

You're kind of just quickly getting to the race and then doing one lap where this seems like classic cart racer gameplay, with all the sort of big spectacle moments that that I was missing from Mario cart world.

It's like, you don't see things change over time.

This is like, here's a new thing in the middle of the race.

It's that's why I kind of want to try online.

Cause also Sonic fans are also psychos.

So I wonder like you take us like, that's going to be nuts.

And there's a lot of deep cup Sonic characters like cream, the rabbit, big, the cat.

And again, the all cream, the rubbish cream.

Yeah, I know.

She has a little cream.

Yeah, they should be.

Yeah.

The rabbit.

And she's got a she's got a chocobo on her.

And so her.

No, not chocobo.

Right.

Yeah.

Ciao.

Yeah.

Look, this week is the UFC.

It's Sonic.

It's all collapsed together.

Yeah.

And there is a dude.

I fucking went.

Don't Google cream.

The rabbit jackass.

You're in a hospital.

You're in a hotel.

I can't track it.

No, this is 5g.

The government has me on this.

Oh, okay.

Um, I Googled it and I, before I hit okay, I glanced down at what the like auto fills were underneath it.

And the one underneath the next, the first one was age.

It's a Sonic character.

That's every single.

I like, I like the implications.

I like cream, the rabbit mom.

That's a, that's, Oh, she does have a mom called vanilla, the rabbit.

Come on, boo again.

Sonic's cool like you gotta get into all these characters.

That's why it's fun.

That's why it's so funny to play.

And i want to play online, see who everyone's.

I wonder if there's voice chat.

I could just be like hey, what's your favorite sonic character?

No, you can't.

How old is cream the rabbit?

Anyone here?

Like cream the rabbit, what's the name?

Or like like the instructions?

I don't know Fuck.

Sonic the Hedgehog is a pretty cool series, though.

Good characters.

What's Cream the Rabbits podcast about?

I don't know.

Makeup tutorials?

I don't know.

Taylor Swift.

Also Nu Metal.

She does it with Shadow.

Yeah, exactly.

Shadow and Cream.

That's what they call it.

Creamy Shadows.

Listen to it now.

Sonic Racing Cross Force.

Thanks, Frank.

Did you play it on GamePad?

No, you played it on PlayStation?

PS5, yeah, and it's got rumbles.

And 70 of your dollars on this thing?

No, Sega sent me a code.

Thank you, Sega.

Okay.

But I also generally play it at Summer Games Fest.

I got posters.

It's awesome.

Hey, speaking of Summer Games Fest, if we're talking about erasing, because this does have overwhelmingly positive reviews I'm going to check it out based on what you said here.

There is also a demo on Steam.

Actually, that's probably what I'm going to do is go check that out.

But a game we have not played yet, I don't think, but we did play it at Summer Games Fest.

Was that Lego party game?

Whatever it's called?

It's probably called Lego Party.

It's called Lego Party.

Lego Party.

And is it out?

September 30th, it's out.

Yeah, people have said it's really great.

So it was really great when we played it there.

So I haven't played it since, but I assume it's great.

I think I'm going to try maybe... play some of that with my family this week.

You seemed shocked by review numbers last week on games, thinking they would have more or less.

Yeah.

How many do you think Lego Party has?

Oh, that's tough because that's like on a PC.

Yeah.

Like that's... Fuck.

Ballpark it.

I believe in you.

I'll be honest.

Because I know I could probably intuit what you're going to get.

So I'll be as honest as I possibly can.

If it was a week later, I'd want it to be somewhere around like 500 reviews at least.

Can I throw a guess out there?

I was going to say 1,300.

All right.

Frank, do you care at all to throw one out?

Okay, all right.

You're confirming my numbers.

I appreciate it.

I need someone to back me up.

308 reviews on Steam. oh wow that's low damn yeah I do wonder if it's less of a Steam game it's more to me like I wouldn't play this on Steam I'd get this on something that's hooked up to a TV so I could play it with people this is a Switch game for sure that's true I guessed high because in my mind this was a game that like streamers would pick up and then people who watch them would be like I have to buy a Lego party too yeah maybe yeah well yeah it's uh yeah cross platform hopefully it's it's doing well around um Yeah, for some reason, that to me is one that I would not play on PC.

What's another one, though, that just came out that might be worth looking at?

Sonic Racing Crossroads.

