Sektori, Demonschool, Fallout Fan Fest | Noclip Crewcast

To episode 254 of the no clip podcast.

It's a crew cast.

It's one of the final crew casts of the year.

We're trundling towards game of the year.

Tom, it's the most wonderful time of the year.

Jeremy, how do you like to dress up for game of the year season?

Oh, i like to put on my.

I have a big uh knit cosby sweater that has uh jeff keely cosby sweater.

Yeah, I mean, you know the sweaters are innocent.

The sweaters didn't do anything.

But, like, it's like a Christmas sweater with, no, not with Cosby's face, with Keely's face.

Oh, well, that would be, now the sweater has done something.

Now it's all falling apart.

Don't put my name on his name bar.

Okay.

That was it.

Yeah, no, like I was just picturing like a Christmas sweater with Jeff Keighley.

Well, if you're wearing just the sweater, then you've got a problem there.

It's an oversized sweater.

It goes down to my knees.

And it just has Jeff Keighley on it.

And he's like, here's another ad.

That's what it says above his head.

Beautiful.

Frank, what is your best Jeff Keighley moment?

Your favorite Jeff Keighley moment?

Oh man, so many to count.

I like when he walks on stage and says guys, welcome to the game awards.

We got my friend kojima, we got the guy who's gonna yell fuck the oscars.

And uh, voted by gamers for gamers.

And um, thank you to the nokia theater in hollywood.

Um yeah, i don't know.

Good morning, that's good.

Yeah, i like that too.

Yeah, schlick hydrobot is another uh favorite.

And, of course doritos, dorito pope and classic yeah, Doritos and Mountain Dew.

How can we forget all the good times?

Jesse Gratia, if you had to pick between Doritos and Mountain Dew, if you could only have one for the rest of your life, which one would it be?

Doritos a hundred times.

Mountain Dew is straight up piss.

I'm not drinking that.

You don't like that?

It does look like it.

I hate Mountain Dew.

Baja Blast goes crazy, but regular Mountain Dew, couldn't pay me to drink that.

Code Red?

Code Red's okay.

It tastes like red, which I mean, it's what it says on the can, but I just, I can't stomach it.

It's too chemically.

Couldn't pay you to do, I mean, every man has his price, you know?

I guess that's true.

$10 million to drink.

Okay, what if you never have to work again for the rest of your life and you're paid well?

Well, you can do things.

You're not paid not to work.

You're just paid for nothing and you can work if you want to.

And like an exhort, like you could fucking go to Monaco and throw cash at everyone you see every day the rest of your life.

Like in the face, like coins.

But you can, only you can't drink anything other than Mountain Dew, including water, for the rest of your life.

Well, then I'm not going to live very long.

Yeah, but you'll live so well.

I'm here for a short time, not a long time.

If I only get to live for another couple of years because I'm going to die from sugar overdose, I don't want to go out doing it with Mountain Dew.

I'd rather like Dr. Pepper.

At least that hurts a little bit more.

And he's a doctor.

So if things go wrong, he can check in on you.

He's got a license.

He's licensed.

That's true.

You'll be glowing so green that you'll blend into that screen behind you.

We won't be able to see you anymore.

You'll just be a floating beard and glasses.

Yeah.

That'd be awesome, actually.

Although the idea that you still turn up to this podcast if you're a billionaire would be hilarious.

Well, I mean, I got to use my money to enforce my opinions on the strangers.

That's the whole reason.

If there's one thing I know about billionaires is that they cannot disappear from the public eye.

They cannot shut the fuck up.

If anything, Jesse would be like, we need to do another podcast and I'll do it for free.

I'll do it from my yacht.

It is weird, isn't it?

I bet there must be lots and lots and lots of incredibly wealthy people who are just like Living their weird little lives, having their little sex parties and looking at some of these losers and going like would you just shut up.

You're going to ruin it for the rest of us.

I don't want to have to use the bunker.

I just want to own the bunker.

Exactly.

The proletariat will fucking notice.

Shut up talking about your fucking AI dipshit.

Fuck.

Maybe.

Maybe that's what will happen.

You know what's going to happen on this podcast?

We're going to talk about some video juegos.

That's what we're going to talk about.

Drill Bird.

Drill Bird. which also I think is something that it's like a prison nickname, I think.

Lumines, Arise, or Lumines, if you like saying things wrong.

I might talk about Tekken 4 for some reason.

I'm excited to hear about that.

I sold a lot of copies of that.

Sectory as well.

Dispatch Morsels, which just came out today, and I spent some time in the Mojave area with Walton Goggins.

So we're going to talk about that as well in a hot second.

But first of all, massive thanks to all of our Battle Pass holders.

Look at all these beautiful names.

We have a new one at the top, Corey.

Welcome to the crew, Corey.

Which Corey do we think it is?

Feldman.

Okay, Feldman.

Is he alive?

No, Haim is the dead one.

Okay.

I think it's Corey Matthews, the protagonist from Boy Meets World, a fictional character.

I think I know exactly who Frank's going to say.

Which Corey do you think it is?

Yeah, Slipknot, Taylor.

Thank you, man.

Nice.

If you said Booker, I would have lost my mind.

This is like a personality test.

This is which Corey you think.

Exactly.

Which Corey are you?

It's like a... It's like a... It's like a BuzzFeed quiz.

Yeah, exactly.

Answer 20 questions to see which Corey you are.

Answer one question and then it defines your entire life.

And the only question is which Corey are you?

Exactly.

Well, we don't know which Corey we have, but Corey, we're delighted to have you as we are.

All of these beautiful people.

Love Praise.

Yush.

Tiny Tal.

Dwayne the Rock Lobster.

Anthony Thomas.

Nico Passateri.

It's a me, Ferrario.

Senator Armstrong.

Redredge.

Harry Flanagan.

I'm giving him a new name, a new accent.

Joosh.

Arnaud.

Matt Pearson.

James Brown.

Mark Rojas.

I can't do the role.

Can anyone do the role?

Rojas.

Quote.

Tucker Morgan.

David McGarry.

Goddison.

Sven Huster.

I'm going to say Huster now instead of Huster.

See how that works.

Pez.

John Akers.

You Ain't Nate.

Tim Robinson.

Forrest Proish.

Dark Insanities.

Jonathan Kremen.

Eric Hamilton Schneider.

Christophe Fatui.

Enox.

Grizzly Mug.

Cameron Laird.

Zachary Snader.

Alex Goucher.

George.

How do I mispronounce Tacotus?

Tizorkidis.

I bet people say that sometimes.

All the time.

Jacob.

That's all I'm going to say for God's sake this time.

Entheogen.

James Med.

Tohir Tilyaev.

How do I mispronounce Tilyaev?

Tilyaev.

That's probably right.

I'm probably getting it right for the first time.

And Rickon, thank you all so much for your incredible sponsorship.

I just never want to go through the numbers with the Battle Pass holders.

You know what I mean?

They give us such an incredible amount of support every month.

I want to make sure that we fuck up their names as much as we possibly can.

So that's my gift to you, you beautiful, beautiful people.

Um, let's talk about some games, but first of all, i didn't play any games this week lads, basically because i spent most of it well, i did.

I played a lot of arc raiders.

I'm level 38, i'm doing all the dailies.

They opened up the new map i'm, i'm in there, i'm killing the mantis is great.

Have you like spawned into another player right away yet oh, have you spawned into?

Like the three separate times we have spawned right in front of each other.

Every time we've been like whoa whoa chill chill chill chill, chill.

So funny.

But it's crazy how often it's happened like immediately.

Yeah, let's talk.

Should we talk a little bit about that?

Have you played a little bit of Stalematus?

Yeah, yeah.

It's a weird map.

So this was their first like community map thing, I guess.

We all had to chuck in a bunch of scrap to unlock a tunnel.

They did it.

It didn't work out.

They started it on the first day.

People were done in like two hours and they were like we'll just extend it so people who have jobs can like be a part of this later on.

Yeah, I was wondering because I would like go back to the menu and it would have jumped 8 at like 20 minutes.

And I was like, yeah, geez.

All right.

Um, very different type of map.

It's basically one big, uh, like internal facility, I guess it is multiple floors on it.

I was kind of shocked by how big.

It looks really small when you go in first and then you realize there's like multiple floors to it and it like keeps going.

Um, very different, very like close quarters.

Uh, they added in one new enemy to that, the shredder.

That's only on Stella Montes.

Yeah.

The shredder, which is very cool.

It feels like something that I like Terminator.

It's like a floating uh can enemy that just like blast shrapnel at you when it gets close.

It's very it's.

I do not like fighting that thing.

No, it's super aggressive if it gets close to you.

It just is that what it is a shrapnel.

That makes sense why it's called a shred.

It looks like a little evil r2d2 and the The way I've – it's the only like enemy I've found.

That is basically like primed for shotgun attacks because – Totally

Perfect for the map because it's all indoors.

Exactly.

So I've been using the shotgun for basically the first time really in it now, because it also knocks them back because they float.

So if you hit it with the – and that's the problem, is they sort of just walk towards you really slowly and menacingly and they –.

They make weird noises.

I think mostly to let you know that there's one around.

Yeah.

That's pretty cool.

They also added another... Is it the Matriarch, I think it's called?

Matriarch.

And then there's I think there's one more that they added, but I've only seen the Matriarch.

Yeah, very big, like, crab-style enemy with a big laser horn coming off the front of it.

Very challenging.

I would not even bother fighting.

If you had a hard time with the Queen, forget about it.

You're not fighting the Matriarch.

I got the achievement for shooting something that was whatever two thousand yards away or whatever.

I was at one of the exits on the dam and the matriarch is so big yeah, she was like climbing the the spaceport's middle tower sorry, it was spaceport and i was there with two other guys and i was like yo yo yo, yo.

Do any of you guys have like rifles?

Take a shot at her from here, because you'll pop that achievement.

It's just a steam achievement, there's no other thing for it.

And i did it and it popped up and i was like great, do it.

And we both all three of us did it and she fucking turned around.

Oh, So no one had obviously hit her in a while.

And she's, she was so far away that like, you know, the, the, we're getting that like heat, you know, uh, heat, like she looks like, like there's no, there's atmosphere, but she's like, she's like semi transparent or whatever, because the atmosphere between us.

Right.

But then she's, I mean, is she coming towards us?

Like we couldn't even tell.

And the elevator got caught.

And then she like did the laser at us from miles away.

And I was like, Oh Jesus, you really can't go near that thing.

Yeah.

But it is funny how everything in that game is a crab, a drone or a ball.

Yeah, yeah.

I should read it on the lore of like why all the arc look the way that they do.

But then I had to listen to the voices, so I don't really want to.

But, you know, it is very I like the way the arc look, the way they sound.

I love their designs and like they all have a personality to them, which is so strange.

The wasp.

Like even now I'm noticing little things, like when I fight the the rocketeer.

Just the way it maneuvers and like follows you around and the way it targets enemies is so funny.

You can use it against your opponents.

Yeah like, i've been using a lot more of the deployables as well of like throwing the, the tag thing that like plays sounds to trick people or to trick the arc to focus on enemies, which is great, or like have you used the recorder yet at all?

Oh wait, the actual, like the floosh yes yeah yeah, it's so funny.

It's so funny.

It's great when you run into another player who has it very low chance of it happening, but you're literally just playing a recorder and like music comes out of your character when you're walking around.

It's so.

It's just that you could get tracked arc and like let people know you're there.

It's such a silly little thing.

I love it.

It's so funny.

Yeah.

It's like nobody ever shoots the flute guy because it's like, how could you?

It's just like somebody walking through the map, going like I don't know if it's always the same song, but it always sounds like it's like some sort of like studio jazz.

Like, you know, like it's like it's real.

It's really like Anchorman style, you know, like elevator music over the top.

It's so weird, so stupid but yeah, i'm enjoying stella.

Stella mantis, is that what it's called?

It's um yeah, it's a different style map.

Um, but i've burned through all the quests is basically i think i only ever have one quest at a time now um, so they're obviously they've run out of those um, pretty fast.

So um yeah, more content i'm sure coming, but it definitely feels like we're in the second phase of it now where you've sort of i've eaten up so much of the game.

I'm i'm doing my um uh, expedition.

Have you, are you doing yours at all?

I'm building it up.

I'm on the third tier now.

I haven't gone past that, though.

I'm on the fifth at the moment.

Are you going to do it?

Are you going to do the respect?

I don't know.

So this is basically their how they're dealing with seasonal resets.

So in these games you know Tarkov and others, you know a lot of these games.

Everyone will basically have so much gear after a few months that they reset the servers.

Right.

And they go, OK, we're all going back to zero.

And I guess they're attempting to see if they can get away with not doing that because And the way that they're doing it is you go on an expedition which basically, you build an actual like caravan.

It's, you know, it's just in the menu.

It's just that they're showing you building this caravan and then your raider will go off somewhere you know, and then they will retire.

And effectively, your account gets a bunch of permanent perks.

I'm not sure if they're finalized, but I know it's some like it resets.

A lot of stuff.

Reset your blueprints.

That's the one I'm not mad about because blueprints are hard to come by.

Yeah.

It resets your, you know, perks, all that sort of like your attributes for that character.

That character is gone.

I think you keep your, I think you keep the unlocked, all the unlocked decks and you know obviously any stuff.

You lose all your paid micro transactions.

If you do, you don't think that would be ridiculous, but i think you get like a permanent upgrade to your stash size and a couple of other bits and bobs.

Yeah, do you keep your work benches?

Like i'm not sure, probably not, because i feel like you need to upgrade them if you lose the blueprints, but you kept the the work benches.

That wouldn't make a lot of sense yeah, i guess.

Yeah, it would kind of be silly.

Um yeah, so that's how they're trying to deal with that particular thing.

So, whether or not people win or will or not, i don't know though, because the matches are, i think the matches are gear matched.

So, in a way, That's what people seem to be thinking on the Reddit is that if you go in with a bunch of stuff, then you're paired more with people of the same gear.

The funniest one, the community is incredible.

I read a post from a guy and his brother who basically one played only on PC.

Did you see this?

Yeah.

One played only on PS5.

And they both had... Did they do cross-play on and cross-play off?

Yeah, and they were trying to see who they ran into and everything, right?

The different matches.

And yeah, do you remember what the... There were a lot of numbers on that screen.

The pictures, man.

I don't remember anything of what it was in particular.

The sort of end... And maybe Frank will have something to say about that.

The end.

I guess you know what they figured out from all this thing was that the PC players, if you play with them, cross-play off so you're only playing against PC players.

There was like a majorly significant drop in the amount of people who like jump on you or kill you.

But if you're playing on PS5, there was a way higher chance that people would either camp the exit, backstab you, like they.

They broke down all their matches by like oh, we paired up, or they said go away, or we chatted, or they said they'd pair up and then killed me at the end, or they, you know, and the ps5 people were like way worse than the pc people.

Um, which kind of makes sense.

I feel like yeah, you know, ps5 gamers are all scrubs, so i get it, they don't want to.

I understand any.

Any, uh any comment on that.

Frank is the sort of resident console king here.

Well, the biggest thing in my experiences with like Call of Duty over the weekend is, like with PS5, like everyone has their microphones on the controllers.

And so the default is everyone just mutes.

People are sitting.

They do not want to talk to other people.

But you will like inadvertently hear like cell phones going off and babies and stuff like that in the background.

But I think, like, by default, people on consoles, they're already in their parties.

So they don't want to let – or on discos.

They don't want to do open communication.

But, like back in the day, like on Xbox Live, like Xbox 360 – everyone that was very committed, i feel.

I don't know everyone is very communicative.

But then like yeah, over over time, like a, you would stop getting microphones with your consoles.

I mean, you didn't even back in the day, but like yeah, people just don't communicate on in console lobbies.

I wonder if it's also like a?

Um, sort of like the medium dict or like the console like dictates, sort of like the behavior in the way that uh, like we've talked about server browsers before as a thing that like dictates a totally different style of play.

People in old counter-strike maps doing like knife rounds and stuff, and it's like if you're throwing the match, it's like who fucking cares?

Because it's more just about having like a fun story, a fun experience kind of thing.

Um, i feel like people playing pc games maybe have more like frequent encounters or more sort of like psychological investment in having weird sort of like lateral experiences, whereas i feel like consoles are sort of more like, for example, like when we talked about battlefield 6 and there's the playlist, like you boot up the fucking battlefield 6 hulu menu and it's like, do you want to watch the office season one or do you want to play conquest?

Um, i feel like that engenders a sort of like all right, let me get into the game.

I'm gonna have this fucking game experience.

It's gonna be like this thing where i run in and shoot people and then i'm on to the next thing.

I feel like that for me, as someone who has played a bunch of, you know, like old call of duty games on console and like old shooters and console, that is always what it felt more like to me, whereas pc like even in the same genre, even in fps, it felt more about sort of like, you know, having weird conversations with a dude from sweden while we're like hiding in a trench together.

I wonder if just the process of also like to that point, the process of sitting down in front, like at a desk yeah, you know, as opposed to in the living room Also, that's more of a shared space.

