902: I LIKE SCREAMING｜Giant Bombcast

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Hey everybody, it's Tuesday, August 5th, 2025.

Welcome to the Giant Bombcast episode 902.

I'm your host, Jan Ochoa, still confused and confounded by dates and the passage of time, but here to help guide me through that co-captain of the ship, Jeff Grubb.

I can't help you with anything. I'm just here, Jan.

That's all I got for you. That's fantastic.

We have a man that is untethered by time, definitions, numbers, science, and the presence and absence of light, Jeff Bacalar. holy shit that's my intro i feel i feel like we established all the opposites of the things that you just laundry listed that's fine thank you for the intro i was thinking you're like the opposite of a crystal right so like crystals capture light and you like light I'm the black hole.

That is true. You're very diffuse. Yeah.

Zero light escaping. It's beautiful to be here.

Beautiful to see you all back and healthy.

Yes. Whenever I need to like healthy, that's a different story.

Who is healthy? Whenever I need to sleep in, I will just put up a picture of Jeff Backlar instead of a pair of black curtains.

Yeah, just black curtains. We call them Vantagerf.

Vantagerf. That's good. It's the most black.

That's it. Yes. And last but not least, you have the bad boy of games media.

Lock up your doors. Charge your crystals.

Spray cinnamon water on your front door because it's the fifth of the month.

But it was the first of the month. It's Mike Minotti.

I like cinnamon. That's surprising. Really?

Oh, cinnamon's great. I think I said this before.

I like cinnamon so much, I have certainly eaten more tree wood in my life than tree fruit.

I mean, that's why it's surprising, Michael, because... Come from trees.

Well, and also, there is a certain thing that's the closest partner in taste with cinnamon.

I'll have you know. And it sure as shit ain't pizza.

No, I know people put cinnamon and apples together, but no, you get that out of here.

I'm sorry, they've been dating forever. Yeah.

Apple jacks are just cinnamon. Apple jacks, which famously doesn't taste very much like apples.

All right. Well, leave apple jacks out of it.

Cinnamon apples. Yeah. Like, buddy, come on.

They are found. They are seen together all the time.

Yeah. So is peanut butter and jelly. Guess what's in my sandwiches?

That's what it is. No, no, we know you. Yes, you absolutely.

I guess if you do the word association game and you say to somebody cinnamon, I think a majority says the next word is apple.

Donut. Yeah, like the family feud, that's like got like 43.

I see. Cinnamon donut. Green. What's that?

Green? Green. Green apple. The color green.

Oh, sure. Okay. I thought cinnamon was the key.

Wait. Cinnamon was. Oh, sorry. Sorry. I was playing a different game.

It's the next step ahead. Yeah. Wait. I'm sorry.

Peanut butter and jelly, you make them different?

I don't mess around with jelly. At all? No.

No jelly. Marmalades. No jelly, no jams.

Petroleum jelly? What's the opposite then?

Is it just a peanut butter sandwich? It's a peanut butter sandwich.

Yeah, that's all. All right. Just peanut butter.

That's fine. Let me tell you. Sometimes I put my dry cereal in the peanut butter sandwich.

I have a little crunch in there. Before we get to Bantz.

Never mind. Yeah, I started saying something, and then what he said sunk in.

Yeah, let's just let him live his life. I don't want to stop this beautiful thing.

This is the rest of my life when I think about it, you know?

Uh-huh. Okay, cool. Hey, guys, gang, the wonderful Chuck Towski, our resident hacker, our own IT, our own engineer, a man of many traits, who I learned in the pre-show makes his own sauerkraut.

That's exciting. Yeah, that's a good move.

That's bad. Sounds like Chuck would do that.

You know what? You could tell Chuck is a guy with good gut health.

You could just look at him and be like, yep, he's got his gut situation on lock.

Oh, my gut health is terrible for some reason.

We know. Yeah, we know. We know. In June, we learned all about each other's gut health.

Never a biotic has been pro in this man's body.

I was in San Francisco for like two minutes, and I already had to buy a probiotic root beer because there's no other option.

We have regular soda here, Mike. Oh, I could not get a diet, a normal diet root beer.

You're also too good to just have a McDonald's or a Wendy's at your airport.

It's bacon bacon. That's where you have to go to get your burgers.

God. The way. Okay, God. I'm trying to make a short of the way you said that.

Bacon, bacon. So offended at the concept of this place.

Bacon. I'm sorry to cut you off. Mikey, how do you feel about honey?

Honey's good. Like Winnie the Pooh. Okay, cool.

So you could do, Simon in chat was like, yo, what about a peanut butter and honey sandwich?

Yeah, sounds a little decadent, doesn't it?

He's anything but decadent. A lot of decadent dandy.

No, this is a salt of the earth boy. You've been using the word dandy too much, Mike, and it's starting to make me feel uncomfortable.

I'm sorry. I don't think it's something else.

Is it because honey is bee jam? No, it's bee throw.

That's much better. If only more jams and other stuff were puke.

That doesn't bother me. Oh, yeah, I don't care.

All right, going back to Chuck Towski. Chuck is putting together a premium-only site beta.

Chuck has tirelessly been working on the new website, and we're announcing here and now that there will be a public beta for premium members.

So if you are an existing premium member, you can also go to johnbomb.com slash join. to help support us that way but you get to test drive for a week or uh you know the actual time duration still tbd but starting august 12th we're going to have a public beta includes a full video catalog all the shows all the articles reviews live streams all ad free continuing on You'll also be able to use the current GB email that you use to register for premium to get access.

Chuck is going to have a suggestion box, a bug reporting form as well.

The wiki is not going to be included in this beta.

That project is still ongoing. Speaking about the wiki, Chuck is still looking for volunteers to help out.

Use the wiki street team channel on the GB discord.

You should also join the giant bomb discord.

It's a great community. And yeah, the premium, Site beta is coming next week, folks.

August 12th is next week? Yeah, August 12th is next week.

Week today. Yes, exactly. I don't want to under... I don't want to oversell it.

This thing's coming together in an unbelievable way.

I think the best way to put it is we're all very happy with it, right?

Holy shit. When I look at it, I just feel happy.

And so, yeah, let's be clear. If you're not a premium member now and you go sign up and you try to get into this, you're going to get in and you're going to be able to see the new website and partake and see all the goodies and then offer your feedback and help shape what it looks like.

So... yes get in there make that happen feel free to help us figure out what the future of the website is and we are like dedicated to the website because we're realizing a lot of people are looking for a home base that is not a major platform a major social media corporation that tries to control you via algorithms we're just going to be a cool place to hang out and if you're looking for that we're going to try to continue to be that for you so help us like focus on the things we should be focused on chuck could really use the help Yeah, can I see some FWCs for I fuck with Chuck in the chat, please?

Because Chuck, oh my God. Absolutely. Chuck has been able to fix so many things that I and we have had to just duct tape mid-air like bacalar you've used the phrase uh like refueling uh mid-air a lot uh but then i feel like also a lot of the time we are like patching holes in a boat constantly with like water which doesn't make sense no but chuck has been able to keep this boat afloat maybe if we freeze the water it can plug the hole better i don't know yeah oh i didn't think about that okay okay what if the water it'll last hard yeah yes uh but we're gonna keep plugging this folks uh throughout the week and until the uh site beta opens it looks good it looks good it's exciting like all kidding aside like it's super exciting like check it out i really i like people i i genuinely think people are gonna be blown away yeah like we're sort of too close to the explosion right we kind of like i get it but I think people are really going to be blown away tremendous work by Chuck also yesterday we were in a meeting with Chuck and Chuck was explaining something and he basically made a picture with numbers and I don't understand that oh it's awesome it just confuses the shit out of me yeah as someone fastest loading web website you're just gonna it's gonna blow your pants off that's right and if you're not wearing pants hell yeah it'll deglove you yeah your feet will come right off it'll be crazy holy smokes wow please take your shoes off before you listen to the podcast uh all right gang uh you know hey also also while we're sharing people out Shouts out to these two Jeffs over here for holding the fort down while I was away, while Mike and Dan were away on assignment.

Dan is currently out on assignment, folks, if you're wondering.

He pooped his pants. Oh, I heard. He really did, right?

Yeah, he pooped his pants real bad, and it's just going to take him a couple days to recover from it.

That's the right amount of time. Honestly, I don't want to look at him.

And I don't want to have that judgmental... He's tarnished.

You respect him a little less. It was fun last week.

It was a good time. We had a good time last week.

It was like, okay, me and Backlore figured this out.

We ended up doing exactly that, but also...

Missed you guys. Glad you're back. Thank you for coming back to the website.

I got to say, it's mostly grub holding down the fort.

I just still have to be a lawyer for the next couple of times.

That's also a big part of it. I was doing website stuff.

You were doing that. We had to split that up even.

But, yeah, no, it was all right. Definitely agree.

Great to have you back, for sure. Dan, take your time.

Yeah, yeah. I was enjoying watching. I still have to catch up on the dump truck, though.

But, yeah, no, you guys, everything was great.

Really enjoyed the light club and... all sorts of other goose.

The UPF was great. Yeah. Yeah. We had fun with that.

Yeah. Paddle, paddle, paddle boys. Oh my God.

Fucking paddle. Yeah. We got, we got, we got, we did pretty good in that.

I was pretty proud of us. We hit, we hit a groove.

Definitely. A groove is in the heart. I've learned, uh, I want to shout out someone as well.

Fuck yeah, let's keep going. Yeah, I want to shout out Greg, who I met in Asbury Park on Friday, who was so nice to come up and say hello, as did myself, Stacy, and our friend Lori.

We're going to a concert at the Stone Pony Outdoor Stage.

We saw a band called Guster. Guster? Let's just say Guster.

Have you ever heard of the band Guster? I think I have heard of Guster, yes. man it is the most my wife is 43 years old and loves a band called guster yeah that feels exactly okay yes so they are good i i enjoy them a great deal yeah they they are they're just like a lot of fun like they just seem like they would be a lot a great time to hang out with and and dib was you know this is like the 12th concert by now he's oh yeah he's a veteran but i will say being recognized went to that dude's head at the speed of light in a way it was boston all over again that never happens to me and and you know we had a friend there who witnessed the whole thing and she and did because we were like yeah you know it happens and this and greg was such a chill awesome dude uh saying hi and then we get in and dylan's like he's like how many other people you think know me here it's uh it's Hey, stay humble.

Stay humble, bro. That's all I got to say.

I got to shout out the guy that chose not to throw an apple at Mike Minotti when he was presented with the opportunity to do so.

Thank you. That would have ruined everything for everybody.

He would have been deeply upset. It would be all we would be talking about this entire week.

So thanks for not doing that. It's a joke, but it's not a joke.

It's not a joke. Please don't ever do that.

Yeah, don't do that. I mean, yeah, a banana maybe, but not an apple.

I could live. I wouldn't like that either.

I'll live. Banana peel. Banana peel. A banana wouldn't hurt as much, right?

Like an apple. You get a well for an apple.

I wasn't even thinking about that. I just don't want an apple to touch me.

God, it'd be disgusting. folks before we get to video games what's happening what's popping I mean Dib is now a celebrity and everything yeah and he also found his first bit of graffiti in a porta potty if we want to talk about that I remember my moment finding that kind of graffiti in a public bathroom in a mire in Michigan yeah he's like dad There's like a writing on the wall in there.

A whole story about buttholes. He's like, there's this guy who wants anyone who's in this thing to text him pictures of dumps.

It's like our show. I'm like, what do you mean?

I'm like, what do you mean? So I get in there.

You could be the proprietor of RateMyShit.com.

You don't know. Like, look at the content.

Sure enough, like a whole backstory. Like, I need this in my life.

It was basically like reading it like Bernie Sanders.

Like, I am now asking you once again to send me pictures of your duty.

Really amazing stuff with a whole ass phone number attached.

Thank you. Thank you, Colin. Fantastic.

I was supposed to go to the East Coast to go see Lincoln Park, but we decided to save some funds and go backpacking instead.

Gang, this is going to be my toxic mail coming out, and I'm sorry.

Oh, shit. I used to poo-poo on anyone hiking or backpacking using trekking poles.

Uh, I mean like, yeah, like the walking poles, the walking sticks.

Yeah. Uh, you know, for older folks, a hundred percent get it.

You know, you need, you need to maintain balance and everything.

The hips, the knees and everything. But I thought like, I'm a sprightly young man.

Uh, and I'm strong. I don't need these. What happened, Jim?

But we were going, we were going backpacking for like a longer, uh, a hike.

And then, uh, my partner got me a set and let me tell y'all, I felt invincible.

Yeah. I felt amazing. It's two more legs.

What do you mean? It's two more legs. Yeah.

It's two more legs. Going uphill, a blast.

So easy. Fucking chunking that shit up and then going downhill.

