Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Andrew Goldfarb (Special Guest) - Kinda Funny Gamescast Ep. 115

Episode Date: April 14, 2017

IGN's Andrew Goldfarb joins us to discuss Persona 5, Switch accesories, and how he handles news at IGN. (Released first to Patreon Supporters on 04.07.17) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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That's MVMTWatches.com slash kind of. Movementwatches.com slash kinda. Join the movement. Did you like that one, Kev? What's up, guys? Welcome to the first ever episode 115 of the Kind of Funny Games cast. As always, I'm Tim Geddes. joined by one of the coolest dudes in video games, Greg Miller.

Hi. And joining us on this illustrious show for the first time, the Dark Night of News, Andrew Goldfired. Hello. Yeah. Yay. I say it all time on the morning show. I've started calling Dornbush when we read his stories, the boy wonder of news.

Which is amazing. That's fair. That's about right. Yeah. It's like scary sometimes. I'm like, oh, God, you really are like five years ago, me? Yeah. I don't like it.

Does that end well? No, I mean, probably not. Although, like, since he's gotten like super buff and stuff. So he's like already doing what you did. He just took you five years. He's fast forwarding it. He didn't have to be bored in Texas for you to go. I was going to say, when does he go do his gearbox stretch?

Because you did get super buff. I'm proud of you. I did. way and you came back and I was like, I'm thinking about you. But then I got like real small again. It's because I have friends here. I have like stuff to do here. So I'm not like,

I'm not doing like the prison workout or I just have like nothing to do but like push ups and running and yeah, you just cut to you in the thing. You're like in front of a persona poster doing pull-ups. Oh my God. If you didn't know this is the kind of funny games cast each and every week we get together talk about video games and all the things we love about them. You can get it early on patreon.com slash kind of funny games or you can get it

late on YouTube.com slash kind of funny games. Either way, we appreciate you. But if you do it on Patreon, we appreciate you even more. Like Salem, Gondam, all Gondham did. Shout out to you, our Patreon producer for the Millennium, I think. I'm not sure how it works. I just don't understand when it became Highlander, where Stephen Insler murdered all the other people,

and then he got murdered, and Salem took over. Salem's there. He's out there. Is it a monthly? Is it you sponsored the episode for the month? You sponsor the month, but whenever people do it, there's been a trend where they just keep doing it. They're here forever.

Stephen Inzler had it forever. And now Salem Gondon, Maldon. Was there a conference? conversation somewhere where that baton was passed? Maybe there was like a trade-off. Yeah. Either way, I'm into it. I mean, we're proud of you guys.

Don't get around. It is very weird. It allows us to have cute young boys like Andrew Goldfart. Make his games cast. They flew me in. Yeah. Private helicopter. So Goldfarb, we have you here, which means we're obviously going to talk about one thing.

Dogs. Yeah. Persona Five. So Persona Five is now officially out in the Americas. Yeah. And Europe. everywhere. Great. It's been out in Japan forever. It seems like. Seven months, which feels insane. So this is our first proper time, Tom Up or Sonia. You played it a little bit the last couple

weeks. Yeah, for the last games castor we had, or two games casketo we had impressions piece up. Yeah, of like whatever it was, 10 hour, five hours, something like that. Yeah, I'm what, 15 or 17 in now? Okay. Yeah. So percentage wise, what does that mean? Nothing. That's jack shit. That's fucking terrible. Yeah. I've done one palace. I finished off one palace, which is the, you know, the main dungeons, uh, and it got introduced to Mementos, which is like the ever-changing, the old-school dungeons, we'll just talk about a second. Like the grinding dungeon, yeah, but it's totally like that thing of like, well, we're searching for the next guy. We gotta take down. Who's harder we steal the next? I'm like,

trying to figure it all out or whatever. Go, how far are you? Uh, so I've played it five and a half times, I guess, the game across two languages. Yeah. I have it platinumed in English and Japanese. Uh, so I started in Japanese when it came out in September. And I, I was like, I'm going to play a little bit and get used to the combat and I just beat it. How hard was that? Because you don't speak Japanese and there's no English option. So hard. Yeah.

There's, I mean, thankfully, a lot of the menus are in English. So I kind of knew what I was doing. I knew what I was doing as far as what I was selecting parent category wise in the menus. Okay. And then I knew how to save. And then for like recovery items,

HP and SP are really in English. So like that stuff, I was pretty good on that. It was harder. Like, I was terrified to get a status ailment because I didn't know. Which one I have? I don't know which.

item heals that. I was terrified to die because I didn't know which of my items. I would like trial and error like all my healing spells and be like, all right, I'm going to bring this guy. Nope, that just to heal somebody else. That wasn't great. So it was a lot of that. The heart reports. Were you taking copious notes to impossibly complicated notes? I was to the point where if I found an item I needed, I would take a picture with my phone and then like essentially like copy the Japanese characters by hand. And then I had like a Photoshop doc that was like this one equals revive. This one equals whatever. Yeah. It was a little. weird. So what about the story? Does it have English subtitles in it? Not in the Japanese version, no. They might have added it now. But that was my thing. So my playtime's all weird, because I skipped cutscenes when I was playing in Japanese, but also things that should have taken me one minute took me an hour.

Because it's like, go to the faculty office in the third floor. I don't know what's telling me that. So I talked to every single person and tried every single door to figure out what it wanted. And yeah, it took a while. This is endlessly impressive to me. Like, when I was in third grade, it is.

It is. It is. The most impressive thing I've ever done in my life is I beat Pokemon silver when I had it imported when I was in third grade and it was Japanese and I beat the game. At this point, I don't know how I did that. I could barely read English in third grade. I don't know how hell I did that. But it was the same thing of just kind of figuring out, all right, well, this squeakly line throws the polka ball so I can figure that out. But Pokemon doesn't really have a story. So it's kind of like over a while, you kind of figure out the status ailments how they look. So I'm like, all right, I know what's going on here. I just don't understand how you can play a game that like where the story like actually matters. It's weird because I kind of understood. I keep relating it to like when you're at a bar or restaurant and a movie's on on mute.

Sure. And you can look up at it and like if someone gets shot in the head, you understand that that guy got shot in the head. But you're not going to know why. Or like a good example is Bioshop. If you were to play Bioshock, not understanding. You would spoilers for Bioshock, sorry. I was just about to play it. You would know when Andrew Roshchok.

Ryan gets club to death, but you're not going to understand would you kindly. And you're not going to get like the context of the moment. So that was that was it for me. Like I knew broad strokes, but I didn't have a lot of context. Yeah. And then so I was kind of like preserving it in that way where like in English I still like was learning as it was going. Because I was like, oh, like that's why he hates that guy.

How many times playing the English version where you're like, man, I was so stupid to do it the other way. Like 50 at least. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

There were so many moments where I was like, oh, like that's why I'm fighting this dude. Yeah. Yeah. So weird. So my question comes down to on this Is that you get American English version You go through in platinum this How long does that take?

Well, that was weird because I Like puzzle solutions I basically remembered And I had a lot of like notes written down So like a lot of that stuff worked I would say around 110 hours Which is like surprisingly fast to get that Because the story itself probably takes 80 to 100 If you, you know

Do everything, talk to people. Yeah, yeah So I would say like 110, 120 It's a little hard because the way I do it, and I have some like trophy tips I can give or whatever, but like Hot tips. If you have a save on November 25th, that's the longest stretch of free time you'll get in the game. And so I even after I beat the game, I then would reload that save and just morning, noon and night just read books for two weeks to get that trophy or like morning and night play games to get that trophy or go fishing to get that trophy. So like I kept reloading the same save for that stuff. So like my play count, my play timer like isn't exactly accurate. Okay, okay. So do you like this game?

No, it's really bad. What if I did play in English? I'm like, oh no. Oh my God, this is horrible. So the question for me, as somebody that's never played a persona game at all, two questions. One, is this a good jumping in point? And two, how does this compare to the other ones? I think it's absolutely a good jumping in point because there's no, there's like some Easter relations and some things that sort of carry over, but it's like a final fantasy, like

new story, new characters, all that stuff. So totally good place to jump in. systems wise, like battle wise, it is by far the best. In the same way that if you play, because I started actually my first persona game that I like really played through was persona for Golden, like while you were

reviewing it. I've been talking to people about why for me this is such a special games cast to have you on is that it's totally the role reversal in a way of like I when I reviewed Golden for IGN or whatever, I remember when you picked it up and then you got obsessed with it. And so here we are and it's like you're still obsessed with it, but you reviewed it

and you know everything about this. And I'm still so, young in the game and everything's all everything's I'm like and mori the cat turns into a car like I'm like so excited about all this crazy shit is happening it's funny because you know how like I'm sure you guys have this too there's always like someone who recommends a thing to you and they're like you would love this and you're like yeah I'll get around to it like and you don't actually do it yeah that's been that was me with persona for a long time and I tried to play uh when I was big into PSP I try to play percent of three portable just like didn't like I was interested in it but like totally never dived in and then yeah when um when we got golden uh god did i it just hit the perfect like every note

for me and i i got like really into it and then i tried to go back to persona three portable after and it definitely you you felt like that it was like aged a little bit yeah of course of course like i love the i actually like the character's probably better in persona three and i like the story a lot but for sure like the systems feel a little worse than in golden um so as far as jumping on point like five totally makes golden feel that way now like for the review i went back and played a little of P4 and I was like oh no like I love this game I love replaying it but it's like so hard to go back to you now yeah yeah well that's I mean for me you know jumping in the persona 5 it is that thing and I know what you're saying because I've gone back since and looked at videos of persona 4 golden but it is of like oh yeah this is persona 4 doing you go back oh no this is not what persona 4 look like or felt like or it is those systems but it is the fact that I was telling uh Kevin I think earlier today or somebody else maybe Nick about the fact that as far as Nick loved it. As far as a jumping in point, though, the fact that I feel like persona 5, even though I've played, what, I started with three, then reviewed portable, then reviewed golden. The fact that the systems are being explained even better here, where I feel like I'm jumping in.

And this is why I recommended it as a jumping in point of like, you get into this. And it's not just like, oh, you should know how to do this. It is very much like this is. And they're saying it in a way that I'm always, I was like, oh, right. Like, I never thought about it that way. I never used it that way. Yeah, it's really tutorial heavy. But in a good way because I feel like it would be totally.

overwhelming if it wasn't. Like it kind of needs to be handholdy. And it's also like when I was playing through it, especially after having played in Japanese, like some of the tutorials, I was like, oh God, I wish I could skip these.

But then, you know, there is stuff like even if you played persona three and four front to back and you're obsessed with them and have done everything. Like there's still stuff like ranged weapons and negotiation that are actually going back to like persona two and that I, and that's the thing. It's for me starting with three,

I never knew about those. And so to have that in there, I'm like, what a cool. When I read your review and I went back, and I'm like, oh, I didn't realize this is a callback to the series before I even got there because I feel like I've been there so long. I was reviewing the stuff on PS2 IGN team.

You know what I mean? Yeah, it's crazy. It's weird because, yeah, like, I always feel like, I feel like because I really wear it on my sleeve and I'm literally wearing a persona shirt. Like I love the series and it like means a lot to me, but I'm totally like a late, like a bandwagon fan because I jumped in it golden. Sure. And so like I've gone back and played, um, I haven't beaten persona one.

I've only played one of the persona twos. Like I'm not as well versus. as I should be on like the old school stuff, but I do really appreciate watching the series evolve for sure because it's like it's really cool going back and looking at that history of, you know, like I don't think people think of persona

the way they think of like Crash or Tomb Raider or Mario or Zelda or anything, but it's been around for 20 years. Yeah. So it really does have like, like there's a, Shimigami Tense universe virtual boy game and it's like so insane that it's been around for that long.

Yeah, Jack Brothers is on Virtual Boy, which is like so weird to think about. And like Persona 1 is a PSO one game. Like it's crazy that it has that legacy. So I think in that way, like this does feel like the culmination of like everything it's been building to. Sure. But it's also for me, the improvements they've made to it where it is like, okay, I haven't played it before in a while, but the platforming around chandeliers or the camera angles or the way the story is told in flashbacks, like they're doing so many interesting cinematic touches that are really like, I think, you know,

persona for golden nailed it so much in terms of like, all right, here's characters you care about. And this really is the presentation of all the information. Yeah, I think that's where it's like the easiest way to explain why it's better is that um the dungeons in percent of four are visually themed but they're still essentially the same thing they're randomly generated hallways and you're working away up and up and up and maybe there's a room with some treasure or an enemy but you're basically doing the same thing these aren't that these are hand-built like defined dungeons they all have different puzzle types that like literally feel like different games like it's it's completely different and then if you want the grinding if you want that like randomly generated that's

mementos, which you were talking about. And that's such a nice throwback to it, because that is the thing of when I was going, you know, so I've polished off one palace, I've gotten into mementos. I haven't even started the second palace yet, which is the dungeon. And being in that first one, it was like, oh, man, this is so different. And first it was that thing of like, what is different about it? And I was like, oh, right, like, persona four, the way they randomly generate, even persona three, right?

It was like, that's fine, but it got so monotonous. Because once I got in and I was like, oh, my God, like, Rizze's world's a strip club. Well, that's cool. But then it was just like, oh, I don't know, it's just another fucking neon pink hallway that I'm going through. Here it is like there's the dungeons on the, you know, then there's the nice things, the chandeliers, the secret passages. How do you get through this wall? Yeah. Book puzzle.

Yeah, it's really crazy. And even, especially as you get further, like they get more complicated. They get more, they get bigger. Like the scale of them get so much bigger. I don't know. I'm just so impressed with like the scope of this game and how much it has because everything we're talking about right now is battle and like dungeons and all that. And that's half the game. That's not even counting how big Tokyo is and how like.

how distinct like Shibuya and Shinjuku and Akihabra feel and like just how accurate it feels to Japan. Like it's just such a incredible like improvement upon everything. Like what I keep saying is last year and this year, you look at like Zelda or Final Fantasy. And their big thing is breaking conventions, right? Like Zelda rethought everything. And Final Fantasy like totally took away turn-based combat and made it much more action-oriented and made it kind of Western influenced. And like that is awesome. And that really helped those games.