So talking, you know, especially with the conversations I'm having with these people like I wonder, like sometimes you're playing a multiplayer game.

You know, maybe I'm not as self-conscious, but like our creators are so weird.

Like I find myself role playing a lot.

Oh, yeah.

You know, so I don't know if I was in the living room, whether or not I'd be at my wife's like in the next room over and I'm like, hey, Raider, you know. that's a really good point it's it's also like um uh yeah pcs are like more in sort of like private areas less than sort of like the public commons of the house but the other thing is that uh when you said that it made me realize that the like if i was podcasting in front of my tv it'd be fucking weird because you guys would be like you'd be like far away and i'd be like talking to a microphone like it's so much more intimate like you guys are fucking like a foot in front of my face and the microphone is like an inch in front of my face right you know what i mean like yeah no okay now you're getting too close i gotta go to the living room you'd be like a 10 feet tall if you were in my living room in the words of wcw playstation games i am in your house yeah there you go but yeah no i just think being like you know like it's a little i'm like cuddled up against my fucking monitor i can whisper to some strangers sweet nothings in their ears it's good stuff uh all right i was going to talk about something else but i'll come back around to that because otherwise it'll just be danny arrow over here uh jesse let's jump into a couple years here sectory i played a bit of this too kind of bullet heli um geometry wars-esque yes pc game tell us about it how are you finding it this is i i look i had a problem growing up uh with geometry wars uh, retro evolved to the original version on Xbox three 60.

There was a free demo.

I think I played that for like a hundred hours.

I never bought the game.

Good old days.

Uh, and then they made a sequel and I was like, great, I'll buy this one.

I have money now.

That game was a problem for me.

Um, I love twin stick shooters.

I love playing.

I have always enjoyed playing them.

Um, I mean, I made a game with zombies in.

It was one of those first Xbox live arcade purchases that I made.

Same thing.

I love playing those in co-op, but that one had geometry wars galaxy two, uh, had, uh, what is it?

Um, well, it's like gates or waves or something like that.

I think it's called pacifism mode.

And basically the first one too.

Yeah.

Oh, it was.

See, I never, I wouldn't know.

I didn't buy it.

So in the second one, when I was playing the pacifism mode, it was like you would just fly through those gates and they would cause explosions.

You didn't have bullets.

And for whatever reason, I was entranced playing that.

It was like constantly weaving between these millions of enemies, their bright vector graphics, and like the sounds, everything was so, the particle effects.

It was like, so entrancing.

And I played probably like 200 hours of that, like just that mode.

I'd play it nonstop.

Excellent.

And I had to put it away.

And I've finally found a game that has caused me the same distress and joy.

And it is Sectory.

Finally, I have the twin-stick shooter of my dreams, which is a game I already played, but better.

I think this is amazing.

So this is yeah, like I said, a twin-stick arcade-style shooter developed by I'm going to butcher their name possibly Kimo Latinen, a developer who worked at Housemarque for 13 years.

Okay, now, okay, this makes so much more sense now.

Okay.

They had made a game like this, I think like 10 years ago that looked very similar, but like this is on a whole other level of quality and graphics and animation and everything.

So it's structured like an arcade shooter in the twin-stick style of like you spawn as a little ship which you can customize into an arena that like starts in a different shape.

The arena sort of changes shape over time.

You see where it's going to happen, actually, like...

Part of the arena will start blinking red, so you know it's going to pop up, so you need to get out of there, right?

If you stay, you take damage.

And you have a limited amount of hits you can get.

Like, you have shields, which you can get more of over time.

I'll explain that in a sec.

But like basically, you're just trying to move around and not hit the enemies, while also shooting them with the right stick in whatever direction you want.

Maybe you could play this on a mouse and keyboard.

I don't know why you would.

But, basically, that is the structure of the campaign mode.

You're playing it, and...

You get these little drops from the enemies.

They're like little gems on the screen.

You go pick them up.

You get enough.

Eventually you get an upgrade for your character.

And, you know, you can call this a roguelike thing if you want.

Arcade games had upgrades in the past.

It's a pretty common thing.

Exactly right.

I think.

I think there's a.

There's elements of these early arcade games and roguelikes on the Venn diagram.

Which sort of crossover.

But yeah, it's not necessarily that.

Yeah.

And this is that middle point.

The upgrades are interesting.

Like you'll get missiles.

So now when you're shooting, you spawn a couple of missiles that will track an enemy or, like you, get drones that can maneuver around you and block stuff or also shoot missiles.

So like every run that you have, you can sort of build towards whatever you want.

You have a selection of card decks that will pop up in the upgrade menu, but you can change those out as well.

I think there's like one full screen and then you unlock a second, one full set of like 10 more decks that do different things.

They have like really crazy ways that they connect together like the drones with the missiles, and then the missiles can do other stuff.

It's simple and like it adds enough to each run to make it feel different while you're playing the campaign.

But the thing for me that think really elevates this over geometry wars is like geometry wars was basically just score attack.

See how long you can go.

This has boss fights and they're really good boss fights.

Like the boss fights, it'll spawn a bunch of different versions of them and they have different evolutions that you see the further that you get in.

Like there's one that's a snake, but like the snake head has a thing you need to shoot inside of it that also shoots a laser, and like it has little ones on the side of its body, which is kind of 3d.

Yeah, they're weirdly 3d, even though the game is effectively like I mean, it's not a flat plane but the elements within it are almost all sort of 2D looking or spritey.

Well, not spritey, but like very vector-y, graphics-y.

Yes.

Yeah, it has that like flat 3D look.

And then when you get to the bosses, they're lit.

They have lots more color and stuff going on.

They're very dynamic.

Like it's very involved, the movement and look of them.

And yeah, just the campaign mode alone is like a really good arcade twin stick shooter campaign.

And then there's all the other modes, which are amazing.

Amazing.

There's like a classic mode that plays like Geometry Wars, so it's just a score attack thing.

There's Gates, like I said, like the pacifism mode from Geometry Wars.

And then there's another one called Crash. which I love.

Ludacris did a great job.

No, it's great.

You have this ability in sectory that's called like the strike.

And basically you can crash into enemies and it does like a big explosion.

But also if you crash into a score drop.

There's like these orange drops that appear after you get a certain amount of score.

It causes a little explosion.

If you dash into it instead, it spawns a bunch of missiles and like attack stuff.

So when you're playing the crash mode, it's like you're trying to basically line up four enemies dashes that go a specific distance and then kill as many enemies as you can and and go from there and like it just it feels great it's like a fun it's almost like a puzzle trying to kill everything on the screen without getting hit because if you get hit like you're dead in that mode basically you don't really have a lot of a lot of options and you're done you're going directly into the enemies so it becomes a lot more challenging um oh oh last thing the uh the upgrades that you get when it's not just the roguelike stuff you also have in the top left there's like a bunch of different upgrades that you get and randomly there will be these little blue spawns on the map that look like like just little flashy things you go pick them up and after you get a certain amount of them it stacks up and you can unlock different things so like the first one is just you go a little bit faster you can get speed but you can also get more shields so you can take more hits or make your blasters shoot more bullets as you shoot like there's so many layers to it so many different little things to focus on and be aware of and the thing that stands out the most to me i'm i i could i don't think you even mentioned yet is the arenas Oh, like the way that they change over time?

They change.

So, yeah.

So, like, I got a weird, like, super hexagon vibe from this game.

Oh, yeah.

You know what?

That's a really good comparison.

Yeah.

Because it like – and the way they explain how it's going to happen, I think it like – I think there's like sort of a red outline or something.

Yeah.

The area that's going to disappear flashes red or, like, lift up – yeah, flashes red.

Yeah.

It's really good.

So the actual arenas themselves like fairly – frequently i would say i don't, i can't.

It's been maybe two weeks since i played it, but like it feels like every like 30 seconds or 30 seconds, something like that.

Yeah, they'll change into like some really weird you know, some of them are big and wide, some of them are like two diamonds stuck together, with like one little entrance between the two of them and it's yeah, or they'll spawn jump pads like into a corner so it'll jump you from that point to the other side of the map.

Oh yeah, and the jump deals damage.

So like you also use that as a way to attack.

Like you're totally right.

I think the arena changing stuff is like the thing that really puts it.

That in the bosses for me is like that's the stuff that really takes this over the top.

And it isn't just like, I feel like I play games like this and I'm like, oh yeah, okay.

It's like geometry wars, but like, you know, a little different.

This is like a whole new thing that is clearly feeding off of the energy of geometry wars and trying to do a whole new evolution on that idea.

I absolutely adore sectory.

Like if, I would put this up as one of my favorite games of the year.

I would have done that before I even played it again.

Cause when I played the demo months ago, I was like this is I could play a hundred million hours of this.

Again, I have a problem and it's called sector.

I love it.

That's amazing.

I am actually.

I think that's a good point in that you can.

You can have one of these games and it'd be quite derivative.

Yeah.

Um, the fact that you mentioned, is it Kimo Latin?

And we, we think is the, that's how we're going.

Somebody who worked at a house mark for a dozen years.

So house mark is basically like um.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm not a huge arcade nut when it comes to this, but they made Stardust back in the early 90s for the Amiga, like before they were called Housemarque.

I think they were called Terramarque or something else, which was like a super early one of these games.

Of course, the game that everyone remembers of recent years was Resogun.

That came out in 2013 on PS4.

Which Kimo worked on, as far as I'm aware.

Right, yeah.

And so they've worked on like Super Stardust HD and like all of these... uh, you know, this is part housemark is sort of like, you know, they've in many ways, geometry wars was cribbing from early work that they did.

I'm not saying entirely, to an extent probably like the early stuff treasure, like the Ikaruga team the previous game.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So I'm not saying that they invented twin six shooters, but like this type of you know they, they have uh, they've blood in the water on this one.

Um, So it's interesting.

Yeah, because Housemarque now have turned into, you know, Returnal and Saros, as it's called, the Raul Coley game that's coming out next year.

So they've turned into, you know, the people who made Resogun and the Angry Birds games into now making these, like, you know, third-person action games, which still, you know, obviously the whole thing about Returnal is that it kind of, the shooting does evoke some of the stuff they'd done before, so... that's cool that's that's that actually to me adds a stamp of you know authenticity to this game as well which it didn't necessarily require but makes me a little bit more exciting excited just knowing um knowing the lineage there so that's really awesome sectory yeah music's great too you can buy the soundtrack uh alongside as well it's 15 bucks it's out today day it is out today yeah among the hundred other video games that came out today also the soundtrack i don't quote me on this but i'm pretty sure i saw kimo posting about how the soundtrack is their brother oh really yeah doing the music which i think is cool like it's not i don't think they're like some big artist or anything but just they made really cool just really intense drum and bass music tommy banan oh my god it's four discs jesus there's a lot Also worth noting, we had the conversation about Metroidvanias and search action being the Japanese term for it.

I did not know that the Japanese term for bullet hell is Donmaku, literally translated to bullet curtain.

Oh, curtain.

A curtain of bullets.

I like that.

Oh, that's beautiful.

It's evocative.

It is.

Bullet curtain.

It's very elegant.

Typical, you know, the West we turn it so brutal.

Yeah, yeah.

They're like bullet curtain and we're like, oh, you mean the shit shooters?

You mean dirt blasters?

Stuff just be shooting.

Oh, my Lord.

Sectory.

Good stuff.

Love to hear about it.

Let's stay in the world of beautiful arcade colors and music, and you know, just like numbers and feeling and music.

And yeah, just...

Frank, you've been jumping into the wonderful world of Lumines Arise, the latest game in the hottest PSP franchise in the world, which is Broken Containment and is now on other machines.

Unbelievable.

We played this at Summer Games Fest, right?

We had a good bit of fun with this.

Yeah, so this is, yeah, same team that did Tetris Effect.

It's Luminous, Arise in the same exact style with, like the hyper-trippy visuals, the incredible music.

And, yeah, it's really good.

I've gone through, like, the... I forget how many stages there are.

It feels like 10 like isolated stages, and then you can do it all as one, like survival journey mode, which takes like an hour and a half.

Oh, wow and uh yeah, it's an.

It's incredible and like the soundtrack, did you do the hour and a half one?

Yeah yeah yeah yeah, what were you like in bits at the end of it, or no?

So so, like i mean, i also like i would play like 30 minutes of it, take a break, 30 minutes, take a break, 30 minutes.

Take a break and just chip through it.

Wow and um, But yeah, if you know Luminous, it's just more of the same.

But I would say, yeah, they definitely lean into the Tetris Effect visuals.

And it looks so good and sounds good.

If you've never played or heard of Luminous, to me it's most similar to Super Puzzle Fighter, like the Street Fighter version.

I don't know what you call it.

It's like four blocks.

They can be a variation.

It's Dr. Botnik's mean bean machine.

Yeah.

It's that variety.

Um, but like also the way the levels are, it's like, it's also like a, kind of like a rhythm game.

Cause every time you tap X or circle it, like, and the click.

So it's like, you're almost like remixing the bass track.

Like, so it's very responsive to your, uh, your, your, your, your tapping or whatever.

And then as you, as the combos form, the visuals change and meld into the background and all this stuff.

And like there's people like complaining, like on on steam reviews where it's like Oh, the visuals are so overwhelming.

It's hard to see the blocks, but that's like, no, that's it.

I mean, you can also reduce some of the effects or opacity.

Like even DDR has the same options to like change, um, opacity on everything.

But, um, yeah, it's great.

Like I feel like I don't have much to say about it other than um yeah, I really.

It made me consider getting a PSVR too.

Um, cause I feel like I'm missing so many dimensions with all these games.

Um, did you pay for this?

No, I got a code for it.

You got a code.

How do you feel about the fact that it's $40?

I think it's worth it.

I love Luminous.

So, like, if you don't know what the hell this game is, then I don't know.

But, like, I had Luminous on the PSP.

So, for me, I'm like, hell yeah.

Like, I think it's worth it.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's funny because, like I feel like a few years ago I wouldn't have batted an eyelid at this.

But when we're talking about games like Sectorian, it's $15.

It's like the market has shifted so much in my head that I'm like you know, this is – it's not a first – it's not a first party sony gig.

I don't think it's published by sony, so yeah.

So in that way i feel like yeah, it's um.

Yeah, it's on steam.

It's 10 off at the moment 3599.

Yeah, i'm with you.

I think we talked about it at um in our video for summer games fest um, or at least certainly on the podcast after the fact uh, it's really strong, it looks great, the music is is amazing, it's you're sort of um.

If you're into that sort of, you know transcendental, just experience.

You know it's not, it's not quite res levels, but it's it's, it's.

You know we're not, we're not trans vibrating here, but strapping, strapping in.

Maybe in VR you are, who knows?

Yeah, maybe.

I mean, VR Tetris effect was incredible.

Like that is.

That is just an absolute dream.

It's all connected, literally it's playing in my head right now.

I know it's so good, so i actually frank, sent me a key for this as well.

I guess he got.

He got two keys, so he did.

He got it half price for free.

Um i, i played like two hours of this before recording the pod, or well, we're currently recording the pod.

I think he's playing it right now.

Yeah, i'm playing it.

I can see the flashing on his face.

That's what my yeah, i'm going to a weird trance.

I have never played a luminous game before.

Oh, this is really hard.

I was not expecting this to be as challenging as it is.

I think I finally figured it out in the way that you're supposed to play it, because the timeline as it moves across, you need to be considerate of where it is and where you're placing your tetrominoes.

I guess you can call them.

When you are, yeah.

Exactly.

It's like a 4D puzzle game.

It's so crazy.

But to maximize your combos and everything, once it clicks, I think it just feels amazing.

I love it.

But the visuals... are insane.

Like the way that this game looks is so cool.

Like the chameleon level blew my mind.

That was so much fun.

There's like there's ones that are just fruit and vegetables and like the sound effects are so charming.

It's so enhanced.

It just makes some of the coolest video games.

Did you play Tetris effect?

I did play.

Yeah.

Which I mean it has a lot of the similar things, but like just the way that it works here with the music and the sound effects and the way that you influence those sounds.

It's not like over the top but, like Frank said, when you're moving things around, like there's a disco level, when you're moving things around, there's like a like a little beatbox as you're moving the pieces around.

That's just great.

My one uh uh issue i have with this game the music is is like 50 amazing 50 love is blind transition songs.

I don't know if you guys have watched love is blind.

No thankfully, it's like i can imagine exactly what that's, you know?

Yeah, it's like corporate, you know plug in music that's telling you the exact emotion you're supposed to feel, like I'm with my friends and we're all happy.

And I wonder if this is just like there are certain genres of dance music which America just can't fuck with.

And I feel like trance.

To a certain extent, the American mind kind of comprehend the love of Eurotrans.

I don't know.

It's like a weird thing where it's like people who don't speak English as a first language doing a whole song in English.

It's like it never comes out right.

That's sort of what it feels like.

Like we are here.

We're having fun.

We are going to make some songs like it.

All right.

I love it.

It's like if you can go to like two different types of clubs in Ibiza and like one of them will play, like you know, really experimental stuff.

