Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Fortnite is Someone's GoldenEye 64 - Kinda Funny Gamescast Ep. 190

Episode Date: October 8, 2018

Nintendo Life's Steve Bowling (https://twitter.com/SteveMBowling) comes by to talk The Messenger, Nintendo Switch, and more with Jared and Greg. (Originally released on Patreon 10.05.18) Time Stamps - 00:00:18 - start 00:10:57 - Forza Horizon 4 00:23:03 - The Messenger 00:33:28 - Grip 00:35:23 - Crossing Souls 00:38:29 - Assasins Creed Odyssey 00:48:28 - Overcooked 2 00:52:42 - Creed Rise To Glory 00:53:36 - Jack And Jill DX 00:55:41 - Tanglewood 00:58:49 - Mega Man 11 01:03:46 - Conic Lightening Force 01:07:076 - Ghost N Goblins 01:09:20 - Reader Mail 01:32:55 - Mobile Game Or Bullshit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up everybody? Welcome to the Kind of Funny Games cast, episode 190. I'm one of your host, Greg Miller, alongside two of the coolest dudes in video games. Jared Petty. Dokey Dokey. And Steve Bowling from Nintendo Life. What's up, everyone?

Thanks for having me. Now, many people know you, of course, from choking at the Pax Tournament. Yeah. This was covered in depth, of course, on the pre-show when it was discovered, we never posted the Pax Tournament video. We're going to get on that.

Yeah, we're bad at this. It's okay. My shame shall live forever. Steve, here's what I want you to do, though. Sure. Give me the pitch here. Tell me about your career. You're the U.S. editor at Nintendo Life.

Yeah. What does that mean exactly? Well, being U.S. editor at Nintendo Life means that I put together all of our coverage for the states in so far as, you know, I coordinate getting review copies for our review team here in America because we're headquartered out in the UK. So Darren, Damien, Alex, all our executive staff, if you will. are out there. So I handle E3, the Pax's, you know, media events that happen here in America while they handle literally everything, everything else. But yeah, most of it is just managing

relationships with publishers doing, you know, US-based coverage. So if we get something that they can't get out there, we handle it here. So for Nintendo Life, is it more reviews? Is it more news? Is it equal sides? Oh, it's definitely equal. So we have, we'll post obviously anything Nintendo-related news-wise. We do reviews of as many games as we can handle with the staff that we have. We used to try to do everything, but now with the Switch being popular, that is

way too hard. With the Wii U days, it was super easy. I remember we reviewed meme run, so clearly we had some time on our hands. Now things are a little busier. Have you seen, I guess, with the uptick in Nintendo's

resurgence in popularity. Sure. People care about the Switch. Has that been reflected on the website? Oh, absolutely. Our traffic is way up since the switch came out. We're easily the largest Nintendo-centric website in the world. You know, we get about 3 million unique visitors a month,

12 million page views a month, which a couple years ago was we were maybe half that. So it's definitely gone way up since the switch came out. Does it open up new opportunities for you there? Oh, absolutely. We talked to Bethesda. I mean, just digest that for a moment. like Bethesda talking to a Nintendo site. Would you have guessed that five years ago?

Probably not. So yeah, we get, you know, it's weird when we get hit up by companies that traditionally steered away from Nintendo. And now we're kind of having to meet new people and make friends with new people in the industry and cover new things that we weren't even really thinking about before. That's awesome. Yeah, it really is. So now, I think whenever we bring somebody new on the shows, you know, there's so many people

trying to do what we do or exist in the same ecosystem as it would be a review or personality, however you want to describe it. What was your journey where you are now? How long have you been professionally writing about video games? Sure. So I've only been doing it about six years. Nice. I started out when I was my first daughter was about to be born. So, you know, six years ago, she's five now. And I was worried that I wouldn't be able to play games anymore. So I wanted to have a way to stay connected to what I love. And so I decided to start writing about them. At the time, Kotaku had a small community blog where anyone could write whatever they want. And so I signed up there and started writing little articles just about, you know, mevers and and stuff like that.

And it grew into, you know, I discovered that I really enjoyed it and wanted to go further with that. So I ended up finding a small local controller shop in Tempe, Arizona. Yeah. And they let me do a tour and take pictures. And I wrote up a really in-depth article about it. And Tina Amini from Kotaku at the time. Friend of the show, Tina, Amy. Friend of the show.

noticed the article and liked it and shared it on Kotaku's main page and from there it got tens of thousands of views and many people telling me I'm stupid and on the internet weird hey can you fact check this are people mean on the internet yeah I'll tell I'll look into thanks oh thank you so yeah after that I started just writing more and more and and I started conversing with Tina about the possibility of doing freelance work and and she she gave me the great opportunity to write one of my favorite pieces I've ever written, which was about the Perry mechanic in Street Fighter 3 and how much I just love it. And I don't know if you've ever seen Evo Moment 47 where Daigo is down to like a sliver of life

and full Perry's Justin Wong-Supor and then destroys him and people lose their damn minds about the whole thing. But it was basically an article centered around that and what made that moment so great. That's where I first became familiar with you. It was that article, actually. I didn't know that was you until today when you walked in and told that story. story. I had not connected reading that article with the fact that you wrote it till today. But that is still one of my all-time favorite things that was ever on Kataku. It's a great article.

Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You hear that Kotaku? Just saying, hi, Stephen. So, yeah, I, uh, Tina left and, you know, she went on to different things. I won't say bigger about her. She washed out. No one knows where she ended up. Yeah, no one knows what happened to her. They should really do a where are they now. Yeah, exactly. Fell off the face of the earth. Yeah, she was on here. what three weeks ago? She runs IGN's editorial.

She's running the biggest site in the world. But yeah, so she left and that stream kind of dried up. New management wasn't really interested in syndicating my stuff. So I started writing for Nintendo Life just reviewing anything they would let me review. And from there, I decided to, and I was telling Jared this in between shows, I flew out to New York on my own dime to go to the Switch reveal event. And I ended up hitting up Rich George, former IGN. Sure, friend of the show.

Yeah, and told him, hey, I'm going to go to New York, and I would just love to look at the switch. And, you know, he graciously let me in with a couple friends that I snuck in. Sorry, Rich. And we, I wrote a bunch of articles and showed them off to the guys running Nintendo Life. And they were like, holy shit, you know, why don't you come do this more in a greater capacity? So since then, I've, I've been, you know, doing it more professionally and loving every minute of it. just is it your is it your job do you have another job or are you just writing are you just making the video game stuff work um right now i am just making the video game stuff that's awesome that's awesome

i saw you i saw you're on twitter this week i think right where you're like my this is your first ever ign article just went up right right so again those relationships i tina mini hit me up and asked me if i wanted to do something about megamam bosses sure uh for the release of 11 calm down yeah i get you'll never work for i jane again jared is going to get you blackball There are three Mega Man 8 bosses in your list of the top 10 Mega Man bosses. And they're amazing bosses, man. You know what? This is a sad state of affairs.

This is America. Get it's the internet. You can't have different opinions, Steve. Yeah, well, then we were talking about, I was teasing about this earlier on the show today, but I think it's pretty rad that you made such a bold move. What a splash. Oh, thank you. What are you going to write next?

Whatever they ask me to. Who's paying? What do they want? That's what I'm doing. What was Dave Chappelle's line? Drink Pepsi more recently, so tastes better. Ladies and gentlemen, if you didn't know this, is the Kind of Funny Games cast.

Each and every we, no, every I've never had to redo it on the fly, right? Because I'm just, Tim, of course, is in a monkey forest for like two weeks. Nobody knows what's happened to him. Oh, yeah. Each and every Friday on Patreon.com slash Kind of Funny Games, we put up a new episode of the games cast

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There's no sponsor today. So let's just say Patreon.com slash kind of funny games is the sponsor, all right? Go over there, help people. What did you say? I said morning show. You want the morning show to support this?

No, the Patreon, all right? Here's the thing. I'll be dead in the ground before I ever fucking support or promote Nick Scarpino's shows. Are you still mad because you win mobile game or bullshit? I don't want to talk about that, Jared.

All right, I don't want to talk about that. I don't want to talk about verification on Instagram. I just want to point out. Is Nick verified too? No, no, it's just him. But Nick continues to point it out in the morning shows. And then I get many people tweeting me about it. I don't know what that's all about.

I don't like that. Is this part of you? Did you do that? No idea. No idea. Patreon.com slash kind of funny games. If you like the content we make, it helps keep the mics and lights on.

And then, of course, Extra Life, 2018 is November 3rd. We'll be streaming games and shenanigans for 24 hours. as we raise money for the children's miracle network, join or donate now over at kind of funny.com slash extra life. That's exciting. I love extra life. Yeah, it's fantastic. I'm working on getting some cool stuff for that.

Then, of course, this is the first games cast, right, since we announced that we're doing a press conference. Yep. Yep. That's a lot of work, it turns out. By the way, that's a lot of work. I've seen the screenshots of your email on Twitter, man. It's only worse, dude.

It's only worse. And now it's gone so long. Now I'm getting the emails again. I'm like, hey, did you just check it. Did you get my email? I'm like, oh, fuck. Do you need help sorting for that stuff? I ain't you to stop trying to steal this from you, Jared.

I'm not just to steal it. Just try to help. Just sit your ass down. Thank you. Every fucking show he's on, he talks about Red Dead Radio. Every time he talks about how Blub and gentlemen, all the great videos he's making. He's talking about how Red Dead's coming up and everybody. I'm looking at you, Andy. Talking about this stuff, you know what I mean? He's talking about Red Dead Radio,

and how successful it is and everybody should subscribe to it. You know, you find Jared Petty on the internet and get that stuff. It's crazy. I know. He mentions that all the time. It's a terrible guy. It's a terrible.com. Patreon.com. slash Jared Pettie.

Yeah. Okay. Or just reddedradradio.com. If you want to give, it'll go right there too. The numbers are exploding, you're saying? It's been a really good few days.

Yeah, that's awesome, dude. At every, I mean, now it's just finding a way to monetize it. I'm getting the views now. Now I just got to see if I can get the support to keep it going. Sure.

So that's where we're at right now. Maybe one day, patreon.com slash kind of funny games will sponsor you too, but maybe not today. It's time to talk about what we've been playing. Andy, I know you have to go assemble some Gundams,

so I don't want to waste any more of your time. Serious work. What have you been playing? I decided to give Forza Horizon 4 ago. Oh. And totally, like, not in my... Like, that's just not something I do. I don't play racing games.