And I think, like, in a lot of ways, it made them more approachable and things like that. Persona takes the exact opposite approach. It is leaning so hard into a genre and leaning so hard into kind of, like, what it's built in the previous versions that, like, for me, it is easily the best turn-based RPG of 10, 20 years. Like, going back to that, like, S&S era. Because, like, it's impossible to compare to Krono Trigger or Final Fantasy 6 or the things that are, like, revolutionary. But I don't know that anything has felt turn-based-wise this good since at least, like, PSX2. era. Like, like, it's been a while since something feels this, like, genre defining in that way. Right. And that, and that's the thing of, like, what you're talking about? I think when, you know,

for me with persona, it is, oh, my, what's the next dungeon going to look like? And who's this next character? And in a momento's like, you know, who am I going after or whatever? But, like, it's the old persona trope of like, all right, you're back in your room. And it's like, oh, cool, I can I, I can't leave. Like, why didn't you just put me to bed? Why do you? Why do you just, you know what I mean? But it's like, no, no, the cat's like, stop me from going I'm like, what the fuck? Why am I even about doing this? Then I'll make lock picks.

No, no, you're tired. Go to bed. I'm like, put me to bed. So, and I think that's like, without, like, getting too specific, like, that is where this game gets even cooler because the confidons, which are social links are called, can even change some of that. Like, they can give you extra free time. They can give you, they now much more than just, like, you're spending time

with this person and you can date them. And, like, if it's a party member, they get, like, an extra attack in battle or whatever. They're now, like, game changers in a way that, like, they can actually affect the way you spend time in the real world or they can affect battle and they're like much smarter about like making them connected to what the person does. So like there's like this like watch

a politician dude and like he gives speeches and so he helps your negotiation and things like that and there's like I don't know I don't want to get into too to like specific examples but yeah like they are just so smart about it. Everything just feels so much more like well thought through. How's the story though? So when it comes to RPG specifically JRP's I think the story is kind of my favorite part at the end of the day like game plays always fun but it's always

the means to an end of getting to the next cutscene and all that? Like, how do you think it holds up? So to me and when I say my review, I do think it's the best one. And I will be curious to see what people think. I think the overall story is so much more like cohesive and it feels like it matters more to me. And you mentioned like the, so like the way the game starts, it just throws you in. And then it's kind of told in flashbacks leading up to that point. I like to call it the Maverick.

Because there's an old Melgift's a movie called Maverick that doesn't. And I was a kid that was the first time I saw a movie do that. It wasn't the first. It's a magic move. To you. That's where it all started. But yeah, like they're working their way back up. And that to me, like, it makes you a little more invested

because it makes you like, you feel like you're putting the pieces together and it has that almost like usual suspect style vibe where you're like waiting for like the missing puzzle pieces and stuff. And that was the thing of getting ready for this second, you know, my second dungeon, my second heart to steal. Where in the flashback she turns the pavement, and he's like, and how did this guy come in and play?

I'm like, ah, I don't know. I can't wait to find out. Let's go play the game. It gives you that cool thing where like you feel like you're like, you have a one-oh. up over the characters because they're like, who's our next target going to be? And you're like, oh, it's that weird dude I just saw. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I think they're really smart about that. Like, it is really long. And so I do think it gets into like some pacing stuff towards the end. But, like, it's all minor. I don't know. I don't think, I don't think persona three or four stories quite had like the weight that this one had, at least for me. Well, that's what I thought was really interesting about starting it, right?

And going into, and I fuck, I know how bad I am with the names, Camasito's dungeon, right? Okay, cool. And in the, thank you so much. And the fact that like when you start, when this, they start peeling back like what he's doing. And like, you're like, this is fucked up. And I was, and I remember, you know, I wasn't obviously ready to do any kind of review for it. But I put out a tweet at the embargo.

It's just like, hey, I'm super early. But like, I'm really into how like adult this story is. And then it was like, well, I guess like, prosona four. It was, you know, a guy hung himself. And like this is like, well, but it wasn't the same way where it was also very much like, well, right, whatever. You know what I mean? And this is the opposite of like, this shit's fucked up.

And people are in really shitty situations. and you're a dirtbaggy kind of kid. You're fucking, you don't have Dojima to fall back on this one, Dojima or whatever. Like, it's like, you're the guy taking care of you at the coffee shop sucks. I hate him. He gets better. I'm sure he does. Well, I mean, he's already trying to do that shit.

I'm like, I'm not going to forget. I'm not going to forget what an asshole you've been. How's the dating and all that stuff? It's good. I feel like, um, it, I think there's like more variation in the people. Like, like that you can date every woman in the game, basically, every social link. I do find it weird. It feels outdated to me

that you can't date any of the men. I do think that's weird. Like I've talked about that and beyond. It feels like a weird omission to me to not at least, if they don't want to do same-sex dating, they could have gone

the person three portable, like give me a female protagonist option or give you the option to date more people. But it just feels really weird how blatant it is when you like level up a female protagonist or a female confidant

and it's like, hey, are you going to be a romantic or platonic? And then you do the man and it just ends. And it's just like a really weird I felt that gap, I think. But I do think like the actual, like, relationships themselves are more interesting and more varied and feel less obvious than I think they did in P4.

Well, it's just the same thing too. Like everyone, so far, everyone in the confidence I have, like, I'm way more interested in their story, in their backstory, before I got there, where Chi A was just like, I'm good at sports and I love me.

And I'm like, I love you. Cheea, don't get me wrong. We're like, we're just kids, whereas this does feel like there's like a real high school drama kind of thing happening there. Yeah. Yeah, and there's like a range of ages

and genders and circumstances that I think help a lot. It doesn't just feel like you're like, this guy in a school uniform or this girl in school uniform or this guy works a part-time job. It's much more varied than that. And it's people that have like kind of... And plus, like, the way the ones you unlock are tied to the areas of Tokyo you can visit.

So, like, they have much more, like, distinct circumstances. Like, when you're in Shinjuku, it gets a little seedier and there's, like, a bar available. So, like, there's, like, someone who's, like, a drunk journalist that you can have a confidant with that's very different than someone you would meet at, like, you know, convenient. sore standing in whatever in the square of the subway.

It's really good. It's a great game. I'd be genuinely curious to see what you're doing. My thing is so much about this is intriguing to me. Love anime, love the over-the-topness, love the art style, love the idea of the dating and all that and like all the more adult themes and all. It all sounds great. It's just, man, 100 hours.

Yeah. I'm like, I just, when it comes to story-based things, like I would be in this for the characters and story, that just sounds like a bit too much. Yeah. I mean, especially now. Like, I mean, we're in this word boat where, like, games get delayed so often and it happens and happens. But now we're, like, living through all that Q4 stuff that got delayed to Q1. And it's like, oh, no, it's Zelda and it's Horizon and it's this and it's near.

And it's all these games that are like really, really, really good and interesting, but require a major time investment. And then that's not even to mention like Night in the Woods or like these smaller games of ukulele that seem great. Snake pass. Yeah, like there's so many things I would love to put 10 or 15 hours into you. But, you know, like, the fact that I haven't played a new Mass Effect game blows my mind. Like, I love that series so much. And like, I, like, there's a PS4 exclusive that everybody universally loves that I have barely touched because of Zelda. Like, I haven't touched Horizon.

That blows my mind. Yeah. Persona to me, I think, is a perfect example of the type of game that I know that I don't really want to give a chance because I keep trying to find excuses of why I'm not going to play it, whether it's saying it's too long or now I'm like, oh, well, if this is portable, I feel like I have a better chance to play. I'm like, that's bullshit. I didn't play for sort of four. Yeah.

And like that was portable. But it's just interesting that so this is out on PS3 and PS4. And it is coming at a time, especially in America now, where there's so many of these games coming out. So I'm interested to see how it does. But I also don't think that Alice is expecting it to like, you know, blow the fucking doors down in terms of sales. The reviews are so good.

And I'm sure everyone will be playing it on Twitch. So so many people will see these live streams. So Tom of the Twitch thing. Like, do you? Do you really think that that's going to affect them that negatively? And also, don't you think that they'll change it? Because I think that it's been out in Japan. They haven't changed in Japan.

I feel like there's not necessarily a Japanese Twitch audience. To bring everyone up to speed. We're recording this on Wednesday. On Tuesday, the game came out. And the Atlas put out a statement that was basically like, hey, if we obviously have disabled streaming and screenshots in the game, which is so fucking stupid. It's insane. And then it affects my whole brand on Twitter.

I know, right? I know. I'm like, do I want to take photos of the screen? And then they were like, hey, if you're going to stream. it, please don't, and this is to everyone, not the press. If you're gonna stream this, please don't stream after in the game July 7th. Or there'll be problems, wink.

That was, what the fucking talking about? The more insane thing is that the post they put up is literally copy pasted from our press embargo. So it's literally like, example of how to talk about the game, good and bad. And I'm like, you can't say that to people who bought the game. Your customers. It's crazy that they're like, they just don't,

this isn't enforceable to me. Like, even the Twitch streams and everything, Like I don't understand the amount of manpower it would take to look through every single person who puts up a 91 minute let's play or who streams past a certain date that's impossible to recognize without watching each video. Like I just I don't understand how they could possibly enforce it. It's also not to mention the fact that I think in a, there's not a large section of the audience, but there is a section of the audience who's bought this game who's going to stream it or put up letsplays who they're not following IGN or polygoner. But they have no idea you said this. Yeah. And this isn't in your game.

This isn't in your like terms of service when I say okay. Yeah. And I mean, as far as your question of. it. In the long run, probably not that much. But I do, like I've seen people on Twitter

talking about, like Amanda Cosmos, who I follow pointed out that there's a lot of people who are artists who, while they're painting or drawing, they watch Twitch streams. And then they do fan art

related to a game. And then they put out that fan art and it gets 100,000 retweets. And like, yeah, that's probably a pretty small actual connection to sales. But in terms of like,

awareness. The best type of marketing there is is people that actually like the shit. And think about like, overwatch or something. something for example. Like it's it's all of the people who are drawing fan art and talking about the game and buying all the merchandise and all of that stuff. Like that is a small part of the machine and Blizzard is so much bigger than like an Atlas game and a kind of niche JRP. But I feel like

they're preventing themselves from taking even baby steps towards that status by not allowing people to just stumble upon the game onto it. What I was talking about today is just the fact that I can't believe they're fucking up their goodwill like this. Is that Atlas has been a great friend to gamers. You know what I mean? And Atlas is the company that I think this game's going to do incredibly well. And I think what I've said before is that for me, it's the uncharted to uncharted two thing where uncharted came out and if you had a PS3, you played it and loved it. I mean, people talked about it four years.

So when uncharted two came out, if you had, by then people had PS3s and they're like, oh, I'll pick that up and I never played uncharted one. They understood persona four, you haven't not been able to hear about the game everywhere. Anytime Vita comes up, it's the best of Vita game. Everybody knows that. So like persona five coming out to the most popular console, like, okay, yeah, of course, I'll give that a shot. But then come on and say and like start hiding it and totally be tone deaf to what 2017 is to be a game's publisher.

I mean, I think there are people like we were just talking about how busy it is with Horizon and Zelda and all this stuff. And like there is a segment of people like maybe it's not millions, but there are people who like number one like you guys rely on playing these games as their job or number two who like to go home and unwind by streaming and by playing a game for their Twitch channels. And they will probably pick a different game now. Like they might have bought persona and now maybe they will just be like, you know what? maybe I will jump into horizon or mass effect or whatever it is. So I don't know, like, again, like I don't know that that's really going to make that much of a dent, but I do, I agree, it hurts their goodwill, and I think it hurts their kind of like that discoverability of people finding this game who might not have otherwise.

And, you know, what sucks about not being able to take screenshots or share videos easily and all the stuff is the game's beautiful. Like, that's the big takeaway for me is like, I love the framing. I love finishing a battle and that d-d-d-d-d-d-d-and-like you walking and all the stuff comes, and it's so stylized. And all the transitions, yeah. Yeah. It's really weird.

It's also, I feel like, Um, even having played the game many, many times, uh, the cutoff point feels really arbitrary to me. Uh, I don't understand. I just, I don't, that post was like completely, it wasn't out of left field. Like, I shouldn't be surprised by it because I, I understand that like, um, they're playing a little bit old school and that they're very concerned about spoilers. Sure. But it does just feel like it's like so aggressive and like I hate using terms like anti-consumer. Like that's, that's a little too intense, I think. But it, it, it isn't great for the people who bought your game. game, especially to do it after it's out.

After pre-orders have shipped. Like, it just wasn't great. It's just that thing, too, though. I mean, like, the game's been out in Japan. Like, you could watch the ending already. For seven months. I'm not, go on YouTube, search Persona 5 playthrough. Literally, you can watch a full playthrough of that game right now.

Yeah. And the whole part, you know, like, the thing about persona and playing persona is making those relationships and choosing who you want to invest time with and how do you want to expand your character and how do you want to fuse your personas and do all these different things. It's not about, well, in the end, who was the real bad guy? You know what I mean? Like, that was never. That's not what this 100 hour journey is about.

So why worry so much about this stupid thing? Yeah. Yeah. And plus like it's that thing where like we all know how the internet works. Like the second they were like, please don't talk about spoilers. Every response to that tweet is the ending of the game. It's all like, like don't go anywhere near Atlas's like official post right now because it's all spoilers. Yeah.

You want to transition out, I think. But my question would be then. So how hard was the platinum in English? Not that bad. It's really, I can't take me up there like this is worse than persona for gold than when the trophies popped. Some of it is. Like the, fusing the,

getting 100% the compendium, I think is harder this time around. So the ones that you think are going to be hard are actually not that bad. Like clearing all missions and even all social links are pretty straightforward. I made one stupid mistake,

so I had to do it in three play-throughs, but you can do it in one and a half. But the ones that are harder are, there's three that require new game plus. And then there's some missible stuff. Like the best tip I can give you is to, if you're trying to get read all books, I thought it was being so smart.

I was buying books for the whole game and I had all my time planned out and I was like, oh, I can spend like this many days like reading during free time. It'll be great. And the trophy didn't pop. And I was like, what? And then I realized there are books in the school library

that you can only get up until a certain point. So like the best tip I can give you is read all of those ASAP. Like get through, I think you unlock a new one every month up until November. Like read those as fast as you can and have them because then you can actually get the trophy. Gotcha. And then rotate saves a lot because. Yeah, you would put this one up that. Your Twitter is, I'm like, looking at it.