And then one of them will just play like Eurotrans.

That's probably the one more people are at.

It's the more mainstream.

So I don't know if that's what's happening here.

But yeah, I have a soft spot for some of that.

It's cheesy.

I should.

It doesn't read as cheesy.

I think that's the thing.

I'm not cheesy bad.

I like I like the cheese, but like it's it's just so funny.

I like psytrance as an American.

I just want to pipe up a couple of times.

It was a blast.

And Spongles first live performance with a band in America.

Beautiful.

I think Jeremy is that.

Yeah.

Jeremy is the most European American ever.

I'm sort of an ambassador, a cultural ambassador.

I go and check shit out and I'm like, Oh yeah, no, you guys got some good stuff over here.

I like trains.

I was flicking.

I was flicking on YouTube shorts earlier uh, or last night when I was going to bed and uh, I got absolutely like railgunned in the head in terms of the algorithm, because it was an Arc Raiders post with Apex Twin playing over the top.

Nice.

I was like, oh, they got me.

Right in the heart.

Unbelievable.

Luminous Rise, available now.

Very positive on Steam.

I'm sure it's doing really well on PlayStation as well.

Yeah, two thumbs up from us.

Many thumbs up, seems like.

$35.99 on Steam at the moment with 10% off.

And I assume something similar over on...

PlayStation.

Is it on Xbox at all?

Let me know.

This would be a good Switch game as well.

It is.

It is on Microsoft Windows.

And, of course, all of you GeForce Now owners.

Oh, hell yeah.

Did you imagine streaming this game, all the particle effects and everything?

This might be the worst possible game to stream.

Yeah.

Because, yeah, yeah.

Because, like, compression dealing with, like, random particles.

Yeah, which would just be... Like, every time you score... the resolution drops to 720.

It's like, what was that?

What the fuck did you do?

Why'd you do that?

Moving on, I don't know which of these games I can do a Lumines style transition from.

I guess I'll pick Motion Rec because it seems 2D and cute and beautiful and...

And colorful?

That's the opposite of colorful.

Jeremy, what's Motion Rec?

Motion Rec is a puzzle platformer kind of in the.

I would say the closest thing I've played this year to it would be something like Ooo.

Yes, okay.

A cutesy 2D puzzle platformer with a very unique mechanic that just sees how many millions of puzzles they can spin out of a very sort of simple core set of mechanics.

The mechanic in question for Motion Rec is that you can as the title suggests, you can record your movement.

And while you're holding a button, every move you make will be recorded.

And then what happens is, once you finish the recording, you hit another button and it plays the recording.

So, for example, If you move across the map and then you jump up a few platforms and make sort of like a, like a Tetromino L piece, then you can move elsewhere.

And regardless of whether the ground is below you or there are traps or obstacles or whatever, you can't go through walls or anything.

But in open space, you can move in the exact shape that you've recorded.

So Motion Rec is a game about sort of like looking at the play space and figuring out the weird sort of impossible maneuver you need to make, like going in an S shape through a in the map, where you can sort of like act that out safely, record it and then push the button to basically play back the recording to move you through space.

Um, so it's very clever.

It's, uh, it's, it's, it's weird.

Cause I feel like playing this and ooh, so close together, like a few months apart.

Um, it made me realize how much of puzzle platformers is just like personal taste.

Like there are just some mechanics where you're like, Oh yeah, like I um intuitive, like i can intuit what this level wants me to do, or like i can feel my way into this puzzle.

Um, i feel like motion rec was more challenging for me, not because it's a harder game, but because my brain just like was the wrong shape for this, like the wrong keyhole shape for this key to go into.

So i it was like a fucking, a frictional uphill battle for me to to sort of like comprehend this game for whatever reason.

Uh, but i have really enjoyed it.

I've probably i think i'm like two-thirds through it or something.

It's not incredibly long, it's like probably four hours long um, but uh, i'm really enjoying it.

It also does some clever things beyond, just like playing back the recording.

That is sort of everything you do.

There's not like another.

You don't get like a metroidvania, you know samus ball.

That gives you another ability later on um, but there are sort of like twists on it.

I'll i'll just say one to sort of like seed the idea of what you could do with this.

There are these little things that you walk through and it connects like a, like a cable to you essentially.

And then you can go and move around, move around, move around until you reach the end of the cable.

And then the cable drags you back along the path that you've walked since touching the cable.

Um, so it's sort of like the motion rec thing in reverse.

But the thing that's interesting about that is, if you need to move say, you need to move through a space in the shape of an like a backwards S, but you can't record a backwards s anywhere on the map what you need to find is a place where you can record, like a forward version, a reverse version of that shape, while hitting the cable at the right time so that the cable drags you back into the shape of the shape that you need, and then you record while the cable's pulling you back in.

So there's like it's not only you have to imagine oh, can i record this and play it back somewhere else.

It's like can i act this out and then have it act out backwards and record it back?

It's just like so many fucking layers of like.

What does this look like backwards and forwards.

That uh, it really wrinkled the fuck out of my brain.

Can i ask you guys about this developer handsome yes, have you come across them before?

Because weirdly, there's a game that came out last month called mind diver.

Oh yes, i heard people talking about i forget who it was.

It was some developer that was saying it was their best game they played this year.

Um, and i've been keeping an eye.

It's on my list, it's on my wish list and i haven't I played it yet, but it came out last month.

So just to be clear, Handsome didn't develop Mind Diver.

Yeah, same publisher.

They're both by Playism.

Oh, it's Playism.

Okay, okay.

I was wondering what was going on.

Okay well, Mind Diver, I feel like, is a game I need to play a bit of before we do Game of the Year stuff.

I'll play the demo.

Actually, make sure I download it now.

Okay, so apologies.

No, no, it's all good.

Yeah, no, I'm looking up to see if Handsome have other, and that's H-A-N-D-S-U-M, have other games.

Great name. uh, it is a good name.

Um yeah, it's.

It's always tough when you click on the developer and it auto blasts you to the publisher page.

Yeah.

I should know that by now.

Silly Danny.

Nah, it's all good.

Uh, but yeah, no, I, I really enjoy motion rec.

I am.

As I'm getting later into the game, I am fucking struggling just because it's I.

I find it to be a challenging game, but I think that that's like.

You know, it's like a puzzle platformer.

If you just breeze through the whole thing, it'd be a bad puzzle platformer.

So there is a bundle with, uh, for, uh, Motion Rec, Ooh, and a game called Catto, Buttered Cat.

That's a good game.

I like that game a lot.

Yeah, yeah.

Can you believe it?

You're a cat with a buttered piece of toast on your back and it's a puzzle platformer where you remember that old meme, the old videos of like.

Can we generate a No, no.

Can you generate like infinite energy if you put a cat and put a piece of toast on its back, because it always lands on their back, but the toast always lands butter side up.

Of course.

Yeah.

What if you made a puzzle game about that?

And it's actually really good.

They get a lot of good mileage out of that.

I played Demofort a while ago.

I got to finish it, though.

It was good.

Motion Rec.

By the way Jeremy, I think that mechanic is so smart because it turns every level into two puzzles.

It's like you're trying to figure out how to maneuver, but obviously seeing the gaps that you can't fill with the basic platforming.

And then also, like you said, finding way to record it safely.

I think that is such a smart use of it's like you're getting double the length of the puzzle platformer because the player has to do two puzzles on every screen.

At least there's ones where it's like you got to consider the timing of like when you activate it right.

Like you got to like fall and in the middle of the fall then trigger the motion so that it lands in a certain spot, like stuff like that.

It's just yeah, it's a really it's a clever use.

You're totally right, very clever puzzle platformer.

I i enjoyed the the bit of it that i've played so far.

There are also these.

There are levels that have these tiles that restart the animation when you hit the mid animation.

And so it's very sort of like again, it's taking this thing that seems very simple of like.

Oh yeah, I need to move across the gap.

I'll record me walking across the floor and then play it at height or whatever.

The play button you're saying that you hit, right?

Yeah, there's like a play button that restarts it.

And so then you need to be like, all right, so this is the shape I need to hit the play button.

But then when I hit the play button, if I'm moving in the shape I need, I'll hit spikes.

So then you need to like integrate, like pre-record, like how do i explain this?

Like you'll need to like move downward, uh.

But then when you start the animation the first time, you'll be like moving downward into the floor so it negates it and stuff.

So you're like you need to account for like multiple versions of the playback in multiple spaces and it's just like i don't, it's fucking.

It gets so complex so fast for a game that is so cute.

If you hit the ceiling or the floor, is it, does it stop the play the animation or does it it does?

Okay.

So it stops it.

Yeah.

So that way, like if you need to move down once you hit the play button, but moving down is impossible when you start, then you can sort of like negate segments of the animation.

So it's about, like you, sort of using the environment to also like contain the animation at certain points.

Wow.

Does that mean if you had one, like going like left and up or up and left, uh, you could because you can keep playing it right you can't it's not just like one time without hitting oh it's only once okay okay so you can't hit the ground or you have to hit one of the repeat things um and the other thing that the last thing i'll say about this game is that it also has a celeste style you know how celeste had like the strawberries or whatever you have to like the challenge thing of those berries um but they're optional uh this game has music notes that are optional um and sometimes i will complete a room and be like i have no fucking idea how you would Get that music now.

There were rooms where I went through where it felt like it was sort of giving you a freebie.

It was like, oh, you could do that and then come back and then get it.

Some of them.

I just cannot conceive of how a human being would engineer a series of motions to get these things.

That's for the streamers to do.

Figure it out.

You sickos.

Jeremy, you mentioned the relation to this and, ooh in your brain the sort of collapse that they have in the space of your brain.

Namataka Hashi helped work on Motion Rec.

Did a little bit of work on it. anyway wait he did what on it did a little bit of work like they haven't said what in particular but i wonder if he did design on it because uh if there's one thing i know about namatakahashi it's uh that lad can design some fucking puzzles that's right like head is i like had newer two of my favorite puzzle platformers of all time yeah hell yeah love it motion wreck available now for the low price of ten dollars actually you'll save a cent it's 9.99

You can buy it in that pack with ooh.

And, of course, Caddo Buttered Cash for $27.87.

You get 10% off for buying all those goodies.

Or you can get the OST as well.

Motion Rec, all one word.

Motion R-E-C.

Check it out.

I feel like I talked about Demon School a little bit, didn't I, a week or two ago?

Briefly.

Yeah, we've talked a little bit about it.

Preview is up today over on Noclip 2, where I interview Brandon Sheffield about the inspirations for the game.

A lot of awesome Sega Saturn chat.

We talk about the combat system, talk about the end zones and also the overworld and how that game is put together.

Yeah, my feelings on it.

I played a bunch of it.

The actual preview only shows, like you know, the stuff that was in the demo and on a bit from there.

I didn't want to spoil too much of it because it's a lot of that.

Game is really cool where it unveils itself.

But yes, essentially Demon School is a sort of Shin Megami Tensai-like.

It is a game where you are playing as a kid in a school, a high school, go to a high school.

Uh-oh, demons in this high school.

No one else believes us.

This town is weird.

What's all this stuff going on here?

Nobody seems to be kind of um behaving right um and then you get into these battles um it's kind of tied to your grades it's really weird like your teacher's telling you to go and kill these demons and you really got to get this vc this vcr tape and then you go fight a big uh one of the bosses is just a big pile of televisions and similar actually to a sectorian that the bosses in this game are in 3d when everything else is rendered in 2 because the 3d world and the battles are in 3d space so it's like the 3d world is like invading the home world um I love the battle system in this game.

I think I would put it closest to... Actually, I don't know what I'd put it closest to.

It's isometric.

It's turn-based.

But instead of like you have a go, I have a go like Mugenics or anything like that, you essentially plan out your whole squad.

I guess more like XCOM, you'd say.

Yeah. and then you hit the button and then the action phase happens.

And they don't even necessarily do it in the order that you set, but all of your actions take place with the characters.

You've like four characters sometimes, sometimes there's fewer and you are basically fighting all these demons on this isometric lane let's call it because there is end zones on each end.

One end zone is yours and if some of the demons get down there and they break through they sort of break containment you lose.

If you, you can't just run to the end zone.

If you, if you factor in the things that you're supposed to do, the objectives in that fight, and then just get to the end of it um, you can finish it or you can just clear the stage as well.

But what's interesting is is that the movement for your characters is actually incredibly limited.

They only really move in like straight angles and they can kind of move very far as well.

And then also uh, brandon talks about it in the preview but um, it's simplistic in that if you sort of bring a character to another character they like will couldn't heal them or do something you don't have to like, you don't have to walk, and then choose what your character is doing and then choose the enemy.

It's like if you intercept an enemy, then you're going to hit them or an object that you can kick or something like that.

So it ends up being this like really punchy experience like the fights are kind of fast and fluid.

You can plan out the whole thing and and then see how it went and then go uh, I don't like that and reverse it and have another go.

So it ends up being like really playful.

I feel like I I play a lot of these games quite conservatively because I'm like okay, I'll do the safest bet first.

Whereas what I find in this is because I'm able to kind of see how it'll all go down.

Um, I, uh, I end up doing stuff that's a little bit outside of my comfort zone.

Um, a lot more visuals are awesome.

I just, the vibe of this game is outrageous.

It's the music is terrific.

Um, The 2D graphics and the character profiles and all that stuff are great.

And then the actual boss fights, the color work in this game, I think is just outstanding.

I adore how it looks, both the daytime or the overworld and the battle stuff.

And then yeah, I guess the Shin Megami or Persona aspect of it is that you have the days are split up into, you know morning afternoon afternoon, evening and night, and and in those you can uh, you know, go on quests, you can explore the Island.

It's not open world.

It's like a menu and it brings you to different places.

And then those levels you can walk around.

There's a bunch of just random things you can do, like go, you know uh, have uh you, you can, you know, do hang out with one of your members of your little demon fighting team and do karaoke, or go fishing.

Or, you know, toss a coin in the mysterious uh you know fountain that's in the middle of the town square.

There's, there's all this like interesting stuff that's going on.

It does mystery really well.

It's kind of stranger things.

Season one in that way of like, you're not quite sure.

I'm out.

I don't care anymore.

That's why I said season one, just to, that was still, it's fine.

Sorry.

You know, there's like something or like a Stephen King novel.

How is that?

That's better.

There you go.

Yeah.

We're like, there's something not quite right here.

Maybe there's not, the villagers are a bit off and, and you know, why don't they notice this?

And yeah, it's super cool.

I think the writing is fun and snappy.

Um, it's not voiced or anything, but, um, yeah, teenager dialogue done right is really tricky.

Um, uh, yeah, I was talking to the, uh, the mixtape people about this before as well.

And I think he missed all school.

There's a great job.

So, Yeah, I really like it.

It's really good.

It should be out.

I think reviews are coming out today.

I haven't seen anything yet.

But they.

They were originally supposed to come out in September, but then it got silksonged into November.

So it's finally out.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's a really good game.

I have not played a ton of it because they said they were taking the extra time to play a little more.

A little more sauce in the dish.

And I kind of just wanted to wait and see what the full version was, and i was also worried about like save and compatibility, although i'm sure that probably wasn't an issue.

Um, but the, the combat system's so good, the.

The one thing i wanted to add is that, like the because all of your characters sort of execute at the same time um, or in sequence, but like in one phase uh, you can set up these like really elaborate plays where it's kind of like um i'm trying to think of another game that does this uh, Like Slay the Spire.

Part of the fun is like the synergy.

It's like getting dealt a hand of cards that it's like oh, if I use this, then it'll set me up to do this and this.

And then in two turns, I'll be able to do this.

There's a lot of sort of like that synergistic planning and execution joy in Demon School where it's like you know oh, I have this guy who can do this and he's ready to do a special, but he's not lined up.

Oh, but I have this other character who has knockback.

They can knock back this person individually into line.

That'll hit this person and then this move will result in them being in the spot.

I need for this like third thing.

And then when you finally hit, execute.

It's fun just to watch it.

Like you know your master plan.

Execute like it's like a scene in an action movie or something.

Yeah, because they do a lot of um.

Yeah those, if you get a combo going like, both characters will like sort of like 2d, like parallax versions of them will pop up in the screen and go like and like.

Then you'll see the action play out.

Yeah it's, it's got um Presentation wise.

It's really cool.

My favorite thing is actually how it transitions into the battles where like, the world sort of like, like like almost falls apart, like like silent hill style, it just gets blown into the wind and then the 3d version of whatever you're left with is it kind of emerges super sick in the background.

Some of the battle screens too.

There's like a bunch of just sort of like random, like beautiful 3d objects sort of like undulating and floating around and stuff.

It's very sort of like.

Yeah, there's a lot of good like um, like you said, with the 2d 3d, transition stuff.

There's a lot of sort of like playing with uh, not playing with expectation, but like taking the 3dness and like leaning into it and just like taking a bunch of 3d shouldn't have it floating in the background puts you in sort of like a feeling of this weird liminal space where the battles are happening.

It's very cool.

Demon school i'm looking at reviews here interesting split we have a lot of like tens and nines and then some sixes, uh thrown in as well.