Yeah. I talked on Twitter about how the last racing game I played was Need for Speed Underground. Sure. On PS2. Like, it's been so long since I've given a shit about this world. Of course, there was a subreddit threat on the kind of funny subreddit about, hey, why aren't they talking about Forks of Horizon? And many people were just like, well, they're not in racing games.

And then you chimed in. I commented, yeah, I thought about playing it. But last night, I saw that it was free on Game Pass. Sure. And so I decided to download it. And I am having a lot of fun with it. It's hard to describe what I like about it. Because I'm just not an authority on racing games.

I don't know. You don't need to worry about that. I know. I'm sure a lot of stuff in this game was in the prior iteration of the game. but I what is hooking you don't throw that away if somebody wants the hey compared to the last couple games they'll get that

there's always these shiny numbers that pop up on the top to let you know how you're doing Greg and it's that instant that dopamine hit you know what I mean? Oh sure yeah yeah yeah anytime you anytime you drift it's popping up and it's like hey good job good job it's just a lot of compliments so for you this is Forzer Horizon Candy Crush

I need some positive reinforcement in my life for for fuck sake Jared Betty okay and so yeah it reminds me of the things I love about driving in Grand Theft Auto, where I find a straightaway and I just go as fast as I can.

There's a lot of things around the world, and I love the idea of the open world racing game ever since, what, Diddy Kong racing on 64? Like, sure. I love the idea that you're going to hubs and you're not just, all right, let me go to a menu, select the next thing I want to do. It's gorgeous to look at. I'm playing on

an Xbox 1x, so playing it in 4K, I don't know if it's true 4K or not, but it looks gorgeous. or you could switch to performance mode which is 1080p 60 frames per second and it's gorgeous regardless of what you pick because the HGR just pops like really well if you have a really nice TV

all of the events around the world where it's maybe you want to do a dirt race and you sort of climb up the ladder and they're saying hey whoa who's this new race you're going through different seasons so you start off in the spring and the world looks one way and then you go into the fall circuit

and you have to get a certain amount of, I can't think of the word right now. It's like reputation points. I think you go to the summer circuit probably next, right? No, okay, you started off in circuit. Summer, sorry. And then you go to the fall, and then now I'm in the winter circuit or whatever.

Sure. And I found myself playing for like five hours last night where it's crazy. I want to go to the next race. I want to see what I can unlock. You eventually get like a little house and where all your vehicles get stored. And in there you can custom.

the vehicles. It has this really cool system of, it's almost like loot boxes, I guess it is, but it's you spin a wheel. It's kind of like, I don't know, like Wheel of Fortune or something. Are you spending money on it? No, no, this is all stuff that you, I've just earned in the game or whatever. And so every

time you spin it, you can maybe unlock a shirt for your avatar, or you can, if you're lucky, land on, like, an epic or legendary car. And so they have the sort of cars classed out like they do you know, weapons in, you know, RPGs and stuff like that. You have like the common,

the epic, no, the common, the rare, epic, and the legendary. And so, you can use reputation points. That's not the right word, but it's kind of like reputation when you drive around. Sure, you're earning that kind of XP. Yeah, you're earning like XP, I guess. And you can use those points to

maybe buy a hundred thousand point Aston Martin or like the James Bond car. Oh, yeah, I saw pair running around that, yeah. Yeah, or you could spend, you know, 30,000 on a really nice like Subaru off-road or something like that. It's gorgeous to play. It's really fun. It's addicting.

Do you want to keep going back to it? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this morning it was weird because I, I, it was like 3.30 in the morning last night. I was like, I got to stop playing this shit because I need to go to bed. And then I woke up this morning

like an hour before my alarms went off. And I woke up kind of like energetic. And I was like, I'm just going to play some more forces. So that's what I did. And I'm having a lot of, fun with it and I would have never thought that'd be the case. I think it might be good next Wednesday to get you and Gary down together because we were reacting to the same thread on Games Daily the other day and Gary's played quite a bit of it too and he's kind of a racing game guy. So I'd really love

to hear like somebody that's new to it and somebody that's played a lot of these talk back and forth about this. Yeah, like I'm just so new to this world. I have nothing. I don't really know much about the forts of games at all other than like, oh, it's a free game. Let me check it out. And now it's at the point where it's like, yeah, I want to, I want to throw them 10, 15 bucks here because I'm enjoying this and I've, you know, put in six hours now or whatever. So I want to like see, you know, how can I support this? Because I, you know, you download it for free with Games Pass. I'm sure they're still getting a nice little stipend from Microsoft or whatever. But yeah, I want to support the developer. It's a lot of fun. And you, it's, it's that constant,

I guess, you're constantly seeking that upgrade, right? It's like that instant gratification. Here's my final question for you in this Forza, a very specific part. What about it led you to play it? Was it the buzz? Was it just seeing it pop on Xbox Game Pass? I felt the same way with Forza Horizon 3. Games, didn't I? It's okay.

Nah, I owe Andrea, a goddamn dollar now. What? Every time I say Xbox games. You said Game Pass. I did? Yeah, I heard pretty sure. Okay, okay, okay, okay. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

What about it is what made you play, Forza? I think it was the, I was always intrigued by Forte Horizon 3. That's the one that took place in Australia, I believe. That sounds right, yeah. At the time it came out, and I was really into watching Top Gear. And I just liked the idea of this open world where there really are no rules. You can just sort of free drive wherever you want, and there's all these little perks all around the world. And that idea always intrigued me, but the fact that it was free definitely drove me to it to say,

I might as well give it a shot. Why not? I have nothing else to really do right now. And it was a lot of fun. Nice shoes that drove me to it. Huh? Nice used to drove me to it. Yeah, that was pretty nice.

Something steered you in that direction. Totally didn't mean to, yeah. So now here's my question for you guys as a panel. And Andy, I want your opinion too, of course. But you've been talking a lot. So shut out. Sure, yeah. Is this the power of Xbox Game Pass?

Is this the whole entire reason Xbox is doing this to put games out there that Andy or a gamer or whoever might not normally give a shit about it? He was intrigued about Fort's a Horizon. and three never touched it, right? Never wanted it plunk down the $60 for it. It's part of it. It's not all of it. It's, that's the beginning. That's the hook. It's also there to highlight games that maybe never got the attention they deserved

so that sequels can have buildup, so the DLC can be sold against those games so that they can keep multiplayer communities. That's a huge deal, something, whether it be Horizon or if you look at something like a shooter maybe that didn't get the attention to deserve first time around. If you lose that server population, you lose the game. It's over, right, yeah. So why not keep making revenue? How do you do that?

Throw it on Games Pass. It's free. More people are populating the servers. I think that's a huge part of it. I think it's a gateway drug towards some sort of eventual what I've heard Gary called the other day, Nestflix when we talk about the AES on what we want from Nintendo online, right? Exactly. And that I think that this could very well be them investigating another kind of blue ocean revenue model.

Some place that they're not making money yet that they could be. But the gateway drug is ultimately key multiplayer servers populated on good games that didn't get the attention they deserve the first time around. Steve, how do you really follow that? But yeah, I agree 100% with Jared. It's a way to get more eyes on Xbox One first-party titles. I mean, it's pretty clear that the Xbox One is in a distant third place right now. You know, there isn't a lot of buzz around it.

Key games like Scalebound, Crackdown 3 are kind of missing. Well, either canceled completely or missing in action, getting delayed. Giving people the opportunity to highlight some of those games for $10 a month is actually a pretty killer deal. And I think it is a way to, I think the appeal of it from what I've heard from friends that are PlayStation-centric is that, yeah, they'd be willing to throw down $10 a month. You know, that might drive them to go buy an Xbox one just because they know they wouldn't have to buy games for it. You know, for them $10 a month is way more appealing than dropping $60 to see if see if thieves is any good. Right. You know, and I have a few friends who have gone and done exactly

that. They've plunked down the $200 plus $10 or $300 plus $10 depending on, you know, which model you're going for and and only played games that were available on game pass and so far that's working out for those folks that I know that have done that I have game pass I never use it I was telling someone earlier today that I think my relationship with my Xbox is that I turn it on once every six months and I think to myself why don't I do this more often and then I repeat the cycle yeah I love my Xbox I just never use it and I pay for GamePass the entire time I don't use it I mean that's what Xbox wants right in a lot of ways of just like give me give you the $10 forget about it's what Netflix wants out of me you know what I mean

right because we I have I have game pass it was provided by Microsoft and in the same way I find it so fascinating that we got all we have I've had the forts of codes forever and Gary Widow is the only one who really expressed interest in it right and I think it's so interesting that for Andy somebody who has access

that and you might not even know that they were chilling or whatever but that you know you can reach out and I can get you pretty much anything you want but it was the nudge of just being like at home one night and be on a whim all right that's out and I have that ability to get it And I was interested in the last one. And now you're doing the thing that I always talk about with my games, right?

Where sure, I get the game for free, but if I really love it and I'm enjoying it, here's the season passed. I'll pay you for the season past as a way to give back to you and encourage you to keep doing stuff, even if I don't get to that content. And the way it's an extension of that Fortnite mentality where why are so many people playing? One of the reasons, frankly, it's free. It works everywhere. In our minds, we can reach a place.

I think you raise a great point there. Free-esque. We think of it as free. We barely think about the fact that we're paying for Netflix anymore. The amount of times, here's your free PlayStation Plus games in the month. Well, I'm like, no, I pay for PlayStation Plus. Like, I understand that I'm getting whatever. Yeah, okay.

Yeah. But I think that it kind of slips through. And we increasingly, many of us, I think, think about some of these things almost like utility. How would I live without it? And that's ridiculous. But that's how they get you. Yeah, that is how they get you. Andy, they got you.

I'm going to drift away now. Oh, you're going to. Andy, can I ask for one favor? Take a break. Can you make a pit stop and make me? another ice coffee at the 7-11? What? Yeah.

Can you like put ice in the, from the door of the fridge and then just put a coffee here? Yeah, sure. Thanks. Thank you, but you like, you didn't react to my pit stop thing because it's like you were driving away. You said the 7-Eleven, so I was like, I didn't. We like, but, oh, well, it was a dad joke that stopped halfway through.

All right, we're going to just keep up. Andy, may I, may I really also request an ice coffee? Sure. Thank you, Steve. Would you, like a water, a refill on the water? Sure. Okay. Thank you.

Andy, what... I don't have a car pun, though, but, you know. It's fine. They're all dead now. They rolled over. I've emptied both of these LeCroix, so I need some caffeine. Sure, okay. Is there caffeine in LaCroix?

No, no, that's what you're saying. You're giving me ice coffee. I apologize. Also, if you're a video viewer, by the way, we're going to be unboxing this C-64 Mini and this centipede machine later in the show. That's why they're out here. Which I'm very excited about.