Like, yeah, these are interesting out your way. You're like, save every other day. Yeah, my advice is that you, you know, if you're playing the game casually, a lot of people reply to me, they were like, oh, this is going to be my first persona game, but that just scared the hell out of me. Like, play the game normally, it's totally fine. You don't need to be insane. But if you're trying to max out social links and max out books and max out playing games

and do all the social activities, uh, I recommend there's 16 save slots plus a cloud save slot. Use all 16 and then save every other in game day because that means if you really need to at any given point you can go back roughly 30 days, which means basically you can go back to the previous dungeon. So if you miss something or if you want to do something differently, it just gives you the option of going back, which you probably won't need. But like, for example, if I had known about not being able to get into the library after a certain point, I would have been smarter and, you know, play differently. And then when you got you, did you

figure all this out on your own or did you have to like the English fund them? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so the the trophies are the same. Because right now, by the way, you're the only person this platinum or the first person of this platinum right that's right yeah that's awesome i want to see if anyone just hasn't synced yet because i can't imagine i mean there i guarantee you that you're the first person only person there's some of the like the platinum didn't surprise me that much but there are some trophies where i'm like how am i the only person who like did this thing towards the end of the game that like isn't even that hard to do yeah there's like there's a lot that i'm very surprised if i really am the only one um yeah i figured them out but they're the things

that you would expect like the japanese trophy list for alive so i used google translate and i understood basically what was happening. And stuff like 250 navigation lines was a persona four thing. Yeah, which sucked. Is it better here? It is a little better, although I don't know if that's just because I knew to expect it. So I was just analyzing nonstop from the minute I got the navigator. Yeah, there's like things like that that are like it was very obvious.

There's going to be get every persona, complete every mission. Yeah, yeah. Get every social link. That stuff's clear. There's some that are harder. There's like some new game plus stuff that you, you have to do like certain things. And then you can only get the complete the compendium. one in new game plus.

So that one's hard to do because there are these remember the gold hands in person and four like the treasure monster and hated those things. So like there's an equivalent of that in this

and there's eight of them and they only spawn in either certain palaces or certain floors of mementos and that took me forever. And the reason I went back and got the Japanese one was because I had like

I think 65 or 70% of the trophies and I was like if I don't do this right now yeah yeah I will never know the game well enough again to do it. Sure, that's a good point so I went back and got that.

Yeah, yeah, no. Someone like across everything, I'm like roughly 220, 230 hours. The final question about persona here is from LP Fanatic forever. What's one piece of advice you'd give

someone starting persona 5 as their first persona? Not to get overwhelmed by the calendar thing. I think everybody the first time they play one of these games sees like, oh, you have to beat the dungeon by a certain time or you're screwed and then you get a game over and it feels very overwhelming. Like literally the loading screen in the

bottom right says take your time every time you do anything. Like, it is okay to take your time. It is like you will be fine if you pace yourself. The way dungeons work this time around is there are these safe rooms. And anytime, once you get part way through a dungeon, you can save and there's like maybe five to 10 of those per dungeon. Once you hit a safe room, not only can you save your game and leave and everything, but you can also fast travel to that safe room and between that safe room and other safe rooms. So if you get, you know, play through a dungeon for three, four hours, get to maybe the third, fourth safe room, then leave. go back, recover, take some casual time to like do some social links or do like activities and then come back.

But like the people who are who try and finish these dungeons in one go, I think are going to get burned out so fast. And just like especially on harder difficulties, you'll just be bang your head against a wall. So that would be my advice is just like don't get overwhelmed by the calendar system. Like it's actually really cool and fun. Also like you will never like you you won't lose those days. So if you do complete a dungeon one day, you still get the 10 days of free time or whatever after that. And that's why you can let it go longer too. That's always what I try to do is if I, when I'm like, oh, there, and I mean, previous

personas and now this one with off the one main dungeon of just being like, okay, cool, that's where it is. How many days do I have like three days left and I'll fuck around. Yeah, exactly. Because otherwise it is just that weird thing of like, well, we did it. And I did beat it early. And there was like, wow, I wonder if he's going to change his heart. I guess we'll just keep waiting and find out when they're the day's supposed to come.

Like, all right. It always reminds me of like in Massac 3 and they're like, the world is ending. We have to be fast. And then you're just like digging for war on a planet for six day. Or like Zelda's the same thing. Like I'm like waiting for a blood moon to unlock a shrine and like sitting there like days and days and days are going by. And I'm picturing Zelda in the castle like, oh my God, dude, I can see you from my window. Please come help.

And then my final question. Yes. Who's your girl this time around? Who you were in love with the resale back in the day? I don't know. Like I think Marie ended up being my favorite when all of a sudden done in personal four. This one's hard. Party member wise.

I feel like why can I say? the people are on the boxing trailers, I guess. The one who ends up being your navigator, I guess I won't give away who people are, is probably my favorite party member girl, but I have some weird reservations about story-wise, about dating her that feel really weird. My favorite person in the game overall,

I mentioned the drunk journalist, I think it's probably, or maybe the doctor. You just like Marty so much. Yeah, exactly. It's just like I had to, like, channel him into the game somehow, and it doesn't let you get date dudes. There's drunk journalist. Marty.

Marty Sleva. There it is, yeah. All right. Moving to something I can talk about. Ooh. Nintendo Switch. And it's accessories. So you have a switch.

I do have a switch. I have a switch. You have a switch too. Okay, cool. When did you get yours? How are you feeling about it? Well, I pre-ordered it, but then Amazon gave it to me like three days after launch. Shout to Amazon.

I love it. I'm a real weirdo. We were talking about this. I love portables. Like, I still love my Vita. I have not taken the dock out of the box yet. Like, I have only played this thing in handheld mode as though it's like a Vita. Nick's the same way, too.

I treat it like a portable system. I mean, 95% that's how I've played it too. Kev. Have you played with it attached to a TV? Wait, hold on Kevin. Kevin's going to throw a bunch of switches, turn on this microphone. Make sure it's working. I have not.

No, no, no. I haven't at all, actually. I just play. It's the way to be. Hell yeah. I would say that I'm maybe 60, 40. 60 portable 40 on TV. Yeah, I probably have put a grand total on a TV.

Well, I guess you count, not counting that week where I played the morning leading shows. it's probably been like three hours on a TV for Zelda. When you like this has like been a weird out of character quiet period for travel for me since it's been out. So it's like I haven't gotten that like plain experience yet either. So good. God it's so good. I can't wait. No, I love it.

I've beaten Zelda since the last games. Hey. There you go. I'm putting it off. So I have 118 shrines. What? Yeah. I have a I'm like taking my time.

I'm so weird. Like I played it so backwards. I unlocked the full map before I ever even went to Kakrico village. So like I've only talked to Impa like twice. And I've. done, I've done three Divine Beasts now. And now I'm going for memories. Like, I'm super taking my time.

Wow. So good. It is. It really is. I just had to get ready for Mario Card 8 though. Oh, yeah. That's the thing. I would like to beat it before then.

Yeah, you're pretty close. My thing with the reason that I play so much with the TV is I like the pro controller so much. Yeah. That it's not really comfortable playing the pro controller on the little screen, especially when I have a 65 inch TV. So I'm like, why wouldn't I just do this? Yeah.

And the pro controller, it's funny because like I think when more games are out for it, like I've played, at work and at events and stuff, I've played other games that are great. And like I like shovel night is incredible. I can't recommend that game enough. And like snake pass seems really cool. And have you played the shovel night specter of torment? I haven't yet.

No. It's so good. Oh my God. I'm excited. So I love shovel night. I didn't realize that this second round of DLC or whatever the hell you want to call it is a new game. Yeah. Like I've just been like I've been hearing and talk about all this stuff forever.

And we played me and Colin did a let's play of the, uh, plague night. D.L.C. I forgot what that was called. But it was just like you just plays as new character. you have different abilities, but it's the same game. Well, that's, Yacht Club is like, this has to be the most generous. Like, they are, because there are some Kickstarter I backed. Like, I still haven't gotten the physical stuff from my mighty number nine pledged like in 2013.

But then, like, shovel night is the opposite. They have been so good. And like, they could have called those shovel night two, shovel night three and made a boatload of money. But instead, if you backed it, it's still free. Like, that's crazy. And now they have the new treasure trove or whatever. Yeah. And so treasure trove is everything.

For all of it, which is awesome. And there's still more. The King Knight one's coming out later too. But playing the Plague Knight one, I didn't like it, didn't like how he played. And I was like, I already played the game. I don't need to do this again. But this one for Spectre Knight, first off, my favorite of the Knights. Second off, it's a prequel to Shovel Knight.

And it's reminds me of Mario Galaxy 2 from one where there's no more world map. It's just you just choose the levels and go to it. But they're the same style of level. It's just they're totally remixed to play for Specter Knight's play style, which is a lot more familiar to shovel night. Oh man, I'm blown away by how much they put into this game that is free for people that bought this game years ago. On any of the...

Your maker want to play it. It's like... Yeah, it's so good. It's exclusive to switch right now. But it's going to... Time exclusive. Yeah, but it'll be on everything. Yeah.

I mean, I'm in that boat where like that is when I think I'll start playing on my TV is when like other stuff comes. Because like Zelda, I'm playing in a very specific way where I set myself a little like microadventure every night and I give myself an arbitrary goal and do it. Like find a shrine or whatever it is. I think other. games I'll want it on my TV again. It's also like I'm less dominated by playing persona for review and playing stuff that like I knew I needed to get through. So now I'm like taking a breath and I'm like when I do beat Zelda, I'm actually going to like feel free to like maybe I will play. Come on. I want to do now. Yeah. Graceful explosion machine shout out by the way. Have you been playing it? Yeah. I'm still super into it. Yeah. I'm in the Nindi's event. I'm bummed that I missed the global test fire first for Splatoon 2. The times were so weird. That was so weird. Here's it. 55 minutes.

to jump into, like, what do you want me to do? Yeah. People seem to really like it, though, from NeoGaf impressions and stuff. So I'm stoked about that. Blastermaster, now that I'm done with Zelda, I've been going back and playing the E-shop game. Sure. Don't really like Blastermaster master too much. Yeah, I didn't do anything for me, but that's not my kind of game.

It is my type of game, it just felt, it felt wrong. I'm loving the Snake Pass. I do think that that's the type of game that I don't really want to be playing right now. Like, I feel like I'd rather ukulelea come, so I want to give that a shot. I really want to stay a fast. It's fun, but I just feel like the levels. they make you, they're so well designed

that they make you want to get all of the coins and stuff and I'm just like, I'm finding myself when G is watching TV that I'm like, I don't want to focus this much I don't want to do it right now. So I think I'm going to wait for a plane

because it requires a lot of focusing. But man, I love how that game controls. Sure. For as weird as it is, just being a snake, like it feels right. And when you fall or fuck up, you feel like you're responsible for it.

Well, that was the problem with the, not the problem, but the problem I guess of the game and why I agree with the IG and review that I read today or whatever. when it was just like the, I'm playing it. And yeah, I'm like, well, fuck. I thought I was just going to go through this and be done with the levels.

But no, I do want to get everything, get all these coins. And I did all stuff and I got all stuff. And then I fell and died and I came back and I was like, wait. And I paused it and I lost everything. I was like, motherfucker. That was the moment that I'm like, oh, fuck. Like, I need to focus on this. I can't just kind of fuck around.

That's the worst feeling. That's like my biggest gaming thing of like, like redoing something or like losing or like losing progress having to do something again. Says the guy who played a game five and a half times. Yeah. But like when you lose it and have to do it again, Yeah. Anyway, I've been happy with the switch so far.

Oh, me too. But I want to talk about the accessories and all that stuff because I've been doing a lot of research. I've gotten a whole bunch of shit. Some I like, some I don't like. Okay. So I want to start with the cases. Sure.

What case are you using? So on Amazon, these things are back ordered to hell. So it's like I was stupid and didn't pre-order a case. Like I had my system, my pro controller. You wouldn't think you'd need to. Exactly. Like, it just, if I had been buying a Vita 2 or whatever and thought of it as a portable, I would have.

But somehow I wasn't. I was thinking this as a console and not, I was forgetting the portable part. So look for a case. Everything's back ordered like two, three, four, five months. And I finally, like I had alert me notices set for like every single case on Amazon. Because GameStop was sold out, Best Buy was sold out. Finally, Amazon 4 Prime had a starter kit, like a PDP starter kit. So I have the Lynx tunic edition.

It is basically the same as that case on the inside. But on the outside is this very ugly like, yep, baby blue like imitation of his tunic with a Right gold zipper. It's just hideous. So it'll get the job done. I was like, I was thinking of it as a handheld. So I was like, okay,

cool, I'm gonna get a case. Didn't think I'd have to pre-order it because I'm like cases are things that you should get. But we did. You and I both pre-order the same case. And we pre-ordered the PDP case. So it's this one is one like out of, if you're listening at home,

this is the one with like big grade. But it's different than that. Oh, is it more similar to that. It's a hard case. It's a hard case and has room for a charger and it has like a flap with like cartridge. It's actually really similar to that one.

Go imagine this is Kevin's. This is the Nintendo Collectors Edition or the Zelda, Breast of the Lock Collegers Edition. It's fine because it is hard. I really like the inside of it because it is really, really padded. Yeah. Yeah.

And it has room for all the stuff. And you can carry a charger and you can carry. Yeah. It has a cool little like purse handle on the top. And it's going to protect things. I like the design. I don't like how it feels. I personally,

I don't like the like, all right, it's the actual in game stuff in here. It's like just give me something that looks sleek and cool. This is cool. I don't like how it feels. Like, This is all, what thing?

I mean, I feel's more, I mean, I'm using it. Like there's way too many edges. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's unnecessary. I love, I love the heart.

I'm fine with that. So this is my thing. Kevin, anytime you want to put goldfarb in the frame for what I'm talking. I think for me like I do like this. I'm away from the mic. I like this texture or this like toughness. It feels like it's going to protect it. The minute there's Mario ones, I'm going to get a cool Mario.

Okay. Like you know, you know for like each big release there will be themed merchandise. There will be Mario Car, there will be Splatoon, which will be cool, bright colors. Well, the more I look at that, I'm realizing my case completely ripped off this one. It is identical to this. It's the same Velcro Strap. It's this. Well, is the same material, too?

Yeah. I think it's just the Nintendo because this is an official Nintendo one. Yeah, this is just... Mine's made by PDP, but it's like almost a PDP version of this. And then the front of it just even uglier if you can believe it. So Nintendo... I think the Shika Slate is cool. I think the Shika Slate is cool.

I think the Shika Slate. Yeah, there is. You wouldn't know about it. The Nintendo licensed a hoary and PDP to do a lot of stuff. So a lot of these are officially licensed. This is a PDP case as well. Oh. So I do have the exact same case.