So that's how you know it's a good game.

Yeah, that's true, it's like a chinese restaurant.

You never want to go to the 42, you want to go to the 34 35 baby, that's.

That's where the, that's where the sauce is the good stuff, all the flavor.

I wanted to know about demon school because i did play the demo and i thought it was fantastic.

I thought it was really.

I'm very excited to play it.

Actually, i have a different big rpg to play, though i did pick up digimon, so i'm gonna be checking that out before i check out demons.

Game of the year conversation.

That's right baby, get ready to get agumon boys.

Um yeah, demon schools combat.

Do the arenas?

Are they always sort of like?

Because in the demo is very sort of always the same grid structure in terms of the size and scale of it as things go on, does it get a little bit more complex in terms of how much space there is?

Yeah, I wouldn't say it gets like crazy, crazy different, but each each level is a different size.

So and that that factors in.

And also the.

There's a pretty big disparity in like how many enemies come in, because they also like spot in during the fight as well.

But sometimes you'll be playing against, you know, the typical here's a couple of really beefy ones.

And sometimes you're just completely overwhelmed, like ball pit style.

So, yeah, yeah, they do.

It does. do a lot of that, especially in the boss fights.

The boss fights are really different, yeah.

Very cool.

It does expand.

It's a long game.

I haven't completed it yet.

I think it's like plus a dozen hours and I'm not that far, so I suspect it keeps doing some of that stuff, but I can't say for sure.

But yeah, definitely, I know what you mean.

In the early fights.

It's very, I feel like the opening two hours maybe more of that game is is teaching you kind of all the bits and bobs.

And then I didn't have an issue with it.

I was just curious how, how big it got, or at least not near the very end.

You're not like end game or anything, but just from what you're saying it sounds.

It sounds like yeah, it involves the way I want.

It does.

I'd say, I'd say these the variety of the the, the play boards, is one of its um, one of its strong suits.

Sick.

Uh, it's funny.

Yeah, perusing quickly the reviews that are coming out because uh i, back to back, i saw one that was like oh, the writing is like fucking unbearable, it's not funny.

And then the next one was like the humor is on point, like the quips are hilarious.

So i i feel like a lot of the split is just like do you, do you think that the humor is like try hard, or do you get that?

It's sort of like i don't know.

I mean like the humor in, like a high school anime is.

You're not supposed to be like.

This is the funniest joke writing ever.

It's supposed to be like fucking corny.

Yeah, i would say it's.

Um, I think a lot of us know Brandon.

And anyone who listens to the Insert Credits podcast, of course, knows Brandon Sheffield.

I think he's got a keen eye for speaking about certain things.

And so I wouldn't be surprised if this is a game that people who listen to the Noclip podcast really like, because it vibes with a certain way of viewing the world that maybe other people might not feel, as you know close to, let's say.

So, you know, I think, allyship and, you know, collective action and fighting against a, you know binding together to fight against a seemingly unwinnable battle.

You know, I suspect there are elements and themes in here that you either connect with or maybe go over your head, you know.

That's a really good point.

I feel like when people try to talk about or like, include or touch upon, like more serious issues, whether it's like allyship or mutual action or mutual aid, rather and like things like this

I feel like if you're so foreign to those concepts or they're not things that you involve yourself in or think about or talk to people about, it can feel like it's like oh, this person is just trying to be like you know, like they're like virtue signaling or they're like they're forcing this in to seem as if they are some like better person than me.

And it's like it may just be something that that person doesn't thinks about and interacts with more regularly and it seems very natural for them.

Yeah and hey, if there's fucking demons hitting your school, you probably should team up.

Eh uh, demon school available.

By the time this podcast is up, it's launching tomorrow.

As we record it.

Um, i actually don't have a price on this, apologies folks.

Um, consult your local video game store to find out more.

Um, i guess is it just steam or is it launching on anything else?

I believe this is really bad that I don't have this off the top of my head at the moment.

No, sorry.

Of course, it's coming out on everything.

That's what he said in the video.

Yeah, it's coming out on everything.

Switch, PlayStation 5, 4, Xbox One.

They don't have Switch 2 yet because they don't have a, what do you call it?

Dev kit.

You can just play the Switch 1 version on Switch 2.

Sorry.

You can.

It still works.

The PC Gamer Review says expect to pay $25.

Okay.

Wow, that's way cheaper than I thought it would be.

I thought that would be $40.

What did PCG give it?

86.

Nice.

That's pretty fucking strong.

That's pretty good from PCG, especially this type of game.

It's thematically not necessarily a PC PC game.

So, you know, I thought you were saying PCG is like secretly some anti collectivist group.

They, when the children rise up together, they hate that shit.

I mean, for communist propaganda, it's not fucking innocent.

That's what I'm saying.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

It's not a first person shooter.

You can't sell a keyboard and mouse with this game.

Couldn't turn into a coffee mug and roll.

Exactly.

Coffee mugs to use while playing demons.

Yeah.

Sorry to everyone at PCGamer.

I get it.

You got to do what you need to survive.

We're just joshing you.

We're having fun.

We're just joshing you.

Jesse, have you played more Dispatch?

I have.

I completed it.

It's over.

Wait, are all the episodes out?

Yes.

So they stuck very strongly to their two episodes a week schedule and it worked out perfectly for them.

If you've been following the business side of this, if you follow Matt Piscitella on Blue Sky –

I think this game hit like 5% of Steam's active player base when the last episode launched.

52,000 reviews on Steam, overwhelmingly positive.

This game is amazing.

I love Dispatch so, so much.

This reminds me in every way.

Now that it's over, I can finally confidently say I was worried, it wasn't going to stick the landing.

It stuck the landing.

It's exactly what I wanted it to be.

It reminds me so much of playing early Telltale in its writing, in the confidence in the writing, in the sort of vibe it has with its characters and like the relationships between them.

They're not incredibly deep, but, like, what you get out of them is very fun.

Like, I just... The storytelling is phenomenal.

I just love it so much.

It is not gonna, like, you know... It's not high... high sense.

I'm not going to watch this on Apple TV plus.

You know this isn't going to be.

This isn't pluribus or anything, but it is like a fun workplace drama comedy about a group of characters who clearly don't like each other.

And they have the found family shit going on.

It's great.

I really, really liked this a lot.

I played with my wife the whole way through.

And again, like on the first episode, she couldn't care about that strategy stuff.

I think that part of it doesn't really work.

Uh, I think like narratively it makes sense.

Cause like um, you mean the him at the computer doing all the like sending, you know, doing the dispatching yeah, doing the thing the game is called.

Yeah like, if you've played this is the police, the video game um, then you know sort of roughly how the gameplay works.

There's stuff you do like upgrading the characters.

You get skill points and that makes them better at doing certain things.

There's like a, a skill graph that you can see and like some.

When you go to do a dispatch thing, it's like, oh it, you have to think really hard about this and they're going to send in explosions.

It's like who do you send?

The guy with a lot of the brain stat and the guy who's good with fire and just send them in?

So it's not like overly deep or anything, but there's just enough of that tension to deliver story in the midst of it.

Like characters will talk to each other and they'll sort of drive each other.

It's very funny.

Um, I think I just, I love the way that this is told.

I think doing it every week made it so much.

It was like playing the water cooler TV show.

It was like finally something where everyone is playing it at a regular pace and we can all sort of speculate and get excited and think about what's going to happen next.

My wife and I.

When we'd walk the dog after finishing an episode, we'd be like wait what happens here?

Like at certain points in the story, different things occur.

It's like, what choices do you make here that are going to, like, it's so, it's just so good.

There's so many things that I loved about this game in the way that it's presented.

The storytelling, the look of it, it's great.

And it also has the cutest dog ever other than my dog called Beef.

And he is just there all the time, and I love him so much.

Star-studded cast, of course.

Aaron Paul, Jeffrey Wright, a bunch of the... Young Gravy.

Young Gravy.

I mean, Laura Bailey, Travis Willingham, Matthew Mercer, all from... Critical Role, yeah.

I can't remember the name.

Critical Role, yeah.

Alana Pierce is in there.

Yeah.

Moist Critical.

Jacksepticeye plays the... Joel Haver.

That was the one.

Joel is in it.

I'm on board.

Who does he play?

The bat guy or something?

He plays the Irish short guy.

What the fuck?

Wait, Jacksepticeye doesn't play the Irish short guy?

No, he does.

Oh, sorry.

Joel Haver?

That's Moist Critical's name?

I don't know who he is in it.

Oh, Moist Critical plays... I keep calling him Screech.

That's not his name.

Sonar, the bat.

Okay, who's Moist Critical?

That's someone else.

Moist Critical is a streamer, content creator.

Yeah, Jacksepticeye plays the little Irish fighting guy.

That's good.

He was talking about joel haver.

Who is joel haver?

Sorry, joel haver plays water boy is who's?

Oh yes yeah, he's good, he's funny, i like him as well.

Joel haver is the dude who did um uh has done a bunch of great youtube videos, especially back in the day he did like the uh, it's not uh, it's not rotoscope, it's like ai assisted rotoscoping where you sort of like draw an ms paint picture over footage and it interpolates the frame.

So it's this sort of like janky rotoscoping this guy.

Okay, all right yeah yeah, i've seen the donkey kong.

I love those videos.

Yeah, one of my favorite joel haver videos if you've not seen joel haver a great introduction is the one where um uh is it lanky kong listens to the dk rap.

Yeah, he's like what the fuck is this?

Because it's just they're just like shitting on him and his abilities.

That's a great one.

He has no style.

What the fuck he's like?

What the fuck is this?

He's like really excited.

I'm not saying that one.

I gotta check that one out.

That was funny.

I've watched all like the oblivion ones and stuff.

You know all right just oh, they're so funny, god it's.

I always say haver, joel haver.

It makes a lot more sense.

It might be haver, i don't know.

I forget.

They got really good performances out of these youtubers.

I feel like when a lot of games they'll do the.

Let's get a popular youtuber, like a popular social media person, to voice a character and it's not great.

They did like.

Everyone here is doing a really good job again.

Young gravy the rapper, young gravy plays gollum and he's really good.

He's like genuinely i.

Yeah, he does like the Vin Diesel thing for Groot.

No, sorry.

I did say Gollum.

I meant Gollum, I guess.

Where it's like they really tone his voice all the way down.

But it's a good performance.

Everyone is doing a great job.

Alana Pierce does a great job as Malevola, the big red sword lady.

Oh, that's who she is?

Nice.

Yeah, it's great.

Everyone does a great job.

I cannot say nicer things about how much i liked this, and they've been talking about making a second season of it.

Oh god, i hope they do, they must for how much money it made.

Like they had a three-year projection of what they needed.

They beat it in like three weeks.

So this is.

I was uh, i was talking to, i think, the guy who runs the studio.

I was, we were filming in san francisco two weeks ago and um uh, his partner was involved in the thing we were filming and um, he came up to me and said he was a noclip fan and and he told me who what he, what he did, and i was like, holy shit congratulations, like this is fucking insane.

And he was completely bamboozled by the whole thing.

Ad hoc right, is the name of the.

Yeah, there might be, might be, an opportunity for us to tell some stories on that.

No clip next year maybe we'll see, but that's it's really incredible and i think yeah, super impressive.

And um, you know hey, like you said, you got all these amazing voice actors managing to youtubers doing great work.

You know, fucking Embark.

You could have gotten that fucking.

Maybe Eurogamer would have fucking given you a couple extra points.

Hey, I know four YouTube content creators who are available to... We're right here.

If you need any quips, you know, I could... I know some people over there, so... Oh, right.

Do you want to... Should we all go... Yeah, let's go around the wheel.

Let's all go around the wheel and see how we can... Give me a scene, though.

I need a scene.

Yeah, I guess I've probably played the most, so I should go...

I don't want to write Weirdly.

The only one I actually think works is Lance because he's an android, but I could just like.

I feel like I could just get in the booth.

No.

No, no, no.

I do think that's the only one where I think the text-to-speech that they're using actually works and is funny.

What about... Okay.

You need a line?

Should we find a line?

I feel like... Here, this is what I would do.

If they gave me the call, I would just be like... I feel like... Actually, this would be better.

I've never played Ark Raiders, so I would just get in the booth and I'd be like, you know, get this, get this guy off me, like i'm fucking, just like, say the types of things i imagine characters in a game might say, and i'll just give them a wide range.

I'll just do that for two hours and then they can just use whatever you know, i like it.

And if they buy me a sandwich for it or whatever, why don't you do a boston?

And you know, i know hey, i'm fucking pinned down.

My father over here, my father and my mother here yeah, you know.

So yeah, i like that.

Uh frank, what do you got what for?

To be a voice in dispatch?

No, our craters oh oh uh, i don't know what a lot.

Just do a bad job, say anything poorly, and you'll don't know what happens in this game.

Uh, you raid things.

Um well, actually it's the quest givers are all the is the where the bulk of the, the bad voices are.

So it's like raider, i need you to go to the dam and find uh, some torn cloth so we can stop the machines.

Back then we threw bombs at them.

I would go real quippy with it, because all these games have dudes doing obnoxious quips.

So I'd be like My guy would be like, oh great, more fucking junk in here, because you're just going through stuff finding junk, you know.

And then they could use that for the character, the player character.

They could use that for almost every quest you submit.

Oh, great, some more fucking junk.

Oh, look at all this fucking junk still.

The amount of fucking junk... that you find in this game.

They should have called it Junk Raiders, honestly.

Junk Raiders, yeah.

Junk Raiders, and occasionally you find a plastic duck.

Yeah, and then you find a little thing that you can't use but it goes and you're like wow, I'm really excited I got that pink item.

I don't know what that does.

I'm so happy I got this pink item that I am now going to be terrified to use.

Yeah.

It's like.

It's like, as soon as you get the pink item, you think everyone else on the map, you're like glowing pink or something.

Oh my gosh.

They must know.

Oh my gosh.

It is like, I swear to God, I've met people at the end of maps...

And you can tell when they've gotten nothing.

Yeah.

And you can tell when they are secretly hoarding a load of stuff and are super fucking nervous.

They're like, I just need to get on the train.

I just got too many fucking pink items and little jewel items.

It's like that last poker phase of like, hey man, you ready to extract?

You're chill, right?

And I'm like, oh yeah, I'm killing this guy.

He's got stuff.

I don't have any safe pockets and I really need to get these light bulbs back.

Fucking mad.

What a game.

Um... uh let's bounce over to i'm gonna talk about fallout fan fest fallout fan fest i went to fallout fan fest so hot i saw i was i was uh essentially besides i was i could have touched him he was right there i was filming him i didn't touch him i didn't say hi i was there uh as a voyeur tenderly capturing gameplay right on the forehead serving drinks to people um I did a lot of blagging my way into things at this.

I was, for some people, depending on who they were, I was part of Obsidian.

For some people, I was filming a documentary.

They just, Obsidian didn't seem to give a shit either.

So I was just like blagging my way into absolutely everything.

I didn't cut any lines though.

I didn't do that.

So Fallout Fan Fest, I need to explain, this was so much fun and it was so weird.

So about five years ago, they started doing this.

It is a fan run event.

So there's no.

I think there's likely some support happening somewhere, you know, maybe logistically or, I don't think financially, maybe financially I have no idea coming from some people.

But essentially up until this year, it was a free event.

And for reasons I'll get into, it was ticketed this year but like super reasonably, it was like 45 quid or something for the ticket for the three days.

Essentially, what they're doing is, if you've played fallout, you know that there are the town you start in, i think you start in prim, and then you go to good springs, or maybe you spawn in good springs and prim is the next one.

Actually, i think that's what.

That's right yeah yeah, i think prim is the one with the prison, isn't it?

Yeah, which does exist.

Um so uh they, it takes place in good springs, the town of good springs which or, i actually think it might be called goods springs but um it's uh, it's right there.

And uh Prim, for people who don't know, is the border town between the Mojave, on the California side, and Nevada.

So essentially it is the first town you hit on the state line, about 30 minutes outside of Vegas on the road.

There's only one road that goes into Vegas from there, because you're in the fucking middle of the desert.

Jeremy knows all these places really well.

He spends a bunch of time out there.

So Prim, though, has famously these like two hotels, Buffalo Bill's.

And the other one, I forget the name of it, but the other one closed down ages ago.

Buffalo Bills closed down last year and they are famous because they are massive.

They have like Buffalo Bills, a huge water park.

It was like built like 40 years ago and they built a fucking casino 30 minutes from Vegas, thinking you know what?

People don't want to drive two hours and 20 minutes from LA to get to Vegas.

They want to drive an hour and 50 minutes to get to Prim.

In prim and like maybe not a great business decision.

So Buffalo Bills closed last year, but it reopened for one week for this event.

What?

Yes.

So I've always wanted to like go into Buffalo Bills.

It was like it's been in a state of disrepair for a long time, basically since COVID.

I think it kind of closed, but it permanently shut last year.

They opened for this.

And let me tell you, doing an event like that is about a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas and staying in a hotel where water is coming through the fucking ceiling in the casino room was amazing.