How many does that have?

That's probably got thousands, right?

Yeah, that probably did pretty well.

I would guess like four.

Yeah, I mean.

Pulling it up.

It is 4,192 overwhelmingly positive.

Jesse is just the fucking Steam Whisperer over there anyway, so he knows what the fuck's going on.

All right, that's all the games for this week.

House of Necrosis Mugenics, Moon Remix, RPG Adventure Absalom, Final Fantasy Tactics whatever the fuck it's called Sonic Racing Crossworlds, UFC 5.

And a couple of other ones splattered in there, too.

We cream the cat, of course.

Frank, we have one email.

Cream the rabbit.

Don't cream the cats.

That's eugenics.

That's a different game.

Freudian clip.

If you want to send us emails or cream the rabbit fan art, direct to us at podcast at noclip.video.

That's podcast at noclip.video.

We'll take vanilla, too.

Yeah, vanilla.

Jeremy likes moms.

That's all we're saying podcast at noclipvideo or in the patron discord in the podcast channel.

Um, this is kenny from queens wrote in about sandbox multiplayer games.

Dear noclip.

Frank's experience with a new skate game creating an impromptu objective around a glitch on a food court umbrella reminded me of an all-time favorite online mode, gta4's free play.

There was no progression, so me and my buds just spent dozens of hours organically finding things to do, including the infamous swing set glitch.

Despite GTA V's massive success, its structured online mode never clicked with me and my friends the way its predecessor did.

Are there any series or genres that you recall having similar online sandbox experiences with?

Any you think could find success with an audience today?

Hmm.

Ooh.

I got a quick hit for this one, but it is a game that is designed as a sandbox, so I don't know if this is like sandboxing non-sandboxy games, but Star Wars Galaxies was just like one of the best games ever for imagining the things you could do in this possibility space and talking about them with friends and being like we could open a fucking robot shop on Tatooine.

But that is the core.

That's not like, oh, my God, you can bounce off the umbrella instead of play the game.

That is the fucking that's the game.

Right.

Yeah.

And similarly, I feel like. uh the game that sort of stole this for a generation was minecraft like that was the place where all that stuff happened where if you're playing with some buddies you had to make up something because there was you know no definitive objective yeah yeah or yeah if you're in create mode i guess you can just do whatever but like you know you had to come up with ideas and then that's that sort of uh pressure created all of these sort of established games then within minecraft you know obviously battle royale stuff a lot of came out of that and loads of other like interesting modes and hides and seeks and all these ones kind of came from that void that was there and the pressure that was created when people were in that void and needing something to do you know it's it's very like i i love that minecraft i love the minecraft i don't know what we call them game modes or you know community game modes that emerge from that because it almost reminds me of the games that happen in like a playground like when you just have a bunch of kids that have 30 minutes to burn every day you know they just have to come up with stuff or my daughter comes home with all these stories about the game they made up that day and what it was and it's like i that's i i think that'd be really good like if they did a minecraft documentary that's what they should do they shouldn't do one about like the you know development of the game like hasune miku talking to her about making the game and how hard that was yeah what what do you mean is there some notch lore i don't know about who's notch oh okay okay um i don't know i remember where that bit came from but it's always stuck in my mind um no the the one game that i could think of that i had a sort of like sandboxing unintended experience but it's still playing the game, is Modern Warfare 2 is every time I got on Rust, I would do whatever it... Everyone who knows Modern Warfare 2 knows what Rust is.

Greatest map of all time.

Every time I got there I would do whatever it takes to get every member of the lobby to switch to snipers and jump off the top of Rust doing a 360 trying to get no scopes.

Whoever gets the most wins.

That's the only way to play the game.

As soon as you get on Rust, you have to do that.

That's the rule.

I do like in Counter-Strike matches when you would...

Was it CS mostly?

I think it was in CS.

The knife rounds?

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

But like the... But not the intent... Not the... Like the ones that would emerge organically.

Or if you just like swap to a knife, and then they're looking at you and then they're all right and they go knife and they're having a knife fight.

That was... those moments always felt good.

Yeah.

Counter-Strike in general had like um, not only sort of like emergent things like that where everyone is willing to play in like a knife round and just you know, I feel like usually in the old days, like 16 people would be like a knife round.

Most, I would say the majority of times, no one would pull out a gun and fucking ruin it.