Oh, man. Normally, my knees would hurt. Not today.

Stop. extend out my like little trekking poles and then like gently lower myself down it was fantastic that being said though you should always look forward when you're backpacking uh and and watch where you're walking because i i did fall and then my backpack uh it's okay right now it's okay i keep it elevated buddy yes yeah rice right what is it no we're over rice it's love and care now uh Yeah, I think that's the acronym.

I can never remember what it stands for, but specifically we're not supposed to put ice on there anymore.

It's crazy. What? Yeah. Look, I'm no professional, but I remember they were like, oh, yeah, but put ice on there forever.

And they're like, no, ice is bad now. Am I great?

Cool. Well, I see it as bad. fucking mike's dad he's he's been canceled he's like yeah just you you have an oyster from the bottom of the sea that's magical i'm gonna put my hand over it and just say a little prayer and that'll yeah peace and love thank you and you're muted mike you're muted i can't hear you peace and love is the acronym that's right thank you I think, so is it, but your ankle's getting better, right?

Yeah, yeah. It's like going in the right direction?

I put it in a brace and everything. Okay.

Well, is it better, though? It's better.

It's one of those, it was one of those incidents where, like, I sprained my ankle, like, really, really bad, like, a few years ago.

So, like, that ankle's kind of, like, fudged to begin with.

Oh, yeah, got it. It's your bum ankle. It's my bum ankle.

And I took a bad step, and I heard the, and I'm like, oh, this is going to be bad.

Oh, geez. And I thought, like, okay, I'll be fine.

I'll be fine. And then I, like, fully twisted it because I wasn't using my poles, gang.

You got to get those poles, baby. You got to get those poles.

You could also do, like, a you shall not pass thing with Scout, maybe.

Yeah, but that's what, like, I would do, I would just get a walking stick because I, too, have a bias against the poles, Jan.

Although you're winning me over. But it's like, did you, like, was there any consideration of going for a walking stick? uh whoa mike your microphone is wide open now is blasting us what is this what happened is this what happens at disney might be okay for disney it's not okay for the giant bomb cast yeah we're better than this no no one's hearing that it's just i think it's the google meet and okay uh my my audio listeners mike is holding his hands up and he's like sweating profusely because the audio is not working He's doing the meme of, like, we got a badass here.

Yeah, this is one of his least favorite things when stuff like this happens.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's calling himself a fuddy-duddy right now.

He's not uncomfortable at all, though. He's cool as he comes.

What's worse, Mike, this or apples? What's worse?

He's undecided. Anyway, that being said, I suggest everyone go outside and have their own wilderness weekend.

Yeah. Oh, it's good. I love being outside.

Outside is a cool concept. I would go outside, too, except the air quality index is about, oh, $1.40 today.

Canada is fucking you guys good up there.

What's going on? What's going on? They're just setting fires to fuck with Bacalar.

Put it out. put it out why have they considered that have they not considered the rain rain maybe all kidding aside though like uh this is bad and no it sucks oh no last year wasn't as bad two years ago was the apocalypse when the aiq was in the 300s yeah oh it's california bad huh Yeah, like, it's California bad.

Like, I'm sorry that this is a thing you guys... And then we're LARPing as California last week with another little mini earthquake?

Yeah, what's up with that? ground shaking in New Jersey?

Have you not been worshipping the devil enough, Bacalar?

Is that the problem here? I mean, you know, if I were a religious man, I'd think I backed the wrong horse, you know what I mean?

But, you know, all of that's tomfoolery, but yeah, I'm like really upset with the air here, and I really wish we would fix the air.

When I'm president, I will fix the air. Wow.

I like air. Oh, go ahead, Mike. I like the air.

I just want to say I like the air. You hear me.

That's great. That's fantastic. We can hear you.

They can't hear you. I know why. Okay. Oh, in the meantime, we got a super chat from Chris Kish.

5676. Good day, gentlemen. I'm a new Giant Bomb fan this year.

Loving the shows. I'm still laughing at the Giant Bomb dev kit is a vape and some dice.

That's right. Hey, sometimes that's all it takes.

Yeah, that's all it takes. They can hear you.

All right. There we go. We got them back.

I think that they hear me now. Yeah. hey, there was an earthquake near Russia when I was in San Francisco.

And then all my, you know, it's like right when I get there, now all my, everybody I know is texting me like, are you going to die from a tsunami?

I was like, no one here seems to care. I think I'm going to be okay.

I actively, when I got the tsunami warning, I went to the beach to watch.

To ride those waves, baby. I was like, let me see it happen.

Let it overtake me. Can I ask you all about syrup? sure sure bud you know the cousin of honey go ahead yeah it's relatable because we are like yeah dan and i went to a chicken and waffle place and it was fun oh keith chicken and waffles Maybe, because, yeah, it's right by your house, because all the aunties were named after rappers.

I love that you two were in my city, also, like, five minutes away from my house, and I wasn't here.

That happens, you know? Yeah. And they had, like, this giant, like... cylinder full of hot syrup, right?

And she's like, oh, pour your own. Yeah, carafe.

Pour your own hot syrup. And we're doing that.

And Dan's like, man, this is so weird. I'm like, why?

I was like, oh, I never had warm syrup before.

And I was like, oh, wow, another crazy Dan moment.

But a surprising large amount of people backed him up.

And were like, oh, yeah, I have cold syrup all the time.

And I don't know if I've ever had it in one.

So people keep their syrup in the fridge.

Yeah. That was the other thing. I was like, I never even keep it in the fridge.

It's shelf stable. And then Greg Miller texted me a picture of his syrup.

And it says, put it in the fridge at their opening.

He even said, 100% syrup. It's all sugar.

Why does it have to go in the fridge? no no i think okay i'm not a hundred percent sure but i do think the more real the syrup is the more it needs to be in the fridge i think that's the rule of thumb if you're if you're doing like the corn syrup syrup that's just like whatever because it's just fucking bullshit But I think I do believe like mold can form in real organic maple sugar.

Yeah. Yeah. Yes. OK. Right. Because the sugar it is what attracts bacteria.

Yeah. I guess we'll sugar what sugar can.

It's like dry sugar. You don't put in the fridge.

You just keep that. Oh, yeah. Right. Right.

Yeah. And isn't. And also while we're on this sticky subject, I think.

I could have sworn I read that honey can literally never expire.

Honey is the one food that really doesn't expire.

It's the one. It's amazing. The bees, they know what they're doing.

Why does honey have to not go in the fridge?

Because it's bee jizz. Yeah, but that's just the process of how we got here.

Syrup is tree jizz, right? What's going on here?

So many good titles for a podcast. If this is your first time listening to this podcast, welcome.

Yeah, I mean, that's what hooked Chris, obviously.

No, it's exciting. You know, plant jizz is exciting.

You know? Yeah. Okay, so keep your syrup in the fridge.

Nuke it for a little bit. Come on, try it.

At least try it hot. Yeah, like... like if you're having a stack of waffles i know i realized but like i would i would not be against the syrup being a little warm well there's a whole like there was a brand of syrup that had like the microwave icon on it and then you would put it in the microwave and then that icon would turn from like black to red when it was the perfect temperature or whatever the whole idea of like microwave the shit like let's get it going by the amount of people are like oh yeah i just put it on cold That seems... It's sad.

I think it's sad. But I also think this is a bit of a non-issue.

Like, this doesn't even register on the... This is the issue of our times.

But it doesn't even register on, like, the weird radar.

No. Like, this is not a thing at all. For normal dance stuff, not at all.

That's why I was... That's why I was taken aback.

Because to me, I was like, here's another one of these.

Oh, no. Here we go. My microphone is lowering itself constantly like crazy.

I am in an internal struggle over here. I am going to attack the first...

Actual human, I see. I'm so mad about this.

Well, you're doing the news now. That's for sure.

Anything else happen, gang, other than syrup mishaps?

We went to a tiki bar. That was fun. Oh, yeah, Trader Sam's.

I fucks with Trader Sam's heavy. No, no, no, no.

Trader Sam's is Disney. I went to Smuggler's Cove.

Not everything's Disney. My God. Sorry, sorry.

Stop bringing it up. Oh, my God. Oh, yeah, no, no.

Okay, so I thought y'all went to a different tiki bar.

Smuggler's Cove is a shit. I remember getting kicked out of there because I went inside.

I've gotten kicked out of there twice, actually.

First time was because I tried getting commemorative tiki cups because I remember you were... Unofficially, you were trying to steal them?

No, no, no, no. They were selling Star Wars ones and I thought, oh, Mikey likes tiki cups.

Maybe I could get into tiki cups. I do. And then I went inside asking, yo, y'all got any more of those?

And they were like, no, it's all gone. Also, we're not actually open yet.

How'd you get inside? I'm like, Don't leave the fucking door unlocked.

Shit. That's not on you. That's absolutely not on you.

I hate that. When something like that, like you're trying to check something, you walk in, you ask them something like, yeah, I hate that.

All right. What did you get? Did they do the cinnamon over the drink, Mike?

They do on some of them. I don't know if they did that for any of the ones I had.

God, the best one I had was a coffee-flavored one.

I thought of you while I had it. It was very, very good.

Yeah, I did get the novelty tiki mug, of course.

So, we'll see about that. We met the most New York couple ever.

I think they might show up in a video. So...

What does that mean? You met a New York couple and they're going to show up in a video.

They liked Mike's vibe. They invited him over.

They liked Dan's vibe more, I think. Dan, this guy, talked about metal for a good while.

Now it's like, I like Iron Maiden. He's like, oh, I'm sorry about that for you.

Then went back to... talking about your new york accent wow all right hey that was we got to make that a character that was special that has to return yeah that was that was a moment manhattan mic or something i like that yeah new york new york mic minute uh love it manada your your microphone's all types of weird today uh but that's okay because we're a podcast so audio doesn't matter it's fine no that's what they say We'll fix it in post.

Anyway. I already had to start another recording.

Don't worry, though. I saved the other one.

I'm doing great over here. What's funny is, like, why would Windows even want to do this?

Why does it do this? And why is there not an easy way to make it stop?

I don't want you to. I know I'm screaming.

That doesn't mean to get lower, Windows. i love that what it's doing is that it's literally putting him like in a corner mike dynamic range is a problem all right this is i've always said that he can get too loud he can get too quiet it's a problem if for whatever reason it's prox chat like just right now for mikey oh well he is too dynamic is is the problem uh we've known this about him for a while now he's too dynamic of a man anyway video games Oh yeah, video games.

Yeah, sure. I want to get this out of the way because we've talked about this quite a lot.

Y'all had a very good discussion about it last week on the podcast, but I have not had the chance to talk about Donkey Kong Bonanza.

Holy smokes. I thought Expedition 33 was an easy lock for Game of the Year.

And then I started playing this. And then, holy smokes, I think it's just the mindless means of mashing through.

And this being a video game ass video game was enough to assuay me.

That being said, I think I'm in sub-layer 12. hundred now.

I think that may be near the end of the game.

It feels like I filled out the skill tree with like the different options now.

I really enjoy it. I've been the terraforming with my fists has not gotten old quite yet.

But I think for me it's I kind of wish the platforming was a little bit more challenging.

I kind of wish it was more of like the Mario flavor there versus what we have here because so far, you know, I can solve most of my issues just bashing through and kind of just jumping and spinning and punching out.

Yeah, the platforming is always going to kind of suffer a little bit for that design.

By the way, Jan, I'm not the one with microphone issues.

Chat says they want more Jan juice. So you think about that.

Whoa, he got you. Damn. No, he scolded you.

You know, you have the challenge rooms to kind of make up for that.

And I think there's a lot of those, I think, specifically because of that.

Because they realize in order to make challenging platforming sections, you really have pretty bespoke levels where there's maybe not as much of the terraforming stuff and whatnot.

I don't necessarily mind that. I think it's a relatively good mix and balance. yeah i think they found they are they found an artistic balance i think where it's like they did made the decision like they didn't just find themselves here with this game where they're like okay we're just gonna try some stuff and see what happens it's like no they had an idea in mind for what this game should be and built toward that direction and so they established something that is really fun and kind of accommodates a lot of different play styles the way i've been talking about the last the last couple of weeks and then it like Creates opportunities for slightly different possibilities where it's like, okay, I can now take some of these materials and breath of the wild, combine them, throw them together and make a bridge to cross a chasm.

I was never supposed to cross this way. And that to me is like such a cool thing where that probably wouldn't and maybe shouldn't be in a Mario platformer.

Mario platformers feel like they should be obstacle courses essentially.

And here it's like, well, no, Donkey Kong can destroy, but he can also build if you're and I like that this enables that different side of this kind of platforming game.

Yeah, I do enjoy that a bunch of Nintendo games will have that flexibility to, like, yeah, we know you're going to break it, so just go ahead and break it.