This was the weirdest fucking trip I've ever gone on for a video game thing.

So Buffalo Bills was just full of Fallout fans.

The whole place was full of Fallout fans.

I would say easily at least 30% were in insane cosplay.

Like, it was just LARPer heaven if you were into Fallout.

The most unbelievable cosplay.

Full suits, Brotherhood of Steel, Highwaymen, Vault Dwellers, every single tiny character.

There was a guy walking around saying Gary all day long.

He did karaoke, or as he called it Gary-oke, where he sang the song the melody, but only said Gary.

There were people dressed up as rad roaches.

It was just like ghouls with like incredible work done.

It was like a fucking B-roll wet dream.

Everywhere I turned, there was just the most incredible shot.

Because the whole thing was taking place in Goodsprings as well.

So you're just in the fucking Mojave.

And that's what it looks like.

Apparently this whole thing came together because this guy bought a bar.

Bought the bar in Goodsprings.

He called, he goes by the name, uh, old man liver, right?

This is, this is a pre him buying the bar thing.

This guy is like a character.

He's already like deep in desert lore.

He is a, he wrote a book about whiskey years ago.

He's done all these like different things.

He, you know, he's got earrings and he looked cool, like a cowboy kind of guy.

And he bought this bar in Goodsprings a number of years ago.

And then people started turning up in Fallout gear taking photographs.

And he was like, what the fuck is this?

Like, I don't know.

He knew about, like, ghost town stuff.

And I think they've had Zach Baggins out to this bar.

Like it's been on a bunch of – you can do ghost tours in there and all this sort of stuff, because that's a lot of like Mojave.

You know nonsense.

But he was, like, rubbing his chin.

We should do a Fallout event here.

And then he basically, like, turned the bar into this mecca and then set up this event.

And for years it was free.

People would just come and they'd sell burgers and try and make up the the amount for it.

But clearly, like you need to take it for something like this.

So I think this weekend there were and they also didn't want people parking in the town anymore.

And it's surrounded by BLM land.

So people were camping and stuff.

So what they did was they paid for shuttles to run people from Prim to Goodsprings all day.

Like you never had to wait more than 10 minutes for for a big bus to come and pick you up, which is good, because on Saturday that fucking atmospheric river that hit Frank and SoCal came straight through and the place was completely drenched.

Like we were all just hiding under metal.

You know, I had my camera trying to stay dry.

Obsidian did some talks there.

The voice actors did some talks there.

I met Mr. New Vegas, who did all the radio bits.

He was there.

Wayne Newton, right?

Wayne Newton.

I met Wayne Newton.

Yeah, yeah.

Very cool.

He looks like a fucking... He looks like he sounds like that.

Yeah.

I mean, he was telling us stories about Dean Martin and, like his beautifully Botoxed face, was smiling at everyone and doing the work.

Every bit of plastic going down his chin.

Oh, yeah.

He looked amazing for however old he is.

He's 83.

Yeah.

He was funny.

He was quippy.

It was awesome.

So everyone was losing their minds and taking pictures with him.

And Walton Goggins turned up and some of the other cast members from the TV show on Sunday unannounced and served drinks to people in the bar.

It's a tiny bar.

It's like two rooms.

It's like this is all taking place in a tiny little area.

There's a vendor village.

If you live in the area, or if you like going to video game events, or if you uh, are a huge fallout fan, i can't recommend this thing long enough.

The vibes were impeccable.

Everyone was so nice to everyone else.

I met loads of noclip fans out there who were super cool um, who were excited to see me because it meant that we were doing you know.

They're like oh, you're doing something on new vegas then and i'm like well, maybe it's the 15th anniversary, it's a good time to do something.

Um, i met john gonzalez out there, who's back at obsidian, which was awesome because i hadn't spoken to him since we filmed in amsterdam jeremy.

Um, He was super complimentary about how we've been doing and was excited to talk again sometime.

So yeah, it was Mikey Dowling was out there who we had at our PAX panel as well, and a bunch of other Presidium folks.

Shout out to Austin as well, who's the DP for the bar, actually.

He does a bunch of other stuff as well.

He saved my ass with a mini XLR cable that I desperately needed.

So thank you again, Austin.

Yeah, it was so much fun.

Really good.

Everyone was in such good humor, even when it was raining.

The vendor village was just full of beautiful, you know, crafted stuff.

And I think it reminds me a bit of QuakeCon as well and that, like I know, Bethesda's gotten a lot more involved in this.

But I think it was cool that like they had Obsidian people there, but also, like you know, none of this was like none of these people own this IP.

This is like a fan-run event.

There's like a vendors village where they're all selling.

You know, black market fallout, merch.

You know like it's.

It was just so like it's.

There's not many games you could pull this off with.

And the whole thing because it's happening in that area of the Mojave and like there was all these tours you could take to the prison and to like all the different areas that are available in that early part of the game.

And then staying in Buffalo bills, like when the, when it I woke up, the it was a fine hotel, my room was clean, there was no bugs.

You know, it was a classic two and a half star experience.

But the morning after I walked into the lobby and on the hallway I was like walking along the carpet and suddenly it was like squelch squelch, squelch.

I was like oh boy, oh boy.

And as the weekend went on, more and more of the main atrium which had, like you know, i watched the ufc at the bar there they had like all these temp workers selling.

There was no beers on tap, it was all bottles.

Like more and more of the the casino floor and they had some slot machines and stuff uh was getting cordoned off because more water was pouring through the ceiling.

It was fucking brilliant.

Yeah buffalo, the structure for buffalo bills i can't tell if it's part of it or whatever the red like barn like structure next to it.

That's where i stayed.

It looks like a like a grain elevator.

It does, doesn't it?

Yeah, it's the strangest.

They call it the tower.

There's two of them and that was tower two and that was the one i was staying in.

Buffalo bills is bizarre.

Like it has a roller coaster that goes like around the car park.

It goes through the casino.

Oh yeah, like it's not on anymore, with fucking good reason.

I was gonna say a place that has That is filling with water is not a place that I want to be in when there's a roller coaster.

There's a water park there that's been shut down for ages.

I think there's the.

You know, the scuttlebutt around the event was that they're going to demolish it soon.

So we may have been the last people to stay at Buffalo Bills, which you know, in and of itself is some, was worth the trip.

Every time you go to a convention, it's the last one that they do.

What's up with that?

It's like the Grim Reaper.

Yeah, all the doors are like e3, buffalo bills and then whatever is next.

Totally yeah, it was great.

It was awesome.

You guys should go sometime.

Uh, we were the last people to stay at.

Buffalo bills should be the name of your next uh, autobiographical work.

I have so much great b-roll as well we're.

We're gonna be swimming in it.

Uh yeah, i didn't as many interviews as i thought i would.

It was pretty loud and i figured we'd catch up with some of those people after the fact but um yeah, it was.

Uh, it was a good time, and thank you again to everyone who who came up and chilled out.

It was um, it was a lot of fun to see like lots of people there watched our Bethesda docs and lots of people that watched our Fallout 76 docs a lot of Fallout 76 players um out there, unsurprisingly.

Um yeah, especially with, I mean they're expanding it into, is it not?

Is it Ohio, where I think the new they've announced a new expansion pack with the Google in it?

Um, so it keeps getting bigger as well.

So there you go.

That was my fun at Fallout Fan Fest.

Expect.

Oh so in the patron show this month I'll have a bunch of B-roll in it, including Mr Goggins and some other bits and bobs.

So yeah, check that out.

I actually I finished.

I only had ever watched the first half of the one season of the Fallout show, and I watched the latter half of it while I was on vacation, because Chelsea's a big fan of it.

And we, I had never finished it and she wanted to rewatch it.

It's really good.

I actually thought the latter half of the season was much better than the first half, because I feel like the first half is establishing these characters.

Agreed.

And it's sort of like you know it's you're just like getting on board and then you have like the bottle episode with like the mr handy stuff, and then i feel like the back half of it is way more about the world building of fallout.

And i agree yeah, i was impressed i, i was, i really really liked it.

So i'm excited, for i stopped right in the middle.

So that's okay, i'll go back and finish it.

It does feel like, like jeremy said, that the top half feels a lot about uh, introducing the characters and also explaining what the hell this world is to people who have no idea about it.

Yeah, and it sort of i don't know throws a lot of that away, like the, the episode where they're in the, the vault.

I won't say what happens, but we're like when they're that whole thing and the back and forth between the two of them um is, it was incredible like all the, all those bare parts, uh.

Also great uh, great cameo in the final episode as well by a certain comedy slash musician that i really appreciated.

Oh yeah yeah yeah, i'm excited for the second one.

Hopefully it picks up where that one sort of left off and you know, because it did get a bit more self-serious as well, like it was quite jokey at the top half and by the end it sort of believes in its mission a bit more.

Um yeah, that's the thing is like i, i feel like sometimes people look at fallout and they're like oh, it's like post-apocalyptic, but it's like quippy and jokey and i don't think it's that at all.

I think that like the real crux of the fallout tone, like the magic of it, is that it's like It is very self-serious and the humor is sort of spun out of that.

The humor is not, like, characters being jokey characters.

The humor is, like, the world is so fucking grim.

Like, awful things happen.

Yeah, it's like black humor.

Like in presenting the bleakness of the situation, you can't help but laugh when there's, like you know, cracking open a cold like Nuka-Cola, and it's like they fucking the contrast of like weird branding still being incorporated into these things in a world where people are like eating each other is fuck.

I don't know.

It's like absurdist.

It's not like quippy.

Yeah, I totally agree.

And I think it was funny because we have in the uh first episode of the disco Elysium doc which you can watch now if you're a no clip early access patron.

Um, the uh.

Rostov says that like yes, the first two fallouts were deeply serious, deeply difficult games, but they were funny because of the you know the what happened, the ridiculousness.

But yeah, The sort of Western ones have become.

I think it's less so with 3 and New Vegas, but definitely with 4 onwards even more so and definitely 76.

76 feels like you're playing a Fallout theme park game to many degrees.

You kind of are.

Yeah, those games are a lot more like... It's a fun time.

It's, you know, it's like... It's a bit more cheesy and weird.

Whereas, yeah, 3 even, I felt, was like... It's a grim-ass game.

You know what I mean?

And funny things happen.

But when you find that... when you find the gary vaults you're not laughing it's fucking terrifying and weird and like what you're kind of like you're like scared laughing kind of you know yeah that that's the kind of laughs that i wanted from a fallout experience is like i want to laugh because it's so like bizarre and like uncomfortable and surreal that i'm i'm i'm laughing as like a coping mechanism because i just shot someone their body exploded and i'm in like a horrible vault oh my lord uh Yeah, Fallout FanFest, good stuff.

You'll see more of that in a documentary at some stage next year.

So keep your eyes peeled for that.

Did they announce anything else about next year for that?

Some rumors going around.

Maybe not.

Okay, we'll see.

Jesse.

Morsels.

I played a bit of this.

You played a bit of this.

It came out today.

Tell me about morsels.

Morsels is good.

Yeah.

I'll just, I'll be brief on it.

Cause this is the sort of game where I think it's best if you, if you play it as blind as possible and and fall in love with how weird it is.

This feels like a nineties cartoon Sierra, like comic book series with that sort of like grungy art style to it.

And it plays like one too.

So this is um a top down shooter.

Top top down shooter uh, a bit like binding of Isaac, I guess, or like nuclear throne in terms of the perspective.

Um, You play as a bunch of morsels.

Well, one morsel in particular, a little mouse who's just trying to get some cheddar, like we all are.

And the world set up is like some cards appeared one day that are magical.

And there are some big animal cats that have the cards and like they're the most powerful beings.

But you need to go kill them to get the cheese or save the world or something.

The setup for it is like so bizarre.

The reason I said you need to play this blind or like as, with as little information as you can have, is

I think the binding of Isaac comparison to this isn't just the gameplay.

It's also the feeling that I got the first couple hours, maybe days, even weeks.

I, you could argue of playing.

Binding of Isaac is sort of adjusting to the rules and what the items do and how everything interacts.

Morsels is on.

It's like that cranked up to a million.

It's everything.

Nothing makes any sense in this game.

There's no, there's no, there's no stable common ground here for your brain.

It's just fine, fucking weird.

It's like being caught in a ren and stimpy nightmare or something.

Yes, ren and stimpy nightmare is actually the perfect comparison.

I was trying to think of something and i was like secretive nim, if you like, you just did like 40 tabs of acid.

Like, not that, i've done that, i'm just guessing.

Sorry sorry jeremy, if i'm don't take 40 tabs of anything, let's just 40 units of anything.

Yeah yeah yeah, drink a little too much apple cider and this might do it to you.

Um yeah, this game is insane.

It's like it's you.

You are just shooting enemies and trying to collect resources and like get to the next area um, collecting cheese so you can buy things.

We pay for things with cheddar, that's totally normal.

Um, between levels, there's like characters you can talk to that will give you different resources.

The characters are weird.

It's like a stork is one of them.

It's like an alligator in a top hat and then a thing inside of its mouth is the thing you talk to.

Sure whatever, like every, there's little rooms that you can walk into on each of the stages, like you're just fighting enemies.

It's very straightforward.

You're trying to get to the goal at the end, which is the ladder which you just you're climbing out of this underground sewer area.

But between the goal and where you start there's about 100 things that make no sense, like no sense in the weirdest way.

I walked into a room and there was a.

There was a big mushroom in the middle of it and I shot it and a bunch of other mushrooms appeared around it in a rainbow pattern.

I shot the mushrooms.

Nothing happened.

I shot the mushrooms some more.

A rope appeared and I took the rope out and I was back in there.

I was like, what just happened?

Like the game makes no sense.

But in the way that like it's so intriguing, you want to learn more about it.

Like I've spent maybe six, seven hours playing it.

They sent an early code.

And like every bit of it that I've played.

Every time I've got to fire it up I'm like OK, I know this, does that now.

I know that if I have the ticket that you get early on, I can use that to do something.

And it introduces you to this little thing later.

Cool.

OK.

I never saw the ticket again.

Like, I don't know.

I never ran into anything.

There's all these parts where you can, like, bring things between levels.

I'm like never sure if it's something that I'm going to end up giving to someone at the end of the level or I just have to keep carrying forever.

The first time I played this was, like, at the end of... It was a Friday night.

I'd been partying a little bit.

So I wasn't... My state of mind was... Maybe not the best time to be playing this.

No.

I was not, like, you know...

I was not living my most sober moment, let's say.

And I booted up the game and I played like maybe 40 minutes of it.

And I went, no, man, I can't fucking deal with this.

You want to throw up?

Like this.

It looks incredible.

I love what it's doing.

But like my brain just can't like figure out what's going on.

So I put it down and I played some the next morning.

Felt the exact same.

Yeah.

Sober or gone skis.

This game is just not.

It's not going to.

Yeah yeah, but it's super.

I but i liked it.

It was like that was the, what i read, what it was, at least i was like, oh no, this is just the game.

Okay, it's not that, it's not any chemist chemical clone to my body.

Um yeah so um, art style is just.

The art style is amazing.

I think this team never seen any atomic crops.

I think is the other game that they worked on.

Um yeah, it's.

Uh, toby dixon right, is the?

Um, atomic crops?

And what was the other one i was just looking at?

Uh, hang on, nidhogg 2.

Oh, that totally reads for me.

Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah.

It's got that fleshy wetness.

Yeah, that big, gross hamburger kind of look to everything.

Everything looks like it's just ground beef.

Yeah, like Garbage Pail Kids, but like... Garbage Pail Kids!

That's what it was.

Dude, I couldn't remember!

You fucking figured it out!

That's it, that's it.

Scooped it out of my brain.

Yeah, very Garbage Pail Kids shooter.

I love this game.

Also, the characters that you get, they're called morsels, like you're playing as the mouse, but you get cards that are your different... characters that you fight as and they all have weird unique combat styles to them like one of them you just like punch but then like you have a special ability that does cool stuff one of them's like a flower and you shoot you know shots like flowers do one of them has a volleyball that you you throw and then you warp to the volleyball to deal damage this game makes no sense it makes no sense i want so desperately to understand everything here like i was saying like it's it's nice to play a roguelike or roguelite whatever that isn't interested in in telling you everything and giving you every stat and explaining how things work.

I get why people want that sort of thing when they're playing these games, especially with the time commitment required.

You don't want to pick up something that messes with your, your build, but like there is a joy in feeling like you don't understand what's going on and just rolling with the punches.

And it's like playing vaudeville.

Like it's so funny and weird.

And like, it doesn't care what you're doing.

It's just like, this is the world get on board or get off the train.

You know what I'm saying?

It's like Binding of Isaac is a great foil for this because, like I think, a lot of the reasons why Binding of Isaac worked when it came out because this was like sort of very early in the idea of, like you know, difficult roguelikes.

Because Rogue is a tough game but, like most roguelikes that came out, were not particularly challenging.

And Binding of Isaac was one that was held your feet to the fire a little bit, but the art style and binding of Isaac was very approachable and very minimalistic.

So like, the things that were different stood out and it allowed you to figure out.