Like it was otter.

Don't be a party pooper.

Yeah.

But then, like um CS obviously had a really robust uh modding community and you know, like surf maps and gun game and all these things emerged out of it.

Again there's there's like a, a sliding scale here where it's like, once something is made into an official mode, it's sort of lame again i.

I just mean like that's not really an example of what this person is talking about, but it is.

I feel like those modes emerge out of the same impulse of like it would be fun to play this sort of alternative way of playing this game, but the game does not currently facilitate the ability to do it.

So you have to modify it.

Um, but it's that same impulse of like, what else can you do in this, in this world?

And, you know, having to like bend the rules slightly to accommodate it.

Yeah.

The gentleman's agreement in multiplayer games is so interesting to me.

Like in Marvel snap.

Weirdly, there's this location that can pop up called ego, where the game plays for both players and And it just completely controls all your cards and movements and things you can do in the game.

And you have no you just have to hit end turn.

And there is a rule in the community where if you, if ego, pops up, you both have to snap, making it the highest risk game.

Like you're trying to win points.

That's fun.

That kind of stuff in multiplayer games, especially in games with no communication systems.

When the community outside of the game agrees that this is how you're supposed to do it.

This is what like that to me is that's what gaming is about, baby.

Multiplayer games are about everyone coming together and agreeing let's have a good time.

I don't care what the rules are, we're gonna play it our way.

Thanks for the email kenny, appreciate it.

I did want to share.

Mine was yeah, i'm sorry yeah, halo 2.

Uh, so before skype, before discord, my friends and i would come home from school.

We would just hang out in a halo 2 custom lobby and, like maybe a few people would be shooting or trying to glitch but, like i would do my homework, i'd watch tv and we would just have our xbox headsets on, using halo 2's lobby as our voice chat.

That is so funny.

You're just red versus blue in it in there.

Yeah, basically.

And so like I remember, like I would finish playing, like it was such a weird time, like even before I had like a router and I sometimes I would have to like use my computer.

Like I had to take the Ethernet cable, plug it into my computer, do stuff and then, when I'm done, go on the Xbox, talk with friends and then watch like Nickelodeon or whatever.

But the specific thing, too, was, like, yeah, we just have glitch lobbies.

We're like, oh, let's just stack all the explosives and see what happens.

Like, people were experimenting and, like...

And then like, you'd hear stuff like, dude, you got to try this mode.

It's called zombies.

What?

Yeah.

Let me set the custom road.

And then like yeah, just like playground games, people would figure out like the custom levels, which then that then became real playlists like griffball through red versus blue.

That became a mode.

But it's like things would.

People would mess around, make these custom game types.

And then that would be in the thing.

Also like people learning to glitch with swords.

It would just be hours of people trying to learn glitches.

So glitch lobbies.

And then same thing with Tony Hawk. like tony for me it was like underground he would just join glitch servers where people are just like not trying to do score attack or whatever but like oh what corners in this lobby can we glitch into and you just spend hours doing that yeah oh yeah i feel like this points to i'll keep this brief because we've been talking about this for a while but i i feel like it points to a really interesting sort of like game design is not like this separate activity that's like a specialized thing that you have to like go to college to learn I feel I mean there is like game design that you can learn beyond that but I feel like at its core level it's this very human impulse to just like yeah design cool experiences so like I remember being in elementary school and like playing wall ball with friends and And then different friend groups would have like emergent rule sets that would emerge within wall ball.

And it was cool to have like like kids are just game designers by their own nature, because it's just fun to like tweak the rules of these little activities.

So I remember there were like phases where it's like wall ball was all anyone did at recess and then people would like fracture and have like different rule sets for them.

Um, so i feel like it's like that we're talking about this within the context of video games, but it is interesting that this is just sort of like a human, like emergent culture thing that people just like to tweak rule sets.

Yeah yeah, big time.

Thanks for the email, Kenny.

Really appreciate it.

And thank you all for listening this week.

We got a bunch of cool stuff hitting the channels.

The Mugenics preview, like I said, is up right now over on Noclip2.

There's also a bonus scene.

It's like a 12 minute video, I think, of Edmund.

We did like a Cribs style tour of his office space.

You can check that one out there.

We're starting to get a bunch of patron exclusive stuff over on Noclip2.

And of course, we could use your support.