I actually didn't realize that the C-64 Mini came out. And I had every intention to pre-ordering one. And then some of my friends just kind of were like, hey, look, I've got one. Oh, yeah, the Csix 14-Many actually does an officially wide release here in the States, I think until the 9th, I believe. Well, then, luckily, I tucked the fact sheet into the box. Even though we're not unboxing it now. Steve, you get ready. Believe it.

Or October 9th, October 9th. Now I've got time. I got time. Got time. All right. Steve, with all this time you've had on your hands, Greg, way, what have you been playing? So I have been playing a few games. I've been playing, and mostly indies.

which is kind of interesting. This is all on Switch, I assume, right? Yeah, yeah. I literally don't play anything else. I'm kidding. You joked about only turning your Xbox every six months. Yeah. But is it pretty much legitimately for the job and what you're doing?

You're just playing Switch? Yeah, for the most part. I mean, I did take a long break to play Spider-Man because I was, there was no fucking way I wasn't playing Spider-Man. Exactly. I have needs, food, water, shelter, and Spider-Man. Shirtless Spider-Man cameo. I did.

I actually went hunting for that once I found out it was there. I'm very proud of him. He's done a lot of great work. Yeah, he's a real hero. But I spent, I've been spending a lot of time with The Messenger. Jared was just talking about it before. Where are you right now? No spoilers, but into the messenger, how far are you?

So, ballpark. I think I'm close to the end. Okay. Have you beaten it yet, Jared? I know you are. No, I haven't beaten it yet. That game means a Surgeon General's warning for how awesome it is. Yeah.

It's so good. It is so fantastic. I keep coming back to it. It's like, I'll pick it up, I'll play it. I'll complete one or two objectives. then I'll leave it for days at a time. But I always want to come back to it. Whenever I have idle time, I'm like,

oh, I should play the messenger. And it's easily my favorite indie game this year. Okay, hold on one second. I always want to do this. Ethics, of course. My wife, Jen, does brand management for the messenger. So I just like to put that out there. Didn't even know.

No, the $20. I've never met her. The $20 is in the mail. No, my question. Okay, so that's interesting you say that. Because last time I think, was it a Games Daily or a Gamescast, you and I were talking about this,

I believe. I don't think we've talked about this. How do you think it matches up against Celeste? Because that seems to be the one where people are like, it's a great game. It's one of the game of the years. I'd probably go Celeste over that, but blah,

blah, blah. Yeah, so I'll be honest, Celeste doesn't grab me the same way. It is a competent and extremely fun platformer. Yeah. But I don't want to play it nearly as much

as I want to play the messenger. Really? Yeah. The messenger hits that nostalgia sweet spot for me, though. I'm instantly reminded of Ninja Guideon on my NES when I was a kid. Yeah. You know, sitting on the floor of my parents' fucking living room,

playing on a ridiculously tiny CRT, whereas Celeste feels more like something that was made this year. Sure. And so it doesn't have that same nostalgia factor for me. And while it's a fun game, I just don't, I'm not drawn into it the same way. Do you feel the messenger not overcomes it because that's a great thing, but does it do more than just nostalgia? Oh, absolutely. I mean, mechanically, the messenger feels like something completely new.

I mean, but it feels like something that legitimately could have been done back then. Okay. Like, you know, the whole jumping mechanic and hitting enemies and being able to flip off them. And just the way it ramps up its challenge so steadily as you go through the game. Like I was playing on the flight here. I was playing the messenger and I was trying to get through this one room where there are no platforms and nothing to grapple onto, just enemies floating around that are moving and you have to basically jump and cut your way through to the other side of this chasm with a massive dip in between.

So you have to let yourself fall, then continue to springboard off of enemies. to the other side. And it was incredibly frustrating. But once I got through it, I just felt so good about myself. For that one moment, everything in my life was right. Yeah, that's, I think that's around the moment where I realized that it was, that this was the sequel to Kloa. I never got and always wanted. Oh, I know, right? I never even thought about that. It's the bonus stage in Kloa. It's just like, oh, look, use enemies to move through the air. The whole game's built around that. And it's just so beautifully, brilliantly put together. I'm really glad you're enjoying it. For me, it's definitely in the, in the game. of the year discussion, but I tend to think of it as almost a deconstruction of the way

that platformers are put together. Sort of like you look back at a movie like the man who shot Liberty Valance and it's a John Ford like taking his whole career of tropes and what makes things work apart in another movie by him and taking everything and then making something beautiful anyway out of all of that. I think the messenger kind of does that for platformers and its design. I love it for that. Yeah, it is a fantastic game.

I can't say enough good things about it. And that's why I want to give the floor and keep asking you questions. It's something I similarly asked, Jared, I think. Do you think it waited too long for its hook or like the... Because I don't even know what it is. You know what I mean? Because I tend to play through more or do more...

You know what I mean? Because I touched it and whatever. I'm like, I get it. I want to play Valchari Chronicles 4 right now. But I know that... I mean, I know there's the 8 bit to 16 bit, but I know that there's like a story moment where the game suddenly becomes something different.

Right. There's another hook. And I think it gets dangerously. close to that but doesn't get to that point. I think by the time you reach that kind of moment where the, where the game tonally shifts in a way, you're almost getting to that point where you're tired of what you've been doing. And I think that's really critical to what makes it such a good game is because it pushes you right to that edge of, okay, I've done this enough.

And then it says, hey, we're a whole new game now. So you get to do a whole different set of mechanics and a whole different, you know, you play the game in a completely different way. And the thing that I love most about it is that while it changes, you're still, you're finding new things out about familiar locations that you've already visited. And whenever a game does that, I'm in love with it. It makes me think of Skyward Sword when you had the time stones and you would have these little pockets of the future or the past. Sure.

And you're traveling through a landscape. It's just whenever games can repurpose their existing locations and make something completely new and exciting out of it, I've just fallen in love with that. Oh, sure. For me, it's always Ocarina of Time. Oh, right. When you come out of Temple of Time as an adult link or whatever, older link, right? And it's just destroyed. Like, oh yeah. My story and I know it's tried for

old listeners, but like, I don't think I've told it in a long time now. Like, I remember being in honors English class, junior year of high school, and it was they wanted us to write sample college essays. Like, you know, you're getting the thing for this for a graded assignment, but you know all this stuff. And so it was a compare

and contrast two different time periods from any one of these books. And they listed like 25 books and I had read nut of them. And I was like, all right. And I just fucking put it all in line and did Occurion of time. No kidding. How was your grade?

B plus. Freaking. And it was, read more books, idiot, but I was written there by Mr. Koloje, but. I've never heard that story.

Oh, really? Yeah, like, because it was just like, for me, maybe it was senior year, but I mean, playing through,

because I played through Ocarina of Time. I started it the night before my ACT test and played it way too late that night. You know what I mean? That was a poor choice.

No, I still define the ACTs. Uh, Ocarena had been, it was one of those games that I had a friend who was like, you need to play this, you need to play this, you need to play this. And it became that thing of me being like, well, no, now it's just going to be like, I'll never play it. And like a blockbuster was closing and then, or just doing a game sale. Yeah.

And I remember going there and seeing the gold NES car or N64 cartridge for it. Oh, wow. For like, 10 bucks or whatever there. And I was like, I didn't even buy it. And I told them about it later. And they're like, you're fucking idiot. And so sure enough, one day I broke down during a spring break. And he gave me the guide and he gave me the cartridge.

And I put that cartridge and I was like, what the. fuck is this game. Like, holy shit. And when it did that first twist of coming out after like, they, and I keep in mind, like, you know,

I'm a Sega kid. This is my first Zelda. So any of the tropes, any of the stuff, like I don't know them or expect them or any of the twists I'm going to get into. So to play that and be like, oh man,

like, Hyrule is so alive and so awesome. And it still was. Remember when we all run into the field for the first time? And like now you look at it, it's just like totally flat and there's like two bushes and an enemy.

But it was like, what the fuck? Oh my God. Games. But to get in there, and it was just such a living, breathing place and all these characters I cared about and side stories I cared about. And then to go into Temple and come on, everyone's a zombie. You're like, what the fuck?

And that's it. You've got like that repurposed world. Repurposing usually feels like something in a game that feels lazy, something that was done because, oh, man, we've got to use these assets again. And yet there's... It can be. I wouldn't even say usually. I think it can be.

Often is. Okay. I would say, when I encounter repurposing in games, more often than not, I'm bumped. Are you thinking back to NES, S-NES days? There's a lot of stuff. I think you see it more now than he did then, honestly. But they're exceptions, like Akaranah, like for me it'd be the inverted castle in the city of the night.

Or like, think about all the reuse of assets that went into an undead nightmare. You know, and that created an amazing situation. And that was good. And that was the same thing. Hey, this fucking world that you've been in for hours is now this brand new thing. And that's great. I love when that gets pulled off right. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Well, that was an abrupt stop. I didn't know. Boom. I'm done. Jaron Petty's made his point. All right, cool.

I made the point. So you think Messenger, best indie you've played this year? Oh, absolutely. By a, by a mile. Would you say, this is,

stick with me, a load of question. You've played a lot of Indies this year because the Switch, obviously, there's like 15 every Thursday now for you to get into. Oh, yeah.

I've played a lot of Indies. I have a 512 gig card in my switch that is full. Yeah. Wow. Wow. That's a slow clap. Don't applaud me.

I'm the same way. I forget which I have one of the bigger cards. Kevin, do you remember what card? 128? Well, now Kevin's confused. But I have a bigger card in there and it's like, it's that weird thing of now hitting that ceiling.

Where I'm like, fuck and I'll have to go to lease stuff. I'm like, there's so many games on here. I haven't even opened yet. Oh, yeah. Flipping death. Fuck, I really want to play that. Ah, shit. All right.

Delete something else. Come back. Remember it's there. Is this yours or mine? Which one? The ice. Oh, the ice is for everybody. Andy's never made a nice coffee apparently.

so he put two cubes in every cup and then was like, oh, this isn't enough. Cup your hand over it. It's going to splash back. Wondering why my ice coffee was so warm. By the way, can we appreciate a moment? Jared's fabulous Nintendo Switch Cup. Oh, what that?

That is a wonderful piece of branded merchandise. That's marvelous. Yeah, I want one. Maybe even more than that. Well, it was when Damon Baker came by, right? He came by with a million cups. It was at the end. What the hell?

He gave me a business card and a pat on the shoulder. Well, this is the, Saman Francisco Press Tour. And we were the last stop. So he's like, hey, here are all these Nintendo Switch pens and cups. I don't want to bring back. We're like, all right, cool, thanks. Also, when Damon Baker gives you a pat on the shoulder,

you need to understand it's kind of like when Jesus touched you. And actually, you were blessed. I actually figured I might make a successful indie game now. Like, if I use this shoulder. Because he blew the indie dust on you. Yeah, exactly. I have such great ideas of platforming. Tell me about grip, Steve.