It's just a different outside. Yeah. So including the handle. I like things when they're sleek and a bit more fashionable when it comes to the cases and stuff. So when we saw this one, this is the charcoal PDP premium case is what they call it. That's the one that's the one. And I'm like, I like it visually. I was like, I definitely, this is the one that I want.

Now that I have it, fuck this. Oh, no. Take that for me. Sorry. Patreon didn't see that you're going to be in there. I had a nice camera. Didn't mean to do that. Um, that's a piece of shit.

Hate the case. Do not buy that case. Wow. I got one. Greg got one. Both of us are like, there's also different versions of that case. So there's one with like a bunch of Mario coins and stars on it.

There's like all these different like outer designs. My problem with it is just it's got such, I don't feel this protects anything. No, there's no protection. But that's even worse than that, though. Let me see it. The worst thing about it is not only does not protection. When you go on the inside Yeah

Just his weird bag Everything's gonna scratch the screen Yeah that's not great You're telling me that you're gonna put it against the actual Game Carts themselves or against this freaking Like this reminds me of like when you go to Ross To buy swim trunks I like having this

This strap This Velcro strap to keep it secure Yeah like I like traveling with it I also because I'm extra paranoid I put like an extra microfiber cloth on top of the screen and then put this down so it wasn't scratching. But see, this came with a microfiber cloth.

So I'll give a shout out to them for that. Yeah, that's the PDP one. See, we had ordered this one, the charcoal PDP one. And then the problem was it didn't come on time. So I was walking on my switch wrapped up in a t-shirt.

And then Nintendo sent me this one, the official Nintendo one. And that one is a kickstand, which I think is cool, but it doesn't protect. That's a kickstand? Yeah. So like this thing,

if you take that out, this thing, this one's what that is? I've never ever folded it out. You could now, you could basically do it like that. And then keep it in a plane and want to play with your broken control. See what I like is that's a lot of good padding.

I put it there, pat it up, done. And then I feel like I'm padded up. So that's my thing is then I wanted the Nintendo one. After I saw yours, I'm like, this is exactly what I'm looking for. Sold out to hell. Eventually, I got in when Amazon had like a quick chip. And I'm like, fuck yeah, I need this thing. But I love this case.

It doesn't offer as much as a hard case would. But I think it's fine because I'm never throwing my shit around. So I'm okay with it. Altono has both is this one, the figure slate one and that Nintendo one. And what he does is that's like his throw it in my bag, go to work. Morgana. That's his like throwing his bag, go to work. At work, Jose is all the Zelda amoebo.

So he scan them every day for all that crap you can get. So a lot of us bring our switches to work. But then this one is like his like let's travel. Let's go on a trip. Let's bring a charger. And like that's kind of the boat I'm in where the one I have is just hideous. But at least it'll get the job done and protect it. And then down the road, I really do think I'll get kind of a slimmer.

Like I really like that one. I love this. It has everything that I need. need. However, the one that I really want, Kev, if you can bring that up, I don't know where, I guess on the... The one you just had? The Waterfield Way one? Yeah, the Waterfield one. You had it. Yeah, that one. Oh, damn.

That's like... If you remember, this is Waterfield Way, SF bags on Twitter. You might remember these guys from Podcast Beyond because they made my Vita case, which is a smaller version of this. And I love that Vita case, because on the inside, it's super soft and awesome and it's protective and padded. But the problem with

this one is that this has been also back ordered fucking hell. So it's back order to hell. It is $80. So it's also pricey. But it is very much a premium case. And they have a giant one that you can put the dock in and the power brick in and all this. You can fit the dock, but you can fit a lot more than you can in this.

I think you can get the USB adapter in there. You can get a whole bunch of games and some even extra joycons and shit. Like that's my joy costs. That sounds intense and awesome. I've seen like even crazier ones. Like there are like actual like messenger bags with like a switch section inside of them basically. Well, these guys have that. That's basically that yeah this one but they them this is really tiny but they do have bigger ones as there. There you go that one right there. Yeah that's like that is like this is like you are that are all pro Mario Kart well you know what like what I can see that being is like probably what like IGN is going to get to like carry them to events and stuff like when we're gonna need to like plug in for direct feed and all that like that makes sense this seems a little bit like overkill for like going to LA for a weekend. Exactly wrap on my switch case. But I definitely once once it kind of settles down and these get a little bit more accessible I think I might.

bite the bullet and you get one. It's classy. They're really nice. I like the leather and I love your Vita case too. So, like, I'm totally, but you having,

having your Vita case and having this one, what are you thinking? I mean, I don't, this is fine. I'm, I'm more in the goldfarb camp of when there's a cool one that I think has a branding on it

that I like when Patapon's on there or something. You know what I mean? That's the one I'll be the one I jump over and get it's going to have. I think there's going to be a padipon- Switch case, huh? Well, there's a good dry bones.

When there's a good dry bones. There'll be like a flaming toast case thing. Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This, uh... The Sheka Slate one. This guy, the Shika Slate one, the collector's edition one, like, in the same as mine, I would feel so weird pulling out in public.

Whereas, like, that one, you were just showing me that, like, that's... Yeah, that looks like something an adult will carry. Exactly. Like, that no one's going to know that that's not just like... But they bring it out, you start playing your fucking neon blue toys, so who cares. Dude, this one's hot, though. Look at that shit. No, that wasn't a knock.

I'm just saying how long do we want to keep up the facade that were adults until you play your fucking toy? I'm on a fucking toy. fan of the adult thing, but I mean, they literally were like, hey, Tim, we're going to give you your blue. And I'm like, all right. I can't say no to that. If it was any other blue, I wouldn't do it. That also, like, even that, even with the blue or even with the red, like, that still looks more adult than like a big folding clamshell like the three. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's, that's true. So, my, so you're happy with your purchase of the joycons. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I mean,

like, so yeah, move it on to, before we move to controllers. My apologies. I want to talk about me, everybody. Screen protectors. There's a lot of screen protectors that I, that I I do not recommend it all. Don't do them at all. Don't do them at all. But if you want to, if you want to, the, there's all the, the PDP ones and the official ones, stay away from those because those are like shitty plastic and they're not going to feel good. The hoary one is okay.

The hoary premium one is better in the PDP one because I tried both. But I mean, they're both shitty plastic. They're still not like tempered glass. So the temper glass, they're cheap as hell now. Yeah. $10. There's three different brands of people that I know that recommend them. There's the Amfilm one, the Orsley, that's ORZLY, screen protector.

And then the one that I actually played with is the Anchor GlassGard Premium. They're all between $8 and $10. So it's like if you really want to have a screen protector, I think you're going to be fine. Or just grow up and don't use a screen protector. It's stupid. I'm less worried about the glass cracking. I'm more worried about scratches because this thing seems really susceptible to scratches. So what the scratches come in is the dock safety.

So I own two of these. There's been a lot of, you know, scuttle butts on the internet about, oh, you got to be careful because Nintendo are idiots and designed the dock stupid. And they did. So if you look inside, it's padded on one of the sides. Oh, they can totally see that. Yeah. But it's padded on this side. It's not padded on this side.

So when you put it in eventually around the screen, like the bezel of the screen, it's going to get scratched. And you can find a whole bunch of pictures online. To be honest, of a bunch of fucking idiots that are trying to scratch the dogs. Jamming it in. Right. Like, come on. But it's the internet. That's what it is.

But to get ahead of this, there's multiple things you can do. You can just go to a hardware store and buy little the rubber. Oh, the little nubs. Rubber nubs. That's like $2. You can just put them on the inside and you're totally fine. If you want something a little more, you know, visual, go on Etsy and just search for Nintendo Switch doc.

If you double back. Doc sock. If you double back and can you click on the Zelda map one? This is the one I bought. I have two of these now for the two docs I have at home. I bought it because it was one of those things. I was noticing what they're talking about here that there's like smudges there

and I was like, I don't care if it happens but if I can protect it, why? Why not? Does it look cool? I think so. You could just get colors. You could get, honestly, there are hundreds at this point.

Can someone make me a persona? I'm sure there is. Please let me know if anyone makes a persona doc song. But they range between $10 and $20. So if you were to do that, go for it. But I think I might do just the rubber. Yeah, that seems like my thing with the dock, like we were just talking about bags

and looking like toys and stuff. for someone with as many toys on his desk as I have, my apartment itself is actually like fairly adult. And like my entertainment center looks good. So I do think like if I'm, I still haven't taken that out of the box. If I'm going to put the dock up as much as I like would probably put a dock sock on if I had it.

I want it to look classy still. And I feel like the black looks fine. It looks fine. And so like putting things on the inside is more appealing to me than putting that whole like glove over it. But that said like, I will do whatever to prevent my like, you know, 250 or $300 thing

from getting scratched out. Absolutely. So you were talking about the, the controllers. Yeah. I was wondering if you, if you, like you're fine with your JoyCon decision here.

So I, I haven't talked about this in the show before. I was happy. Like, I was really hurt when Nintendo first announced the shit and you can only get the neon in the two different colors.

It's like, fuck. But now I'm happy because I'm like, my shit looks unique in the grand scheme of things compared to everyone else's. There's other people to have this

obviously. But like, I'm like, all right, cool. I like the mind's a little different. See,

the joycons come down to me in the same way of like, I like the kind of funny blue, but obviously it's your blue now. I can't take it. And so, and not what I want to take it either, because I don't love it. But it is for me of like, what's going to happen when they start releasing joycons in crazy colors and it's the clear throwback to N64. It is the solid

goal. Or just like the Famicom color. Exactly. Yeah, GameCube color schemes on there. And that's what's cool is like, unlike it with 3DS where like every time there's a new Pokemon one or a new Famicom one, I was like, oh, like, I want that, but I'm not going to replace my whole system. But now these are like, Obviously, assume these are region free.

So you'll be able to import like a cool, rare Japanese one. Not to mention that it just, it just added benefit to you because they are still just controllers. All right. Cool. Somebody else is here here. Play Mario Kart with this rather than us having to figure out how to do this. Yeah. So because of this, I had to buy the extra pair.

That's 80. I got it for $80. Steep. But I was like, I know I wanted an extra set for multiplayer games at my house. I wanted to make sure that I was. And for even when they're just long bad. I wanted four controllers. So I bought two pro controllers and one set of joy concerts.

so I was set. That was 80 bucks. Now you can find a set for 60 bucks on Amazon, like as low as 60 bucks. If you just wait and find out right time, Amazon's been super good about getting the Nintendo shit like below MSRP, which I don't even understand how they're doing it. But especially if you have Prime,

like you can get a lot of their accessories really cheap. Yeah. So keep your eye out there. They sell them individually, the left and right for $50. I don't even understand who the audience is for that. I guess it's just if you bought, I think this is what paired it.

I think he bought the blue and red one, and then he wanted, he, kind of like you, he wanted blue and blue, but didn't care about having an extra red, so he just bought one blue. I think.

That just sounds so weird to me when it's like you could have just had two reds and had another controller, you know, but I don't know, whatever. Per doesn't want to play those kids. Everybody knows that.

Yeah, he doesn't like his case. So I'm calling up Pear. That's right. That's right. He's in a car, slamming on the wheel. So then there's also the JoyCon

grip, which was the, it's the charging one? This is the charge grip. Yeah. So the switch comes with the non-charge one, which is insulting. Yep.

Super upsetting. I got the charging one. I haven't used it ever. I think honestly the grip is, I like that one comes in the box for if you really just don't want to shell out for a pro controller. Like once I finally held them both, because when we were writing about them both,

I was like, oh, like maybe one is more ergonomic and one is lighter and blah, blah, having played them both, like I will never ever use the grip if I have a pro controller option. I will never because I don't like these little baby buttons. But I do think that this is a totally. serviceable controller specifically for we're playing multiplayer Mario Kart. Whoever gets stuck with this isn't going to hate everything.

Yeah. In the same way that on the Wii you, it was like, whoever gets stuck with the controller. The sideways. It was no. You know, you get the steering wheel. Fuck.

That's why it's frustrating that the charging one didn't come with it because it's like, I have this essentially useless thing where if I get a second set of Joey cons, I'll probably keep them on that conveniently to know where they are. But then it doesn't do anything for me. And I mean, so the good thing, the reasoning I have for why it's okay that the one it came with doesn't charge. is that your joycons are always going to be on your system charging anyways.

When it's done. And if you only have one set of joycons, they're always going to be charged. So you don't need to be charging with the dock piece. If you're using a pro controller, you're charging that separately, right? I think if I hadn't gotten a pro controller, I imagine my setup in the world, in a world, where I have a charging grip and I don't have a pro controller. I think what I pictured was having an extra set always charging on the charging grip that I could swap out for the ones on the system itself. Yeah. I think now I've pivoted to once I eventually hook it up to my TV.

Yeah, exactly. That set will always be charging and they'll have a pro controller. And when I eventually get a second set of joycons, I guess at that point I'll buy either a charging grip for them or just, I don't know. I don't know how I'll do it. Yeah. And then pro controller, I could not say you need it enough. Like this thing is beautiful.

Love the big ass buttons. Look at them. Look at those, Greg. Those are big buttons. Kev, have you seen these big buttons? Those are real buttons. Those are really big buttons. What?

Anyway, this thing, while expensive as hell, I think you need one. Yeah. For the Switch's future. Oh, yeah. The second I play that thing on TV, that's what I'm using. The AC adapter, $30. You got an extra one just because of how we do things here. No, well, I mean, I got an extra one from my house because I, I, oh, really?

Yeah, I was like, I don't want to keep moving this thing. The whole dock and all that shit back and forth. So I bought an extra dock as well. So I have a dock in the bedroom. This is where I love Nintendo and where they did it right in that, like when the first Vita came out, it used the proprietary port. And when I got the slim, it was so nice because I had charging cables for that already. Like my laptop, I got a new MacBook. It uses USBC anyway. So like I have a USB charger, USB charger in my bag at all times. So now I just carry one extra

cable and I can literally go charge it from my laptop or use my laptop charger, which is like the most convenient thing in the world. Yeah. And in addition to that, so the, what I was talking about Amazon earlier, so it's $30 for the Nintendo official adapter. But yeah, you could just use any USB AC adapter. but you can get the Nintendo one for $20 on Amazon. Wow. So I don't know how they're doing that, but they figured out a way. And USBC cables are super cheap.

Like, Kevin, I can't see the price here. 699. 699. You can get an extra cable. Plus one comes with the pro controller, which is so cool. So you get that, then you're good. Totally didn't think they would do that.

Totally. Yeah, the PlayStation model. Yeah, exactly. I was fucking controller, no extra cords for that. It was like, it was such a weird feeling, like opening up that pro controller and being like, I would not have even been mad if this wasn't here because I didn't expect it.