Okay, this is like made for the 2025 audience, where the biggest problem with roguelikes is that you've played a fucking million of them and that you know the patterns and you can see what's going on and you can figure it out.

And this game is like, you are never going to feel comfortable.

It's like, it's yeah.

And it's, yeah, it's, it's super cool.

Like I'm, I'm totally with you.

Like I am, I am still trying to figure out figure out what this game is like.

That's the feeling of it.

And I haven't felt, you know, I felt that with like immortality, or you know lots of other weird games.

When it comes to roguelikes, I'm I know we all know 85 percent of the game we're going to play.

We're going to figure out what it is.

And this is like a top down, you know, shooter thing.

But like that's about where that's the only thing you can hold on to.

Yeah, everything after that is.

At one point i was playing frogger.

I was like okay.

And then i played frogger again and it looked better and different.

I was like what's going on?

Sometimes they just change what the game is and don't tell you why.

And sometimes there's ladders, tall ladders to places and yeah, morsels game cool.

I'm glad you liked it because i played a.

I was intrigued by it.

Yeah.

But, uh, yeah.

And I was, and I want to play more of it, but I'm I'm I'm, I'm excited to hear you've played a chunk more and you're still feeling that vibe.

Cause I was worried I was going to cross the, the, the comfort gap and then be, Oh, okay.

Well, I get how weird it is.

Okay.

Now I'm just waiting for the thing to pop up.

No, I straight up.

I thought I told you, I figured out how something worked.

Haven't seen it since.

And I've run into 40 things.

I still don't understand.

It never stops.

It's so cool.

Fuck.

All right.

I'm going to play some more today.

I'm excited about that.

That's awesome.

Frank Howley, tell us about the wonderful world of men with leopard's heads.

Yeah, I've been playing Tekken 4, and it's incredible.

So Tekken 4 originally was in arcades in 2001, and America was released in 2002.

My history with it is so funny, because Tekken 3 is one of my all-time favorite games.

That was my first PS1 game, so I played years of Tekken 3.

And then Tekken Tag Tournament was my PS2 launch game, so I played like two years of Tekken Tag Tournament.

By the time Tekken 4 came out, I rented it, but Vice City had also come out.

So fighting games, that's so boring.

It's one level.

I want to run around, drive cars, fly helicopters, whatever.

So I barely touched Tekken 4 at launch.

And like even at the time at launch, like it got negative reviews because they kind of changed the system.

The levels were uneven.

There was walls.

And, like, they, like, changed the format.

Tekken 3 used to be infinite spanning levels.

And they eventually went back to that and put... Every...

Every iteration technically switched up and people get mad at whatever reason.

But the biggest reason I didn't really like Tekken 4 at the time was at the time we were so spoiled.

Every fighting game evolved into like tag games.

So you had like Street Fighter then.

Oh, Marvel vs. Capcom.

I have two teammates, three teammates.

And then same thing with Tekken Tag.

It was 2v2.

So all of a sudden you strip that and you go back to Tekken 4.

It felt like such a step back.

And so like as a kid, I was like, I don't want to play this anymore.

I'd rather play other stuff or whatever, like.

So I just ignored Tekken 4, eventually came back to Tekken 6 and onward.

The reason I got into Tekken 4 is I've been listening to its music for months, maybe all year.

It's way more like ambient and like I mean it's early 2000s.

But it's way more like lo-fi and chill compared to how bombastic like the synth guitars of Tekken 3 is.

So I've just been listening to that music like when I work or whatever.

It's really, really, really, the soundtrack is so good.

It's on Apple Music, everything.

But then I was like, well, shit, I keep listening to the music.

I should like actually play the game because I bet stylistically there's things that match that.

And it's even so I started playing it.

What year was Tekken 4?

It was a 2002 console release.

OK, OK.

It was a one in the in the.

Yeah.

Which I've never seen an arcade machine of Tekken 4.

So now I'm like, shit, I want to hunt one down.

I want to hunt one down.

But yeah, I'm playing it with retro achievements and just picking each character on law and unlocking the characters and like

It's so funny compared to how addicted I was to like Tekken Tag or later Tekkens.

There's so many systems.

This feels so like, I don't know, stripped down.

But like the core mechanics are so good.

And also because I played all the UFC games, it kind of like retrained my mind to think about like jabs and like just being playing more and more defensively.

Even when the rounds start, before the round starts, like get ready to fight.

Like you're standing there.

You can already start moving.

And I think they eventually put that into later Tekkens.

But, like, so depending where you spawn on the map, you can, like, you know, dash sideways.

That way you have the upper advantage.

You can already position yourself.

So now I'm like, oh, I want to play this game competitively.

Not competitively, but I want to, like, play this game in a multiplayer setting.

Because, like, yeah, it's wonkier than the later Tekken games.

And so, like, you can spam people against walls.

And it's like, oh, I want to see what this is like.

But I've just been playing it against... the CPU getting richer achievements.

But yeah, graphically, musically, everything about it is incredible.

And then there's also a Shinjuku level.

So the same map that's in, like Yakuza, Kabukicho.

You get to see that millennium, you get to see that square reflected in Tekken.

And yeah, there's fake Konbinis in the background and stuff like that.

And so it's just like, I don't know, it's an incredible game.

And so yeah, I've been hooked playing it.

And yeah, now I'm like, shit, now I want a physical copy.

But it's very funny just going back and kind of like, Yeah, it was a game I ignored, dismissed.

I only rented it.

I didn't buy it.

I was burned out at Tekken.

And, like it has been since, reappraised and a lot more people are coming back to Tekken 4 because it also represents just that early 2000s PS2 era so well.

And then, yeah, by the time Tekken 5 came out, like I got it, but I think that was like so late.

I didn't, I don't know.

It wasn't like significant to me, but maybe there's something there too.

But Tekken 4, specifically the soundtrack, even when you pick a character, it starts like with this voiceover and it's this very like like, almost like neo-noir soundtrack.

And you have this very dramatic voiceover.

That's like martial law opened up a Chinese restaurant in New York.

And like the tone of Tekken is always very, very goofy.

But like, I listened to that song while like getting ready or cleaning or like at the gym.

And it's just, it's such a good, the actual track, I should pull up what it's called.

Um, the voiceover track it's called fetus.

And that's like – yeah, the track is called Fetus on second four.

But it's this like synth buildup, and it's so – it gets me so fired up.

Yeah, so –

Yeah, Tekken 4.

Like it's birthing the game.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that's the track they used to set up everyone's backstory.

And during the backstory video, you have these insane manga illustrations.

And so, yeah, every element of Tekken 4's style is remarkable.

And again, at the time, it was like, what the hell is this game?

This sucks.

But that's, again, the joy with video game stuff is always reappraising stuff.

Now, in 2025, I'm bringing three decades of fighting game experience to this whereas, like when i was eight, what i mean, i couldn't beat horror, or maybe i couldn't be heihachi, who knows but um, you're just like why did they change the bear?

Why did the old bear have to die?

Yeah, and like this always happens too, is like every fighting game, they'll throw out old characters, put in new ones.

Like it's funny.

I was talking about like the ufc stuff.

In this game, they specifically added a boxer with steve and then an mma guy uh, mart marduk, and so it's like i don't know.

Yeah, it's just, it's funny.

Combat Yeah, he got combat.

Yeah, exactly.

I think that's the only Tekken game combat ever appeared in.

I think combat was the man's combat game.

Yeah, because they replaced him with Mokoujin was the wood block.

Yes.

Same thing, but they changed it.

But then they did Tekken, Tag 2, which I think had like every character's combat might be in that, but I don't know.

You know, it's cool that you went back to Tekken 4 and you sort of had that feeling about it, because I think Harada was doing an interview with Justin Wong.

I think he was like...

I love Tekken 4.

I think he went back and said it was like his favorite of the Tekken games, which is cool because like, I feel like if you just had the eighth game come out and you're like yeah, the one from 20 years ago is the best one,

No, because I feel like five is so – like I remember, there was nothing remarkable about five to me other than the fact that there was Tekken 1, 2 and 3 on the disc, because it was like the 10th anniversary or something.

But like yeah, I think Tekken 4 is an example of like this creative team being like all right, let's fucking make our – let's really – go out there.

And at the time it was seen as like, oh, whoa, whoa.

Like, I don't know.

But yeah, now when you play it today, it's like, oh, this is awesome.

It's so, God, again, the style of it is so good too.

But yeah, again, the fact that like in the Shinjuku level, there's a telephone.

No, that's what's generally so cool is, in the shinjuku level there's like telephone booths so you can like maneuver so you guys are in between telephone booths so you can like hide oh that's awesome like you're trying to beat up your little brother like yeah yeah or or there's a um in the there's a parking lot level and so it's like the matrix lobby there's there's just pillars in the underground parking lot and like you can you can like knock down the pillars to get to the person you're fighting like there's environment there's so much environmental stuff happening in this game that they've never done again since like There's stuff where you can throw people into different stages in Tekken 8, but the core thing... And Dead or Alive later did this, but every beat of this game is doing something so different than the rest of the Tekken series.

And it's so funny now...

Like, at the time, everyone hated it, but now it's like, oh, this is so cool.

Nothing else is like this.

Like, before and after.

Yeah, yeah.

It's so weird.

So, yeah, Tekken 4, like, god.

And, again, even running it on, like, PC with emulator, the graphics looks better than ever.

So, yeah, really, really, Tekken 4 is so good.

Hell, yeah.

Kuma 2 or Panda?

It's so funny.

Kuma in this one, he's got, like, a red shirt and red shoes.

So, I like Kuma in this one.

Different bear.

Yeah. different yeah this is kuma too hayachi like uh trains a new bear also king king's new too yeah yeah king's got long hair in this one yeah it's king too i think it's king's like son or some shit i don't know so lazy just putting a two at the end of the first guy's name well that's what they do in japan because like and that's where it comes from it's like they have tiger mask one tiger mask i've seen tiger mask four in vegas so you gotta throw the old ones into volcanoes that's the thing you know wait is that dead or alive no it's that's this isn't this off a cliff yeah How's Yoshimitsu looking in this one?

I hate Yoshimitsu.

They always make his design intentionally weird.

I feel like he's got big tubes.

Big tubes?

Oh, they made them digitally weird.

Yeah, like CyberGoth.

There's a Tekken 4 cabinet for sale in Palatine, Illinois for $1,300.

I think you should go get it.

Free delivery, I suspect.

It's local pickup only, I believe.

I also was listening to Tekken 4 Fetus while Frank was explaining what's cool about this game, and I've never been more inspired in my life.

I felt like I was listening to the opening monologue of the game and it was just Frank being like It almost sounds like the Chicago Bulls, like It kind of reminds me of NBA Jam, now that you say that.

I'm trying to listen to it, but there's a fucking ad playing on YouTube.

Oh yeah, this is great.

I love Fetus.

Yeah, it's... Oh, yeah.

Don't put me on that.

It's a hype track.

I feel my fetus rising.

Tekken 4, available now.

How much is it?

I bet it's like 30 bucks on Steam, is it?

No, it isn't.

There's no remake?

God, they really didn't remake any of these, did they?

No, no.

Your only option is to spend $1,300 in Palatine, Illinois.

Yeah.

It's the only way to play this game.

Bring a flatbed and hope it doesn't rain.

Tekken 4.

Last game we have here is Drill Bird.

Drill Bird Drill.

You're going to tell us all about drilling, killing and drilling.

My favorite thing about Drill Bird is that oftentimes, when new games come out, you'll see the developers stream some of the game.

And then there's a little like little now broadcasting thing on top.

One thing I didn't know about those is that they often loop.

So they'll do the stream at the start.

And then I've been in ones where I'm like chatting to them and then realize that it was a several days earlier and it's just looping.

And on the drill bird page they just have like a wildlife documentary about cranes playing as they're.

Do they really?

Yeah, like an 80s or like 90s?

Oh yeah, four by three.

I've been watching for an hour since uh, the podcast started and it's still playing.

So uh, that's fucking crazy.

Um yeah, that's cool.

It makes a lot of sense, because if you were to stream playing the game, this game is only like an hour long, so i feel like it would just be an hour of playing the game and then you would see the whole game and then you wouldn't probably play it.

Yeah, Drillbird is a, So I've been playing a lot of games for Game of the Year stuff in preparation.

So I kind of wanted to find something that was a little bite-sized, but also like a new game.

I like platformers a lot.

It's kind of like my comfort zone, comfort food, mashed potatoes genre.

And Drillbird is just a very chill, small, but very cleverly designed platformer.

So this is a it's kind of like the mining segments in machina for people who heard us talk about machina earlier this year.

Machina was the one with the very, um, it was like stop motion art style.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Um, very different.

This is pixel art.

It's a very different style, but in terms of like you're at the top and you like upgrade stuff and then you go drill, drill down and into the earth and then sort of like, come back with your uh, your hall.

This is like, I'd say steam world dig, uh, Yeah, there you go.

Yeah, I actually, I forgot about the game.

I have not ever played any of those games.

Oh, SteamWorld Dig is really good.

I'm not.

There's a lot of SteamWorld stuff like Heist and those that I feel like I should play more of, but Dig is Dig and Dig 2 are incredible.

They're really, really good.

All right, cool.

Maybe I'll grab SteamWorld Dig.

Like top 10.

Yeah, Dig 2 is really fantastic.

So this is probably like a more bite-sized version of that sort of game.

But basically what happens is you're a little bird.

You can sort of like jump and then tap jump to fly.

But as soon as you start gathering minerals you're weighted down and you sort of have like a jump flap flap, flap.

And then you have a limited sort of jump ability.

So this is interesting because as you go deeper down, you're basically having to sort of like strategically – drop and pick up minerals to be able to get height on things because if if you can't make a good your escape as the the timer is running low and the daylight is running out um you might have to drop everything and run away just to not die so you're sort of like building paths of egress as you're going deeper which is interesting um and also sort of like anticipating that you'll have stuff like you you'll have to sort of like project into the future and be like all right this will be difficult when i'm coming back because i'll be heavy jeremy yes is this an extraction platformer oh shit everything is extraction now yeah i guess i guess so is the egg ai voiced or because yeah the the egg is unvoiced thank god you're so good at turning me on whoa hey now it's a sex robot voice uh yeah so you're a little bird on like a planet you lay an egg and basically you're going and getting minerals by mining into the earth and bringing them back to feed and grow the egg wow extraction game in more ways than one then Yeah, true.

Yeah, to extract from the planet ultimately.

Jesse, look, you're months away from this.

I know.

Once the dad gene kicks in.

It's already fermenting.

It's bubbling inside of me.

Yeah, it's happening.

I'm getting ready.

It's turning.

But yeah, I mean, that's kind of all I want to say about the game mechanically.

It has a few surprises, which to have sort of secret mechanics that kick in later in the game, in a game that's only an hour, was like, legitimately surprising to me i was i was pleased that this game this game was sort of like oh it's like a fun little comfort game and then by the end i was like oh shit they like they pulled off some really cool stuff in the short amount of runway they had um and yeah it's kind of kind of like jesse said compared to sort of to like incremental games because when you go up with the minerals it's like you can upgrade your health the amount of time that you have per day the the speed of drilling things like that um and and there's a time mechanic where it's kind of like spelunky if you run out of time there's a fucking a ghost that comes and tries to kill you Uh, so that's kind of the whole game.

It took me an hour to beat.

I played the whole thing yesterday, one sitting, and it was just sort of like a delightful bite-sized experience.

So I wanted to throw a little light on it.

And if you like platformers and if you like steam world dig, I think I've never played it.

Uh, I feel like this is the game for you.

If you've got an hour and like 3 3 2 78, 48 at the moment, cause it's 17 off and valves, taken at least a dollar of that.

So, you know, okay.

Throw the bird a bone here.

I think, especially when we cover these shorter games, we'd really compel you to go to Steam and just check it out.

We often run into issues where like, you know, we were talking about what videos to do this week.

And Jeremy makes a really valid point of this game is too short.

We can't like spend even 15 minutes.

With a year it's a quarter of the game.

So you know, there are a lot of games that we don't end up doing.

Uh, indie recommendations on, i think we can probably get them in to other videos and we're going to have our game of the year.

This year we're going to be doing categories for the first time um and, and we'll be looking at short games and looking at games for under 10 bucks and stuff like that and trying to give them their flowers.

But yeah, if this sounds interesting to you, make note of it, open up steam on your phone, do whatever you know on your pc, and and check it out because um, oftentimes we don't get to talk about these games much more than this because of the nature of how short they are, and we don't want to spoil them, um.

So yeah, drill bird available, and now for the low, low price of three dollars.

I would.

I wish i could not take the sale price.

You know i wish you could like turn it down or something, because that's like I'm going to wait until the sale is over on November 23rd.

There should be a tip jar on Steam.

Give someone a copy.

Oh, that's a much better idea.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Let me do that.

Yeah, yeah.

That's great.

That's a good point.

That is the tip jar.

Drill birds for everyone.

You should be able to just... Like someone who has it on their wish list just gets it for free.

Like a random person or something.

That'd be cool.

That'd be fun, yeah.