I can't say a whole lot about grip because it's super early. Here's what I'll tell you, honestly. I don't know what grip is. I don't have a, when you say you're playing that, I don't have a visual of what that game. Right, so it's a combat racing game. Think like Twisted Metal or something like that. Oh, okay.

Vigilating A, something like that. Yeah, yeah. This has been a series. Yes, there's been grips before. Okay. Now I'm starting to get there. Yeah, it's like one of those, you know, developer comes back, makes a spiritual successor kind of thing.

Gotcha. I don't have a release date for it yet, but they sent me a code and they didn't send me an embargo. Oh, okay. So I was like, hey, cool, I can talk about this. Usually the sign of, please say something about it. So where does it fall on this? So where does it fall on the Carmageddon to Twisted Metal to Vigilentate 8 to Interstate 76 scale?

Oh, that's hard. Like I said, it's still a really early game, so I'm not sure where it's going to land, to be honest. It's like, you know, assets aren't completely done. I mean, like the earliest game I've ever played on a retail console ever, so I'm a little surprised that they sent it to me. Are you seeing glimmers of this could be good? Yeah, it definitely could be good. So the idea of the game is that you can race around the tracks. And they're all kind of tubular tracks.

So you can race on the ceiling or on the floor on the sides and you can pick up weapons and destroy other racers. Kind of. Okay. Are you racing or are you fighting? Both. Okay. You are racing, but you are heavily encouraged to kill people on the way through. So there is a goal line.

Yes. There is a goal line and there are laps. And yeah, it's like Mario Kart, but people die. Okay. All right. There we go. So it's not like the vigilante. We're just going to wait until one minute.

Right, right. It's not arena combat, like Twisted Metal or Vigilani, yeah. Okay. So it's a fun little game, but I definitely need to spend more than 48 minutes. Something to keep on your radar. Yeah, it's something I'm still actively playing, but to be honest, it's taking a backseat to other stuff just because it's still, I'm waiting

for more updates to come out for it. Sure. Right. And then what about Crossing Souls? Crossing Souls is another indie, of course, and it's published by Devolver. So it's weird as fuck. It is fucking weird, right? What is this one, dude? Whose heads exploding are fucking

Cthuloo's having sex while one in a meeting mark. It is a, it's like a Saturday morning, 80s, like, cartoon. Okay. So, and the cutscenes are exactly like that. They're animated in that really cheesy kind of weird way that 80s cartoons were. Oh, rad. And, uh, you,

you play as a group of kids in, in a sleepy town that discover this stone that lets them see ghosts. And you turn, and it ends up, uh, you have to work together with ghosts to solve issues in your town. that usually involves like beating the shit out of things with a baseball bat. Kevin, can I please see a trailer for Crossing Souls? This game sounds like 120% Greg Miller kind of story.

Yeah, it is a really fun game. I mean, I've been enjoying it. How far into this are you? I would say I'm about 60-70% through. Oh, shit, okay. So I've uncovered most of the main story beats now. I've seen a bunch of the really cool little animated cutscenes,

and I keep coming back to it. It's just really fun. And it plays almost like an old school Zelda. What turned you onto it? Well, the fact that they sent me a code for it. There you go. All right. No, I actually really liked the trailer for it. So this is what turned me on to it.

Let's take a look. Are we watching? Yeah, showed up for the kids too. And I'll describe for this for Raddick, Devolver Digital. We got the tape. Oh, yeah. I love that. Oh, fuck.

Yeah. This looks fucking awesome. Yeah, I'm telling you it's bad ass. How did I? God, David, Greg. I was sleeping. Keep at the wheel, guys. I'm sorry. These guys look like they ought to be like representing Burger King in a brand.

I know. So is the story good? Are the characters cool? Yeah, the story's good. The characters are really, really cool. You can switch between one of, I want to say, four living kids. Like, you can see them all in the trailer here. And they each have unique abilities like the blue-haired kid uses a bat. The orange-haired girl.

And the Delorean. Oh, yeah. There's a dragon. It's Vigo! Yeah. You were supposed to fly. I like the kid looks so much like Egon. Yeah, and of course, in true 80s, 80s fashion, the kid's like a super genius that can make anything.

This kid from Explority. Wow. Yeah. Looks fun. It is an awesome game. Yeah, you'd be playing this. Yeah, you're playing this. Yes, 1,000% in. I can't believe that slip by us.

Is it out already? Yeah, yeah, it's out now. Oh, well, okay. Fuck. There's too many games, guys. Well, yeah, that's the thing. Is this the problem with our lives? I saw an article on.

somewhere, probably gone or Kataku this week? Too many games. Maybe if we weren't writing about games all the time. Maybe if we're just playing them all the time. Can we work on that becoming independently wealthy and just play games all the time? Yeah, let's do it. I mean, you're kind of on your way there, right? If we could just stop talking about it, if we just have a Twitch

stream every day, just play that, you know what I mean? But make the same amount of money. Yeah, that sounds good. Definitely. I'm in. I'm excited to stop this show now. I don't get crossing school. I've got it on my switch and my bag over here, so we can definitely throw it up somewhere. Things I've been playing.

Yeah. I want your opinion on this one, Steve, because I know you've been there with me, right? Assassin's Creed Odyssey. I've talked a lot about it. But I know Big Kev Dog's been playing a ton of it. I know Steve's been playing a ton of it. And I know Jared hates it.

He's running away. No, that's not true at all. I can hear him over there. What's that? No, Jared. You won't play it because it has a female protagonist. I'll tell you what, Jared. That's not a old statement.

Today, I'm talking his mic. Cut his mic. The San Francisco Scroo. That is untrue. I got up because I had to pee. No, I can't wait to play this game. I feel like you need to cap that off with a wink. I need to be.

I cannot, as I've said before, get over how much I love this game and how much it's dominated, like, I'm at home. It used to be, I'm at home and I only have 15 minutes to do something. I'll do a luminous run. I'll fuck around here.

I'll just put on Netflix. And now it's like, well, I can do a side quest. Oh, I can see a go. Oh, yeah, whatever. Odyssey. Odyssey is fucking with my sleep schedule right now. My girlfriend gets up to work out at 4 a.m. because she's a lunatic. Love you.

And, uh, she, she goes to bed at like 8.30. Yeah. No, that's that, that's that farmer life. I'm not about that.

Yeah, no, but she gets up and I'm usually like, okay, I'll wake up in six hours. Bye. Yeah, and she gets up and I'm like,

oh crap, I could just turn on the TV and play some Assassin's Creed. And before I know it, she's coming back from the gym and she's like, oh, you didn't go back to bed? I was like, there are people to kill.

Yeah, I got all these mercenaries. I found a spear. It is just such an enthralling game. And it's funny because it builds so much off the back of origins, and I didn't like origins. How much origins did you play? Oh, I played through the whole thing.

Okay, good. This has been not, you play. I liked origins, and I played through a good chunk of it. And you're in love with Odyssey now, right? Okay, cool. Then let's, I'm going to bring in a reader question, all right? Do it, dude. Awesome, Nick 94, responding to my tweet,

Twitter.com slash Game Over Gregory. And said, which is better? Origins or Odyssey? And why should I bother playing Odyssey when I have so much of origins left to play. What do you want to see improved for the next Assassin's Creed now that's taking another year long break? Let's start at the top though. Steve origins or Odyssey? Oh Odyssey. 100%. Why?

Because I haven't had a leg to stand on the argument because my whole thing was with Odyssey, I played an hour, two hours in the beginning and I was just like, I don't like Bayek, I don't like Egypt. I understand why the combat's cool. I understand why people are connecting with this, not for me. So for me to fall in love with Odyssey now, it's been hard when people are like, oh, but why? I'm like, it's brighter. I like the characters. I don't know. Right. So for me, Origins, I mean, I didn't like Bayek or Egypt. I thought it was a boring setting and a boring

protagonist. Damn. In your face, Kevin. Did you like Bayek in the setting in origins? I didn't like Bayek so much. I did like the setting. I thought that the biggest issue is everything was really, really spread apart. Right. Egypt was really sparse. There wasn't stuff to like climb and skulk about and kill people from the shadows, which is what I feel makes an Assassin's Creed game. And I feel like

Odyssey addresses that. Ancient Greece feels like so much better of a setting and while I haven't played enough unfortunately to really get a feel for Alexios or Cassandra's characters, I've played enough to know that mechanically it's just leagues better. I mean the

environments and the way missions are constructed is just on a whole other level. And it feels good. I'm 20 some hours in now and so like I am in love with Cassandra and I'm sure if it was Lexio it would be the same thing. Just the fact that they are cool characters and the little, and it's not an RPG, but, well, you know how it is.

Yeah. The twinges of choice of, am I going to kill this guy? Am I going to tell him, I killed them? You know what I mean? That stuff. Like, it really does let me personalize her to a character. Like, I really like you. And her story is amazing.

The story beats they've given me, it is the first Assassin's Creed, I think, ever, where I'm literally like, man, fuck the side shit. Let's get to the, I got to see where this is going. Where is this person? I'm the opposite. I'm like, give me every side mission. Do you like the story from what you've seen? You know, I do like it, just to be clear.

But it's just so, like, they've constructed those side missions in such a way that, like, when I open up a new area, I'm excited to go to the little, like, things and be like, I'm going to take all the missions and then to see the little pops in the map. Yeah. And when I'm running to do one mission, I see another one as I'm walking by. I'm like, well, I'm going to stop, talk to this person. Yeah. And have that in, like, my... Don't know me wrong, I love the side missions, too. I think they're exceptionally well-crafted.

They have really interesting stories and characters. but I just really, I'm so, like, her thing of just like, her motivations, why I'm off on this quest and not what I'm doing. I'm fucking all in. Oh, yeah. It's such a fantastically put together story from the small amount that I've seen so far. Yeah. And I just like the dialogue between the characters, the relationships that they have with each other.

It's way better than origins. I just think origins can't hold a candle to Odyssey at all. Yeah. So this was coming out right around the time. I had it off for vacation. Yeah. This game is made. for me. I read ancient Greek.

Like that was, this is what I did in college, it's what I care about. Wait, like the language? Yeah. Oh, okay. Wow. But the, uh, the, uh, the fact that GTA, or pardon me, that Red Dead is on the way. Plus the fact that we just learned that there's something to all this Google stuff for sure. And that they're going to be streaming this. Yeah.