But having it was such a nice, like, oh, awesome. So now that's just in my bag. I recommend the anchor. One, the anchor power line. Anchor is pretty much, in my opinion, is one of those brands that in the last couple years I've been like, I just trust you guys. Yeah. Like your products have always been good.

I love their, their cables. I love all, like I bought their little bricks for the wall for traveling when you charge your iPhones and stuff. They're super good. I bought that anchor power core. And then, yeah. So the power cores, that's a whole other other ball game here. Sure.

So battery packs. Yeah. There's a lot of rules you're dealing with here. if you're trying to buy one to charge your switch. Switch battery, it's going to die, right? Doesn't have that much juice in it. If you want to recharge it, right now, there's no great option to have a battery pack

that will charge while you play in a way that works totally perfectly. You right now have this anchor, power core, something or other. It's the one Kevin has up there. The 2600. Yeah, 268. So that'll charge it because not while you're playing. Yeah. 26800.

So to be clear, when you say while you're playing, all of us immediately think Zelda, which seems to be more of a power drain, it does seem like other games drain the battery way slower. Yeah. So it might not be like, like I'm mostly playing Zelda on this thing.

I would imagine it'll get better once you're playing, you know, shovel night or... So I'm not an expert when it comes to power and how the volts and amps and all that shit work. But from what I understand,

it doesn't matter what game you're playing. It's just a system thing. So it seems like this will charge it at some stats I was seeing with something like at a 1% for five minutes type thing, no matter what you're playing because it's just more

of like trying to give it. because it's the, what I have here is, so you need to have at least an output of five volts and three amps for it to even charge the switch. So a lot of the little tiny lipstick battery chargers, those just won't even work. So this is kind of the bare minimum when it comes to charging it.

However, this thing will charge the switch three to four full times. That's awesome. So it's a worthy investment, but what's your experience man with it? So, I mean, it's limited, right? So what it was that we went to Boston on the flight out there,

I had a power outlet in my seat, so everything was perfect. And then on the flight back, I had the power outlet, but it wasn't working. So it's like traditional Virgin America bullshit. So it clonked out three hours in. So I ordered this guy. I've only had to use it in passing.

It is that thing of like, I can't tell if it's, I put it in and when I was in and it showed that it was going while I was playing. And it definitely seemed to slow the battery drain if that makes sense. Because that's what it is. It's the 1% for five minutes. And so I would, which means you're,

when you're playing, the percents might be going down faster than it's charging. Gotcha. Okay, okay. I see. Now I understand. That makes sense. But for me,

it seemed to maintain. for a little bit at least, where it did start clicking down, but not drastically. I was able to stop the bleed for a second. The one thing, though, that I didn't like, so I stopped was like it was, the switch seemed like it was getting really hot. And I'm not about that life. That always freaks me out especially on planes. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. But I think it was just me, because that happens with my iPhone and with, like, portable chargers as well, and I just got over that, that's going to happen. That's going to heat up or whatever. I just took a GoPro in my pocket that was super hot. And so what happens, right? And that's the thing, like, having, like, obsessively played Pokemon Go, especially

early on, but like even still a little bit. And like carrying all these battery packs and keeping my phone charging and stuff. Like those things got like to the point of like burning my skin hot. And like that is not great. And like I feel less concerned, especially when I had my older iPhone, like I felt less concerned than I would about Switch. Especially with saves currently only being tied to that one system. Like it just the second starts getting hot, I kind of freak out.

So like I'm, I'm excited to see that it seems like a lot of people are making like battery packs that are more dedicated for this. geared towards the switch. Like people are advertising them as like, yeah, yeah, for the anchor's doing that. So, so a lot of people are doing it. The first ones out the gate right now are Razor with the Razor power bank. It's $150. So it's a little on the price of your side.

Right now you have to sign up for notifications for when it's going to be. Yeah, for when it's like it's not even out there. But it's not even made for the switch. This is made to charge laptops. Yeah. So we're talking about some beefy power here where you're getting 15 volts with 2.6 amps, which sounds a lot more than the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the five necessary for this guy.

Yeah, you're gonna be good. Don't you like multiply two of the numbers or something? Like, we ain't electricians. I just read. Yeah,

and I didn't got some like feedback from people that have tried different things. I'm so afraid on the other end because my MacBook charger is 87 watts and it's USBC and it charges it fine and I'm like, oh, I hope I'm not like

overclocking it or something. Yeah. Yeah, so anyway, if you want to sign up the, I'll put the link in the description for that for the Razor Power Bank, but there will be other ones coming soon. But the other thing here is like,

if you can hold out, hold out. Like these battery charges are only going to get cheaper. Well, that was my thing of like, I'll pick this up now. It wasn't that expensive. And it was just like, I need to charge a million things anyway. You know what I mean? I just put it in my backpack and never think about it. I've charged, I've charged the battery pack once. I've used it once on the switch and I still have full power. So it's like, it's replacing the little laptop or the little cell phone batteries. I care of them usually. The last two things

I want to talk about are the, the Ethernet connector. So there's no Ethernet port on the dock itself. And like, not that it really matters for anything. Like the Wi-Fi's been fine for me for downloading games, but there hasn't really been a multiplayer game yet. So once Mario Kart and Splatoon income, we'll see how necessary it is. Uh, the, the official one is like ridiculously priced. I think it's like $30. Yeah. Any USB Ethernet cable will work. So if you just go on Amazon, you can get one of those for like $3. I still actually had mine from the Wii. If you have one for the Wii or Wii, it works totally perfectly. So I do want to give a shout out here to Canaries in the coal mind I didn't listen to. Because when they announced

the switch and they're like, it doesn't have Netflix. It doesn't have this. It doesn't have internet browser. I was one of the people like, I got all that on my other things. Why do I fucking care? Jump cut to me in my Austin hotel room getting codes for new switch games. And I'm like, fuck yeah. Connect to the hotel internet. Just fucking times out. Yep. Because there's no window now to pop up and say, oh, hey, are you a shared and guest or whatever? Hit okay, put in your room number and other shit. And so the same problem. Terrible. So 3DS had, if you have like a MacBook, you connect to a thing and, uh, Wi-Fi pops up and you type in the password and whatever. on a 3DS you had three saved connections

and so because you would just save the connections ahead of time and do the internet test you could never get that window to pop up so it's frustrating that they didn't learn from that and make hotel Wi-Fi work man I've had so many Wi-Fi issues with my Switch like I basically have to connect it at work if I have it this far from my router

like three inches of my router it still won't always read it and if it does it'll be at one bar because apparently just really susceptible to interference from other Wi-Fi devices people were saying interesting I've had a lot of trouble so I'm definitely going to do hardwired. I've had it.

It has worked great at home downloading stuff. Games go super quickly. I have good internet home. But then when I was at a rooster teeth in the achievement hunter office, it just could not download whatever I was downloading. Maybe it was graceful or it was the other.

Oh, uh, Puyo Poootterus. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't any, any issues with the, the Wi-Fi yet,

but I have had random issues with the switch where three times now just completely locked up. Huh. Ooh. Yeah. And then I had to actually do the thing where you hold the power button down for 15 seconds to like hard reset it. Wow.

Kind of sucks, but it's crazy how like in the same way I did when I went up to my Vita, like when I play it, I feel so comfortable with it now. And like I like, I have mindset to like the dark, the night mode or whatever. Like I just, I like, I like, I'm so excited to do stuff with it. Because I feel like right now it is just my Zelda machine. Sure. And I'm excited for when the full online service available and when I am like browsing eShop and getting virtual console and doing all of that stuff. And that's why like right now having Wi-Fi issues hasn't been that big of a deal. But it does make me nervous for late. I'm sure I have that ether adapter as like a kind of a backup plan. Yeah. And the last accessory to talk about is memory cards, which is one of the most important accessories, but I feel like one of the least important right now just because there's nothing to download. Yep. But this is going to become a problem sooner than later.

It's another thing like the portable chargers where I would recommend holding out as long as possible because the prices drop on them so quickly. If you need one or really want one now, the best one to get is the Sandisk Ultra micro SD card that just has the fastest read and write speed and like you're going to be good with that. Is that the 200-jured one? The thing is, it comes in different, the things that are worth it right now, there's the $128, which is $44.

So that is the most like you're getting your best bang for your buck in terms of quality, space and price. The 200-gig one, which is a weird price for memory card or a weird number. Yeah, $27. So it's like, not too crazy if you really want that much space. Where we're getting crazy is $256 is $242. Yeah. So, like, you can kind of see that threshold.

And I imagine within a year, everything will be pushed down even further. So that was what I used all my, because Nintendo, bless them, never drops the price of their first-party games. So, like, if you go to buy, like, a used copy of 3D world, it's often still, like, $50. But what that meant was that the Amazon trade-in for all the games I bought over the Wii U's life was still crazy high. So I just traded in like my whatever, like 10, 15 first-party games. And that was enough for, I just bought a 256 game card with credit. So, like, I have a 256 in my system. because I love them, but I know Nintendo,

and I was just so paranoid about, hey, like, you can't swap memory cards or it's tied to your profile forever or whatever it ends up being. So I just wanted smart, high capacity. I can go digital. I can, you know, not worry about losing cartridges and all that stuff.

Yeah, that's a good call. But it was expensive. And like, if I had been, I mean, it was real money, obviously. But I think if I had been adding that to my purchase price, like I never would have gotten that high. I think that 200 gig or that 128 seemed like the best.

Seems like a good thing. I didn't even buy one yet. I'm holding until I need one. I mean, that's the thing like, right now, so Zelda, I think is like 13,

15 somewhere there. And then like Lego City, if you wanted it, came out today and it's like seven. So it's like, it's getting there if you're just using the internal memory. But even then, like the next real thing that isn't just like a tiny game

is going to be Mario Kart and you have, you know, a month from the time of recording this until that comes out. I think you're going to see microSD. They said this supports the standard, which is up to like two terabytes or something. So like, you're going to see.

the 512 and the 1 terabytes over the next few years. So I agree if you can hold out like wait because that 256 gig card in like two years is going to be nothing. It's going to be so cheap. Exactly. So all the the ones that we recommend will be in the description of this video. You can get them on Amazon. Some of them are a couple other places. But yeah, there you go. That's cool. Next topic. You. The Dark Night of News. I want to talk about news at IGN. Okay. So I worked with you for five years, give or take, a little bit. Yeah.

You were there the whole time I was there, weren't you? Well, I mean, I left. So I worked with you from what, like probably 2012 to 2014. Oh, okay. So, fuck. I was way off. Well, because then I left. I never worked.

Oh, I guess actually, no, I guess I was there before you. And then, yeah, then you left. No, I started. So I started. Because I was there in 2010. Oh, so you were there for me. Yeah. Because I started as contract in like August-ish of 2011.

And then I became full time in October of, 2011. And then I was there until February 2014, left for 14 months, 13 months, came back in May of 2015. So you were doing news. Yeah. Then you came back to run news. Yes. Yeah. So what does all that mean? And what does news mean at IGN? So we have a we divide things a long time ago. We had content teams like divided by the content type. So PlayStation Nintendo PC, all that. And then now we did it instead by rather than content in terms of manufacturer, we have it by content like previews, reviews, news features are kind of our four big verticals. And so I run the news part of that, executive editor of news, and then I have a counterpart for previews, reviews,

and features. So when you, when you, you being in charge of news, is that news in terms of article and video? Sort of. So it's like news is like this weird foundation where, yeah, like we, like, I oversee the news video team and then the fix is sort of separate from me, but I still work with those guys a lot. And I guess if the fix has like a huge mistake or problem, that's probably ultimately on me. But like we basically do it as, yeah, like announcements, press release, you know, blasts, things like that and things announced during press conferences are all news. And then we consider there's this gray area that other sites call a report, which is sort of a newsy feature, which would be kind of like a long form interview or things like that. that becomes more of a gray area, but it's still pretty much under me, unless it becomes much more like big picture focus. So for people out there that read video game news every day, they go to the IGNs, the game spots, wherever or katakus and like kind of just read through all the articles that were written, that's where they get all of that.

Where do you get the news? Mostly directly from publishers. Like we're obviously getting press releases and, you know, every morning checking PlayStation blog, Usel blog, like all that stuff for announcements that go wide. and then other things that we get exclusively that we either negotiate for or pitch for or that come out of IGN first, maybe we go somewhere to see a game and then while we're there, they're like,

oh, by the way, we just started working the sequel and then we have a story like that. It's kind of, news is a weird thing because it's unpredictable, right? So like there's no, I come in with like 10 things I'm expecting to do that day, but then if there's a major announcement, like surprise, we announced a sequel

or, you know, really unpredictable things like, you know, a death or, you know, a major person leaving a company or things like that, we kind of have to stay on our toes. So I think where do I get the news? Kind of from everywhere. I am constantly looking at Twitter, looking at Facebook, reading through blogs, looking at my inbox.

We get tips from people. It kind of comes from everywhere. And it sort of feels like a little overwhelming at times, like kind of looking down the barrel of that gun and thinking about like kind of the triage of like in the moment, like what is the most important thing and what are we focusing on. And all of that is just sort of the aggregation side of it.

Then there's also the generating original news. So the conducting interviews and being proactive about if someone does announce something, how are we following up? And who are we in the phone with to be like, well, what else can we get out of this? And where what is the, okay, so this is what you said in the press release. What did you not say? You know, what are our questions still? It's stuff like that.

So it can be a little daunting. But there's a lot to it. So NeoGaF is kind of the biggest video game website where I'd say the most people interested in video game news and industry side stuff usually are. They're looking for the scoops. The rumors. That ranks the leaks. Oh, yeah, and read it as well.

But they're kind of doing all the work themselves because they want to be doing it. How often do you, does IGN get news stories from Neogath? Well, I mean, I would say like the experiential things. Like, so, you know, whatever. Why can I not think of a multiplayer game? But call duty launches. And like there are server problems or there's, oh, my God,

if you choose this obscure combination of classes, like you actually can't connect, but everybody else can, or things like that. Like the things that only come from gameplay, that is where Reddit and NeoGaf are incredible because they just by virtue of the volume of people are going to encounter things that we might not encounter. As far as like seeing a blog post first or something,

like, you know, we're, if we're doing our jobs right or seeing that at the same time they are. So if a NeoGath thread pops up, a lot of the time it's like, oh, like Mass Effect and Dramid has been delayed. We might have known that under embargo from EA. we might have just seen the blog post at the same time they did or the tweet or wherever the source was

or maybe it was even set on our show or maybe it was set on a GameSpot show and so we have to source that. I think Gaff just kind of has a wider set of eyes than we do but for the most part I would say it's rare for us to find out something from them than the opposite. So you mentioned getting tips earlier.