That would be cool.

Although there's probably some way you could launder money or something like that.

I don't know.

Who knows?

That's all the video games we talked about this week.

Motion Rec Drill Bird, Lumineser Eyes, Tekken 4 Sektori Dispatch Morsels, Demon School and Fallout Fan Fest.

That's a lot of games.

We're still not done.

We got some electronic mails thanks to our electronic mailman, Frank Howley.

What we got, Frank?

Yeah, if people want to write to us, please send us a message to podcasts at noclip.video.

That's podcasts at noclip.video or on our Patreon Discord in the podcast chat channel.

Our first question comes from Peter from Poland.

Uh, greetings.

I have a question about circling back to game of the year games.

Uh, danny mentioned he's only put about five hours in a clear obscure expedition 33, i realize.

I struggle to choose what to play because my schedule often means i can't touch a game for several days.

That makes me avoid story heavy games and smaller indie titles, since i know i'll forget where i was in the story when i come back a week later.

Have you ever dealt with this?

Do you try to binge games with a clear ending or are you okay with dropping a story game for a while and picking it up back up later?

Hmm, i'll go first.

Just because you mentioned clear obscure, it really depends on the game.

So, like here, clear obscure, i feel like i had a pretty good grok, like where i stopped um, to go back to uh, if a game's story is compelling enough, or like the seance of blake manor, for instance, like so much of that game was making sure that i was remembering lots of specific details.

So that was a game that i felt compelled to finish um, but thankfully I also felt compelled to finish for other reasons.

So yeah, there are games for sure.

Like there are games that I didn't like immortality.

I didn't start for a long time.

Jeremy was bugging me about it.

And then eventually he missed.

He mentioned it to me when I was sick with COVID and I was like no, this is the right time.

Cause I didn't want to start it without finishing it.

I think was the sort of feeling there.

And I've had that with a few games.

Um, but yeah, my biggest one for this was new Vegas.

Cause I'm played the crap at a new Vegas when it came out and then didn't finish my save file for like six years, maybe because I'd gone to the.

The choose choose, your choose, choose the lesser of three evils part.

Um, and couldn't decide.

I was like stuck looking at the cereal boxes, choice paralysis style.

Um, but then eventually shot and got off the pot.

Um, yeah.

So yeah.

Okay.

I, I think it, it, it differs.

I'm just sidebar question. this is also an issue we run into for game of the year.

So everyone on the team has, like a certain amount of hours or days rather allocated for work to go play game of the year stuff.

And we try and spend as much sort of of that time hitting uh like a breadth of games.

But yeah, like a lot of us and I'm sure the guys are going to end up playing more than we've even sort of talked about for for billing purposes or whatever.

But um it, it always ends up being this way, where you know I I've gone back and played more clear, obscure because of this.

Like I need to see, or like kingdom con deliverance is definitely the one that I'm probably the one on the team who's playing a lot of that to, to make sure we cover that one off as much as possible.

And hopefully we have at least two people playing a lot of these games when we, when we talk about them.

But yeah, like to.

That's why this time of the year for us is super busy, because of the compressed december schedule and also because we need to play loads of games and then have enough time to record game of the year stuff and then produce all those videos um.

So yeah, and we'll have news on that soon enough we're gonna have one more podcast next week and then we're gonna be in game of the year season already and we're mixing up the format a bit this year, but we'll tell you a little bit about it later on.

But anyway sorry, i sort of went on a bit of a tangent there.

No no, i think the story stuff, i agree on the goatee stuff uh, just to touch on that for a coming to games that I know that we have this big list of stuff.

Right.

And I'm like, we have like 55 games or something in our Excel spreadsheet of stuff we need to cover.

Um, we're not going to.

There's no possible way even if we like spent all of our free time playing them that we'd be able to get through everything.

Right.

So the thing I'm doing is I'm going, what do I know?

At least two people already liked a lot.

I'll play a little bit just to like get a taste of it.

If I love it I'll keep playing, but like I'll get enough where I'm, like I don't need to give that a ton of time because I know people are going to champion it.

And I'm being a little more picky about it.

But that's my process with that anyway.

But when it comes to story games, I don't know.

I have this like brain disease where I just can't forget story stuff.

Oh, really?

Dude, I don't know what it is.

If I played something two years ago and I start playing again, I'm like, oh, that's this guy.

This happened previously.

Cassie actually gets really annoyed by it, because we'll be having a conversation and I'll be like you remember in Oppenheimer when um, when Benny Safdie's character was talking to him in the, in the, in the room.

We've seen the movie one time.

She's like, why the fuck would I remember everything that happens in Oppenheimer?

And I'm like, I don't know.

I just, I remember.

Uh, so, so I have the opposite problem.

It's all one scene.

The music never stops.

There's no, I can't tell one from the next.

It was three hours and also five seconds.

I don't know.

That movie was, was over and wouldn't end.

Um, but so my problem isn't so much that I I have a an issue with with stories coming back to them later.

The thing I have is I feel compelled to like save things for an emotional feeling that I have.

Like I waited to play, I'm still waiting to play a promise mascot agency.

I'm just waiting for, like when I'm I'm in the right mindset to sit down and really play that ridiculous video game.

So that's it.

For me is like, especially when we get to game of the year season, where it's like now there's a bunch of stuff that I didn't play earlier in the year that I've been saving.

Now I have to play it.

I can have to jump in, which is a different problem.

But but in that same vein of like feeling like you need to get into something, even though maybe it's not the right time for you, like you've been waiting, so i don't know.

Yeah, i'm sort of hot or cold on story stuff, i feel like when it comes to games, a game will either get its talons into me and i can't stop playing until i finish it, or it's like persona 5, where i'll play five hours a year and be like i think i like this game, but then be like i don't really like this game, and then the next year i'll play five more hours.

So i mean, i'll finish it by the time, you know, By the time I, like I'd like to finish it by the time I retire.

You know, that's sort of my goal.

It's like a.

It's like a video game 401k for me where I get.

I get tax free enjoyment of it or something.

You can play metaphor re Fantasio once you're retired too.

That's another dude.

That's another, I have the exact, I just, I think it's like Atlas games.

I can't do it.

I fucking play metaphor on a plane for six hours and I'm like, this is the best game ever.

And then I landed like, I'm going to keep playing.

I'm going to play this every night on my steam deck in bed.

That I just don't.

I don't know something wrong with me.

Yeah, there are a lot there.

Yeah, they're not games you can play like tired or something like you need energy.

And yeah, it's weird, isn't it?

Frank, any feelings on this or jump to the next question?

No.

Yeah, for me, it's just I just play whatever is interesting to me at the time.

So like I've been playing Final Fantasy seven remake for like three years.

Like it's just like oh, I'm in the, I'm in the mood for this now.

Or like oh, that's an easy trophy to get.

It's only when, like I can tell a game is almost done, then I'll kind of try to siphon it and finish like.

Like, yeah, try to siphon.

Like, all right, this week I'm going to try to beat this game.

But until then, it's just whatever is interesting to me at the point.

And if I forget the story, I'll just go to Wikipedia for a minute and be like, oh, okay.

Or now most games have like a – I forget what they call it in Death Stranding 2.

Previously on or whatever.

Yeah, they have – they literally have a thing.

Yeah, a thing where you press start.

Okay, this is the last time you did this.

The mission objective is the character Bible, all this crap.

The great part of it, the Death Stranding one, is that you read it all and you still haven't a fucking clue what's going on.

Look outside has a very clever version of that, where when you save, the character that you save with is reacting to the things that happened since the last time you saved and when you load in again, it will replay her dialogue, where she'll be like oh wow, you saw a big creepy guy with a weird thousand eyes.

Oh wow, this happened too.

It sounds like a lot happened to you, and that little chunk saves for the next time you load up, so it kind of like jogs your memory in the last session.

I like that in The Witcher 3 too.

When you start up, the loading screens will be like and he went to see Yennefer of Vengerberg in the thing.

And I was like, yeah, that's good.

That's good.

Speaking of, I think, was it last week you guys were talking about No, I'm Not Human?

Yeah.

I played some of that.

Jesus Christ.

Oh, what'd you think?

Dude, isn't that so stressful?

Isn't it good?

It's... I'm glad.

It sounds like you get what I'm saying.

The first time... I don't think... Yes, I think I agree with where you guys landed.

I don't think it's scary jump scary.

It is very unsettling, dreadful.

I don't feel good ever, ever like when i any decision i make, like the first one that i got rid of, was like, deeply traumatizing.

I was like jesus christ, this is what i have to do.

Uh yeah, and what i love about it is it just reminds me of like being like i've just, you know uh, i don't know, i don't want to say poverty, but like working class old houses that aren't heated properly and, you know, like people having your neighbors having those types of small problem, like small problem version they have to come over and do stuff, and like that type of thing is is quite nostalgic to me and you know, you know, like the shitty carpet and the the like cross that's been up on the wall for, You know, since granny owned the house, all that type of stuff is very like lived in.

And you can tell it's like Eastern European or something like it's very, you know.

Yeah, I haven't completed it yet, but it's it's yeah, it's super unsettling.

I'd say most unsettling game of the year.

It's one of those – I feel like it's an easy game to overlook because it was so popular.

Like I sort of was like, oh, yeah, it's just like one of those popular indie horror experiences.

But I – it's really fucking good.

I thought it was going to be more of like – when I realized how popular it was, I was like oh, it's like a meme game.

This is like a streamer you know kind of – it's like way more artistic and artful than I would have – than I was anticipating.

It's like really cool that it did well, because I'm like oh, this is like a weird – I'm like what would happen if, like this War of Mine came out now?

Like would it – do even better or something, i don't know, you know?

Um yeah frank, we got one from uh chips here.

Yeah, from chips.

I'm sure the team will have plenty to say about the steam news, but i wanted to ask how big of an impact you think that's us?

We always cover the hottest news topics over here.

I'm wondering how big of an impact do you think the Steam machine will have on the current console and PC market?

I mostly use a company laptop for work and a personal laptop for hobbies, so the Steam machine feels like it could replace both my PS5 and my PC.

4K AAA games, early access indies and a reasonable size that I can move between my office and living room.

Even though I'm a big PlayStation guy and I like being able to upgrade my PC, I'm not sure either can beat the convenience Valve is offering.

What do you think?

Yeah, so Steam, to pull it back a little bit, steam announced valve, rather announced.

Uh, four separate things.

Uh, i think three separate things.

Three, four goggles, the steam machine, the controller, the controller, i think that's it.

Was there a new deck?

It wasn't a new deck, was there?

I don't think so.

No, so the goggles are called the steam frame.

They are the, The new virtual reality headset that has inside-out tracking and also does not require a tether to a computer.

It looks like Half-Life Alyx might be able to run on that thing tetherless, which is pretty crazy.

So that looks pretty cool.

The Steam Controller.

They've done a few of these over the years.

They stopped selling the, what was it called?

The Steam, no, the Link was the thing that transferred to your television.

I forget what the old Steam Controller was called.

Just Steam Controller.

Was it called Steam Controller?

It's just new Steam Controller again.

It's got two haptic pads now on the thumbs.

Does a bunch of other stuff.

Has a cool little charging dock thing.

Seems neat.

And then the big of all of these was, of course, the Steam Machine, which has been, probably for a decade now, been a rumor, something that's going on at Valve.

It is essentially a PC in a small like micro ATX style case that runs SteamOS, which now is able to run basically everything.

Um uh, very high powered, decent storage.

Um nice uh nice, look to it as well.

They did try something like the steam machine a decade ago.

Uh, i was gonna say machines.

Yeah, i remember going to like um oh, e3 event or something with game spot maybe uh, where they launched the steam machines, but it was like it was too early and it was too expensive by the alienware brand, one that's ugly.

Wasn't that the thing?

It wasn't.

It was almost like they were um, doing franchising like, like they had a certain spec that any third party or maybe not any, maybe people they deals with, but like third party people like Alienware could make to that spec and it would run SteamOS, whereas this is like it's similar, I guess, to the HTC Vive.

Right, the first time they did a VR headset was with a partner, whereas this is them putting out this is a distinct, particular box that you buy and yeah, it's literally a box.

It's, it's the shape of a cube.

Um, do it jeremy, say it.

What the companion cube joke, or something?

No gaben gaben, cube.

Oh, the game cube.

Yeah yeah no, i'm like the billionth person to make that joke, but it's still funny.

And then on discord, you were the first person i saw to say it on discord, so you should be proud of yourself, thank you, i am proud of myself.

And then get they need game pass, which is game pass for states, except they don't need that.

No, that's a great idea.

Come on, do it, don't.

You want another yacht?

Do it Don't, fucking do it.

Did you see he just got a new yacht this week?

He was like, let's announce the new hardware.

I'm going to buy a 14th boat with 900 machines on it.

Here's the real new hardware.

The funniest part of it was the stories on it were like it has like an Olympic swimming pool, a helipad and 15 gaming PCs.

And it's like 15 gaming PCs is like so disproportionately smaller than the fucking.

It has a garage for cars.

It's like a billion dollar boat with like 10 computers on it.

It's like throwing out a a tower, but you took the one from the office, i took my one back from the office.

I haven't thrown out a tower since i've lived in america, so i have like eight gaming pcs.

Several of them would have trouble running counter-strike fucking go at this stage.

But i have them.

That's true, i have them.

You just need the yacht to put them on.

Exactly yeah, like a yeah, exactly mega yacht.

Hey man, he lives on that yacht.

Yep, good for him.

Don't be a yacht hater, i don't.

I don't think it's going to have a massive impact on people buying consoles or not.

Like the data seems to be that younger people are not buying consoles, that they are predominantly used to playing games on pcs because of laptops for school or because of ipads that they grew up with, or because their parents have laptops or desktop computers.

Um, and the consoles have just become boring because all the triple a games that came out for them are stagnated.

For the, You know they're really well made.

Those new Assassin's Creed games are really well made, but they do not light a fire under the arse of people, like those games used to.

And it's basically cannibalized that whole industry.

And the only reason the PC stuff is working is because everyone has access to them.

Because during COVID, everyone was using them to chat and play with their friends, because games like Minecraft were there, and Fortnite predominantly.

So, yeah, I think that big sway that's happening has a lot more to do with other stuff.

But, you know...

I don't really know who the Steam machine is for.

It could be for, like, I don't think it's for people who are outside of Steam's current user base.

Like, they already have tens of millions of people.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, exactly.

Like, there's a massive amount of hardcore gamers on Steam.

Like, there are a lot of people who play games as much as we do in the world.

I do think that if the price point is sufficiently low that it could be a good sort of midpoint where, like the position that I was in before I had the work PC that you let me take is that I was a hardcore PC gamer from back in the day, who was also like somewhat of a starving artist professionally

And so like, like I played Divinity Original Sin and a Mac user for your editing and a Mac user for my editing, because that was sort of like one of the I was also doing like a lot of freelance gigs where I'd have to be like a aerosols DIT.

So I'd have to have a computer on site while we're like offloading files, like mid shoot, you know sort of like the things you do when you're totally gorilla style on a, on a shoot.

Like the first freelance gig I got was with Google and I had no fucking idea what I was doing.

So I was just like Better like bring one memory card and have to offload it in the middle of the shoot 600 times.

So, like for a lot of reasons, I just you know, spending the amount of money I would need for a decent gaming rig was just out of the question.

And so it's not that I was a console gamer.

It's just that I had a console.

And then like when there was a PC game I really wanted to play, I would just like find a way.

Like I played Divinity Original Sin 2, one of my favorite games of all time.

On a like a beta account for GeForce.

Now their streaming service.

Oh, yeah.

So like I put 120 hours on to like streaming that from a fucking server farm in Vegas or whatever.

And so.

But if there had been a Steam machine at the time that was like an entry level gaming PC, that was like it wouldn't replace my edit machine because it's Linux and all the Adobe shit runs on Windows or whatever, or Windows and Mac OS.

But.

But if I had something that was like that cheap, that was just for gaming, I think I could have justified it.

So, and I had like a Steam account, to your point Jesse, like because I played a shit ton of games back in the day.

Yeah yeah, like i.

That was the thing when the steam, when i got my steam deck, was realizing oh shit, i own like hundreds of video games for this thing.

Yeah, i think that'll be what it is is.

Uh, there's a lot of people who probably have really cheap video games or have wanted to play older stuff, that only have a laptop that they just they play you know some free to play game on steam, but they also own stuff that was like five dollars or they'll have access to stuff that's five dollars and now they can play it.

I don't know about AAA 4K60.

Digital Foundry has done enough talk about the on paper specs of the Steam machine that it doesn't quite sound like it's going to be some future proof device that's going to play like Cyberpunk 2077 maxed out or anything.

But it is the sort of thing that I think for players who don't have access to better hardware or are looking to get out of the console space and just like play on PC where online's free games are cheap.

There's like usually bundles you can get that have crazy amount of keys like there's a lot of ways to enter the space of playing games more frequently that i think a lot of people avoid because they don't have the hardware or it's not convenient enough being able to play in your living room is very different from playing like at the kitchen table on your laptop or in your bedroom at the desk like there's there's a value to that that i think really like jeremy said is going to come down to the price if that thing is like 700 it's not going to work like it'll work for some people there will be people who buy and use it but I think the cheaper they can get it, the better it will work for the majority of players.