We're not going to hide that you can do that.

Because I definitely... Grubb, I think you were talking last week about, like, sequence breaking a couple different instances and everything.

A ton of stuff, yeah. And I was able to do that as well with a couple things, and I'm like, oh, I love that I can do this.

Like, this is great. But... Overall, I think the game is fantastic.

I love the colors. There's certain worlds I kind of got too tired of.

I don't think I like ice levels. I don't think I like snow levels.

When you get blasted to, I think it may be layer 800 or It's kind of like a beach-ish biome or level set.

That I was just having a blast with. Mike, I'm sorry, but there was a lot of big fruit, and I was eating up all that big fruit.

Apples, giant apples. I was more concerned I didn't see Funky Kong over there, because Jeff threatened something, and now I'm worried.

Everyone watch out for Jeff, is all I'm going to say.

It's coming. It's coming. Also, you know, the story, it's cute enough.

It definitely feels like that Saturday morning cartoon style of like, there are stakes, but they're not too heavy.

And also, some of the enemies, they're not that mad at you.

Yeah. And the relationships between the characters is like mostly done through fun facial animations.

And like Donkey Kong's got so much personality in the way he animates that I'm just like, oh, this is maybe my favorite Donkey Kong, the way he looks and behaves.

It's fantastic. Yeah, I mentioned this when Dan and I went to the Switch 2 event, but I am a Kongvert.

I didn't really have an affinity towards Donkey Kong in the original design or any of the old games, but this one, 100%, totally on.

Two things with the game, though. One, I understand that this is targeted towards kids.

I do wish the boss battles were a little bit more...

A meteor? Something. Yeah, anything. I just wish they had like two times, three times as much health.

I think mechanically they're sound enough sometimes.

It just feels like 10 seconds, they die.

And it's like there's all this buildup to them and it's just, it's over.

Yeah, it's so fat. Like 10 seconds is not even an exaggeration.

I know that... Someone in chat last week pointed out that they had the intro animation, the boss fight, and the defeat animation all in one 30-second clip on their Switch 2.

And it's like, yeah, now you mention it, I think I had a couple like that.

So yeah, and that's just a letdown. I don't know what the answer is necessarily, because I know they want to keep these things light and breezy for a vast majority of different people.

And they also don't seem to love the idea of difficulty settings at Nintendo.

They find other ways to increase the difficulty, which is like, hey, if you want to 100% this and find all these things, some of these bananas are going to be harder than the others. and that's where your difficulty's at go do that you freak and i'm like oh you know what i like that but then when you get to the boss fights they haven't really found an elegant solution along those lines uh so yeah i i hope they right but they saw that in the future and like in odyssey with the brutals you could beat them very fast but it was kind of a trick to it right they felt like boss fights still here the trick to beating them is usually pretty easy just go up and you just kind of break through shit pretty quickly you just kind of if you stay on their ass uh pretty diligently they go down very quick again even just doubling your health just so that the easy boss fight at least lasts longer i think it'll be fine um the good news they're like no spoiler there but the final boss fight's great yes it is it is a good bat boss that's dialed in very well so i just wish more of it was a little bit like that Yeah, I couldn't help but think of some of the boss fights from Astro Bot and how those felt like giant sweeping.

Or like or like Splatoon, even like Splatoon's got some really good boss fights that would probably be like, oh, these would have been a good fit for a game like this.

Even the old Donkey Kong Country games, the way they handle it.

I don't necessarily love this, but this is a little bit what Astro Bot does and does it well. where the bosses are kind of just platforming challenges, and you sort of wait for the moment where you can hit them, right?

So you're just kind of dodging stuff, and then when the game says you can hit them, you do that.

That is one way around it, and a lot of these kind of games do that.

I do like the idea of boss fights. Like, no, if you can get in there, you can attack them.

It just isn't very well-tuned for that. They don't have enough health. yeah i think that i think that is like maybe the solution is like uh make a boss fight the level yeah i'm like or like a shadow the colossus beast or something like that i'm like climbing up it and you and like maybe it's made of some materials that sometimes you can punch through and you have to do stuff on your way up to the top of the head to deliver the final blow i mean we're game designing we're uh uh what is a fantasy booking now but still like clearly there are other things they could have done other than just make them so simple that they go by in a blink of an eye yeah My other qualm is very, very minor.

But if there is at all a slope in a video game, I think if you have the equivalent of a rolling ability or like a butt stomp, you should always be able to slide down that whole thing.

Oh, sure. The Apex Legends style slide where it's like as soon as you start it, if you're on a slope, you just keep going forever.

I agree with that. Yeah. Because, you know, there's a lot of hills in this video game, and Donkey Kong has, like, a forward somersault roll.

I just wanted him to go down that whole thing.

That's it. That being said, you can rip off the ground and use it as, like, a little skateboard or snowboard.

That ability, I also wish was more useful.

Or had more instances to be used. You can get creative with that.

That's one of those things where that has helped me with some sequence breaking before, for sure.

Okay, okay, okay. But yeah, otherwise... this is another one of those games where I cannot stop smiling.

Yep. And then they also just focus on the fun.

I do like the balloons. It's like, bring back the balloons from the other games and give it a different ability other than lives.

And here it's like, okay, if you fall off an edge, it just brings you right back up.

And it's like, you know what? Yeah, that makes sense.

Like the punishment for falling off a ledge should be pretty minor because you just want to get back and try the jump again.

And that's exactly what this enables. I think I thought that was a pretty good solution.

Well, it makes the game easier, but in a way that just makes it a faster paced game and in a very good way.

Um, I, I don't mind the Bonanza power up animals to some of them though.

They look too freaky. Yeah. They're, they're kind of freaky looking.

They were, they were, it felt like they were sitting there at the design doc, the blueprint, and they were thinking, all right, do we go for the horse from the movie spirit?

No, that's too sexy. You can't do that. No.

Or or do you have some weird fern gully land before time fucked up?

Animal monstrosities and they kind of went like that way instead.

Yeah muscles on muscles They're freaks and I like them, but they are not welcome in my home.

Oh, yeah Yeah, no, I'm glad they're out there doing what they do, but I do not wish to be friends right like like like no spoilers But they gave they gave beefy arms to things that shouldn't have arms.

It is deeply upsetting. Oh Everything has gorilla muscles, and an ostrich just shouldn't.

It just shouldn't have gorilla muscles. Yeah.

I don't like... Like, I will purposely, after, you know, some bananas you need those abilities to get to, I will de-transform so the screen that you get when you collect the banana isn't with one of those monstrosity transformations.

I kind of like their faces. Like, look, I do prefer DK's face when he gets a banana.

He's got that big kind of... toothy grin that I think is great.

But the pose they do, all those banana mania things is very good.

I usually still enjoy those. Banana mania, huh?

Yeah, that's what I got. It's the name of the game.

Yeah, Donkey Kong's Banana Mania. Speaking about one game that is a new entry into the franchise, Jeff Grubb, you have checked out Ninja Gaiden Ragebound.

I'm sorry. Not your best, not your best segway, Jan.

Most of these games are new entries in a franchise.

Well, that's just where the industry is at right now.

Given the run of the show here, there's not a lot of those.

It's a commentary on the state of the industry.

Uh, Ninja Gaiden Ragebound. Yeah, I loved Ninja Gaiden on the Nintendo Entertainment System.

We played that all the time as a kid. I think I eventually got to the very end and then couldn't beat the boss rush at the end.

So I never beat the original Ninja Gaiden.

Liked the Xbox games for sure. Played a bunch of those.

Don't know if I ever completed those, but they're very good.

They were hard. They're hard, and that's the whole idea, and they're great because they were hard.

This game is definitely a successor to the NES and arcade-style games.

A little informed by the later games, but it's just a really good one of what it's trying to be, and that is a 2D action game that makes you feel cool and gives you a lot of opportunities to express yourself through the various abilities of the characters.

Kind of the hook here is You're a ninja and you get paired up with a ninja from a rival clan who becomes like sort of your ghost partner.

She becomes your odd rock, essentially. And she could throw the shuriken or what it's called, the little pointy things.

Yeah, she could throw those and you have the sword.

You could do both at the same time, but when you use her powers, it uses a little bit of meter.

And there's a powerful move that she has once per round or once per level.

And it's very cool, but it gets better when you start getting into the challenge stages and you have to sort of use all of these abilities, and it's platforming abilities, it is very offensive combat abilities, like this guillotine spin move, where if you jump in the air and you hit the attack button or hit the jump button right as you're about to be hit, you'll bounce off them, very similar to a cuphead, something like that.

And that figures into both the platforming and the combat.

There's just a lot of opportunities to look and feel cool, and the game knows how to build levels around that.

And so I've been really into it. And then you get to the boss fights and the boss fights are, you know, the pattern recognition thing you kind of want from a 2D action game.

And I really enjoyed those. They've taken me about four or five tries in some cases.

And I think it's the right level of difficulty.

And once you dial it in, you just, again, you like look up at the screen and you're just doing the coolest stuff and feeling very ninja-like.

And I've been very happy with the game so far because of that.

So yeah, I'm maybe halfway through and I'm going to keep playing it.

I've only played a little bit of it, but I've been enjoying it quite a bit.

Have you? Did you play the messenger? Yeah, I played some of the messenger.

Yeah, I didn't super click for me. The messenger.

I know you love it. I love the messenger.

And like one of my things I liked about it was, you know, you kind of use all these things, the environment and like the enemy projectiles and enemies as like ways to get extra jumps.

And that's that's you talk about what that's in this game.

I don't know. I love that stuff. I think it's super satisfying.

They definitely build the entire levels around that.

Like you can tell when there's an opportunity for you to do like an extra jump and there's something hidden.

They make it very clear. There's an enemy that will respawn in a specific point, even if you kill it so that you can get up there and try to do it.

So it's pretty friendly in terms of its design.

It wants you to feel cool. It's not trying to like hide anything here.

And so it feels very considerate. This is from the team that made Blasphemous and Blasphemous 2 that I know has some fans.

Yeah, those were solid games. This does feel like they continue to get better at making these kinds of games, and I'm super into it.

Is Ryu fighting the Catholic Church here?

You actually play as Kenji, but Ryu shows up, but now he's not fighting the Catholic.

Well, I guess I don't know for sure. Some of them seem pretty Catholic-y.

I get it. I get it. All right, gang. My vision is getting blurry because I think I got a migraine coming on, but I took some medicine, so we're fine.

We're okay. Time will heal all just like time flies.

It's a very small game that I have been checking out.

Kind of want to do a quick look of it, but it's like a two-hour game, so I don't want to spoil too much.

This is very much akin to kind of like an untitled goose game where you are an animal and you have a various set of to-dos to do.

But the funny thing about this is you are a fly, and based on your location, it pulls up world health organization data as to how long a fly lives for.

So in the United States... apparently a fly will live for 70 seconds according to the average on average I don't know I didn't read too much into it it's got to be on average right yeah On average, I believe, yes.

So your runs in this game, depending on where you live, are as long as a fly will live on average.

So in the United States, it's about 76 seconds.

So every run that you have in this game is 76 seconds to complete your to-do list.

Oh, that's so funny. And if you perhaps die at the end of those 76 seconds or you run into an obstacle, say you buzz yourself on accident on a light bulb or drown somewhere, you die and you restart the next run.

And you were supposed to complete, it's about 10 tasks, I believe.

All in one run, but the great thing is you see all of your previous flies there.

Oh, fun. In one run, I accidentally burned myself on a light bulb, and then my fly fell straight to the ground.

The next run, I see that same fly that was burned by a light bulb there, and then the various flies.

Do you mean that they're like, are you seeing them like ghosts flying around, or do you just see their dead bodies?

Dead bodies. Just their carcasses. Hell yeah.

Okay, I love that. So the game is very, very simple.

It's just black and white, very simple art style, but there is a lot of character into it.

It definitely feels like the type of game where they encourage you to poke around.

And yeah, it's cute time flies. Maybe we'll try and get a quick look up.

Yeah, this looks cool. Yeah. Yeah, I remember playing this at an SGF like last year or something.

It's kind of like that Stanley Parable vibe.

It's just go in there and fuck around, see what happens.

Yeah, it's new stuff. Yes. I dig it a lot.

And, gosh, you know, flying around is very fun, just like Mike Minotti has been flying around in the galaxy, the Outer Wilds.

Yes, this was my punishment from Dan, who trounced us in Tony's Pro Skater three plus four beloved kind of puzzle game from 2019.

I found out I failed 2019 as a year really badly.

Like at the time, I had not played this Resident Evil two remake.

I didn't play through control. Sekiro. So I've been doing a 2019 apology tour. basically lately.

I think I'm just gonna play Control after this to complete all of that.

Mike, the cool kids are now calling it the Revenge Tour.