I signed up the day of the, uh, the release that that was going to be streamable. That, that Odyssey was their game. What are they called project streaming? Project Stream. So my hope is that when Project Stream opens up, I'll make it in, and that's what I'm going to play this. I decided to wait and see until Project Stream opens up. As a quick footnote.

So what it is is that, yeah, Google announced Project Stream. That basically they're going to put out this, they're doing a beta where people are going to be able to play Assassin's Creed Odyssey through their browser, just Google Chrome. Yeah, just play in Chrome. Plug a controller and play there. Yeah. And that's, I want to. So I've decided to wait to experience the game.

Yeah. That's really smart. And that way I'll be able to be like, I can come in here honestly and tell you whether or not, I think that that's an awesome tech, whether or not the game was fun, without having it kind of corrupted by having had previous exposure. Kevin.

Yo. Awesome Nick's second part there, right? Why should I bother playing Odyssey when I have so much origins left to play? So I put, I think, like 60 hours into origin. And same thing, where I've been doing a lot of the side, maybe a little bit less, maybe 40, doing a lot of the side missions,

moving the story along. But like, there's just, something about Odyssey it's so it's tighter everywhere and it's just like I'm sure the origin story is cool I didn't really care about it to begin with like it was too cut up like the fact that it starts and then it jumps forward yeah and then it's like what you miss this segment it just I wasn't into it and Odyssey is the whole time I'm like holy shit this is awesome this is a cool story immediately like you find out who the big like boss is gonna be and then you keep going

And it's like, oh, it keeps driving you. Kevin, is it analogous to the jump that happened between Assassin's Creed and Assassin's Creed 2? I mean, way back in the day? I mean, I'd say so. I was talking, no? I think that's a bridge too far personally. Really? Yeah.

I think it's a perfect analogy, to be honest. Yeah. I was just mentioning that in between shows earlier. That it definitely feels like if Origins was a reboot for the series, then this is the new Assassin's Creed too. I agree with that. I think it improves so much upon origins. I think Assassin's Creed to Assassin's Creed 2 was so dramatically like, oh, this sucked and that sucked and this took too long.

And they did all these things. I think the fact that so many people are looking at Odyssey and being like, it just looks like origin. Why is everybody freaking out, right? There's more under the hood smaller things. But maybe, I mean, I'm talking about like stories. We're talking about what we love, right? Storylines, side quests and stuff.

That doesn't show in the same way gameplay changes from one to two maybe did. That's true. I feel like there's been a fair amount of gameplay changes. Yeah. Like this seems like a vastly improved. version that like I enjoyed origin but I could put it down. Oh yeah, yeah. This I woke up to this morning, uh, had to move my cars around because I have too many cars.

And, uh, first of all problems. Yeah. And, and I was, poor Kevin in his fucking 15 cars is Aston Martin's. There's three of them are nice. Uh, and, but I was like, oh, I have like 20 minutes to kill. Let me just open up a new part of the map I hadn't seen before. Yeah, yeah.

And then I got hooked doing like these, this infiltrating this, like lava base with people that were like ranking like three higher than me and it was like fuck I have to do this perfectly and I couldn't put it down and then I ended up coming here at like 1030 because of it.

Is that why the internet's broken today Kevin? No, it has nothing to do with that. Did you ever check your DMs? Did Comcast get back to us? They haven't responded. Okay, cool, we'll look into it. I want to call out Stephen Titillo over Akitaku. He put up an article called What Assassin's Creed Odyssey Changes

from origins which gives a detailed rundown awesome Nick on all the things we're talking about but like very specifically how they improve stealth and what they did here and why this is like why it's getting the acclaim it is and so many people are like it looks like origins yeah and and it does on the surface like yeah but it's all the simple things like the ui things that really it's all quality of life stuff right yeah yeah so i mean but it's so much better of a game and and definitely read stephen's article it is a really

great read and he's a huge fan of the series he picks every single one apart in crazy detail every well not every year anymore but yeah whenever they release uh next up on my list of things I played is the thing I've actually played the most because like I was talking about in the pre-show I had a friend in town. Poe of course catch him on the game over Gregi show. Um, and what we did is went back to our roots from a few years ago and because like our friendship is founded on video games. Like when we were when we became best friends in junior high, it was that he liked playing Madden as much as I did. So he'd come over and we'd play a ton of Madden on Genesis. Uh, years ago when I bought him his PlayStation 4 and we brought it home and we

put it in the first thing I downloaded was overcooked. And we stayed up to again to like two in the morning playing over cook. Oh Jesus. And so no when he came out to visit, I was like, Overcooked two is here. You and I are, what? Because Overcooked, of course, fucks up the platyms. You and I, Poe, are going to platinum it, meaning he'll get me the platinum. Um, he just got my trophies, fuck him. Uh, and so that's what we played like all, you know what I mean. Like we, we, uh, three started all the levels. We did all the Kevin levels. Three start all of those. My trophy is, you know, my trophy list is down to, you know, throw away 500 items or whatever it is or watch this mini play. It's all the stupid

like just, you know, maybe gritty stuff, but man, what a fucking game. So you didn't actually make the platinum? No, but he, we did all the stuff I really need a second player for. And of course then, just to fuck with me, I think, Team 17 put out DLC this week. So now there's new trophies to get. They don't apply to my platinum, but they're right there.

You got to bring him back. You got to bring him back. I'm thinking about maybe bringing in the one and only Joey Noel. Ah. Because a long time ago, Joey, a big overcooked fan. When the Overcooked 2 got announced, we're like, we're going to do this, we're going to do that, yeah. And then it came. And then Joey started playing on Switch and then I never invited her over and then Poe came and did it

you know what I mean? But now that maybe this is the perfect opportunity. Play more firewall. No, there's too many games. Play more firewall! There's too many games. Here's the problem I have is that we have this weekend now. It is a lifeless weekend. Jen still in Montreal working really hard. So I'm thinking Saturday, pajamas and pizza

and I just play Odyssey. Just give myself up that. Hard stop. You're going to eat more pizza? You spent several days doing nothing but tweet about pizza. Well, it was it one day, but it was a really long day in Newark. But yeah. Yeah, that's not, you can't stop me. Okay.

I'm like a Ninja Turtle. Come on. Yeah, that's not even a question. Exactly. One day, all Odyssey. Then the next day, sort my life out, get groceries. You know what I mean? Do this, but then maybe invite Joey over because it's three new levels for over, or three new worlds, I should say, for over cooked.

New mechanics, stuff like that. Maybe knock out those trophies. You guys share your pizza with Joey? Well, this will be the next day. This will be trying to fix my life. Well, yeah, yeah. Kevin, I don't know what you want me to do. You know what I mean?

I have Fortnite. fire team either or firewall there's fucking uh astrobot on vr i got to play got that astrob there's too many things to play cool gregg don't come in here try to fight me cool gregg he came with those eyes uh overcooked two though we already knew it was great mechanically but to play through the entire thing like awesome my critique is so what it is is like you play the story levels right certain ones of them are you know if you do a certain thing it's their hidden objectives all like the hidden kevin levels for the dog and they're all all those levels are steaming stuff like making like dumplings and stuff, which I know doesn't sound any different than the rest of

over-cooked. But when you just saved those for last, it's like, man, I wish I was making anything else. I would, this is, you know what I mean? And also not nearly as hard as overcooked one was, especially the final boss. Because the final boss of overcooked one was me, me and post screaming at each other and like, fuck it. It's three in the morning, like yelling into pillows because we don't wake a sun or whatever. We're playing this damn thing. Now, we've already seen Steve's masterful overcooked two skills. Sure. Played on stage. Of course. Of course. Kind of funny, undersite championship.

One day on YouTube. com slash kind of funny games. Maybe. Maybe. But where, where, how good are you now?

I'm excellent at overcooked. Yeah. Here's the thing about Overcooked 2. All Overcooked 2 is, is making a plan and executing it. And that's why I love it. Because when Poe and I play,

we play it the right way of, we look, you get that real, you know, like to pops up with the information above the screen so you're looking real quick and then you look at it, you look at it, you pause.

All right, I think how it's gonna work is I'll stand over here and make this, you do it. you start doing it. And then every level we fuck around for a while. And it's like, all right, we restart it. We got it. I'm sitting over here.

You sit over there. You do this. You do that. You run around with the fire extinguisher. Like, Poe isn't a gamer, right? He likes playing games, but he's not like us who, you know, live and die by this stuff. And we were playing one level and he was, we were basically, the fire keeps spitting out. And you got to keep running over with the fire extinguishers and putting it out.

And he shocked me because I'm so caught up in the moment to moment of like, we're close to maximizing the score. Let's just do this down. And finally he's like, the fire's all. alternating sides. Every time, you know, I put it out up top, the next one's definitely coming down low. Yeah. And if I had to put it out down low, it's going up top. So he finally figured out, he's like, I got this.

And he was just running around the fire extinguers, put it out, and then run it down and drop it low and then get whatever he needed to do. And then be right. And it was like, Dan, Poe, that's my high quality stuff right there. Post on top. Yeah. Yeah. Overkick 2. Fantastic.

I'm going to play the deal with see eventually. Maybe with Joey. I was hoping yelling about it would call her in, but it didn't. Uh, Poe played, uh, Creed, Rise to Glory in front of me on PlayStation VR. A game I had seen at Judges Week and been like, I don't know about this thing, right? He'd never played PlayStation VR of anything before, so he wanted to try something. Put that on him. Definitely wore him out.

I'm like, you guys see Super Hodge. He's like, you play and show me. I'm like, all right. Creed looked like fun, though. Like, I don't, it's, you know, a boxing game and it's, you know, got this whole weird Creed influence of the movie. But it didn't look, I thought it looked hokey at Judges Week, seeing him playing it. He was having fun with it and stuff.

So something to keep on your radar for PlayStation VR. Cool. And then I gave in, as you'd expect me to. Pose in town. He goes to bed early because the first night because he flew in from Chicago, the time difference, all that stuff. And I'm like, I'm not tired yet. I'm going to play some Assassin's Creed. Started playing Assassin's Creed.

I was like, all right, I'm too tired to fully enjoy this right now. I need something less intense. What do I want to do? What do I want to do? I know what I want to do. Go to the PlayStation store and I buy Jack and Jill DX. Oh. You remember this one?