Agreed.

It doesn't need to be like a high-end gaming PC.

I feel like the most impact it would have is if it was like a surprisingly low-cost PC that can run top-of-the-line games at mid-specs.

I feel like that is filling a niche, that a lot of people – people who have, like Danny said, like 100 Steam games on their account that they just – they don't use because they don't have a gaming PC or they have like a fucking – you know gaming.

I, I again.

I feel like the steam deck sort of is the reason that the steam machine gets a pass now.

And it didn't 10 years ago is because now the deck is like uh, like the, the Linux, uh compatibility stuff has gotten a lot better with like proton or whatever.

I don't know a lot about shit about this, but just from what I gather.

Um, and also just like culturally is normalized as like Oh, you can get a steam deck and it's like you can have a gaming PC.

But I think that for a lot of people that are like, if I'm if I'm not playing on the go a lot and I'm using a controller anyway, why wouldn't I just play on like my fucking PlayStation or whatever?

So having a steam deck that you can put a mouse and keyboard into and sit at your desk, but it's like similar price point, I think is like a.

It's a pretty good fucking niche that's not filled.

And I think from a technical level also like developers having a specific piece of hardware that they can target, like that's the steam decks best feature.

I think from the developer side of family not I'm a developer, but just from what I've read is like having a specific piece of hardware that you can target and say this is the spec point is like that's great for selling your game.

It gives you something especially for the steam deck that's low spec that you can say.

If this works on the steam deck, the vast majority of people on steam are going to be able to play this.

Now there's a new benchmark for if this works on the steam machine.

They based it around the steam hardware survey.

It's like a little bit better than most players devices.

If it works on this, it'll work on the vast majority of players machines.

That's a great target to have.

I think that's useful as well for the industry.

So there's lots of good parts of it.

I don't think it's necessarily people who are like, this is going to kill Xbox.

I think you're misunderstanding.

Xbox is doing a great job of doing that by themselves.

They tied the noose.

It's not that they don't need the Steam machine to do that.

So yeah, I don't think it's going to collapse the industry or anything, but it's definitely a cool extra piece of tech to have.

Like the Steam Deck is popular, but it's metric wise.

It's basically a blip in the industry.

So who knows?

I am flabbergasted that what happened in this era of of video games.

And in this point in my life was that PC gaming, one like that, is not in the way that I would have anticipated.

It's, it's, it's, yeah, it's, it was supposed to be mobile phones.

What happened?

It's very strange.

Yeah.

Um, Frank, we got a couple more questions.

Yeah.

Steven asked Hey crew.

Danny talked about mental health slash wellbeing on the podcast last week, which is always a good thing to talk about.

I was wondering if you guys had a particular game that helped you through a particularly challenging time in your lives thus far.

I feel like we've had this one in maybe a couple of different ways before.

I think I only mentioned that not to critique the question.

Thank you, Stephen.

Just to apologize in advance if I've repeated myself.

But I do remember mentioning before that Horizon Zero Dawn was particularly.

It was a very bright spot in a dark time.

It was one of the lowest depression valleys i've had in my adult life.

I'd say it kind of came out of nowhere too, it was bizarre and it was right before uh, we got pregnant and all that stuff, um.

So yeah, that game was a, was a ray of light like just genuine, like in every way, and it's in how it looked, in its themes and its music, in in, I think, there's an element of femininity that's in that game as well that I also found very comforting, like almost like sort of you know, in the words of Final Fantasy, the spirits within which you should watch our no clip patron exclusive podcast about

I felt like Gaia was wrapping her arms around me when I was playing Horizon Zero Dawn.

So, yeah, I remember that.

I remember a very the flip side of this.

I remember maybe the most traumatic thing that happened to me when I was young was Um uh, it didn't really happen to me.

I should, and I won't talk about it.

Obviously it happened to one very someone very, very close to me, but it was very when it happened.

I remember there was, I was.

I was put in a particularly challenging situation uh, immediately afterwards, and I couldn't process anything.

And I went home and I played quake three for three hours.

I just like needed to kill things and it really helped.

So. that's sort of on the opposite end of the spectrum as well.

If you ever feel like you need, you might need to do physical violence to somebody.

Just play some the longest yard and you'll feel a little bit better.

Um, the last time we talked, I'll, I'll summarize quickly my feelings of this.

Cause we have addressed like similar games.

And I think this is the one I said last time, but are similar topics.

But disco Elysium for me was like I felt like as someone who has always had sort of an irreverent sense of humor and has been into politics pretty seriously since I was like 11 years old.

I i seeing like people talk about serious, like criticisms of capitalism and of society in a way that was not just overtly cringe and preachy, was very heartening to me because i think that that has always been.

The issue is that if you get into any sort of serious level of uh you know politics or activism or anything, there hits a point where it's like the weight of the things that you're talking about supersedes the human level on which it's okay to sort of just poke fun at yourself and about the things you're talking about.

And that's not to say that every serious topic you should be like hey, we're at a funeral, let me crack a couple of jokes.

It's not like that at all.

It's more just that if you lose your sense of humanity and the, if you hold too tightly to the things that you take seriously, no matter how virtuous they are and no matter how like, morally and philosophically correct they are, it can destroy you if you grip too tightly to those things.

And so to see Disco Elysium tackle these big topics very seriously in a way that was like materialist and well thought out and well informed, by like a lifetime of being invested in these things, but in a way that was also like and every communist meetup is doomed to be like a overly intellectual circle jerk.

It's very, you know, it's heartening.

It's like it was very human and real for me in a way that uh, I did not feel was reflected in my actual interactions about like activism and politics in real life.

Yeah.

Interesting.

It's like love collective action.

Sorry about the gulags.

That's my review of disco Elysium.

That would be my version of that's disco Elysium.

Just a picture of Stalin going like my bad shrugging.

Yeah.

Uh, anyone else want to chime in?

Or um I uh, when I played to the moon with my wife uh, the whole way through we, like voice, acted the whole thing.

It was a very, I don't know.

It was a tough time.

I think someone in our family had passed and it was like processing that was really hard for me.

Cause it was the first sort of adult loss that I've had.

Like you know as a kid, older family members had died, but it was sort of like okay, I didn't know him.

Um, like it's sad, but just not for me.

Uh, it was sad.

I felt worse for my mom than I did for myself.

Right.

So when I finally went through that, it was like, how do you, how do you process that?

How do you, in what way can you possibly get through that, get over that feeling of like that person missing?

It was like a, it was like a picture where they were the only thing that wasn't filled in anymore.

And playing that game.

It was like it was.

It was weird seeing that reflected back at me, that feeling of like the the grief of them being missing, but also the holes left by their past passing, like the things where I would expect them to be in the room or expect them to be nearby, or if I needed them, I could call them like.

That being gone was so yeah, so hard to handle, and I think that game was the first one that really made me go.

Okay, I get the first anything I had seen at that time that made me really feel like it wasn't the only person to feel that way which obviously is not the case but like just when you're young and that happens for the first time, it's like this is the end of the world and it's like no, it's a common thing that happens to a lot of people.

Very sad game, Beautiful.

Thanks, man.

Adrian has a question and asks if the afterlife turned out to be a video game universe, which games world would you pick to spend forever in, and why?

World of Warcraft.

Good pick.

That was a good pick.

That's it.

I'm just trying to think of one where I wouldn't die.

Yeah.

But you'd res.

If you die, you just got to do a fucking corpse run, baby.

That's a good point.

That's the thing about video games.

You have many lives.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Is it weird that I want to say, like, Dark Souls?

Even though it's, like, the worst place to incarnate?

That sucks.

Can you even jerk off in that world?

Can you even smoke weed in Dark Souls?

Yeah, I don't know.

That's a hard question.

I want to just hang out at, like, the Golden Saucer in Final Fantasy.

Yeah.

Schedule 1?

No.

You could do that in real life, you know.

That's what I'm saying.

But the drugs don't give you electrical powers in real life, or do they?

Is that...

Is there a game where you can sit down and play games?

Probably.

Animal Crossing.

UFO 50.

I just want to live in an arcade forever.

Probably a fucked up world.

Just be like jumping from weird reality to weird reality over and over again.

Yeah.

I want to live in whatever game universe is like.

If there's a game about, you know, like eating a nice turkey dinner and smoking a cigar with your feet up.

I'd like to live in Yakuza.

That seems fun.

Yeah.

A lot of tragedy in Yakuza though.

A lot of tragedy in real life.

Oblivion would be good fun, would it?

The hell gate yeah, you could.

Like you could get locked up all the time, you know, you do some scallywaggery and then you know, stop right there criminal scum.

And then you go fucking in a prison for a while and you hang out there and then you come out and you have an amazing hang out with amazingly erotic relationship with a kajit and you get fucked up on skooma criminal scum.

And you're back in again and then you fucking go off to.

You might be on to something, maybe just all of tamriel, you know, because then you could fuck off tomorrow in for a while and do some shrooms.

And then so you're saying you want to live in elder scrolls online.

I'm not necessarily saying that, what about like the sims?

Because then it's just the real world, but everything is very sort of like.

I don't speak simlish, i wouldn't know what the fuck, but you would if you lived in the sims, like if i was immersed there, like yeah, and if you worked out it would be like you would know like i'm.

I'm so close to like level five strength.

Like that's what I've always wanted is over gamification of my status in life.

I'd be, every time I went swimming, I'd be worried that God was going to get rid of the ladder.

I wouldn't go in a fucking if I lived in the Sims.

There was no way in hell.

I'm going in a house that doesn't have like seven exits or a swimming pool.

And I'm not cooking anything.

But I'm telling you that fucking, those goths, I'm going to hang out with them a bunch.

Me and Mia goth, we go way back.

Yeah, me and Mia, it's bad to say it.

Sorry, Mortimer.

I was thinking Mia Goth and I was like, wait, is that the name of an actor now?

It is, yeah.

Wait, what's the... What's her actual... What's the mom and... What's Mortimer Goth's wife called?

Oh, it's Bella Goth.

Is that what it was?

Yeah, because I was going to say Mia Goth and I was like wait, is that the girl from all those horror movies?

I thought maybe she was named after the Sims character.

I just accepted what you said.

They were like, what's another vaguely Italian sounding name with the last name Goth?

Frank, roll a dice in here.

I feel like we must... You must have a couple of...

Or did I beat you to the punch with wow?

No, I mean, like, Animal Crossing generally is very sweet and wholesome.

Dead or Alive Extreme is awesome, but it would be boring just on an island.

And then, yeah, like... Some of your needs would be met there.

Yeah, yeah.

It's fair to say.

Maslow's hierarchy, you know?

Yeah.

No, Yakuza's a fair bet, because you can go into cabaret clubs and all that stuff.

No, I want to go there for other stuff.

If you're in heaven, like, you know...

We need sustenance.

You do need companionship in some form or another.

So that is a thing that most games are bad at.

I guess Mass Effect would work, but I don't really want to be in that world because it's constantly being invaded by people and the writing's bad at the end.

But you can fuck aliens.

That's what I'm saying.

At least you can have some coitus.

I guess any David Cage game, again, bad writing, but lots of rhythm, action, sex scenes.

True, yeah.

You hang out with Space David Bowie?

Works out.

That'd be great, yeah.

God of War, also a rhythm sex game.

True.

That's true, yeah.

They really had that shit on lock in the 2000s.

They did.

They knew.

Well, that's how good guys were at sex back then.

It's just a rhythm game.

That's what they were saying.

I learned it from Kratos.

You told me everything I know.

Great emails.

Thanks very much, Frank.

Thanks to Adrian Stephen.

Peter and Chibs.

Thanks, Chibs.

For your email.

Thanks, Chibs.

Thanks, everyone, for listening to this podcast.

I guess we're warming up for Game of the Year season posting these fucking two-hour 24-ass-minute podcasts, getting it up, getting some blood pumping.

Make sure you check out all the awesome stuff that we've just published.

More to Great Little Indie recommendation.

People have been loving us.

20,000 views on that one.

Bad boy.

Nice work, Jeremy.

We also have No Caps' first video, The Freedom of Hypergea.

Makes it hard to put down.

People have been loving that too.

Our Demon Schools preview went live today.

And if you're a Noclip2 patron, you get access to two bonus videos.

One is a fantastic 20 plus minute tour of Brandon Sheffield of Necrosoft's house.

He lives in Oakland.

He has a frankly ridiculous collection of video game and film and media VCRs Laserdiscs vinyls, a near complete Sega Saturn collection.

Just absolutely insane.

And he is...

If you listen to insert credits, you know that he is a video game lore master.

So he pulls out some of his favorites and we talk about them.

It's kind of like that.

It accidentally turned into like one of those videos of people in the Criterion closet kind of thing.

He's just pulling stuff out and chatting about it.

We have that and we also have an extra extended bonus scenes from the interview with Brandon, with an extra 10 minutes of questions, and we split them up into chapters.

So yeah.

If you want to know which one of his teachers was most likely to be a demon in high school, go check out that video.

Our Disco Elysium series starts on Monday.

By the time this podcast is up, the trailer will also be up, the teaser trailer.

Very excited to finally get that out there.

It's been a massive team effort.

So thank you to the lads for chipping in on that in many, many ways and helping us get there.

I've still got a good bit of editing on the last few episodes on that one.

It's going to be a five-part episode.

And we'll have them out early on Noclip, a week ahead of the public release.

So you can go watch episode one right now if you want.

It's 40 minutes all about Estonia, politics, D&D, and the founding of the studio.

And the second episode dives much more into the game's development and the building of Disco Elysium.

So yeah, lots of cool stuff.

We'll have episodes on art, on writing, and we'll have an episode sort of on the ending of the game's development slash, the aftermath and uh, i guess, legacy of the game as well.

Um yeah, so loads to talk about there and we hope you really hope you enjoy it, and we'll have a patron show up this week where i'll be showing off footage of all the stuff, some of the stuff we filmed in san francisco two weeks ago which people should be very excited about if they are fans of roguelikes that take place in the Greek underworld.

And then if you are... Man, that really did narrow it down.

And then, if you are a fan of Fallout New Vegas B-roll, also make sure to check out the Patreon show, because we have a bunch of stuff there as well.

And the rest of the crew here are going to be working on awesome videos for the next few weeks as well, on some indie recommendations and other bits and bobs.

And then we are very truly going to be in game of the year season.

We are working our asses off.

We're going to change the format slightly this year.

We're still going to pick our top 10 games unordered, but instead of doing the, let's spend 12 hours trying to come up with puns for all of these game titles.

We're going to do something, and hopefully that has a similar type of ability for us to spend time doting over games.

But instead of doing that, we're actually going to split.

We're going to invent a bunch of categories, which will be part of our game of the year.

And we're going to give awards out within those categories.

But those categories are not going to be like your normal-ass video game website.

We're not going to have best indie game, for instance, with a bunch of questionable games in there.

Expedition 33!

We're going to be picking categories that uh, perhaps as a noclip podcast listener, you might be able to vibe with.

So we're going to be picking very fun and interesting categories which we'll use for this year's awards and give out those uh, those noclip game of the year awards to those developers and to those games, and that's it.

Thanks so much.

Thanks, lads again, for chatting video games and we've got a bunch of work to do this week.

And Thank you to all of our patrons who are keeping the doors open here on Noclip and Noclip2.

We really, really appreciate it.

We're going to end the year in a bang with some cool Disco, Elysium madness, a bunch more other stuff on Noclip and yeah, Noclip2 and the Noclip podcast here just trying to round out what was a very interesting year in video games.

So until next week, which will be our last normally scheduled episode of the podcast for the year, before we do Game of the Year December, And until then, take care of yourselves and we'll talk to you soon.

Bye.

[The NoClip Crew: Arcade Nostalgia, Fallout Fan Fest, and Indie Gems]-[Sektori, Demonschool, Fallout Fan Fest]

📋 Summary

The NoClip Crew: Arcade Nostalgia, Fallout Fan Fest, and Indie Gems

Arcade Revival and Twin-Stick Shooters

Puzzle Platforming and Mechanical Depth

The Surreal World of Demon School

Fallout Fan Fest: A Post-Apocalyptic Reality

Dispatch and the Future of Storytelling

Community Q&A: Gaming Habits and Afterlives

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[The NoClip Crew: Arcade Nostalgia, Fallout Fan Fest, and Indie Gems]-[Sektori, Demonschool, Fallout Fan Fest]

📋 Summary

The NoClip Crew: Arcade Nostalgia, Fallout Fan Fest, and Indie Gems

Arcade Revival and Twin-Stick Shooters

Puzzle Platforming and Mechanical Depth

The Surreal World of Demon School

Fallout Fan Fest: A Post-Apocalyptic Reality

Dispatch and the Future of Storytelling

Community Q&A: Gaming Habits and Afterlives

Deep Learning with ListenLeap

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

ListenLeap Brings You Into Real Context Learning