How often does that happen? What is that like an email address or something? Yes, we have just news tips at IGN or I have my DMs open and that's a lot of the like you know hey I work at GameStop and we heard about this

or hey like I just got light off in this publisher and like we were at the time doing this and I'm really frustrated like we'd love to show it off and stuff like that and I think we've we're doing a little less of that than I think we were when I was more in the trenches

it's something I want to kind of get back to like I think like the Jason Schreier's and Patrick Clepix of the world are so they are dedicating so much more time and resources but they're also just better at sniffing for that stuff. And so, like, they have a lot of, like, really cool scoops and things that I feel like we still love to get when we can, but we're doing a little less. But that stuff, yeah, it'll come from, yeah, like fans of the shows who, who, you know,

because they know us and like us, will decide to share something with us, or people who are devs or people who just tell us things in confidence that we're not necessarily reporting on, but that we can kind of keep kind of in our back pockets and that we know and that provide context for other announcements and things like that. How do you kind of balance that, like the ethics of reporting the news, but also not betraying the friendships you have? Like specifically you're talking about like, oh, if you were to go to an IGN first or something and you find something else there, do you run that stuff by them before you write the news article? It would depend. I mean, like, if they invite us into their house and we like see something we weren't supposed to see, we're not going to like take it and put it in our pocket and just run it.

But in different circumstances, like if we find out something that, you know, an ex employee tells us or someone, you know, their sister works there and told them something or whatever. like we'll verify that information, but maybe it is something that we run that maybe the publisher wasn't ready to announce or, you know, like way back in the day, we heard about the Telltale Game at Thrones game before Telltale had announced it at the VGA's that year. And we, you know, double confirmed it

and made sure it was real. And then we ran that news ahead of time. Like, occasionally I think that can make publishers mad or, you know, like you hear Jason from Katakki talking all the time about like the things they've run into with being blacklisted and stuff. like that. I think it's kind of a balance, right? It's kind of like how important do we feel that

information is? How confident are we that it's legit before we, you know, run it and hurt our own reputation or mislead our audience or things like that? Where do you come down on the ethics of leaks? I think whenever we talk about a story in the morning show of this is, you know, Destiny 2's leaks or whatever, but there's rumor, there's not rumors, there's comments that like, oh, this sucks for those people. And not even Destiny 2 because that's just whatever a game's up there that you're ahead by a few days. But when it is like that time that guy snuck in, just walked into an office and like walked up and ate lunch and like, yeah, and like wandered around and just found it everything. I figure it was. I figure what game that was. It was up north. But like, yeah, or all the Kataku assassin's

creed reveals and things like that. I mean, like ethics is the word word for it. Like I don't, I think if you like stole it, if someone like hacked into a network and and illegally got it or something, that's not great. Um, I think there are a lot of reasons people do it. Like, for example, like, and I was like very briefly and in a marketing capacity on the dev side. So it's like, it's weird for me because like I've seen how hard people work on things that we take for granted. How a texture that you probably walk by and didn't notice might have been three months of someone's life that they didn't have dinner with their kids and that they, you know, like really sacrificed for. And so I get why sometimes that's at odds with maybe the PR plan for a game. And if you're a dev who worked really hard on something and then it's not going to be announced for another year and you're like, oh, I just want it out in the world.

Like I get why people would be motivated to talk to the press and would put that out there. I think when they introduce that stuff to us, if they bring it to us and we verify that it's real, I don't consider it unethical. I think it's our jobs. If we know that information and we're positive, it's true and we think our audience will find it interesting, like I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing to put out there

because my job isn't to maintain Ubisoft's PR plan. Like, that's just not what I do. That said, I do think there's like this weird, like when I first started in this job and I would find something that someone put on LinkedIn that they weren't supposed to, like I would like lose sleep over running that story like it like it made me feel like the most awful person to be like you put this out there and you weren't supposed to and I put it on fucking

IGN and now it's everywhere and like that person like we would have those situations where someone be like hey can you take down the story like I wasn't supposed to say that and it's like well no like it's having a bottle on that yeah and so it's like a weird yeah I mean I don't you know it's not like I like yeah got another one or something like it's not like I take pride in that but it's also, I don't necessarily consider it unethical to, to draw attention to that information that was publicly available. Is it a fine line to walk to go from, you're doing the leaks, this is whatever. I mean, you would confirm that it's real, but then like you said, you know, it is PR blasts from people. It is the, there are the connections. I mean, it really, it has to be

case by case, right? Because I feel like it's so, if you put a blanket rule over it, I think it becomes a lot harder in situations. Like, so like one of the weirdest things is like when, like, not even necessarily us, but like the press reports on layoffs and the people that company don't know yet. And it's stuff like that where I think those are where you get into really weird gray areas where like if you know that like the head of a company just left and things are looking bad or like if you were to hear about the irrational layoffs before the employees knew. Like it puts you in this weird position, you know? And I still think like moving on that info if you're positive, it's true. I don't think necessarily makes you evil or awful or doing anything bad. but man does it put those employees in a crappy position

and man does to put their bosses who were, you know, it's 9.56 and at 10 they were about to announce it. Of course, yeah, yeah. There's obviously always going to be areas like that that are complicated. And I think news is like, you know, I talk about coming in with a to-do list and then the nine things I thought I would do that way that day, I do 10 other things instead. I think in that same way, it is sort of,

we never know what's going to kind of fall into our laps or what we're going to figure out. And then it's kind of evaluating, well, what do we do with that? And is it, you know, I do think there's a point where, like, if you're really going to burn a bridge with it, like, you better make sure you're right. Because I do think there have been plenty of embarrassing moments in playing about its histories where, like, they did get something wrong. And I don't know.

Like, I think that puts you, in that way, I do think you've a responsibility to your audience to fact check and to verify and to make sure you're doing it right. So with the verification, like, what does that even look like? So are there certain sources, like I imagine PlayStation blog and the, Xbox wire or whatever it's called. Oh, which are obviously like official channels. And so if you get that, that's just cool. This is fact.

We're running it. But what if it comes from any other source, what does the process look like? Yeah, an official channel obviously, like I guess like the PlayStation blog could get hacked or like a verified Twitter account can get hacked and you'll see stuff occasionally that like, oh, that's weird.

Or they made a typo or whatever it is. Occasionally that stuff does happen. If someone emails us and they're like, hey, I work at Nintendo and I have Metro Prime 4 footage I want to show you. like it then becomes like okay like prove it you know like like number one like my priority is like I want to see it and I want to talk to that person I want to make sure they like what do you have to show me like let's look at it but I want proof of that then being who they say they are and

sometimes that's not even something will publish necessarily but like we have to see like verify your employment and all of that separate from that we then have to like someone giving us an asset is is hard because that's a harder thing to to verify than I think information someone tells you something trying to find another source to verify that information is a little more straightforward as opposed to showing someone

a video and saying, is this real? It's a weird boat to be in though where you have to make sure sometimes information will come out or someone will tell us something and then we want to verify it but maybe both of those people

we're talking to are getting their information second hand and maybe they're even getting it from the same person and that person misheard it in the first place so then we think we confirmed something but really you didn't You just had one guy who misheard someone else in the phone or saw something over someone's shoulder and misread it. And he tells you, but then separately he tells Greg.

And then you two were talking to each other. And then you two are separately talking to me. Like it's this weird game of telephone where like I think at this point, especially with like fake news and everything being what it is, I really, I would err on the side of really like overly cautiously double checking anything before I ran to this point. If it's not from something official. And I think it puts us in a tough spot because sometimes we hear about stuff early. And then it gets announced and we're like, oh, man, we knew that. Like we could have gotten that scoop. But I don't really regret it because I also don't want to be in the other side of the coin, which is we're confident enough to run this and then we're wrong.

And then, and then, you know, you're dealing with the backlash of that. So talking about the official channels, like sometimes I've noticed, even if it is an official channel, especially when you start looking at the worldwide point of view of it all. Like, do you kind of take certain things as more credible than others? Like in terms of like, an example I have is recently the crash bandicoot. insane trilogy, they still are being really cagey on, is it exclusive or is it not exclusive? And they haven't come out and actually said it. And then PlayStation, I don't know, Ireland or something. Yeah. tweeted like, oh, no, Crash Bandicoot is exclusive to PlayStation.

And then, you know, I've exploded with it. Like, oh, they said it's exclusive. And it's like, I don't believe that as a user, you know, but what would you guys take from that? It's hard because, yeah, like I say official sources, though, everyone knows what that means. Like, I think for me, there's definitely kind of this hierarchy, right? Where, like, the actual PlayStation blog or the words coming out of Sean Layton's mouth on stage during a press conference, you're good to go. Like, something that is sent to us from Sony in a press release, you're good to report on that. Like, those are generally going to be okay.

A release date on Amazon or GameStop, maybe not as set in stone because a lot of those things are placeholders or a lot of those things are old info. And then even less so, when you get into, like, international affiliates, like, even, us, even IGN, for example, like, we have the sites that published to IGN.com, which are our U.S. office, our U.K. office, our L.A. office, our L.A. office, our San Francisco office. And then we have these franchisees that are international. So, like, there's IGN Benelux and IGN France, IGN and these companies that are, they're the IGN name and they're, you know, part of our global push. If we have an exclusive, we can put our stuff on all those sites at once. But their editorial staff operates autonomously and doesn't, like, isn't dialed into us.

I think that can be true of PlayStation and Nintendo and everyone else that like what comes from, you know, PlayStation Ireland might not have come from the mothership or it might be a contracted social media agency that some customer service guy just thought it was exclusive and said it, you know, but didn't actually get that information directly from the horse is now. He thinks he's answering a simple question and it turns out this isn't simple at all. It's similar to like Agent M on the Marvel stream recently this week, right, where he's like, oh yeah, and Spider-Man's coming to PlayStation 4 this year and Osmniacs like, no, no. There's no release date yet.

And it's like you, from us having covered this worked in this industry, you understand how that happens that. Yep. Yep. Agent M. who's on every Marvel thing ever. Yeah. I'm sure he's not up to date on every Marvel video game release as well as the comics as well

as this as well as the movies. Yeah. So the Amazon release date thing. So that happens all the time. And most of the time it's like December 31st, whatever that year is. It's usually tied to or like if they've said summer, it'll be whatever June 1st or July 1st. But let's say that you, you today, you note like someone says you, you, a tip or whatever and it's like, hey, look, uh, whatever game, I don't know, like Spider-Man, uh,

has a release date of September 21st, like something that is a little bit more random. Pose birthday. What would be your, what would be the process there of what, how you would handle that? Um, I mean, part of it is just common sense, right? Like, if it's a Monday or if it's a holiday or a Sunday or whatever, like, it's, it's going to be immediately we're going to be like, okay, like, that doesn't sound right. Or if it's like, tomorrow, you know, stuff like, like, there are little things that are immediate red flag.

If it's a Tuesday and it's within the range, then. and maybe we hunt around a little more, look at what they've said. And, like, that's how the Mass Effect release date was out there for so long that the Dark Horse art book, like, months and months before EA officially announced it, had that release date out there. And we did report on that because that was a partner of the publisher who clearly had gotten some kind of information and it seemed accurate. So we reported on it and we're careful with our words.

It's according to this Amazon listing, according to Dark Horse. And we also reach out for comment. You know, we don't, like, one of the things, the laziest thing I think you could do is, if a Ken Levine or a Jeremy Dunham or whoever tweet something about their game, isn't weird? Yeah, it's always weird to say Dunham and be like, oh, why the game? If they say something on Twitter, that seems, whoa, that's surprising or, whoa, that's out of character. Or, whoa, they're really negative about something.

Reporting on that without reaching out, I think would be irresponsible on our part. Because I think that we, by virtue of being IGN, have those avenues where we can say, hey, people are freaking out over this tweet, like, what did you mean? Or did you mean this how you said it? Or like, let us clarify, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think with retailers, there's a little less room to do that. I can reach out to Amazon and be like, hey, where do you get this September 21st release date for Spider-Man?

Probably going to get an automated response or nothing. I can reach out to PlayStation. I can reach out to Insomniac. Probably going to get no comment. We don't comment on rumor and speculation. Exactly. So at that point, it's hard. I mean, at that point, it does become more of a gut feeling.

And we've run plenty of things like that. And then it gets updated and removed or Insomniac does six hours later. say like, hey, like that really says it's not right. September's not right. We haven't announced anything. And then, you know, we'll update our story and put a correction or put that in. So it does get into that area where, um, a lot of it is just instinct after having done it for a while where like, sometimes sometimes, sometimes, I mean, it's hard if we already know. That's even harder thing. It's like if we've been told off the record a date and then that date leaks, it gets complicated too because like we can't use the information that we've been given to influence

are reporting. So we still have to treat it as though, well, take it with a grain of salt, but this person's saying. Exactly. Or just, you know, treat it as like, let's still go down the rabbit hole of,

let's go to the official site. And there have been completely bizarre cases where like the actual Nintendo or PlayStation site will put a release date quietly on the product page that hasn't been announced yet. And sometimes someone digs that up. Or sometimes it's on PSN. Like the telltale Guardians,

the Galaxy date was appearing on PSN before it had been announced. So there's definitely weird little examples like that where yeah, sometimes it's legit and sometimes maybe we passed on it and we shouldn't have. So that's something I've never had to deal with. If you get embargoed information like say some like insomnia like says to you, Hey IGN, spot events release date is September 21st.

And you know, you can't talk about that until July. Yeah. Then you hear like someone else confirms it and it gets confirmed and all that and you know you've confirmed from other people. are you still under embargo there? Yeah, so it's a weird thing, right? It's in a perfect world,

we keep that information on kind of as need to know where it's like if we know what the release date is like I'm probably going to know it and then whoever I signed to write it under embargo is going to know it. But ideally like Jose and Brandon and Miranda don't know so that when it leaks, they can write that story and, you know,

source wherever it came from and write like, oh, Amazon says September 21st for Spider-Man even if, you know, Jonathan and I know that's true. Like they're writing sourcing Amazon taking a screenshot. And, you know, I don't think that's violating embargo because the information's out there and they're saying according to Amazon. James Stevenson and Edsonson and A Insomniac is like, stop using our game as a fake example.