No. This is the 10-minute platinum I was telling you about all last week. That thing. Yes, exactly. So it's an endless runner where you run and you bounce off the wall and you switch directions and you pick up coins and the platinum is incredibly easy and it took 10 minutes and then you get it on Vita 2 and whee. And if you want to talk about Greg Miller getting excited, ooh, doctor. It's the fact that, of course, Lucy James, she's here from the UK. She brought her UK PlayStation, right? She has a UK PlayStation account. I'm like, what if I pay you money, Lucy? I give you money and then I go on to the UK store, buy the easy, platinum games that double up from the UK, then I come into my US account and start doing it. Because I've never wanted to jump through the hoops up myself. Because I have a UK game over Greggie account from way back in the day that I could dust off

and do all the stuff and then start buying money and they're, you know, buy their pounds, whatever the hell it works. And then, but she's already there. It's just, it's easy now, Jared. At this point, I'm just like, I wish that the infinity got let had chosen me right at this moment. Just, like, oh yeah. Like away.

But everything you're saying just makes me want to die inside. the North American PlayStation store won't put out slide. The, you know, the renamed 1,000 star trophies, easy, two second platinum. But they put out slide on the UK store. So I get that, that's one. Then I know a lot of these games have separate PlayStation United, North America, PlayStation UK. I'm thinking about an extra life segment, how many platyms can

get on the UK store. When you said Jack and Jelly X, I was like, that sounds like a cool vanilla wear game or something. No, it's an endless runner where I get trophies. Yeah. It wasn't a bad game, though. For the record. Like, you know how I played that little little town of the prairie and that was garbage like it isn't that okay it's an easy platinum they put them in there but it's like cool but you played the game for the platinum

fuck all I yeah as soon as I got the planet don't stop delete just stop and deleted it you know I mean then it got on the beat of the next day what a life I tell you I know what I mean God bless you hey Yoshita for trophies in this idea he came up with of putting achievements into games Jared what have you been playing oh let's see uh do I remember from what I put the list of what I've been playing great tell me about tanglewood all right let's uh let's talk about Tanglewood. So in this world of brand new video games that we could all be playing, you know, exciting things like Assassin's Creed that I say don't have time for. Red Dead's coming out, getting ready for that. Could be playing with Spider-Man, but no, I'm playing a

a brand new Sega Genesis game. No. I am playing Tanglewood, which is a 2018 Sega Genesis game on a cartridge. Nice. The developer sent me a press cartridge, and I've sat down, it works fine in my Rectron 5. Tanglewood is beautiful, interesting, intriguing, lovingly crafted, really, really atmospheric. I am a big fan of what I've played at Tanglewood so far. Have you seen this at all? I haven't, no. Have you seen it, Greg?

I don't know. I mean, I heard about the Genesis games. Yeah, but I don't know what the game is. You get a new Genesis game every few years, but usually it's an RPG or something like. This, however, is a side-scrolling platformer slash puzzle game. It feels almost like, if you ever played an old Commodore Amiga game, where you'd be like, it's exploring the world, interacting with it. like another world or something like that.

It's kind of got that vibe where I'm hopping from tree to tree, but I'm solving puzzles while avoiding enemies. I'm a cute little fox that can turn into like a flying squirrel, and it's all about like avoiding things that are way more dangerous than you and trying to think your way through these action puzzles. I'm a fan so far. I need to play more of it before I render a final judgment, but this is a game that if you've got a retron,

if you've got an old Sega Genesis thing around, and also it's being made available on another. the platforms. But the original, if I don't play this back in the day, I think it'd be a classic. Wow. Wow. Because it's just so visually impressive. What was the genre again? It's like a 2D side-scrolling action puzzler. Okay. Like exploratory puzzle kind of, again, did you ever play flashback or anything like that? It's a genre you don't see much of anymore. Think like a Metroidvania, but instead of fighting enemies, you're avoiding them. Maybe like limbo, kind of vibe

to it. Okay. But with a little more mobility. Okay. And that's what you got. Nice. Nice. Nice. Correct me if I'm wrong. It's on Genesis cartridge, but you can also get it on Steam? Yeah, I'm playing it on the original Genesis cartridge. That's got to be a fucking feeling. It's, you know, right? Does it come in like the old checkered box? All I got a press copy. So all I have

is literally like just with a label stuck on it. I don't know what the final cartridge is going to look like. That's always a bummer. But I'm playing it right now in a retron. And then my next step is going to be to get my CRT monitor out, get an original Genesis out, plug it in, see what it looks like with the, because you get really good upscaling out of the out of the retro 5. It's emulator is very clean looking. Yeah. But these games always look different. Oh, yeah.

On original hardware. And I want to see what it looks like there next. This is a feat. I don't think it's just a novelty. I think somebody obviously put a lot of love into Tanglewood. And I wanted to kind of draw people's attention to it. That sounds awesome. When is it out?

I don't know the final date on it being out. I should have been ready to talk about this. But I don't actually know when the cartridge version is going to be. Give me your updated Mega Man 11 impressions then while I look for this for you. My updated Mega Man 11 impressions are that Mega Man 11 is real, real good. I like it a lot. I like it more than some people in the press that I've read. That's the one thing.

I knew you were positive about it before review embargo. I remained positive about it. Yeah, I thought I saw it a little bit. I'm not finished with it. Okay. But I really enjoy it. I like the fact that it has adjustable difficulty. I like the fact that beyond blatant adjustable difficulty

and being a nice gateway for people that don't want to sit and get beat up by Mega Man games all day, that additionally I can choose how much and how to use my gears system and how that allows me to make the game easier or harder. I can just choose not to use gears and play it like a super precise, hardcore, really fast Mega Man game. I can use gears in all the clever, puzzly ways

to solve things that it throws at me, or I can use it to make the game easier if I choose to play at that pace. I like it. Are you playing it at all? Yeah, yeah. Okay, what do you think about it? I agree with you completely. I played through the main story, and there's stuff you can do afterwards, but I won't

obviously spoil that. But I love it. I mentioned to you earlier that I think it's probably my favorite mainline Mega Man game, and the gear system is a huge part of that. Because like you were saying, you can either use it all the time, not at all, whatever you really fancy. And there were definitely levels where to get the hang of them, I'd use the gear system to slow time down and get the timing on some of the platforming and then I'd run back

through without it and I'd feel like oh man now I know all this I can jump on there's a one specific level that has a lot of rotating gears that tend to fall and drop off and are turning so that as you're if you stay on them too long you're going to die yeah and uh I used the speed gear sorry I was searching for the name which slows time down yeah speed gear which slows time down to get the timing on all the jumps for that and then I inevitably died somewhere else and and realize, now that I know it, I can just jump through this whole thing and not use the gears at all. And I really, really love that they've curbed that difficulty in a way that doesn't ruin it for people that want that hardcore challenge. Right.

You don't have to use it. But it's not just to make the game easier gimmick. It's also really useful in certain situations just to gain a fun advantage. Like sometimes gears just, sometimes it's not about making it easier. Sometimes it's about, I'm just going to blast this thing right now. Oh, right. You know, I'm going to solve this puzzle. And that's so, and it's adding new mechanics to a base Mega Man game, which is usually a bad idea.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, everything after the slide has been a terrible idea. Until this, which has been wonderful. Yeah. I love it. I really do. Do you think the gears were added to make Mega Man more approachable to new players, or were they added to make it more a twist for, you know, the people who've been around forever?

I, in my opinion, all of the above, Steve. Yeah. I agree as well. I think that it's something that improves the excessive. ability of it, but also gives players that are really used to Mega Man an interesting twist on the gameplay. That's interesting, because that was always my thing with Mega Man, you know, jumping in and trying to understand and, you know, being a Sega kid, missing all that stuff. Coming back to them, I was always like, he's just too heavy. This feels like they need me to be too precise. It was just stuff

I didn't enjoy. Like, I understand why that matters. I understand why people love it. You know what I mean? But for me personally, that's what was what draws me to games. So like, this is interesting of like, all right, cool. Here are different ways to augment the gameplay so I get around the parts that annoy me a bit more maybe. Yeah, and I've heard comparisons to seven based on the speed that Mega Man moves. I think he was, I think that character size is smaller than seven, and I'm not entirely in line aligned with that criticism. I feel like he's way more mobile than he felt in seven. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I've really enjoyed him there. I understand where that's coming from, because there is a, there are moments where the game seems to be paced more deliberately. But I never felt like

it was applaud or slow either. It didn't have that, that grindy feel that five and six sometimes have, for example. Right, not at all. I felt like going through the game, like I said, it took me about four hours to get through the main campaign. And it was a really enjoyable four hours. I breezed through the game, you know, in an afternoon. And it felt like, it never felt like I was having to push myself to complete it. Like I, before I knew it, it was done. And I was like, shit, I'm ready to go again. Like, I really want to keep playing. Unfortunately, there's stuff to do after, but I haven't yet touched it just because I'm kind of saving it for when I, when I'm feeling like there's a hole in my library that I need something.

Yeah, there's, there are the, and this has been observed many places before, there are the great Mega Man games and there are the good Mega Man games. There's not a lot of not good Mega Man games. They're mostly superb games. But at this point, my impression is this one falls in the upper bucket. It's not, nine is my all-time favorite, and I don't think this one is nine. This is my all-time favorite, yeah. But I really do like this game that I've played so far, and I'll keep you updated.

As I play through more of it. Jared, tell me about the Sega Aces. Oh, okay. Ages, Sega Ages. Yeah, okay. I'm starting to go, everybody. You play a lot of Switch stuff.

You play on this? Oh, yeah, I was a Sega kid growing up. Hell yeah, but. Just like Mr. Greg here. So, yeah, Sega Ages is near and dear to my heart. And I've been playing Sonic and Lightning. Yep, Lightning Force. Lightning Force, right?

Lightening Force. Lightning. It's important. Lightning Force. It's not lightning force. It's lightning force. Yeah, that quality control was not what it is. is now a long time ago.

So let's talk about Sega Ages. Why would you want to spend $8 to buy a copy of Sonic the Hedgehog in 2018? Because the new Sega Ages is produced by M2. And M2 does emulation better than just about anybody. Nobody knows how to emulate the x68,000 processor, the 16-bit processor that powered the Genesis, the Amiga, a few other platforms like M2. They have been doing it for literally decades. They have been doing it with tender, loving care.

This is going to be the most perfect version of any of these games that you can play outside of original hardware because that's their reputation and that's what they build on. But it's also things like, hey, you want to play the international version? You can play that. Want to play the Japanese version? You can play that. Want to play the arcade version of Sonic the Hedgehog? We've got it on here. Want to play, you know, and all those little tweaks, all kinds of quality of life stuff on, you know, do you want to play with scan lines but without filter?

Do you want to play with that? Do you want to play with that? Plus time attack modes. They add the spin dash to Sonic 1. Okay. But you can also turn it off if you want to play the original style, but they implement it. And it does change the game. Lightning Force is one of the Thunderforce series.