Oh, okay, gotcha. The Mike Minotti revenge tour, where I kill everyone who's wronged me.

I mean, play video games for 2019. Sounds like someone else is rage-bound.

Yeah. It's funny, because I know people love this game.

I can't read your top 10 list from 2019 unless I join GB Max.

Oh, no. Okay. I shouldn't be behind a paywall.

But... I think my game of the year was Fire Emblem Three Houses, and I liked that game, but it already would not be that anymore, for sure.

But it's funny, because I still somehow didn't really know what this game was about.

I kind of figured it was... I figured out it was something kind of like Myst.

I knew that. It was some kind of first-person puzzle thing.

I didn't... And something about space was involved.

I had no idea about some of the other aspects of it, like the time loop and all that stuff.

I'm still afraid of spoiling the game, because I really liked that it wasn't spoiled for me somehow.

And I did kind of go into reality is like for a game like this is unless you are intending to play it imminently, people talk about it and nothing really makes sense.

So we talked about this game, probably said a bunch of the things that happened and they just didn't register you because they weren't in context for you.

Once they're in context, that game has so many secrets and cool things to it.

It's incredible. the crux of it is that you have a whole solar system to explore and try to figure out why basically the sun explodes and everybody dies at the end of the cycle.

When that happens, you wake up and you start the cycle again.

You carry nothing over but knowledge. Even at first in the game, I'm like, okay, am I going to get some upgrades for me or my ship?

I'm going to get some items. No, it's really just... You'll get upgrades, but to your brain.

It's all just... knowledge uh and like and it's so fun just going out there first establishing a base layer of knowledge like like learning okay this is this planet it's sand is moving from one of the planets to the other one over here and uh this planet has a moon that's just shooting volcanic rocks at it just kind of amazing Yeah, just trying to understand what's going on everywhere in this weird solar system while slowly piecing together elements of the backstory so you can then kind of understand what you even need to be doing, right?

Because at first, that's not even clear.

What's even happening? What do I need to do?

What am I trying to accomplish here? And kind of like 10 hours in, you sort of get to that point where... I'm like 15 hours in right now, so I feel like I'm starting to make... some leeway into solving the mystery.

It's like, oh, then I'm like, do these runs have a lot of purpose now?

And it's not just kind of flying around, seeing what I can sort of learn.

Because of the way my brain works sometimes I get frustrated when I think I'm pulling on a thread and I think the threads about to end and I was doing something really hard and I get somewhere and it's like oh I'm still missing like one or two things actually here and then Nothing nothing important seems to be happening like I think it is a lot of times something important is happening And I am learning something that's gonna help me out somewhere, so that's not really a problem the game That's just a way Mikey brain works sort of thing, but I gotta say mm-hmm That game scared the shit out of me.

Actually, yeah. That's one of the few games that left... It was just unnerving at some points.

I agree, CoolJan. There's something that happens with the vastness of space.

It's poking the same thing that bothers me about the ocean at night.

And it is so good at creating that sense of like nothingness and these cosmic entities that are monstrous and just inherently scary due to their size.

It fucking terrified me like I legit got dizzy a few times and was just like, I need to like play this maybe a couple more feet back, you know?

All of that was like true for me, Backlord, but like the way my brain works is like that feels like a warm blanket.

It's like, yeah, wrap me in this. Uncut gems.

Comfort food. My brain's like overwhelmed by this and it's like, well, I want to keep pushing and explore and explore and explore.

It fits very well with my brain that way.

But yes, and I agree with your assessment of it for sure.

And then there's parts of it that are legitimately like scary.

It's great though. I never played the DLC, I'm realizing.

Neither did I. I'm streaming a lot of plays, and everyone keeps asking me if I'm playing the DLC, and I'm like, I have no idea what that would even be for a game like this.

Yeah. But apparently there's a whole other kind of mystery there.

You could go straight to that if you wanted to, right?

It's one of those games where it's like, if you know what you're doing, you can go right to it.

Okay, cool. Yeah, to the end and to that stuff, yes.

You should be able to go right to the DLC.

Oh, is it like a miss where you I think I'll tell you what I'm playing.

This is games a lot more like this than I was even expecting.

But is it like a miss where if you know to do, you can just beat it right away?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I definitely I tried to do that run as fast as I possibly could a couple of times.

I told this to Mike Bacalar. Jan, do you guys know who was like the producer on this game?

No. Masi Oka. Oh, what? Yes. Hero from Heroes.

And he worked as a special effects supervisor on ILM for years and years.

He's like one of the main guys that developed the water technology at ILM.

And then he was Hero on Heroes. And then he made this.

He's still an actor on like, I think he, well, maybe Hawaii Five-0 was a couple of years ago.

He was on that. He's, I think, the most interesting man in the world.

Wow. A Renaissance man. Yes, like legitimately good at everything he does.

Like funny, entertaining, brilliant, like world-class brilliant.

I suddenly want to drive a Nissan Versa now.

I didn't know that. That is unbelievable.

Isn't that cool? Yeah, that's one of my favorite facts about that game.

It's like a cool dude doing cool things.

I just like flying around space. Yep. It's a good feeling.

Yeah. I used to be a really big Star Trek guy and we have some good Star Trek games, but there's never been like the Star Trek game that really encompasses everything about what Star Trek, you know, is and what kind of makes it neat.

This isn't exactly that, but there is something about the whole, I'm, you know, taking off and landing on planets and, uh, You know, there's something kind of physically and scientifically about this and the exploration and learning and the discovery that is scratching that itch.

I just love piloting my little spaceship and getting weird with gravity.

Yeah. Like having weird close calls like that's that one planet.

It kind of has like a hollow equator at it. pretty early on in the run yeah and i thought it was autopiloting too but something messed up so i was coming in way too hot but i was able to maneuver so i went right through that hollow equator like it was like right threading the needle i was like oh that was scary but felt good uh and then uh you're right like your little spaceship you can kind of tell it's like a miniature solar system which is like you're in a wooden spaceship and i like then the physics like really clicked into place when you consider that it's like They probably modeled this to have a certain level of gravity that works, even though it's like a couple miles wide, this entire solar system.

And yeah, I just enjoy thinking about the way that they kind of pieced all the math together here.

That stormy planet, my first time landing on there and all the things that happened on that planet, like the first time when you don't know how to navigate it, it's just like... best moment in video games in a lot of ways where it's like, oh my God, this is such a cool thing.

I love it. That's a good example of like, you know, pretty early on, I figured out something in the Bramble planet where I went through kind of this maze.

I found a guy and at the end, all I did was find this thing.

It was like, wow, this, uh, This thing is immune to electricity.

I was like, well, can I take some with me?

Am I going to make my ship like an insulator?

What's going on here? Why does this help me?

Then like, yeah, way later. I was like, oh, that knowledge is useful here.

Also, scouts in the game. What? It's a Scout.

Come again? Scout, Dan's dog Scout, but he's a camera now.

He's a camera. Oh, sure. That's what the camera's called.

And every time I set him out, I'm like, go ahead, go Scout.

Then I'll say, Scout, please, when he misses or something.

Just the name. But okay, good job, yeah.

Oh, we got there. Even that, though, is great, because you have this thing, I'm like, I mean, this is mildly useful.

I can send out a camera, then as you play the game, you figure out all sorts of other things.

It's basically your one tool, right? Yep.

I forgot to bring this up during the band section, but when you go backpacking, you kind of just settle and find a site to place your tent and everything.

The place we were hiking to, we wound up setting up camp next to a group of Boy Scouts.

And let me tell you, Boy Scouts that are 12 to 15 are terrible at telling stories.

Yes. Oh, they're the worst. They're terrible at everything.

Yeah, I was gonna say. One of them was very polite and was just like, Hey, you guys have a good hike?

Cool. You guys need your water purified?

We have some straws if you need them. You need knots?

You need a bunch of knots? That's all I can do is knots.

What's your job? Knots! Just knots. Can you knot a knot?

I'm glad that I just played video games when I was 15 because I was so deeply uninteresting.

I'm glad I didn't bother too many people.

Just avoided them mostly. Yeah. Just like, I'll go in here and I'll watch Star Trek and play a lot of GameCube. don't worry so to bring the two together i think i am going to uh do uh maybe not hiking but actually do a camp out night in my backyard set up and i'm looking at outdoor tvs who knows i'll be able to afford one but if i can i'm going to set one up outdoors and i'll play the outer wilds dlc that i've never played before and i want to play that outside by a campfire and like just have like completely vibe out for like a day get a banjo 4D.

4D. You want the 4D experience. I want the 4D experience.

Yeah, I'll back off. You can come over and shake my chair when the spaceship is going.

Amazing. Well, let's stick into the wide void of space because Mike Minotti, you have been playing Gradius Origins.

I decided I was going to pronounce that however Jan says, because I say Gradius a lot.

I think I might be wrong. It's definitely Gradius.

Don't go with me for pronunciation. No, it's Gradius Origins now.

This is another collection of classic Capcom games.

This one's actually coming out on the 7th, so two days away from here.

I was able to get a code and check you get out mostly on my Switch 2.

I'm pretty sure it's just a Switch code, right?

They've been doing a lot of these, a lot of really good Castlevania ones.

There was a decent Contra collection not too long ago.

So, you know, you have the first three Gradiuses and then also the Salamander games, which is just a Gradius spinoff.

The first one came out here as Lifeforce.

Then there's also a Salamander 2. They're all arcade games, but there's also a PlayStation 1 version of that.

So these are all very classic shmups. The whole thing with the Gradius games is the way the upgrades work.

You get those options, which is just like the balls that follow you and shoot the same exact weapons you do.

And I love that they're called options for some reason.

You have incredible music because it's Konami.

The really neat thing here... is that kind of like those Castlevania collections we had where there was like, oh, they remade Haunted Castle, so there's a whole new game in here, blah, blah, blah.

Here, there's just Salamander 3, and it's an entirely brand new shmup.

Entirely new game, very much in the style of the other ones.

It's kind of like... Oh, what if they had made, you know, another Salamander like the late 90s, but it was still kind of pixel based.

We're kind of like remember those rebirth games we had from Konami that were made by M2, who, again, made Salamander 3 here.

It was like Castlevania Rebirth. There's even a Gradius Rebirth.

It's kind of like one of those where it's like, oh, this is very familiar and similar, but new.

Yeah, playing through that is super neat and it's super fun.

It looks great. It sounds great. Gradius always looked cool.

Yeah, Greatest does look cool. Even, like, the NES ports, like, Greatest One, I thought was really neat.

I played through that on NSO, and that's why I'm going to still have a good time with it.

This is, again, pretty much the arcade version.

There are, like, multiple versions of most of these games, though.

So, you can play, like, the Japanese version or the American version or, like, you know, Revision 2 or the Japanese version.

This is M2 doing the ports, and they're known for making sure they always are very comprehensive.

And they do great ports as well. Like, these games are probably running correct because it's M2. right and there's even like a lot of options uh not not not the things that follow your ship like things in a menu um okay like the games are kind of meant to be emulated perfectly but you can like go into the options and like fix um bugs and things like that that's bothering there's just a lot of room for customization uh there and then when you're playing through the game too you can just play through it like normal uh since there are arcade ports you can just add a bunch of quarters so you have a ton of continues but there's even things like you know invincibility mode where you just can never die or a practice mode where if you die it kind of rewinds to a checkpoint for you so you can keep trying a certain sequence over and over until you get that figured out because that's a lot of these games you want to beat them legit you want to beat them one quarter right it's a lot of memorization and stuff like that But yeah, I mean, it's funny.

I never was a big Shmup guy growing up, but I have more appreciation for them now.

Gradius is about as iconic Shmup series as there is.

So you have all that old stuff here. And then StyleMator 3 is this brand new game that's just there.

That's super neat. I love that. This is Origins, the one that's coming out next week.

On the 7th. Got it. It's good stuff. It's $40 on Steam, but you can get it for $36 when it launches, of course, 10% off thing.

I feel like Geometry Wars kind of killed my interest in shmups.

Yeah, I get what you mean because it's a similar idea, but it's very fast-paced and you can see the ending.

You know the round's probably going to last for five minutes, and so that arcade loop maybe works a little bit better at home in something like that.

But I've been getting back into shmups like Mike recently.

The Dodam Pachi, I was just playing it again the other night.

That's the one that really did it for me.

I'm like, this is really good. It feels modern.

It also feels like... Um, the hitbox is appropriate because it's a bullet hell shooter, which means there's bullets everywhere for you to hit.

And you kind of have to, like, weave your way through it.

And it's on the generous side of, boy, it feels like I just narrowly missed that.

And it kind of, like, maybe clipped the front of my ship, but it didn't blow up my ship because the hitbox is small.

And I think I really like that because I do feel like I'm able then to weave between all these bullets and just, again, feel cool like a Ninja Gaiden.