Stop saying September 21st. God damn it. It's a lot of every news site report according to the kind of funny games cast. Take it with a great assault, but they sure were hung up on September 21st for Spider-Man. Then there's the weirder things like, you know, like the, the file man's the uncovered event or whatever, like, when something comes out ahead of time, like, you know, like, we, we wrote, like, hey, according to this leak, this is the case. But then we wrote that night, hey, this was officially confirmed now. Or like, same thing with the Destiny League for Destiny 2.

Hey, according to these posters, Destiny 2, September, blah, blah, blah. And then we run a separate story. Bungee officially confirms Destiny 2 release date. So I think it just, like, I think the, the most important thing to distill for us is that provenance of a story, is that source, is where is this actually coming from when we put something out there? because like it drives me insane even on the kind of funny and beyond Facebook groups when I see people like, oh my God, like I can't believe that Wolverine's going to be an Ironman 4. And it's like, you know, like Marvelmovienews.org or Tumblr.com. And it's like you can't trust that.

But at the same time, like it's, you know, it would be naive of me to think that everybody understands that distinction. And I'm sure what those people do would mystify me. And I wouldn't, you know, wouldn't understand pieces of it. So last question I have, and this kind of has to do with a lot of people listening now. How many people, so obviously there's all the people that work at IGN and most editorial staff writes news articles in some fashion, right? Yeah, for the most part, we have a kind of a kind of a kind of Jose's on news shift.

So it's like, you know, every Wednesday, Jose's on news duty and every Friday Miranda's on news duty. And we'll have people kind of, you know, for a set chunk of the day, just keeping an eye out. And whether that means writing stories on their own or just editing and publishing stories that free lectures have written. Like did you have to do news when you were back in the day, yeah, totally. Yeah. When you were the PlayStation, you did a lot.

Yeah, that was the thing is like news was, I've seen news evolves, and that's why I'm just letting it go for a talk, because obviously we've no idea what it's like there anymore. But I remember when it was, I came in right after David Adams left. And I'm pretty sure he founded the news team with Damon and Kathleen, right? And that's why Scoop was a thing or whatever. But that was in the day where it was like, oh, Bethesda put out of this press release. All right, news team put it up and they just put up the press release. Yeah, they used to put up raw ones. Yeah, yeah.

And it was just how that was at the time. And then it slowly evolves into this, that and the other and talk. people getting sources. Yeah. Yeah. So in addition to the, the tutorial staff, there's also a team of contractors.

How many people do you have working for you for news? And how do you kind of who is credible? Yeah, it's weird because we have, news is interesting because I would say it's the highest turnover for freelancers because it's, um, it's like we pay per story.

So we don't pay like a flat rate or, or salary or anything like that for our contract and freelancers. So it's a volume game. Like for us, it's like, if you write a ton of news stories like you can do well. you know, I remember freelancing. Like if I had the chance to be making, you know, a small amount per story versus writing guides for, you know, 500,000 bucks a pop for some other site, like,

I totally get why people will occasionally leave an IGN news freelance gig to go, as I'm not the mic over, to go do something else. Like that makes sense. And so I think we have kind of a constantly turning staff of like 12 to 20 solid news freelancers across all the different time zones. So some work with our UK team. We're slowly building back up the Australian freelance team. and then the majority of our freelancers are on East Coast or Pacific time. So since it sounds like it's more of a one-off basis thing because it's per story, it seems like an easier way to get into games media. For the longest time, I think the foot in the door at IGN, the way I did it,

the way like Hillary Goldstein did it, the way Colin did it, a lot of people was through guides. I think guides and now wikis are still a pretty good way to start contributing. It's a, yeah, for sure. It's a, and Marty. I mean, like there are a lot of people who started. by doing strategy guides and it was a good foot in the door. And with wikis, it still is because you can, if you kick ass making wiki edits,

like they'll notice you and they'll bring you on for freelance and stuff like that. I think news has become a really good alternate path to that. But news is very different. Like, at least the way we do news, like I like to keep opinion out of news. I see news as sort of the foundation of all of the other content will do. So, like, I remember back when the, I think it was Dead Island, I forget it was Rip Tide or just Dead Island,

had like the, the, special edition that was like a gross force. Yeah, it was like a, like, just like no head

and just like a bikini on boobs and it was just like a body. And we have this like debate in the office of, well, do we run this as like, literally like do the Katakini style headline of like, the deadline collector edition is fucking gross or run it with an opinionated headline? Or do you say dead ion collector edition announced,

stick to the facts and then use that as a launching pad for an opinion piece? that is, hey, the dead on Claire's tradition is fucking gross. And for us, it's the latter. For us, it's like we will get straight news out and then follow up with opinion, follow up with a video talking about why we don't like it or something like that. There are occasional,

there's occasional gray areas where something happens where I think it's okay to put a little bit of speculation into the story. Like, for example, the release state example we were talking about, maybe you say, Spider-Man coming on September 21st. September 21st, worldwide. Also to X-Bong. Take other greener song.

I think we'll say, hey, take this with a grain of salt because this is six days from now. And insomnia, probably, you know, like, we'll put context in in cases like that. But we play news pretty straight. Okay. My question would be twofold, I think, is right now, do you think that there's a problem with journalism? That's the thing that gets thrown around a lot. What is it to you and how do you guys avoid it? I mean, I think part of it is the volume of things being announced every day is like,

staggering and like keeping up with all the games coming to mobile, all the games coming to PC, and also giving our audience what they care about. Like, like, to be honest, like, there's this like kind of cynical, like, oh, they're just doing it for the clicks mentality. I think when when people run news, especially news that seems, you know, sensationalized in some way. But like, we pay attention to what our audience likes. Sure. And if our audience starts really caring about Candy Crush or about Pokemon Go or about things that people kind of roll their eyes at, like, speak with your clicks. Like, I mean, honestly, like, if, if we, have a Pokemon Go article that blows up and then another Pokemon Go announcement happens,

we're going to hit Pokemon Go. And, you know, in the same vein, if we're covering prey over and over or mafia over and over or whatever it is, like we will pay attention to how well it's doing and let that determine if it's worth us running cosmetic DLC. And if it's worth us running, you know, we'll always cover the big beats, a game announcement or release date, things like that for kind of the things in our wheelhouse. But it's everything else. It's all the granular, you know, if Destiny releases a new patch or a new set of patch notes, that is all the balancing to their guns. We have to make that determination of like,

we could just put this in our Destiny Wiki, which is where kind of the hardcore Destiny players are going and they'll care about it. Or if we feel like it's significant enough or game changing enough, we will run a new story. That's Destiny's New Patch completely changes shotguns.

Or Destiny's New Patch makes fast travel easier than never, whatever it is. Again, is case by case. We have definitely cut down in the volume of news stories, I think, compared to what we used to do. I think IGN back in the day was, and especially in the days with posting press releases. But I think even now, like,

we've definitely cut way down on being as broad as we were because the industry has gotten so wide. And if you try, like, if we had 50 more people just dedicated to news, I honestly don't think we could keep up with all the mobile releases, all the Steam releases, on top of all of the granular updates to console games. It's just too much.

And so I think now we do have to pick and choose. We do it based on what we either think we'll do well that our audience cares about, that we personally find interesting or that we're passionate about because I do think part of the power of having a platform like IGN is that we can kind of be tastemakers

we can push something and say we really believe in this game or we're really passionate about this game or we're experts in this game and here's why you should care and our responsibility at that point is maybe this game doesn't do well with our audience but how do we get them to care?

How do we make them interested? So in addition to just the volume of articles what about like the volume of words in an article because something that I found history especially now that we do the kind of funny morning show every day we just read articles like from IGN constantly game spot everybody constantly stop whoever I am there must be like three or four freelancers who write as Joe Scrabbles just knock it off make

let them use their real names I'm sick this pen name yeah he turns out a lot yeah he's really Joe's awesome oh we know because we read this shit every day yeah I mean it's that weird you I mean sorry I can well the point there is I feel like there's almost every single art girl especially when I'm reading them I start reading through it I'm just like kind of in robot mode where I'm like, and this happened, this and this and I get to that part where I'm like, oh, I know, this stuff doesn't matter anymore. Yeah, that's like the below the fold. Like I think we get to that point where. So I'm personally a proponent of small short stories.

Just get the facts out and maybe a little bit of context about why we care. Like something like Final Fantasy 15 or the last guardian getting a release date. I don't think it's inappropriate to be like this is a long time coming. This game was originally announced. Here's the context for why this matters. Yeah. But I'm talking more about like there's always that final paragraph that you hit. And it's not it's literally every site does this where it's just like.

For more. persona five. And I get that they're trying to link people to other things and that's cool. But I do feel like recently there's been a trend to just give so much information and like kind of give the Twitter version of every other article written in the last three weeks about whatever it is at the bottom of this news article. I personally, when I edit stories myself, which like by virtue of meetings and event planning and stuff, I have less and less time to do. But when I edit stories myself, I cut a lot of that. I don't think that always needs to be there unless it's something like, um, a really confusing ongoing story, like, or not even confusing, but like the, the Facebook and Xenamax lawsuit over Oculus, or like,

back when 38 studios was going on, or T-HQ, when something is very, or, or, or Kajima with Konami, stuff like that where it's very clearly a part

of an ongoing story. There's context. I think it is essential to do all those backlinks to like, kind of, hey, if you're just joining us,

here's what's happened up till now. Because I think otherwise, you don't understand why this story matters. Like Crash Bandicoot insane trilogy release date announced, no, you probably don't need 30 paragraphs of context afterwards because people get it. Hey, this is a product.

It's coming out on this day on these systems. But I think when it's more complicated than that, when it's something like how something affects the industry or a person living in a company, like Peter Moore leaving EA, like spending time on his background and legacy and the fact that he, you know, what he did before that and all of that.

Like that stuff I do think enriches a story and it's fine. I just think it's hit or miss on, or it's kind of case by case. I do my biggest, like if you are applying to be a freelancer with us specifically, I think my biggest pet peeve is when someone nails the information about a show. So they're like, oh, the Flash is renewed for season three and blah, blah, blah. And they get all the important stuff right. And then they have this context section where they screw up.

Or it's like in the bottom half of the story, they're like, the Flash is the first ever superhero show to appear in the CW. It's like, well, no, Arrow came first. Like I feel like the context is where people get into trouble is trying to go back and, you know, look at Wikipedia or whatever it is to act like you're an expert. And so my feedback for newswriters, at least for us, is if you know it, if you have been following this story, feel free to link back. But I don't see it as necessarily essential. Are our contractors or anyone incentivized by like word count? No, not for us. I do think that there's, we will pay a better rate if you, you know, we're talking about

original news and stuff. If someone brings us an opportunity or a scoop or if they secure an interview themselves and then, you know, want to offer to us to publish, like, We'll give more for that than we would for just, hey, can you write up this PS blog post or whatever it is? So in that way, it's incentivized, but we don't, we don't have a minimum or maximum for our writers. And we don't have, we don't really do, a lot of sites will run stories at specific times. So it's like there's a three o'clock slot, a 3.30 slot a 4 o'clock. And they'll space out news that way. We tend to do it more as it's, you know, we'll publish it as it's written, basically.

Which I think can give the kind of discovery problem of, hey, our front page is 30 news stories at once. if everything, you know, the Game of Thrones trailer happening at the same time as the Destiny trailer last week. It's a perfect example of two major high priority things happening at once. With those happening, there's no way we're also going to write about, you know, the DLC drop for Mafia 3 or whatever it is. And that's the point where we kind of do have to prioritize what goes on the site right now and what can wait. My final question is I think, you know, since we do the morning show and go through the news and all this different stuff, there's often this battle cry of there's too much journalism or journalism when are people going to do real video game journalism in the way you'd expect the Washington Post to cover whatever and blah blah blah and what I've noticed more and more with our industry as we there are the all right PlayStation blogs put up this release date sites are regurgitating that or posting that regurgitating makes on it they're putting that information out there right because I as a consumer I don't want to go to the every the UB blog and the PlayStation blog and this blog and that blog to cobble us all together yeah then it's mixed

in with what you're talking about, the scoops you're getting that Jason Shriar is getting that Patrick's getting, what I notice a lot is the fact that deadline and variety and all these other entertainment-based news outlets look a lot like our video game news outlets in the same way that I think, do you think that the future of video game journalism is more in that camp or is it going to continue to mature and want to see your waypoints and your polygons break off and they are able to succeed doing, I'm only doing this, I'm not talking about that, So it's two, first of all, I guess I never really answered your journalism thing in the first place. So I guess I should say the biggest thing, and we are totally aware of that, right, the aggregation of the Reddits, the Gaffs, all of that.

And trying to become more than just, hey, we're publishing the marketing materials for this. You know, like, at a certain point, like, if eight releases get announced on one day, the top eight stories in our site might all just be things that came directed from the publisher that you could find essentially anywhere. And so, like, to battle against that, one thing we're working on now is asking that question of, so what? and we're trying to do these more follow-up features of, okay, so Logan was number one at the box office this weekend, but what does that mean? And how does that compare to other X-Men movies and what are the legs on it?

And does opening weekend matter with inflation and all of that? And then so with video game press releases, maybe we do get the Crash Manacute insane trilogy thing, but it doesn't say if it's exclusive. And that's the question we're asking is kind of enriching that story that way. So that's how we're fighting against that. As far as the future games journalism, I think it's, we're at this weird precipice now

where we, everything I just said about enriching that story, we have to do. Because I think ultimately, like, Activision has a blog, Ubisoft has a blog, Sony is a blog, Microsoft has a blog, Nintendo has directs, like more and more, you know, you don't need a middleman to deliver to your audience. And like maybe our audience right now might be bigger than the number of people who read the PlayStation blog,

but the hardcore PlayStation crowd is still probably going to go directed to the source in a lot of cases. And so I think like in order to keep game journalism going, I think it is the things that aren't necessarily subscribing to that PR drop mentality, which is, you know, the leaks and the scoops and things like that. But then it's also if you are going to report on the thing that people have put out there, what can you add to it? Added value.