Noclip2, we're super proud of what's going on over there.

And the reception has been amazing.

But we absolutely need more folks who are patrons.

I just went to check the number.

Guys, guess how many patrons there are.

I almost don't want to ask for any more.

Is it 6969? of 420 my friend it's 420 we have 420 paid patrons yeah over there thank you so much yeah we have six 2677 um total members a bunch of folks hopefully enjoyed our first ever zine that went up last month that was basically first in a month we produce a free game recommendation zine so please sign up for that if you haven't already basically you'll just get an email in your inbox every month asking you with a bunch of our recommendations that we've covered both here on the podcast and on Noclip2.

So go check that out.

We are going to have a bunch of indie recommendations.

You heard some of them talked about this week already.

Looks like Absalom and House of Necrosis we'll have up this week at the very least.

We're also recording a bunch of other bits and bobs because I am going to Australia on Friday.

I'm going to Sydney for South by Southwest.

I think I'm also heading down to Melbourne.

I was a terrible accent, to interview some people down there.

I'm talking to a bunch of developers trying to get as many interviews as I can while I'm down there.

And I'm also doing a talk at South by South West.

I think it's a fireside chat with one skill up on Friday with Ralph himself.

The man who – the last journalist who owns a video game website.

He's out there fighting the good fight like we are.

He's like – we're like, hey, you know what?

Let's bring back – let's do weird indie game coverage.

Let's throw our bones into it.

Let's make creative, cool shit.

And he's like, let's bring back video game websites.

Like that's fucking balls.

What's the site called again?

Last week?

Thisweekinvideogames.com.

Oh, okay.

Thisweekinvideogames.

I thought it was a play on the John Oliver one.

.com.

Isn't it?

There you go.

I guess so.

Yeah, thisweekinvideogames.com.

Yeah.

Twiv.

Thisweekinvideogames.com.

Go check it out.

I like how they write their articles.

They have like a fucking bullet point list at the top of the article says what the fuck the article's about.

I like it.

Cool.

Does its job.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I'll be I'll be doing a talk with Ralph.

It's one of the highlights, apparently, of their gaming tract.

South by Southwest has historically not had a great gaming tract that the one in Austin.

I was out of it a few years ago.

It was fine.

It's pretty small.

I don't think it was it was particularly impressive.

And I don't know if it's grown since that was pre-COVID.

Um, but the uh, the aussie one has a very good gaming track i have been uh told about in the past and um, as part of sort of researching for heading over this year, i've been checking out the games that are going to be on there.

It kind of happens, i think it's like wedged between pax australia and also melbourne gaming week, so there's a lot of game stuff going on, i think.

So i'm excited to head over there and basically play as many indie games as i can at the uh, at the expo, and interview as many people as i can, and we will do a patron meetup.

I'll be posting over on a i'll probably this might be the first dual post we ever do like one that goes up on noclip and noclip2, just so everyone has an idea, or we might just talk about it in the discord.

Actually, it'll probably solve everything.

Um, i don't know sydney, so i'll figure out a place where we can get together maybe and figure out how many people might be around for it.

Um, but we'll do some sort of meetup while i'm there uh, for the week.

But yeah, it's going to be a weird month because I'm gone for 10 days.

And then Jeremy, you're also heading out on vacay in about a week's time, week and a half's time as well.

So we've got some fun stuff planned, though.

We have, first of all, for Noclip on the main channel, we are keeping up with the monthly patron exclusive podcast being about film reviews.

We are right now about to record our review of Final Fantasy The Spirits Within.

I can't wait to talk to you all about that in a few minutes.

So we'll be putting that up.

But we are going to be doing.

There has been questions about what's the Noclip 2 exclusive podcast that is mentioned.

So we're going to do something completely different over on Noclip 2.

And this month we're theming it.

I think we're going to keep up this theming.

But this month, it being spooky season.

We're going to theme our Patreon-exclusive podcast, which will be at the end of the month, about spooky games.

But it's not just us talking about games we think are spooky.

What we're actually going to do is each of us is going to play a spooky game.

We're going to record a spooky session.

So it's like a fat session, but not as fat, not as long, like a normal, like quick look style, like hour or something of a game that each of us thinks is the scariest game.