Do you ever play Thunder Force? I never did. No. Great horizontal shooters. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Lightning Force is a great game. It's a horizontal shooter where you can also, like, move up and down, but the screen

scrolls with you up and down some too. Great weapon selection. They built kids mode in so that if you're, just like me and you're terrible at shooters and you just want to see the game and and play a more challenging version of it. They have that or less challenging version of it. It's so fun. They have that.

We are going to get one shot at this. Sega ages used to suck. And then they put them to in charge of things like the Treasure Box and other stuff in the series and run the PlayStation 2 era and it got good. Now they're saying, look, here are these games a la carte that you would buy in a compilation, one of 40 for 40 bucks. And people are going to go, why should I pay extra money for this? Because this is not a ROM dumped in a decent emulator.

This is a perfectly crafted museum piece, boutique piece of software that will be as close as you can get to living that experience. And if we don't buy them, they're not going to keep making them. So please, please, please buy these. Yes, absolutely. Yes. If I can add to that, they added the drop dash to Sonic 1 from Sonic Mania. And that can make anyone look like a goddamn pro at Sonic. Like I saw someone who I knew had had their copy of the game for all of 10 minutes.

And they posted a video on Twitter where Sonic literally never touches the ground through Green Hill Zone. And I'm like, dude, how good are you? And he's like, oh, there's a fucking drop dash. It's like really easy. It's freaking rad. But you can turn it off. Yeah. And that's the thing.

You can take all these new enhancements and turn them off so you can play like the classic way of playing these games. It's great. And fantasy star is coming. Yeah. With auto mapping. With auto mapping. Thank God. And that's the quality of life stuff.

They found ways to improve these already excellent old games and not take away the feel of the real experience. Jared? Yeah. Is Ghost and Goblins improved? No. Gross and Goblins still sucks and I'm still playing it. Are you still playing it then? We're bitching about how we have no time for all these games.

I know. I was on vacation. I brought the NES classics along with me. They worked for seven days and then didn't work the last day because I hadn't synced with the network. Sure. Just like they promised me. There's a lot better games than Ghost and Goblins. The arcade Ghost and Goblins is great.

There's other great Ghost and Goblins. The NES Port of Ghost and Goblins sucks, but I am obsessed with it. I just want to win. I want to win. And I keep playing this terrible punishing, janky, horribly designed, awful arcade port because I want to rule the world. Okay. The end.

Stop. Update next week. Be better about yourself. Oh, look at this. Look at this. The K-Gerator is working? It's no longer leaking. We don't think.

I can't have it, I'm sorry. You want a beer? I am always down. Cheers to the K-Gator working. Can I get a glass of water too? I hate... Cheers. Well, I hate doing the thing to my body of,

hey, we've been drinking coffee for five hours, an hour, and I switch to a beer. Is there any whiskey militer? I can have that. There is it. Come on, have some fun today, will you? This game's journalism. There should be hard liquor.

Exactly, right? Look at us doing God's work. Here's what I'm proposing. and when I say proposing, I just mean it's happening. I'm sure many of you have been waiting with baited breath for us to unbox these two guys. Centipede C64 Mini.

That's now post-show content. We've had such good discussions and we have good reader mail and we have a great mobile gamer bullshit coming up. I don't think we have time to put that in there and do that way. So that's going to be post-game content. So if you want to go to patreon.com

slash kind of funny games, you can see it in the video version that was posted on front. Greg Miller throwing up the paywall. Nothing like I've wrote it a lot for watching the video game industry. Oh, you wanted this content. Fucking pay me for it.

You know what I mean? Or you can go and retweet 75 tweets and I'll give you a Greg buck. And if you get 20 Greg bucks, you can unlock the country. You get 20, 20 Greg bucks. You get a chance to open the loot box that might contain the unboxing. I want to do some reader mail.

I put it up, of course, on Twitter.com slash Game Over Greggie. Of course, because that's just what you do on the games cast when you need reader mail. And Chris Becker wrote in with good question that I liked, or not even question, right? But like this whole thing. Chris Becker has this discussion point. How crazy is it that in 20 years my children will look back at Fortnite the same way I look

at Golden Eye on the N64? Oh my God. As a warm experience that's like also janky and painful? I mean, think about it probably. Yeah? Think about the quality. Yeah, like there will be this deep love for Fortnite, which I mean seems silly right now. But I mean, oh, really you think that seems silly?

Oh, I think it seems silly to look fondly upon Fortnite as the ghost of video games past, yeah. What, what did it? What do we have here? It's brown liquor. Yeah, what is it? He could put ice on it. That's all I was saying. He didn't know if you wanted it. You put ice in it? Yeah. You don't like ice in it? Oh, why would it? Just start drinking fast. Drink it fast. Oh, man. Chugget. Exactly. The ice can't get you then, you know? Thank you, buddy. Can't be watered down if the ice doesn't melt.

Exactly. Why would you ruin? Why would you ruin good? Whiskey with water and I interrupted you. Sorry about that see. Oh. Oh, wait, Kevin interrupted us. I'm just apologizing. Well, you could have just taken it and been a man about it, but you wanted to derail the whole show. I didn't take it because I was being a man about it.

It's a proper way to take your whiskey and that's... Wow, so you don't like female characters and games and then you're going to sit here and you're going to be a man? You're going to emasculate people like that? No. No. Fight and words. I know what you're talking about. I can't pin them down. I try to pin them down. I can't pin them down.

I was pointing them. out my own mainland. It's not taking away from someone else's. And as for female characters in games, that's my default. Oh, all right, let's all settle down. Putting the quash on that shit. Chris Becker. How crazy is it that in 20 years might shouldn't have looked back at Fortnite the same way

I look back at Golden Eye on the N64? So, thinking about it in the current context, it seems a little crazy, but I mean, our kids, my kids, that do exist. Like, look at me. How many kids do you have? I have two. I have a five-year-old and a two-year-old. And

Both of them look at me like I'm crazy when I'm playing like old games like Mario 64. I tried to get my five year old because she's at that age now into the NES classics when that came out on the switch. And she was like, no. It's a baby's game. Yeah, put Skylanders on, Dad. And I was like, this is it. This is what you'll grow up with. And you'll be like, oh, I love Skylanders.

I'm like, part of me is dying. Did you think at all when you had them and you obviously video games are such a huge part of your life of like, slowly peeling it back where you just gave them an NES and they hadn't seen anything else. Oh, absolutely. And that was that attempt, really. So I initially wanted my daughters

to avoid getting too into games too early. I have a lot of debate about that because I know who I was when I was a kid and I was the kid that they're like, oh, hey, proms tonight. And I'm like, fuck that Final Fantasy Sevens out. Yeah, right. I got to get to level 99.

And so. You turned out pretty all right. I think so, maybe. But, yeah. So I put my daughters in front of some old NES games initially to see if they even wanted to play them. And she did. So she played Super Mario Brothers a little bit in that she moved Mario around, managed to kill a Gumba and thought it was pretty cool. But the minute she saw anything remotely approaching modern, she's like, well, that is trash.

And I want to scan toys and watch them show up in my game, Dad. And so, you know, I don't think it's crazy in the sense that, yeah, 20 years from. from now, people will love whatever they were. They'll be nostalgic for what they grew up with. Exactly. And just the way we're nostalgic for the NES or whatever we started with, the master system, the Genesis, people are

going to be nostalgic for whatever brought them into the fold. And that'll be Fortnite for a whole ton of people. But yeah, to somebody who didn't grow up with Fortnite and who enjoys save the world, I do not want to, I couldn't see myself being nostalgic for it 10 years

from now. I'll say, man, that was a fun game while it lasted and, you know, thank you, Kevin. Oh, there we go. I spent it. Oh, I hope you did. Did you really? No, of course he didn't. No, but I like put my tongue in it. He didn't do that either. Oh, oh. So I've been working on an article called why

Fortnite is good. Okay. And I've been putting a lot of thought into this because I'm not, games are fun. I'm not this big Fortnite player. Sure. But I find Fortnite fascinating. And I do believe Fortnite is actually not just a very important game, but a very good game. Oh, yeah. And I think

that I have nostalgia for some bad games. I talk a lot about old games on here, but most of the ones that I care about are good. There are bad exceptions, Ghost and Goblins. But by and large, they are good games that I happen to love, but a few bad ones. I think Fortnite deserves its success, and I think its nostalgia will make sense for people, because

it's such an inherently social game, it's such an inherently available game, that it's a game people are going to associate with friendship. It's a game that people are going to associate with teamwork, victory or noble defeat getting close and then dying in interesting funny ways being disappointed together

and hopping right back in next time there's a lot that people are going to be able to latch nostalgia onto. Well, not to mention right. I think it's easy to look at it now, Fortnite. And I can see 20 years from now the I love the 2010s

or whatever the fuck it's going to be right. And it is like the Fortnite segment is not it's not going to be the video game nerdy part that I love talking about. This game was fucking in development forever, dead and arrival. It's copied the PubG. Every thought it was stupid and then it exploded. It's going to be these people being like, oh, man, and we used to dress up at Halloween as them.

And I'll never forget the first time I was watching my NFL team. And they did a Fortnite dance in the end zone. You know what I mean? Or when it happened in FIFA. And like, because it's a cultural phenomenon at this point, right? I agree. I think that Fortnite in, it touches Minecraft in that way. Minecraft kind of stepped over that, but because it's free, we, it's far more widespread.

For a lot of people to Minecraft, right, is going to be there. Gold and I were talking about nostalgia. We play all these games. We get hung up on it. And then, you know, I don't think about the fact that the reason the last of us is so amazing. And Neil Druckman's making all these amazing games is because 20, whatever, 30 years ago, right, he sat down and played in NES or whatever. You know, I haven't, I don't, I'm not his fucking biographer. Whatever Neil sat down and played that made him go, man, video games are rad.