What can you, what interview can you get to a company that is giving the people more information? So like when they announced the Castlevania Netflix series, Jonathan immediately talked to the showrunner and got a little bit more on it, you know, and got a little bit more. And I think those are the cases where I like our news product and I feel like it's it's worth coming to I think the the journalism thing is a real concern and it's something that like I think kind of left unchecked. It would be very easy for that to be the only thing we run and I think that would be bad and I do think at that point it would be like well as a reader of the site as a fan of the site why am I coming here and not just going to Sony or Ubisoft? Well, I mean I've always felt even when I was there that you got it's such a it's such a bad deal. It's such a

bad look that you can't help because I know firsthand from covering PlayStation for so long that there are gatekeepers. It can't be that I heard this about naughty dog and I go straight to naughty dog. You have to go to PlayStation to get to them to do that and PlayStation will give you, we don't comment on rumors and speculation. So you get to that point like, well, why even go to this, this relationship doesn't work. So it's impossible to do real journalism if you're just getting cut off at the knees. And that's where it is. I'm going to speak on background. I'm going to speak off the record. I'm going to speak with a fake name. I'm going to give you. That's why the leaks are so prevalent because it's your fake name. My fake name, Joe Scrabbles. It's the only way to get

any information out of these people that isn't PR approved, which gets so weird and weird. And that's why, as you see more and more indie start to do stuff, that's interesting because those guys get to go out and speak with their mind and whatever they want to do. Like a Steve Gainer or Sean Vanamon can just get up and talk about their game more openly. I think as people get, you know, and those are interesting examples actually because you have these kind of high profile indie developers who are working with the big first parties. And so maybe they do have to, you know, keep an eye on what they can say. Whereas like when you get a fully true independent like I can say whatever I want smaller game,

I think you do tend to get more candid answers. Even like we mentioned Dunham, like the interview he did here and the interview he did with Jonathan Nijian, like he's able to kind of speak more openly about their future plans because he doesn't have 30 people above him watching every word he says, you know. So yeah, so he did that interview with Colin a couple weeks ago kind of funny. Who has to listen to that? and like who writes those are like how does that work like do you just tell one of the contractors hey listen to this and write interesting things if we think news might come from it yeah in the same way that like i also do that with our own content like if mcalfrey does an episode of ijun up filtered like we have someone who oh awesome he's talking to peter maln you and listen to that episode and either mcalfrey will say hey i think this will make a good headline or that person whether it's someone internal or a freelancer or whoever will be like oh like it's crazy that he said this i think that should be a headline and he'll run it by me and mcalfrey and stuff like that um so i'd like i'd like i I just consume a lot of content in general.

Like, I, I, the interviews that Colin did all during, uh, GDC were incredible. And actually everything we're talking about, like, please listen to the interview that, uh, Colin did with Jason from Kentucky because Shriar, like, has much more to say. It is, I think, uh, more articulate than I am, but also just like, I think is more in the trenches than I am at this point. Um, and he had so much great insight. I, I super recommend that for anyone who's been interested in this rambling. Uh, but yeah, I think it, it's a complex.

complicated beast. I feel like reviews are complicated in their own way for a thousand reasons, but it's ultimately you get the game, you know what you can publish by a certain date, you have an embargo, do you have time to play it, can it get up by this date? Like I think it's a little more of an exact science than news. I feel like news is a lot of checking your gut and really digging deep to make sure that like what you're running is, is, you know, it's that balance between being accurate and being timely. And like, yeah, I can spend six months verifying something before I run it, but by the time I run it, it's probably old news. Or I'm, oh, it turns out Spider-Man is coming out on September 21st and it's December.

And everyone knew that, you know, so I think like that doesn't, you know, I don't want to wait so long that it's not topical anymore, but I also don't want to just rush into it and have that situation where we did go on one source or we did kind of pull the trigger too early. And so I don't know, it can be hard. It can also be hard when, you know, one of our peers in the industry, like a competitor in the same way that we have in the past, does break an embargo by mistake. And then it is that awkward position where, well, crap, like all of us, you know, we're waiting until this time on this day to report this news.

But whoever it is went early. And then maybe we just source, hey, you know, kind of funny. It just revealed that blah, blah, blah. Hey. We didn't do it. Way to break it. So, I don't know. It's complicated.

It's something that I, I, news is like such a weird. I think I forgot in leaving for a little over a year, how kind of. on call you feel at all times, like even, especially with stuff like celebrity deaths and like things that there's just no way for us to prepare for. It is crazy verifying things that you would just totally take for granted as like you see it on Twitter and you're like like watching you guys react to the invincible news the other day is basically me a hundred times a day. That's so funny. It's like I don't believe it. This can't be. And that's exactly what it is.

It's like someone on Twitter or some, you know, someone on the other side of the office like John Borba stands up and is like, hey, did you guys hear this? And I'm like, oh, what? then like we go through and like maybe it ends up being BS. I'm like, oh no, that's coming from this. You idiot, porbis. I don't know. It's like, it's such a weird. We live in this word gray area where like I, I have to just, essentially I have to just go with what I, you know, think in my gut is right. And we totally do get it wrong.

We've run plenty of corrections. And then there are other times where I'm like very proud of the fact that we were first on something or very proud of the fact that like we handled it well. So it's hard. That's awesome, man. I got a couple questions from the audience for you. About news? No. just about other stuff.

We'll find out. This is from J-DOS 2K. How was your time working for a game dev like gearbox versus the press media like IGAN? It was really educational. I mean, they, I make fun of Texas a lot, but like I still love the people of gearbox. Like those people were great to me. And it was a very like, I had like a very like familial feeling there because so many of them were older than me or, you know, married and had houses. And I was just like this dude in a little apartment.

I think I learned more about the process than I. I thought I would. Just kind of watching how many moving parts there are that go into something. And then by being on the side I was where I was hosting our panels and I was doing a lot of like behind the scenes blog post and things like that. And like at the time we were trying to wrap up a podcast and things like that, I was getting this sort of the same experience I had doing interviews for press, except without that, oh, hey, we can't comment.

I remember like without that barrier. So it was like conversations could go one step further than they ever had. And that was fascinating to me. like just getting one-on-one time with people who are just like so smart like Matt Charles and Paul Halquist and Anthony Birch and all these people who I felt like I learned so much about their discipline from having conversations with them every day. Could not say enough nice things about like Randy Vernel, Aaron Lindy. Like there are just so many smart people there that taught me things I never would have imagined about, you know, again, like I use this as an example over and over. But like the amount of time that goes into like an animation loop or like into like making. sure that like, hey, like this specific art asset is perfect or even like even down to things

like working with publishers and the strategy behind release timing and the strategy behind like when you're announcing something and how much you show and when that does leak and when that does get screwed up, how do you react and what do you do? Like I got sort of this weird because I was technically in the marketing department. And so I was kind of doing this like role as like a almost like a historian, I guess, weirdly, like, in that I was from day one trying to be in there watching the pre-production of something to do behind the scene stuff. And that never ended up really materializing.

But I learned a lot from sitting with the various disciplines doing that. And then kind of when I was with the marketing team, I learned a lot of, hey, like, this is how many drafts something has to go through before. And not even like a press release, but like stuff like the back of the box and the text and menus and the things that are just totally not anything you would ever spend time thinking about. All of that, like every piece of a game now when I look at it, I feel like I'm thinking of it differently in the same way that before I ever did this, I was an extra. And when I was on a movie set, I totally watch movies differently now because I noticed

stuff in the background or I think about like changes in location in a way I never did when I was just watching movies having never set foot on the set. So I think it just gave me kind of this weird like just barely peek behind the curtain. Yeah. And I should clarify that like I wasn't in like a proper deverell at all. So it's like I still, I understand so little about like engine work or even about like checking in builds and stuff. Like I got like just kind of the like tip of the iceberg on that stuff. Just in the rare occasions where I would have to like look at something like in development.

But man like there's I'm still so ignorant on that stuff. Yeah. And on all the tech stuff obviously. How do you feel about Anthony Burch talking mad shit on persona five on Twitter? Yeah. I mean he he's not the only one I've seen saying they weren't crazy about the localization. I think it's um. There definitely are. Don't get me wrong. I do think there are a couple weird choices in this localization. I do think that, you know, playing the persona four, I feel like I had less of that reaction. But I also feel like I'm holding this under a higher standard in some ways. Plus having played in Japanese, I had a little bit more of a weird preconceived notion on certain things. Sure. But yeah, no, I mean, Anthony is like I didn't make it. I didn't make persona. Like I think he's a lot. You're dead to do him, Anthony. That's what he says. I like Anthony a lot.

Zach Walter wants to know what does Andrew think of dreams and the future of media molecule? It's been a lot. a fan of their games before. I'm interested in honest thoughts on the future of the studio. I'm so happy to exist. I'm so happy Sony doesn't like when every time I see we'll see how long they exist. Well, just every time I see like, you know, a, you know, a big big or zipper or any of these like smaller studios go away. I'm like, oh, nomademocule, you know, and it's, you know, I think when every time Sony kind of consolidates their pool of worldwide studios, I understand why. I've never had a moment where I'm like, they shut down naughty dog. what? It's never like, I feel like the writing is always going to be on the wall with like a, you know,

certain brand and, yeah, yep, yep, yep. So like that is never surprising. A little big plan I worry about, or I mean, I'm a little bit plain, Jesus, medium molecule I worry about because I think, um, tearway is awesome on Vita. I don't think it sold really well. Uh, obviously. I don't think that PS4 did many favors. Terway unfolded, yeah.

Yeah. And so now dreams, to me, looks so cool. And I talked to those guys at E3, 2015 about it. and then they said more at Paris Games Week. And we've seen so many cool streams. And like I get what they're going for. But I still don't understand that as a $60 project or product. I still don't understand it as something that wasn't just like with PSVR.

Like there are just so many, there's so many spots where I was like, oh, like, announce it's available now at PSX or make it a pack in with PSVR or there are so many beats where I was like, this seems like a smart time to push dreams. Like this feels like a good empty pocket where now I wonder what their strategy is. But all of that being said, like, that's so much more on like the business side. On the creative side, like, thank God for media molecule, man. Like keep Sony weird. In the same way, it's like keep Nintendo weird.

Like, I want Nintendo to be doing creative things. Like for every, you know, motion control thing I'll roll my eyes at or weird experiment that they do. I'm also so happy it's happening because it's pushing things forward. And I think it would be really boring if we just had, you know, three PS4s in our apartment with different logos in the front of them. I think the same is true for Sony's staple of, of, of, studios and their library of games like horizon uncharted infamous like so many things that are just these awesome brands and awesome experiences i've had are great but i still want those completely off the wall ones i still want something like dreams where i can be like holy crap like you have to

see this and like i want to show it off to people and want to explain or like marvel it in the same way would it like a Minecraft creation be like holy crap someone built and like i did with a little big planet honestly holy crap like someone built final fantasy seven in a little big planet or holy crap, someone recreated all of Hogwarts in Minecraft. Like, I feel like Dreams has the potential to be that. And the way they were describing it to me way back sounded so cool. Like this idea of like you are operating in this, um, in this like creative space where everything can be, uh, iterated upon.

So it's like you might be designing something and you want a tree and you'll search the catalog for tree. And maybe you made a tree six months ago and I take it. And I'm like, oh, his tree's really cool. But a branch pointing upward. would make it look even cooler, and I add a branch to it. And then your tree, if someone else checks it out,

they can either check out the version that I made or roll it back to the one that you made and the tree that you've placed in your world, you can then accept my changes and edit or you can keep it how it was. Like all of that, like, that's one object. Now think of that on scale of 10 or 100 or 1,000. Like, when you think about this kind of shared creative world

and the kind of art people could make, that sounds dope. And especially in VR, like looking at that, that sounds so cool. But again, like, is that $60 game? Is there a campaign? What is the campaign?

Is it that they made like a little big planet? They have these like bespoke levels. And so it's like a racetrack level. So you have a racing game. But it's like I just don't know what that looks like yet. And I feel like I have such a tenuous grasp on what dreams is. And that makes me concerned considering it's been shown off for four years now, more than four years now. Because we first saw it before it was titled at that original PS4.

There's moving everything. Yeah. So I mean, that was a really long answer to, oh, I hope it's cool, I want to play it. And like,

I love Little Big Planet. I love Mario Maker. I love Little Big Planet. I love, I'm really bad at creating things, but I love playing things that other people have created. And I especially love just going through random levels in both of those games.

So, man, I want Dreams to be that. And I've said for years that, like, the thing I wanted from a Little Big Planet was let me, and for Mario Maker is let me do it in a 3D plane. Let me make a Mario 64.

And like, maybe Dreams is that. Like, you know, like maybe that is the kind of next level of creation things because Project Spark kind of tried something like that and that didn't really work. So I don't know. I really, I want to be enthusiastic about it and I want to be optimistic about it. But the longer we go without seeing anything beyond those gameplay streams makes me worry a little bit. And I do worry about the commercial prospects of it

because it would be devastating to see mini molecule go away. Yeah. Final question. Do you think that we will ever get Mother 3? Yes. I do think eventually we'll get it in some virtual console capacity. I think we're getting it this year. Ooh. I think it's going to be at least announced this year. I want to believe, man, I have been hurt before. It's so funny because you look at the Earthbound community

and they're these incredible, dedicated people that have kept something going for, what, 22 years with almost no support. And especially, like, before Smash, really no support. And then now, like, Earthbound is on 3DS. It's on Wii. It's, you know, Ness is better known

because of Smash. I can go to Walmart and buy a Lucas toy, which just blows my mind. Like, that is so crazy. I don't think it's impossible, but I also,

like, I think at this point, it would be Nintendo just doing it to say, here you go, to that niche. I don't see it as a commercial prospect. It's also,

I've talked a lot about, like, what do you call it? Yeah. Because it's not Earthbound 2. I feel like that's misleading. They don't want to lose, like,

there are people, no Lucas from Smash. You got to get Lucas's name in there. So is it like Earthbound colon Lucas's story? Yeah, I think that's what it would be. Yeah. I feel like it would be something along those lines.

But man, I hope we do. I hope you're right. I'm kind of a natural pessimist at this point because it's just, there have been burned so many times. Yeah. So many times where it looked like it was going to happen and didn't.

Yeah. All right. Well, Goldfar, this has been fantastic. I hope so. Man, you got to come back more. Yeah. You have fun stories. You're fun to you talk to.

Oh, thanks, man. I think you're a fun. Where can people follow you? I'm Garfep on Twitter, which is Greg always regrets. Fucking elderly people. As it goes. Wait, really?

It's a hard Twitter handle. So that's what we had to come up with, you know, an an acronym for what it misunderstood for. It's not really, what is it? What? It's such a long story.

We'll have to have you back at another time. But I'm there. I'm on. Garff. Garf E.P. Garf E. was always what I, that's close. It's funny.

Funny you should say that. Yeah. The EP is accurate. All right. You can follow him there and also an IGN where he does all of his other stuff. Yeah, until next time. I love you. Oh, is that your sign of?

That is my son. What a cute sign of. What a cute sign of. Yeah. He's a cute boy. I'm a cute boy.