So we're going to record one individually, all four of us, and those are going to go up uh, up on noclip2 over the course of october and at the end of the month we are going to do a uh, basically a a vote for the patrons to vote, which they thought was the scariest, and then we're going to ask you to submit your scary games and we're going to do a podcast all about that at the end of the month.

Can we call them bat sessions, because they're spooky and they're.

That's pretty good.

That's pretty good if, if they were batman themed?

Ah maybe, if only fat, bat's fat, we can do a hat session.

Man, there's so many we can do actually, isn't there, sure?

Mostly just fat and fat vat sessions.

Vats are kind of creepy.

I can see a vat play iron lung.

It's like a vat.

Yeah, kind of.

Yeah, it's kind of like a vat.

That's the first time anyone's ever said that you do right along, it's kind of like a vat.

Yeah yeah, there you go.

There's lots of rat games you can play.

Uh, yeah.

So keep your eyes peeled for that.

And also don't forget to watch our Indiana Jones documentary and our Warcraft uh review podcast from last week.

Wait, you should play Mugenics for eight hours and you should call it a cat session.

Cat session.

There you go.

I'll do that once it's out.

Once it's once, you know, or maybe it, maybe Edmund will, maybe I'll just do it and see if Edmund minds if I just published thousands of hours of Mugenics, uh, Disco Elysium is still getting worked on as well, of course.

I also interviewed the developer of Shipwrecked Lente, who she made the game while living on a boat.

Wait sorry, what was the name of the game that you was?

It is it spilled spilled?

Okay sorry, did i say shipwrecked?

Did i shipwrecked?

Yeah, i was just want to make sure.

Sorry, i meant spilled spilled.

Horrible slip of the tongue about a game developer who lives on a boat.

Speak not that evil into this world.

Yeah yeah, you're right.

Yeah, i'm gonna get a hex or something.

I'll be.

Yeah um yeah, so that was.

That was fun.

I'm getting that interview um, edited down this week as well.

And also, jesse's got a great video on all of his favorite gunnar games.

It's actually a very meaningful video.

House Party, by the way, I think you would actually really like that game, Danny.

I'm not.

Yeah, I'm not doing a bit.

I actually think it's a very fun simulation game that also is about adult content.

I love adult content.

Yeah, there you go.

It's two of your favorite things.

It's an immersive sim and it has adult content.

Love it.

Keep your fucking Sonic characters out of my adult content.

OK, that's all I ask.

OK, I'm sorry.

Keep those cream.

Keep the cream.

I'll keep the cream out the rabbit.

Keep the cream and the rabbits separate, please.

Don't involve rabbits.

I don't need the rabbits.

But I need the cream.

Danny hates furries.

That's all I'm hearing.

I love furries.

Half of our followers are furries.

Let's be honest.

They're all here for Jeremy.

Why me?

I don't know.

I looked at the four and I was like, who's the least offended person I can put this to?

No, I fuck with furries.

The IT industry would crumble if not for furries.

100%.

Could you imagine?

Could you absolutely imagine?

It's unbelievable.

Load-bearing furries.

If we had load-bearing furries, that's great.

Culturally load-bearing.

Yeah, absolutely.

Shout out to all of you in power.

With the real power.

Not the...

Not the real power.

The cultural power.

I need to get ahead of this podcast and talk about Final Fantasy The Spirits Within.

This hotel room is making me go fucking crazy.

Thank you everyone for listening to the podcast and we'll see you next time.

Bye!

[Noclip Podcast Episode 248: From Mystery Dungeons to Cat Eugenics]-[Mewgenics, House of Necrosis, Absolum]

📋 Summary

Navigating the World of Niche Gaming: Mystery Dungeons, Eugenics, and Tactics

The Survival Horror Mystery Dungeon: House of Necrosis

Systemic Complexity in Mugenics

Rediscovering Classics: Final Fantasy Tactics

Beat-Em-Up Evolution: Absalom

Conclusion: The Joy of Discovery

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Noclip Podcast Episode 248: From Mystery Dungeons to Cat Eugenics]-[Mewgenics, House of Necrosis, Absolum]

📋 Summary

Navigating the World of Niche Gaming: Mystery Dungeons, Eugenics, and Tactics

The Survival Horror Mystery Dungeon: House of Necrosis

Systemic Complexity in Mugenics

Rediscovering Classics: Final Fantasy Tactics

Beat-Em-Up Evolution: Absalom

Conclusion: The Joy of Discovery

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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