Donan Pachi makes me feel awesome. Makes me feel like a god gamer when I'm like in the zone and dodging all that stuff.

And that's not something you get from a ton of games right now.

So I'm like, I'm glad they're still out there doing their thing.

I'm going to pick up this greatest one. I looked on Steam.

M2 also did a Darius collection, which is like Taito's ripoff series.

Honestly, it could be older than greatest.

I really don't know. And I'm going to check that out as well.

I like some shmups. I hope I hope we get a parodius collection now, which was Konami.

It's just like. parody greatest made by them like it's the same exact gameplay but the boss instead of a giant robot is a vegas show girl stuff like that right a lot of penguins everywhere and just really goofy stuff i always thought it looked so fun but never really had much of an opportunity to play them i don't think we've had a good parodius port in a long time and then and then jan's got to play uh choaniki Yes, yes.

The oily, muscly dude shooter. That's a classic.

They've got a bunch of those in the collection now.

I feel like it'd only be right if Nikki and I were in the same room, both covered in baby oil.

Exactly. That's right. Yeah, we could do that now because we don't have HR.

Exactly, exactly. They could. They wouldn't have stopped us anyway.

That's right. Yeah, they would be like, yeah, this makes sense.

Darius, that's the guy from Hootie and the Blowfish, right?

That's right. Darius Rucker. Yeah, he does that version of Whacking Wheel that I like more than the other, like the music stops get mad at me that I like the cover better than the original.

And then I say, well, Bob Dylan actually came up with that song in a jam session.

And then they roll their eyes so hard at me.

Uh, folks, I, I, I've been called occasionally the king of the segue, but, uh, all it is, it's just a bunch of wordplay.

Just like Jeff has been playing wordplay.

Wow. Wow. Uh, so last week, uh, Bacalar and I were, uh, you know, staring wide eyed at each other, not knowing what to do with this website.

Cause you all abandoned us. And he mentioned that Northern Lion had started playing this wordplay game.

And I was like, well, let's do this dumb paddle paddle game.

And then I realized we were probably going to get frustrated with that and need to kill some more time.

And that was correct. We did play that for an hour.

Yeah, we played for an hour. We did way better than I was expecting us to do.

I thought we would probably fill in the second thing and be like, this is stupid.

Let's give up. We got like six or seven segments in.

It was great. It was a good time. And then I played that guerrilla versus 100 men game.

And men won. Men won. They destroyed me on the moon as a guerrilla.

Men won. Men won. They needed the moon though.

Well, no, they beat me on Earth, too. And then we start up wordplay, which is Bellatro meets Scrabble slash Boggle.

And it's that simple. Okay. And it's also that good.

So we played it, and I was having fun. The baccalaureate Chuck and I were just throwing words out there, trying to learn how to use, essentially, the jokers to maximize stuff.

And we were playing on the normal difficulty level.

And we got through a run and we did another run.

And I was immediately like, as soon as we got done with UPF, played it basically for the rest of the weekend when I had like 10 minutes here or there.

And it's really well done. Like I'm just sitting here on the keyboard, just typing out words, trying to see if I can get as long of a word as possible because the longer it is, it starts getting bonus points there at the end.

You know, like the sixth and seventh slot are worth five bonus points.

The eighth spot is worth 10 and so on. And then it's like, okay, that works to a degree.

But like Bellatro, you really got to start getting all of the jokers to help you out and make sure that you are getting as big a multiple as possible and as many bonus points as possible.

And ideally, you're going to need some synergy, especially if you start playing on the higher difficulty settings.

So I was able to do that, got through like normal and then hard and...

I think I'm on legendary difficulty now, which I think is the highest difficulty, and I haven't been able to beat that yet.

But theory crafting about the best ways to use some of these bonuses has been really rewarding.

There was one where it's like, okay, I have a joker that... gives me a bonus if i have two vowels and then uh it gives me a bonus if i have two of the same letter or there's another one that gives me a bonus if i have two of the same letter next to each other so if i have you know two e's next to each other that'll be good and then i got another one that's like you get a multiple for every e you have in the word i'm like okay now these are stacking and i could start like really trying to work my way in that direction and you have um the ability to to refresh your tile set a certain number of times and you can earn more of those so it's all about balancing these resources along with trying to synergize your jokers to survive as long as you can and i'm yeah i'm at a point now where it's like i really feel like i'm on its wavelength and and uh it delivers in the way the game that is trying to rip off bellatro should It has all the kind of the same satisfying math.

And so, yeah, really, really enjoying it.

Wordplay. Very cool. Very smart. I think it was hard for me to like...

I wanted, it was hard to like help, like, but that's not, that's not a criticism.

It's no, no. You're just watching. It's like, right.

Yeah. Cause it's like, uh, you like the way I, for me, I wouldn't have been able to help you if you were playing backlogs.

I have to like, kind of type the words out and that's how I was playing.

And it's like, if I can't do that, it's like, maybe I could spot something like Chuck was having a good time.

Yeah. Cause it was clearly fitting with his brain.

Right, with his broken, broken brain. Yeah, he's deeply broken.

Disgusting. But only works for wordplay.

No, yeah, that game's... And it's just the polish on it's really nice.

I think they did a really great presentational job.

It's not as like Bing Pow Wiz like Bellatro is.

You know, Bellatro is like, hey, basically, you're going to feel like you're playing a slot machine.

This is not doing exactly that, but it is still presented very slickly.

Yeah, it's like Figma. It's like it was made in Figma.

Yeah, it does feel like it was made in Figma.

There we go. We got our quota. They should start paying us.

They should think about sponsoring us. They should give us some stock.

That's what they should do. Give us some stock two weeks ago.

Backdate it. There's nothing wrong with that.

They're allowed to do that, right? I meant to.

I just didn't get around to it. But yeah, I like it's one of those games where I think if you like Bellatro and you like Boggle, they have combined those two things in a very satisfying way.

And I could see myself like this is going to be one of those games I'm playing through the end of the year.

Fantastic. Fantastic. I have discovered one of those for me.

Gang, I... Did you play this? Okay. Does it count as an intervention if you just submit yourself to have the intervention amongst your friends?

Yeah. 100%. That shows maturity. Okay. A couple years ago, I had a very big problem with a game called Super Auto Pets.

Yeah, we remember. And that was a game that involved... That was basically like a...

Gosh, like a TFT, so like a team fight tactics.

It was like an auto chess of sorts. What are the horse girls doing now?

No, no, no, no, no, no. Well, there may be horses in this.

I haven't gone that far yet. I saw one Ben GP, Ben Pack, friend of the website, my dear friend, my work wife, posting about this yesterday.

I saw it this morning and I thought, what is this?

This looks cool. Merge Maestro. Someone recommended this to all of us.

I saw that as well. This is popping off now.

Download it. I haven't touched it, Jan, so I'm looking forward to hearing what it's about.

Delete it now. Oh, no. It's only $2.40. What do we have to lose?

Time. My life. My livelihood. Because this is... It feels like it is... You take a match three, you throw in a Super Auto Pets kinda, and it's like a wave-based...

Match three game. But what is it? A wave-based match three game.

It's like emojis? Is it like Suica game where you're combining fruits into bigger fruits?

It is a wave-based Turn based and wave based match three game where you're using your tile sets.

It's also a tile game. Holy shit. To do damage.

So as you place down your tiles, those will do damage to enemies that pop up at the beginning of every wave.

And initially, you start with ten tiles, and they all do about one damage each.

But then as you complete a wave, you will acquire new tile sets, or new emojis, let's just call them emojis, to replace your original just numbered sets.

So... 1 through 8 or 1 through 10 will get replaced with, oh, now you have a newspaper.

Now you have a dagger. Now you have like a demon face.

And these different emojis will have different abilities that synergize off of each other.

And you replace your original tileset. So now after you combine a 1 and a 1 to add up to a 2, instead of adding up to a 2, it now becomes a dagger.

Um, so the dagger as that, uh, pops up on screen when you first summon it or, or, uh, uh, put it onto your tile set, your match three set that will do damage to the enemies.

Um, and gang, this is bad. This is wild.

It seems nefarious. I'm not going to lie.

Like it seems bad. Yeah, everything about it is, like, tickling my underbrain.

It seems engineered with the worst possible interests in mind.

Yes. Yes. Because this ticks off the, like, kind of super auto pets... a part of my brain, but also the Slay the Spire-esque part of my brain where it becomes that type of card battler.

Within each wave, you have about four or five turns.

So those turns include placing a tile onto your board or combining your different tiles on your board.

And like... You know, you can get pretty snappy with it.

The game can move pretty quick. And then at the top of the screen, you will see the different enemies that you are in danger of getting attacked by.

But those go by super quick. Game very slick.

I think emojis may not work in movies, but they may work too well in video games.

Merge Maestro is that. This is gonna be bad.

When I see a game like this, I almost see someone in a back alley being like, eh, you wanna try this?

You know? Oh, yeah. First one's free. So, wait.

So, okay. So, when I'm... I attack when I combine.

You attack when you combine two similar tiles or when you place a tile down.

Okay. And so... Am I trying to be precious about like, okay, I have two swords right now or two daggers.

Do I want to like save those? Should I merge those when there's a bigger enemy on the screen?

Or is it kind of like, oh, willy-nilly, I should just keep trying to combine things.

I think at first you want to be a little bit precious because as you complete more waves, your original tile set of just numbers gets replaced very quickly with different emojis with different abilities.

Like Ben Pack had a little thread on Blue Sky where he...

He said like, oh, man, at the end of this, my octopi was doing a million damage.

And then as soon as I read that sentence, I knew I would be in danger.

Yeah, that's that's a crazy thing. Like, I know exactly how you get there.

So, OK. All right. Let's let's do this. Yeah.

God, it is going to be bad. I didn't realize.

Jeff, are you playing this on your phone?

Yes. Oh, no. Yeah, it's, like, with me everywhere now.

Oh, no. I bought it. It's gonna follow you home like the ghost from Haunted Mansion.

God, it follows. There's no market. Okay, should I buy a paddle, a clapperboard, or a candle?

What the fuck? Get a candle. That's more ghosty.

Okay. Oh, God. Yeah, I was able to shake Super Auto Pets, and I finally get over that.

Recently, though, I've thought about getting back into it, but then this came across my radar, and this is bad.

This is just all bad. I'm going to assume WWE 2K25 and Mario Paint were from last week.

Oh, yeah, that's probably right, yes. Okay.

Well, the Mario Paint's still good. Get your shit together here, leaving games on the board.

Oh, my God. We leave for one week, and all of a sudden you have, oh, I have four times as much work to do, so I'm going to get mildly sloppy.

It doesn't matter. Wow. If you yell at me about this, you won't notice all the fire I started, so this is good.

Last thing on the list here before we head to break and then get to the news.

Jeff Grubb, you've been futzing around with the 8-bit Dew 64.

Yeah, yeah, the controller came in here.

Check it out, everybody. It's the 8BitDo 64.

What'd it do? It's got the six buttons that you... So it has one analog stick, like the N64 button, or N64 controller, and it has the D-pad right next to it, and then it and 8BitDo have the six buttons, so there's the A and B button, and then the four C buttons, and I've been testing out N64 games with it, mostly through emulation right now.

It'll work with the analog 3D when that finally arrives, although I'm I'm getting something from DHL.

I hope it's that, but maybe that's a bit too early.

I can't remember when that's supposed to come.

Isn't DHL amazing? It's crazy. It's just amazing.

The Germans, they run it on time over there.

I think it's a German company. So, yeah.

So, what I like about this is I like playing N64 games a lot, but the button layout on an Xbox controller is a little strange so that sometimes... you have to apply the C buttons to the right analog stick, and I never love that.

I'll get used to it. I'll play games that way.

Whatever. I'm emulating and playing for free.

I'm not going to complain. But... This is better, having it just dedicated to the C buttons that are actually on this controller.

And then also it's like six face buttons.

So I'm like, could I like play Street Fighter like on here as like a pad fighter and make that work?

And yeah, it mostly works. There's a bit of a gap between the A and B and the C buttons.

And they're a different size. Again, that's like the N64 controller.

But I can hit the A button and the down C button at the same time with one finger press.

So to me, that's like, okay, I can do some of these combos that would be common maybe in a fighting game occasionally.

But the way it feels, great. And 8BitDo's just got all this stuff down now where the D-pad is fantastic.

The analog stick has the concentric circles and the convex sort of dome like an N64 controller.

So it's like it's going for that and it feels great.

The triggers are not they're not like analog triggers like the N64 triggers, but they also feel excellent.

So it's just the build quality is fantastic and it's been it's been working very well.

Now there is like a time where. a lot of uh like xbox 360 controllers or xbox one controllers i should say just automatically map to a lot of these emulators so you start using them and the emulators are like yeah i recognize this here's the setup you should probably be using and go this is not doing that so i have to set it up manually but that's probably for the best because i do want it to just like no this is an n64 controller with the n64 buttons so let's make sure it's good to go i think it's probably going to work out of the box with the analog 3d though Yeah, it looks really neat.

My thing is just, if I'm going that far to get a custom N64-style controller, I think I would just want it to be an N64.

I would want to have the penis, you know?

Yes, you want the penis. Of course, yes.

Your controller should have a penis. Yeah, and I'm not noticing...

Anything with this controller that like is oh Finally I can do this because I don't have the penis in the way anymore No, it's like everything on the n64 was always built with that three prompt with those three prongs in mind So even games that like there's the decay I guess there his Blues Brothers 2000 Mike did require me to use both the d-pad and the analog stick at some point This is my new Blues Brothers 2000 controller right here oh fuck oh god no uh yeah the the the boss rush mode of blight club where all three of you have to play through everything again it's uh it's out now it started shipping so uh you can check it out but yeah i'm happy with it lovely lovely folks that about does it for video game talk and what we've been playing we're gonna go take a quick bricky break and on the other side of that jeff grubb will be chatting to you about the news right after this A treasure trove of bananas has been stolen, and it's up to Donkey Kong and his buddy Pauline to get them back.

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This is Jeff Grubb with the news. This is Jeff Grubb.

That's right, I got news for you, everybody.

Let's get into it. Nintendo's going to hold an Indie World livestream this Thursday.

Details, it'll be focused on indie games.

Obviously, it's going to be 15 minutes, or around 15 minutes.

That is August 7th at 6 a.m. Pacific Time, 9 a.m.

Eastern. I'm sorry, wait, it's got 6 a.m. and 9 p.m.

I must have mistyped that. Yeah, I think it's going to be 6 a.m.

Pacific Time, 9 a.m. Eastern. I'll talk over it.

We'll talk over it, Jan. You just sleep in.

It's just an Indie Direct. Can I sleep in?

You can sleep in too, Mike. No, I'll be there.

9 a.m. What are we doing, bud? Oh, never mind.

I forgot. I had such a hard time getting out of bed today.

I haven't got enough sleep. I don't know.

I have a sleep up. I got enough sleep. And it was still miserable.

That's the problem. Why don't you see your fake doctor dad about it?

Just tell me not to point at stars or open umbrellas indoors.

It's not healthy. Throw your salt over your shoulder before you go to sleep.

I'm looking at your chart here. Has any black cats crossed your path?

This is, of course, separate from the partner direct that happened last week that had some pretty decent announcements in it.

Octopath Traveler Zero, The Adventure of Elliot, The Millennium Tales, another HD2D game.

The adventure of Elliot, the Millennium Tales, Jan.

Did I stutter? This is the Philadelphia, not Philadelphia game?

Philadelphia. Yeah. I think I posted something like, I wish I knew how games got names like this.

And there's like multiple PR people were just like, oh, oh, buddy.

Yeah. We don't know either. We don't know either.

We would ask. Somebody tried to stop Kingdom Hearts 358 over two days from happening, and no one would have it.

Oh, yeah. Mike, your audio is just fucked up.

Oh, I brought it back. Don't worry. I saw and got mad.

Just keep your hand on that lever, baby.

This thing right here just on the sliver I see it and I just crank it because it goes whoa and I gotta crank it back up all the time on my own and it's just annoying I'll just do it myself.

I'll lower it for you stupid. Oh, never mind.

I start screaming. I like screaming. Okay I like screaming and they like when I scream.

This is all gonna be leveled. So yeah, he's gonna sound even crazier.

It's gonna be great. Like, someone out there, do the Master Shake edit.

Like, let's actually get a proper one here with, like, the mouth moving and everything.

I don't sound like Master Shake! Yakuza Kiwami was also there.

It says Master Shake. Yakuza Kiwami 2, I should say.

Yeah, it was a decent direct, but we covered it in a bunch of places now.

The indie direct, look, I'm not expecting Spoon Heaven to be there.

What? Spoon Heaven? Spoon Heaven. So it's a hollow night.

Silk song is, is the real name of that video game.

Uh, I know I'm not expecting it at an indie direct.

That game is, is too big for an indie direct now.

And also it is, uh, probably going to show back up at some Xbox thing.

It'll be, maybe be a games comp and they'll give us a date at that point.

That's kind of the problems. I feel like the two games people want to hear about the most right now.

One second, I got to crank it up. Our Spoon Heaven and Hades 2.

Like, everybody wants that launch date. Is Hades 2 also too big for this?

Or is it, you know, like, well, people are going to watch this.

We can make that the one last thing is, hey, here's the 1.0 release date for that thing. yeah i think hades 2 is also too big for this uh that'll just kind of happen when it happens at this point nintendo loves hades and i think nintendo loves hollow knight as well so if those games you know wanted to be in the big direct i bet they could have been uh but i don't know maybe i'm wrong and maybe they'll like use both of those as a launch point for a bunch of other cool indie games and and those will be like the showstoppers here it's possible but i you know we'll see i i I'm expecting like Nintendo remembering that first year of the Switch one and how a couple of indie games really took off.

Golf Story, a handful of others. Right. And they're just looking to recreate that, which is admirable.

I want that as well. I definitely remember having a very good time with early indie games.

And I'm looking for the next new one that I didn't know I was expecting.

And the indie worlds usually deliver that.

I, and then, you know, on the other hand, uh, this whole Metroid prime four thing, not being in, you know, obviously it wasn't going to happen last week, but now I, I kind of have made peace with the fact that like, it's still too early.

I really think they are just going to like backload that thing to like October at this point.

You know what I mean? Like sometime in the holiday period.

So from late October, anytime in October through December, even like it could be the December game.

Uh, they've done that with their hardcore games before.

Right, but I meant for like the Direct. It's going to get a Direct, right?

It's going to get one. Well, I think it'll be a Direct.

You don't think so? No, I mean, no, I do think so.

But there's, you know, these days it's Nintendo.

They could announce stuff in a YouTube video or on the Nintendo Today app.

But if, yeah, there could be, there's usually a Direct in September.

There probably will be one this year because Nintendo likes to get things set up for that holiday season, and September's a good time to do that.

They're like, here's the shit that you should be buying from us this holiday.

I expect us to get answers on a lot of these outstanding questions by then.

And then there's a handful of other ones like Kirby Air Riders.

That one could pop off at any second. They just give us the release date.

That's been rated... In Saudi Arabia, so is Metroid Prime 4, actually.

So both of those have ratings now in at least one territory.

What that means for us getting dates, it doesn't mean much.

It could happen at any point. All right, this next one, a little interesting just because of the tech inside this controller.

Rare is celebrating its 40th anniversary with a licensed Xbox controller that is up on Amazon now.

It's from 8BitDo, and the one interesting feature about this, other than it's got pro buttons, is it has the 2.4 gigahertz wireless radio that enables it to connect directly to an Xbox without a dongle.

Normally, when you get one of these controllers, they do it through Bluetooth, and...

Or they need a dongle for the Xbox. And so Microsoft has had that stuff as a proprietary lockdown, and now they're letting third parties use it.

Now, maybe that would have been more exciting in a world where I was playing my Xbox more frequently.

In fact, it definitely would have been. But it's like, okay, at least Xbox is opening this stuff up at this point.

I don't love having a bunch of dongles sticking out of anything.

No, no. Even though like the 8-bit do dongles kind of look cool because they look like bricks or whatever.

Yeah. Even then I'm like, I get this dongle out of here.

I don't have a I don't need computers have like 50 of these USB slots and I somehow I'm still running out constantly.

Yep. I like 8BitDo controllers, so this is pretty cool.

I don't know if I need a Rare 40th anniversary one, but cool.

There's also some artwork that they posted up to celebrate Rare's 40th anniversary that is connected to your Xbox background.

A bunch of original art of all their characters, not including the Nintendo ones.

And that's pretty cool. All right, Darksiders 4 continues the original game story after 15 years.

So they're going back to Darksiders. This is actually going to be the fifth game.

There was also Genesis, which was a top-down game.

But since Darksiders 1 ended with War, the main one, where War is about to go fight the forces of good and evil or whatever, and the rest of the horsemen of the apocalypse show up, Well, we've gotten games starring the rest of those horsemen now, including Genesis and then 2 and 3.

So now it's like they're wrapping back to that moment and they're going to continue the story right from there, which is pretty wild for this B-series game that is great.

It's really good. But it feels like, man, I can't believe they're going to complete this story.

They're going to finish the fight. They're going to finish the fight.

Finish the fight, finish the story. Yeah, you know, that's what's kind of nice about this, right?

Is there are these like beloved game franchises that just feel like, well, we love that.

It's never actually going to go anywhere.

Like a Shenmue, right? Like Shenmue is a porn.

A lot of people like it. And that game is probably never going to see an end.

So it is nice that Darksiders, it is something that a lot of people have cared about or, you know, at one point.

I like a lot of those games, man. Those games are fun.

Yeah, that first one was especially good.

I haven't played much of them. I should do some Darksidering.

I should try one. Darksider's one of the better Zelda clones, for sure.

Yeah, I was going to say, they definitely fill the void, it feels like, for when Zelda kind of wasn't as poppin' in the 3D world, at least.

It's weird because I remember 3 was like one of the first THQ Nordic slash Embracer games at that time.

We were like, wow, it's great this company is here and reviving this stuff.

We're getting more B games. And all this time later, it's like the most exciting thing they can do is a Darksiders 4.

So there's been no growth or expansion of what they could possibly do.

Well, THQ Nordic had a bunch of other games that they did announce, and I will ask you if any of these do pop out to you.

Now, SpongeBob SquarePants Titans of the Tide looked pretty promising.

That's coming out November 18th. It's following up the Cosmic Shake, which followed up Battle of Bikini Bottom.

Rehydrated. Yes, rehydrated. And people like those games, and I'm glad they're continuing to make this.

There's also the Patrick Starr game. Patrick Starr is going to be playable in this game.

Yeah, that looks pretty cool. I think, you know, the Cosmic Shake was okay.

No one hated that game, but it also wasn't as beloved as Bikini Bottom.

Yeah, I just picked that up because it was on sale because of this announcement.

So I want to play through Cosmic Shake because when I played Bikini Bottom Rehydrated, I was really surprised how much I liked it.

I like that we can still get these kind of beats your 3d platformers just because SpongeBob SquarePants is still so popular.

So, right. Yeah. Yeah. I'm rooting for this one.

Exactly. It's a glad that like there was a time where we'd get a lot of licensed platformers.

This is the one survivor that we, that we continue to get for the most part.

A recreation is rec fest, but open world kind of Forza Motorsport, but rec fest, that sounds awesome to me.

I'm really interested in, in to see a scene like where that game goes and, Then there's games that I maybe recognize the names, but they're continuing to make more of them.

Tides of Tomorrow, Sacred 2 Remaster, Titan Quest 2, The Guild, Europa 1410.

There's a Gothic remake, Re-Animal, Fate Keeper, and The Eternal Life of Goldman, which actually that looked pretty good.

That's a cinematic platformer kind of thing with really good animation and style to it.

Probably worth checking out, but yeah. It's also different than the Adventures of Elliot, the Millennium Files, whatever that game was called.

I never played the Gothic game. Should I play Gothic?

Me neither. Yeah, exactly. I was asking the same thing.

I'm like, are there Gothic stands out there being like, we got to get more people playing Gothic.

I haven't run into them if they are. All right, full list of all price increases for Nintendo Switch and everything else.

All right, so Nintendo raised the price of the Switch 1.

They announced this last week, and then over the weekend, the prices went into effect.

In the United States, for the Switch, the original Switch, again, Switch OLED was $350.

It's now $400. The standard Switch is $340 after being $300.

Switch Lite went up $30 from $200 to $230.

The Joy-Con for the Switch 1 are $90 now.

They were $80. Pro controllers, $80, was $70.

The NES controller pack was $60. It's now $70.

N64 went from $50 to $55. And the Super Nintendo controller went up $5 to $35.

Switch 2 accessories, some also went up in price.

This is in addition to the price increase that happened right when they were announced, because that's when the tariffs first happened.

They're doing more on top of that. This is all tariff-based.

It's mostly tariff-based. You know, there's some other aspects to it, but it's mostly tariff-based, yes.

The Joy-Con charging stand was $30. It is now $35.

Pro Controller was $85. Now it's $90. Joy-Con 2 was $95.

Now it's $100. And the dock set, so if you want an extra dock, was $120.

It's now $125. Ugh. Amiibo went up to $20 from $16.

The two-pack Amiibos, there's a handful of those.

Those are either $35 or $40, depending on which ones you get.

They were originally $30. $40 for Amiibo, guys.

That's insane. You know, like the tariffs are definitely a factor, but there is a lot of this that is just absolutely wild to me.

For the original Switch. Yeah. The thing that must cost so much cheaper to make now.

Right. It's one thing to be like, console prices just never go down.

Okay. Increasing them. Increasing them after the follow-up comes out.

Right. Right. A $400 Switch OLED actually kind of sounds like a crime.

It sounds like someone should go to jail for making that a thing.

If I met somebody who was about to buy one of them, I would literally tackle them to the ground to stop them from doing that.

That's what I don't get. If you're trying to just liquidate inventory... I don't know if they are. what are you are you trying to like create a new above ground landfill so i don't like so i think they're i i mean one i think that the that the market conditions have made these companies think well we gotta like really be mindful of our prices and we should try to raise them wherever we can which sucks and these companies love raising prices so they're doing that uh But I think they think about it from the perspective of this will look like a story we're telling when people go to look to make a decision about what console to get.

And now the Switch 2 is only $50 more than a Switch 1.

And the Switch 2 feels like a really good deal in that perspective of, oh, I get the whole new generation of console and its games can play all the original Switch 1 games.

And I only have to spend $50 more. It's the medium popcorn thing.

You're thinking about only $50 more instead of, oh, I'm spending $450 to $500.

They want you focusing on the $50. Now, is that the entirety of this?

No, I think the reality is sourcing parts for electronics these days is a shit job.

It just sucks, and it is complicated, and it is causing these companies a lot of headaches.

Could they still make a profit selling the Switch 1 at the original price?

Could they cut the price of it and still make a profit?

I bet they could. How much could that cost to make now?

Also, they're selling all the Switch 2s they're making right now already.

I understand that might dry up a little bit.

Maybe they're like, well, we're doing this so we don't have to increase the price of the Switch 2.

Maybe. It's like Nintendo's hurting, right?

I mean, come on. But it does seem like an expensive way to get to that end of medium popcorning it.

Yeah, no, I think that's a buy. I think they're okay with doing that because they're going to end up with this medium popcorn situation.

The underlying motivating factors here are it's got to be mostly tariffs.

And then the secondary thing, which is huge, is we love raising prices and we can get away with raising prices right now.

So let's do it now while the getting is good, I think, is the situation.

Yeah. If they're trying to like create a scare of people going out and getting switched to for the price of that goes up kind of mission accomplished.

Like, you know, I'm talking to my friends who I know probably wouldn't get switched to until the new Animal Crossing comes out.

And I'm being like, look, I know you want to wait till then.

Maybe just get one now. If you think you're ever going to get one.

You said they're selling every switch they're making right now, but there is that next crop of people that they're focused on.

And for that group of people, the price urgency that you're talking about will be a factor.

And then the medium popcorn thing is a very effective thing.

And the people take that into consideration and be like, well, I mean, look, it's only that much more.

So I think they're already kind of eyeing that segment.

And that's behind a lot of these decisions.

Yeah. I think they're all, I mean, what this really says to me is these companies, because Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo now have all raised prices in one way or another.

And in some cases, multiple times over the last year or two.

And like in Sony's case, it's gone back like three or four years.

Um, I think what this says, the fact that they continue to do this, is their belief is that things are not going to get easier for making electronics.

Sourcing materials is not going to get easier.

The tariff and market situation and the relationship between countries is not going to get better.

If this is a bellwether about how corporations view our international cooperation levels, it's a bad sign.

I think it also says that even Nintendo knows...

They got to make more money from the same people because they're not necessarily going to be growing the console market by leaps and bounds by bringing in new people.

And so it's about nickel and diming the same ones that are sitting around that have been playing their games for forever.

And that's also not a great thing. So it speaks to an underlying sort of ailment at the heart of selling video games to the console audience.

And it's a sign that we're not in necessarily a great place, even though Nintendo is making a ton of money.

All right. Cool. Yep. Cool. This almost certainly doesn't stop, right?

We're probably back here in within six months to a year, probably talking about that switch to price increase.

Like, yeah. And the rest of the stuff doesn't go down in price at that time.

So. All right, Bioshock 4's leadership replaced as 2K insists it's committed to delivering a great game.

Take two has replaced the leadership, Kelly Gilmore, who was the studio head of Cloud Chamber.

She's left the company. And then they moved Hogarth De La Plant, who did a bunch of stuff on the original Bioshock games, to a publishing role, but also removed as creative director on the game.

The reason given for this is, and this is from reporting from Jason Schreier, that the game was up for an internal check with the publisher, 2K Games.

2K went and looked at it and said, we are not happy with this.

And specifically because of the narrative, right?

The narrative is a problem. Not enough lighthouses.

Maybe not enough lighthouses. You got to have at least one.

They had zero. That's a big oversight. They also canceled a Bioshock 1 remake earlier this year.

Yeah. I can't... It's hard for me to imagine what could possibly be wrong with a story that the company's like, yeah, let's delay this thing and remove the leadership and start reworking everything so we can release this game later and spend even more money on it.

The story must be either... Yes, they're saying narrative.

The narrative must either be broken... offensive like unfollowable or the executives are like this is too woke and we don't want to draw the ire of trump like i think there's a strong chance that this is like criticizing uh political figures the way a bioshock game might have done in the past and i think in response to infinite's criticism of that being to uh both sides they're like well watch we can we don't have to go both sides we can really just do pointed criticism and maybe the leadership doesn't like it.

That's me speculating. I'm just baffled at how you get to the point of, we hate this narrative so much, we need to spend more money making this game.

A video game executive does not strike me as the kind of person that would care about that.

Yeah, it seems really strange. Again, I have... criticism of Infinite's story, the post-sizing for sure, but also just that it started off as like a takedown of nationalism, right?

Like, oh, we're gonna talk about that. Yeah, that was a disaster.

But then by the end of it, it's like, oh, well, how about instead of that, wouldn't it be crazy if there were two of you and one was from an alternate universe?

And it just became multiverse swap. age is like a diaper in the hot sun.

I think like, yeah. Uh, but my least favorite video you can quote ever, I think is the whole, there's always a lighthouse.

People love quoting that. No, there isn't.

There's two times there was a lighthouse.

Shut the hell up. As someone who will really fucking die on a hill for Bioshock as a IP.

I like, I love the first one is one of my favorites.

Okay, cool. So we could be friends. Um, but yeah i i don't know i mean i kind of don't care i just want i want to know like where the fuck judas is i didn't realize it's a separate game from a separate developer yeah but also at 2k though it's a 2k project right yeah um i think i think that's supposed to come out next year or something or maybe this was i i don't know people mentioned when we were talking about this on the other show in chat like there was some data attached to judas um or maybe there wasn't uh they're both they both have been in development for a very long time bioshock 4 has been in development apparently for 10 years what 10 years now 10 go 10 earth years 10 earth human years and it's um You could see like, okay, yeah, maybe part of the early part of that was like a lot of pre-production.

That's possible. Whatever. That is all costs because they all have to employ people at Cloud Chamber Games to make that.

Now, that is maybe the frightening side of this is following up from this, executives from 2K went to Cloud Chambers like, we are dedicated making sure the game is good.

Now, we wouldn't mind some more efficiency and maybe streamlining, making you guys more, wink, agile.

And everyone's like, oh, okay, they're going to lay us off.

They're going to lay a bunch of us off. And so those fears are now at the studio.

But they like, I remember Infinite being like, man, that game has taken a long time.

This is a big production and they are, they have to get that thing right.

And then it has to sell a ton to justify as much time as they spent on it.

And it didn't, it was kind of like a pretty good game that, you know, I have my issues with it, but most people thought it was a pretty good game and it kind of did okay, did fine. they're kind of, it's even worse this time where it's like, it feels like the game is going to miss even harder and then also is taking even more time.

So it was probably more expensive than even Infinite was.

It's wild. Yeah, I guess I just hadn't been paying attention to what was going on with Bioshock 4.

I can't believe the 10 years thing knocked me on my ass.

I'm sitting down, but it still knocked me on my ass.

That's unbelievable. And just to be clear, like, Levine, he has nothing.

He's just on Judas. He has nothing. He's over Judas.

He's on Judas, which is a video game. That I wonder if it's ever going to come out even more.

Oh, stop it. I'm sort of like a little excited for it.

Yeah. Part of me is like, I'm trying to be careful because I'm trying to remember.

I can't remember what the details were, but I thought I heard.

I thought I heard that game was in trouble at one play or another in my life, but I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, definitely Infinite was weird because I think also it was the mechanics, too.

Like the development of it. Like, I remember everyone remembers that one E3 demo.

Yeah. And then what the game wound up being.

The funniest thing in Infinite, too, is, like, in Bioshock, there was, like, you know, it kind of made sense.

Yeah, there's, like, there's tonics or whatever, and they give you powers, and it's kind of tied into this.

And then in Infinite, it's just like, here's the magic juice, so you have the magic abilities, like, in the last game.

Don't worry about it. You can still shoot bees from your hands or whatever.

Yeah. It just felt less considered on all those fronts.

And Bioshock is one of the more considered games of all time.

So it just is a little baffling. Massive for the porn industry, though.

I'm sorry? Those character models from Bioshock Infinite have been used in so much Steam filmmaker porn.

It would blow your eyes and the back of your skull.

I think advancements in actual 3D animation were made because people wanted to make porn based off that game so badly.

It's a little Easter egg there, I guess.

Source filmmaker. Thank you. Okay. Yeah.

Good for them. Yeah. Wild story. Yeah. That's, that's, I, the woke stuff just, I mean, right.

But like, tell me another reason that an executive would care about the story of a video game that they are trying to make money from.

Yeah, I don't know. It would have to be so bad.

I guess I don't want to believe that. Right.

We also got a Superman that I feel like flies in the face of that.

I don't know if that memo has gone out to the rest of the executives in that sort of community of creative industries.

I think, yeah, James Gunn has the power to say, fuck all y'all.

I'm going to make the movie I want to make.

I don't think David Zaslav was like, here's my directive.

Get out there and give me a James Gunn positivity.

No, I know. I know. I know. I know. yeah that's that's nuts maybe yeah maybe it's just a shitty story i don't know it could just be a very shitty story bad but i wouldn't be surprised i wouldn't be surprised if it was right right it wouldn't surprise i just don't i like don't want to believe it yeah yeah uh all right so that's bosh apparently lexi and chat said judas has been in development for 13 years what Yeah, I don't know.

What has happened to time in the last 15 years with Bioshock-inspired games?

That's wild, but that's also just two games worth of development for normal time right now.

It's like, yeah, you could get maybe two games out in those years.

All right. Let's see here. There was a bunch of news out of Evo.

We'll hit some of it. Mortal Kombat Legacy Collection is adding Mortal Kombat Trilogy.

It's also getting a bunch of physical versions for Xbox.

But that's like a limited run. And then PlayStation and Switch are getting like full versions.

The Switch version is even getting the full game on the card.

And I think it's going to be $10 more expensive than the other platforms because they're going to put it on one of those 64 gigabyte cards.

So that's the compromise there. It stinks, but also the justification all lines up.

And it's like, it's either this or it's going to be on a game key card.

What do you guys want to do? And I think most people who care about this will be like, we'll pay the extra $10.

Yeah. But yeah, excited about that. Virtua Fighter 5 has a new stage that they introduced.

Let's see, they also showed off the first in-game fighting footage, and it almost looked like prototype footage, but it looked very good for Virtua Fighter Project from RGG.

Mike, did you check this out? What did you think of it?

I did check that out. I thought it looked really good.

Before, it was like, oh, not actual gameplay.

And this time, I think it was more like, no, this isn't running.

But with an engine, we got to see Sarah.

It's some guy in a hat whose name I didn't know.

I think it looks great. I'm so ready for Virtua Fighter to come back.

That was like... One of those, I was there, I remember how important that it was.

Yes, it was so huge. I'm curious because Virtua Fighter is kind of two things where it is very pick up and play, especially those original ones.

And then it became very technical. And I'm like, which one of those do you lean into now?

And I think you probably got to lean into it being sort of technical.

Ideally, you want it to be both. where you can't pick up and play, but also there is all this depth.

Because at the core, it's a two-button fighting game.

Even up to five, it basically was that. I hope it kind of still stays like that.

I hope they don't do things like add super moves.

So they specifically talked about that, Mike, and they said they are avoiding that.

This is supposed to be a more grounded fighter.

And yes, give me that. That always has been Virtua Fighter, but I think...

With the way this game looks, it lends itself even more to kind of being like, hey, this is going to be the Kumite video game.

Like, here's just a tournament of fighters that don't have fireballs and stuff like that.

And I want it. Yeah, even compared to like a Tekken, which like is, you know, martial arts, but it gets pretty wacky.

And that's fun. That's good for Tekken. I want Virtua Fighter to be a little bit more grounded and normal.

Yep, the characters were Akira or Akira and Sarah.

That's just Akira's new look. That's his new look, yeah.

He's got a new hat. Right, you should get excited for it.

Also, quick correction, world stage is apparently a single player mode for Virtua Fighter 5 Revo.

It just said world stage and I'm like, I don't remember what that is.

There was a bunch of other stuff like news for the season pass for Hunter Hunter.

There's a new character for Under Night Inbirth 2, I think.

A bunch of stuff like that. They showed off Omni-Man for that Invincible Versus game.

Oh, cool. Pretty promising. Yes. Very cool.

Yeah, I played that at SCF. It seemed fun.

Pretty Mortal Kombat-y. Right. Yeah. And that's kind of you can see the lineage there.

Marvel Tokan was definitely the big winner of the week in terms of getting people's attention and excitement.

They showed off quite a bit of it in various forms, and then they announced that there is a closed beta coming up September 5th through the 7th.

So that's next month. I think the details about how to get into that are out there, so go check that out if you want to try to get in.

I have a correction. It wasn't even Sarah.

It's Stella, Sarah's daughter. Okay. Oh, my gosh.

Next generation shit happening. Gotcha, gotcha.

She was dressed almost exactly like Sarah used to.

I just looked at him. My brain was like, yep, Sarah.

Sarah Bryant, right? Is that her full name?

Yeah. Yeah, because their brother was one of the other characters.

Right. All right. Let's see here. Oh, and Ken is in Fatal Fury City.

The wolves. We knew he was coming, but they shadow dropped him.

So he's available now in the game. I'm like, Ken, Michael, check this.

Sure. Yeah. Ken's the I don't know. I played a little bit of that.

And then pretty quickly, I was like, this is a lot like Street Fighter six.

I think I might just be playing Street Fighter 6.

In fact, I have been. Because of some of the Evo hype, I was just messing around.

Like, oh, I want to learn Zangief better.

I got pretty good at the 360 motion. I was just doing some arcade runs while watching the tournament.

It was a lot of fun. I was enjoying Evo.

Marvel's Capcom 2 Grand Finals were great.

I loved... Capcom vs. SNK 2, Street Fighter 6, always a good time.

Even watch some Granblue Fantasy versus, yeah, Rising, whatever.

Yeah, Rising EX. The one where all the pretty anime people fight each other with swords and stuff, and that was a fun one to watch.

Yeah, that got new characters as well. Tekken 8 showed off Armor King, which is coming to the game, and they also showed off, I think, the last...

New fighter, which is a legitimately new fighter.

Bikini Lady. Yeah, Bikini Lady. That's, yes, she is a Bikini Lady.

Miari Zoe from Madagascar. She's coming this winter to the game with a new stage.

Armor King is coming October 13th. And then Sea Viper in Street Fighter VI.

Which looked great. I thought she looked fantastic.

Very excited about that. Speaking of the Gooners, she moved her tie over now so we can see more of her cleavage.

That was nice of her. Yeah, she just points it right at the screen and fires them away.

Yeah. Okay. And also, it doesn't end there, Bacalar.

A lot of the characters are getting their swimsuit costumes based on that old Street Fighter 2 art.

And boy, the tan lines are just poppin'.

More poppin' than they've ever been. They know.

Okay. Yeah. It is like, it is, because no one seems to mind.

I don't think they should mind, but boy, they really, it's just, all gooners go, right?

The gooners have won, yeah. It's just, that's just where we are.

We'll look back on this era as it was their time.

The time of the gooner. All right, let's keep going here. nintendo wants to know your thoughts on its divisive game key cards they put out a survey they did a survey in japan a few weeks back now it's here and people are like sharing this around being like go fill this out go fill this out to let nintendo we are not happy with these things basically they just want to know how you buy your games what convinces you to buy physical versus digital and a lot of people are using this to voice their opinion on game key cards and how unhappy they are with it um You know, Nintendo is probably like going to look at the number, the sales numbers more than this, but I'm sure they will use this to help fill in, like come up with a decision about how to move forward with making their deals with the company that provides them with the ROM and the flash memory that they put into these game cards.

And maybe this expedites their efforts to get smaller game cards, 16 and 32 gigabyte, that are more affordable so that they can help out third parties sell more of their games on actual game cards as opposed to game key cards.

But people are using this as a moment, and we'll see if they're able to accomplish anything.

I don't know. Do either of you guys buy much physical on Switch 2?

Zero. I mean, for one thing, I'm getting code sometimes still, right?

Same. Same. Even if I wasn't in that world, even right now with the few game cards I have, I'm like laying in bed or I'm out.

I'm like, I want to play this game. Oh, that's one of the few games I own physically.

And it's all the way on the other side of the room.

That's how bad I am. No, I'm fine with digital games.

I know. I just am. Yeah, I just, you know, I feel like we just got finished talking about them raising prices of ancient hardware.

Like, I want to, I don't know, I don't think you're ever going to get any win with them, right?

Like, I'm surprised there's a survey. What's going to happen?

This would only, like, right, this only helps us if it is combined with sales data that tells them, okay, people aren't happy with this.

We've got to move some stuff, make some moves to get them more excited to spend more money.

And it's like, then they use this information they get from the survey.

And maybe that's why they're doing the survey.

Maybe there's early indicators that they have that game key cards aren't selling the way that they expected them to.

I bet that is the case. But that's the only reason that they would make any changes here.

Yeah. Starfield is reportedly targeting PS5 release in 2026 following weak sales of its first expansion.

Yeah, that's mostly the story here. Not too surprising.

All the Microsoft games are coming to PlayStation 5 now.

There was a time when this game was about to come out where internally they said that game will never go to PlayStation.

And boy, that has changed a lot. And now everything's going to PlayStation.

Yeah. This will probably coincide with the release of their next expansion for that game, which has got to be better than that first one that people seem to really hate, except for Greg Miller.

Yeah, this game was never going to be exclusive back when they thought this was going... It was never going to be multi-platform back when they thought it was going to be the big exclusive to save the Xbox Series X, right?

That didn't happen. Do you have any indication that the performance and reception of Starfield was wildly a surprise by... the makers and the public?

I mean, a surprise is tough because it's like, as they're putting it out, like, are they getting mock reviews that, like, shape things?

Even the real reviews were good-ish, right?

Yeah, you're right. Yeah, they were mostly good-ish.

I think that, like, overall, like, when you look at the lifetime of the development of that game, from its conception through to the release, that I would settle at it's probably a pretty big surprise because they built that thing to be... what Skyrim turned into.

The game that can last forever. And they didn't build Skyrim that way.

They built this game that way. to be able to like, hey, we have all these features that enable you to play it over and over again for forever.

And it's going to be different all the time.

And it's really going to accommodate those players.

And they did that part fine. They got everything else kind of a little bit off or, you know, very substandard.

And I think that they were so focused on that that they didn't realize that people weren't going to just be happy playing the game.

And I bet that did catch them off guard for the most part.

And, you know, the performance of that game definitely was weak.

There's no doubt there. Okay, let's see here.

Battlefield 6, we got a lot of details of that game.

You know, Vince Zampella's in charge now, the guy from Titanfall, the guy from Respawn.

He says they want this to feel like a spiritual successor to 3 and 4.

People are feeling that way. As a reminder, people are very hot on the previews of 2042 as well.

So I'm skeptical, although it does feel like this game maybe is even more well put together than 2042 was at this point.

They also promised to have... They're going to sell skins.

They promise to keep them grounded, to keep them feeling like they would fit with the rest of Battlefield.

So what does that look like? You know, a bunch of different fatigues, I guess.

But people are very precious about this and they're happy to hear that.

We'll see how long that lasts. They don't plan to put it on Switch 2.

And they made a big deal about like, hey, we got a lot of veteran DICE developers, but we also brought in a lot of new blood to kind of reinvigorate this game.

And now they have to sort of deliver on all of that.

Now they... are are giving us some details games out later this this year uh they there is going to be a battle royale mode um but like they still have to kind of sell this game and it is going to be i think it's going to be 70 here and 80 euro i think as i don't know if that's been confirmed in europe uh it's got a big uphill climb to sort of reach the place that they want it to be but at this point it feels like it's in a pretty good position as long as everything else like delivers like they have not stepped in it yet like are you guys feeling any more confident about battlefield at this point i mean the only sense is like boy the pressure is on and you know sometimes that can lead to good things sometimes it just doesn't really matter or it can Make things worse.

I don't know. They got me a little bit just from that trailer when they played the classic Battlefield song in the middle of it.

I'm like, okay. Oh, I did like Battlefield a lot once upon a time.

So I'm rooting for them. I really am. I'd be down for it if it comes out and is this great thing and I'm able to play some Battlefield for a bit.

I mean, I'm already more excited about this than another Call of Duty Black Ops again, again, again already.

That's the benefit. Yeah. that Battlefield has, the thing it's got going for it is that it does, whether or not the game is good, it does wait the right amount of time in between Battlefields.

Yeah, they do let you miss it a little bit, yes.

Especially if you're not, like, if you didn't get 2042 and you were, like, into 1, it's been a hot minute.

So that there's something there. OK, so the other side of this is there is going to be a beta for the game.

Closed beta starts in two days on the 7th.

I think it's going to let you play around with quite a bit of the features.

And then there's an open beta that's tacked on to the end of that that will start on the 9th.

I believe that's correct. But the closed beta starts here very soon.

I think to get into that, you might have to preorder.

I have not. looked at the details of how you get in people if you care about that go check it out yourself uh but it'll be on the open beta should be available on ps5 xbox series xns and pc so you can play it where you want uh all right uh last story here the power rangers are headed to fortnite baby uh fortnite chapter six season four details that's a big deal hoping it would revive our boy It's morphin' time.

It's morphin' time. It's morphin' time for you to go to bed.

Yeah, morph yourself into the fetal position.

Into an isolation chamber. Yeah. This is starting in two days as well, August 7th.

You'll be able to start this news. I thought I was out.

I thought I could resist with the Power Rangers, gang.

No, they're going to get you back in. Can I play as the White Ranger?

I'm glad I didn't say White Power Ranger.

That's got a different tone to it. Wow. No, we liked him better when he was green anyways.

Is this like one of those things where the whole season is based around them?

Or are there going to be Zords in Fortnite?

Because that would be cool. Well, so like, let's see here.

Let me read the details because Jan kind of added this and I was excited for him.

Confirmed collaborations for the season.

Part of the upcoming Battle Pass includes Halo UNSC Spartans, Power Rangers, cosmetic content split between Battle Pass and Item Shop.

Battle Pass. Yeah, it sounds like this the whole season because Tier 100 unlocks Tommy Oliver's White Ranger skin.

Good. I can leave him there. You don't need him.

They never needed a sixth ranger. The five of them were fine.

But green was my favorite color, and I got really excited when there was a green ranger.

Fair enough. I know what happened, Jan. You loved the red ranger because he was your Leonardo.

He was your Cyclops. And then they kind of replaced his leadership position with Tommy, and you've never forgiven him.

100%. We all know I like the Boy Scout character.

And then the Boy Scout character apparently wasn't cool enough, so they introduced the bad boy.

The bad boy of games media, the Mike Minotti of the Power Rangers.

I am the Green Ranger of Giant Brawl. I agree. uh all right yeah so yeah that's gonna be the focus of the season is power rangers um cool yep also to add because you know i'm the guy yeah you're a fortnight guy reading all the fortnight leaks i got i got my spiders apparently uh satama from one punch man is gonna be sooner than later which selfishly i'm very excited about uh so that's gonna be awesome Oh, man.

Oh, this trailer for the Power Rangers. It's so good.

It's really good. Yeah. I really do hope, like, God, if you can, like, get Zords and if, like, five people can, like, meet with their Zords and become a Megazord, somehow they'll pilot it together.

Can you imagine how sweet that would be?

That's cool. That being said, if they drop an emote where it's Tommy playing the dragon dagger and it goes...

Oh yeah. Yeah! I will lose my shit. Yeah, it's good.

Yeah, I mean, there are zords in this trailer, so... Hell yeah.

I hope that that's what they're promising.

I like when they're all dinosaur zords. That was the best.

Yeah, one of them was a saber-toothed tiger, so yeah, they got a little, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, well, it was dinosaur Jason. Dinosaur, I definitely put that in the dinosaur bucket.

If they're both in the footstones, it counts.

Yeah. All right. That does it for the headlines.

That does it for the news. I'm handing the show back over to Jan.

As long as he's okay, I can hand the show over to Bacalar.

Yeah. I want it. I want it. I want it. I want it.

We can hand it to Mike even. Yeah. You know what?

I'm going to highlight two emails, and we'll do those, and then we'll end the show after that.

Let's take a quick break. A treasure trove of bananas has been stolen, and it's up to Donkey Kong and his buddy Pauline to get them back.