And to sit down with something as primitive. but now, by comparison, as we all did, whatever, you know, for me, Ghostbusters on the Sega Master System where I was like, this is my life. Oh my God, that is such a good game. And I'm like, this is my life, but it's, think about me doing that and then where it's all changed and sit there and think about a kid now sitting down and having access to all this, what it's going to be. Now, what I want to put into this conversation, and I don't know if they did it on purpose,

but Chris asked that question. Eric Oliver asked another. You initially said, oh, we're going to look back and it was a fun game, but it was janky or whatever. And I was like, yeah. Eric Oliver says, you should go super high level today. What do you think the video game industry

will look like in 20 years? That's the same thing of when I was sitting there playing Ghostbusters on Sega Master System, right? I was never thinking it would be like it is now. Oh, yeah. So like when people do look at Fortnite 20 years from now,

I can only imagine the things are going to look at it. I can't believe we put up with an inventory system like that. You had to hit a circle button to go over here to do this. Or maybe PC somehow won and it's a little nightmare. And everyone's like,

I can't believe people played with controllers. Here's what I'm legitimately hoping for more than any of those. I'm hoping that we will look at this era and will be looking back and going, oh my Lord, how did we let people work in situations where their studio could shut down and they could have no severance? How did we create an industry that's built on seasonal work but didn't have Hollywood style protections for its creators to guarantee that they would make enough money to work through the next year? How did we not have unionized studios? How did we tolerate that? Well, we'll sit back and like that. We'll sit back and look at all these people, like, they were pioneers. They were doing it for the love of the game

and putting their families at risk, putting their livelihoods at risk. Yeah, at some point we'll be able to wake up and go, putting our families in livelihoods at risk isn't worth it. I love the world that I live in, and I love that I get to play great games, but I'm reaching the point where when somebody tells me a story about how somebody mortgaged their house to make their video game and not like, man, they were so dedicated. And I'm like, don't do that. Oh, my God, I'm glad I have Cuphead, but, but, but, you know, maybe I'm the problem because I'm allowing that to happen. I think ultimately it may have to come from the consumer end.

So that's a big one for me, Greg, to be honest with you. I think the future of the industry, I think for us to have a sustainable industry, I think it's going to have to have some safeguards for the people who work in it or otherwise it's going to devolve. Interesting. I really do believe that. Steve, you? 20 years from now, it's almost unimaginable, right?

Like, who would have thought we'd be wearing VR headsets and waving motion controllers when we were playing N.S. In our living rooms as children. And it's really hard to believe, but I do believe that we're already at the point of diminishing returns in terms of graphics and visual fidelity. I mean, how much better are we going to get before it just... And I feel, and I hear you, and I agree with you. But I also feel like when I say something like that, I think about when I turn on the PS2 and I put in Madden. And I was like, this fucking looks like I'm... watching again, you know what I mean?

Where it was. And I don't get me wrong, we talk about all the time, the PS3 to PS4, Xbox 360 Xbox 1, right? It wasn't that monumental leap, right? Like, we already knew what HD looked like. We already knew this stuff. So it's like, yeah, it's going to incrementally continue to get better. What I think will be interesting is when we take for granted, you know, hair and grass

and all the stuff coming together to look perfect, right? Because it is that thing now you look at Red Dead or you look at like a first party, like Last of Us, right, where they're going through and making every, asset look great. But then you play Odyssey and I love Odyssey, as I've said a million times, but it's like, sometimes it's like, oh yeah, that is a blocky texture and that looks janky. It's like, because it is just like, well, they're trying to fucking make all of ancient Greece live at one time. I was playing, I was in a cave in Odyssey yesterday and I was looking at it and I was like, wow, this does not look as good as everything else. I was like, this is

the one part of the game where I'm like, yeah, that's a video game. And I'm remembering this. It's funny for me because, you know, playing it in release, I was so fucking stoked, they had photo mode. I love photo mode. Oh yeah. I won Horizon and I was playing Horizon pre-release. It was in there too. Took a gajillion photos. But then God of War and Spider-Man

patched them after the review embargo. So I'd already finished those games. So I didn't get to use them. Playing Assassin's Creed and using photo mode, what I found myself doing with a lot of shots was really playing with perspectives to totally hide the fact that like her foot's not on the ground or the guy she's killing's face is just. Yeah.

I mean, like there's like no emotion. I'm very non-plus. brutally getting destroyed. Another important one that you, in the face and this made me think about it. I do think 20 years, this is a realistic timetable. I could be sitting here having this conversation with you right now, just as we are. And if I don't stop to think about it, I won't realize I'm playing a video game.

What I mean by that is I believe that in 20 years it's entirely possible that I'll be able to talk to an AI that'll act so much like you that I won't know the difference until I end plug. Yeah. I do believe AI will have come to that point in entertainment in 20 years, that it'll be able to give a realistic illusion of thought. and have thought enough that a capacitoring test yeah okay I think so and I think we'll be asking questions

about AI rights and the fact that we've created life and I think that that will extend indoor entertainment products perhaps anywhere else the connection between AI and video games goes all the way back to the 1960s it was the funding for artificial intelligence at sale and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

that ultimately led to the beginning of video games that came out of the same people working the same lapse. And I think it might happen here before it happens anywhere else. Because we'll be willing to absorb it first. We'll be the test ground. When somebody finally has AI, they're ready to unleash upon the world. They'll do it through games first, I think.

Sure. And because we're right, we want it. The rest of the world's scared of it. And by the way, I'm scared of a little too. But I think 20 years from now, this will be a big part of it. Games that dynamically adjusts that think about what we're doing, like take the AI director of Left for Dead and multiply it times a million. Right.

We could expect that. That'd be awesome. Because that is that that's what I think as we talk about Red Dead or Odyssey or any these open world games with choice, we always talk about the fact that it's awesome and this. And there's so many articles about it's the illusion of choice, right? Right. You're making these things.

This is what I was talking about. Coloring a book page. We all have the same page. We just all fill it in differently. And so our art looks different at the end and we had a different experience. But in the end, we do have the same ending right before credits. To get to a game that is changing on the fly and doing stuff to where you never see the flow chart.

You don't understand it. It's something that like you had to do all these different little things to get to this part and have them react to you that way, right? Because even in Assassin's Creed right now where I'm like, it's like, do you want to fight them? Do you want to tell them off? Do you want to beg? I'm like, well, all of these are going to lead to the same thing. I'm going to get whatever item I need to give to the guy to be done with it. So it's interesting for like if a quest could really dynamically shift that way and change.

Yeah. I like the way Chris put the initial question of like that somebody's going to look back at this, the way we look back at Golden Eye. And that I think puts it into perspective of like how much fun we are having with Golden Eye. But I don't think we, you, the weird ass controller layout, all these problems. But it's like at the time, we didn't know any better. Well, even when Golden Eye was contemporary, I mean, if you were playing Quake, you knew you were playing a weird and acronistic game. It was just still fun. So it didn't matter.

You knew you were playing the lesser game. But we would just play in the computer lab, Quake, into the lab closed. And then we go back to the door and play Golden Eye. And we knew it wasn't as good. but it was good enough. And that's a part of games that I think won't change. 20 years from now, good enough is still going to be good enough. Yes, there might be AIs that dynamically change the universe

and I can plug in and talk to a Greg Miller that looks like you and acts like you and talks like you. But Super Mario 3 is probably still going to be fun. Well, I mean, that's what I love about our industry right now is the fact that, hey, guess what, Red Dead will assume is going to be Game with Year contender. And if it's not God of War is, right? Like all these AAA millions of dollars, blah, blah, blah, blah.

there's still going to be this year on a lot of Game of the Year awards, right? That slot that is NER5 or whatever, that is Messenger or slash Celeste, right? Here's this little game that did something that people weren't expecting and gets to contend with these games that were hundreds of people multiple years. Messenger, Celeste, Florence, all of those are going to be on my list, high. Definitely. Absolutely. Series listening, don't let her know that she, I know she's listening to all this.

Let's get one more in here, all right. Tweet underscore Fuzz says, seeing as how Steve is with you today, I'll ask you this. Nintendo is typically poked fun at due to the things it hasn't caught up on in today's industry. However, what do you think other companies can learn from Nintendo?

Much love, peaches. Wow. So yeah, Nintendo is admittedly behind the curve when it comes specifically to online and more modern conveniences in gaming, but there is tons that Sony or Microsoft or the bigger platform holders of the world could learn from Nintendo.

And I think the biggest thing is how to love your IP. Nintendo is the master of creating memorable characters and treating them the right way, putting them in the right games at the right time. You know, you don't really hear a lot about controversy with depictions of Mario or Link, you know. A lot of Bowser-et lately. Yeah, you know.

The internet's boner for Balsett is... Oh, no, I'm just... Trumbling. I'm just flashing to all the screenshots of Pornhub that people put up about it. They put out a press release about it. They're like, hey, do you want to see our search statistics for Bouset? And I was like, no, thank you. That's why I was giving you that look.

I was just like, oh. Yeah, I had a friend who works at a game company that shall remain unnamed in Japan. And he was telling me he's like all our artists are drawing Belset and it's fucking gross He's like he's like they're all talking about what kind of stuff they're gonna sell at comicette this year and I don't like any of it That's funny sound I was like you can just do that at work and he's like in Japan you can Nick talks about stuff like they here all the time all the time all the time But I digress what do you think they could uh learn so I think treating your characters with care is a great part or IP and I like that I think this is

been the year, I'll say all 365, or two years, of PlayStation kind of doing it, right? Of like, yeah, Aloy's the new, a new face. All right, Drake's getting his last game. Spider-Man's in our stable. Here's a Kratos you can connect with and care with and his son. Like, they're doing a great job of evolving. Oh, right. They're definitely trying to chase Nintendo in that regard. I think Microsoft still has a really long way to go with that. I mean, you know, I like to joke about how, what was it, two E-3s ago at their press conference, they were talking about their rich characters and they had like Larke Croft and Master Chief and they fucking ended it

with the car from Fortsa. They're like, and we have a car. Like, we can't even get five characters up here. We had blinks, but we euthanized him a while ago. So, I think that characters and IPs are really important. They can't

be underestimated. I mean, just look at Sega if you want to see an example of a company who didn't care for their wonderful IPs and it destroyed them in the long run. I mean, Sega had a stable of characters that could easily compete with Nintendo and they had them on the ropes in the 90s, you know, with games like Shinobi and Alex Kidd and Sonic.

Let's stop with Alex. I agree with everything else you said by Alex Kidd. There was never a time Alex Kidd was a threat to Nintendo. Oh, no, no, no. Alex Kidd is still a threat. Alex Kidd is so derided even within Sega circles that in Seg, ga, ga, ga, he works at the snack bar in Sega. That is true.

That is true. But for a while, he was the de facto mascot of Saga until a certain blue hedgehog came along, showed him what's up. And he's a great character. Sonic is a great character. Oh, yeah. He's not just a great video game character. He's one of the, he's a Mickey Mouse

level character. Oh, yeah. And he's only getting his due very recently with Sonic Mania. So, yeah. But as far as other things they can learn from Nintendo is how to approach younger gamers.

I mean, PlayStation and Microsoft are definitely not the best at catering to those under the age of, say, 15. Nintendo has done a great job marketing their hardware and their games towards, you know, they've got this family-friendly image ever since the 90s, which they've managed to maintain while simultaneously publishing gory, you know, mature games, which is something that Sony and Microsoft haven't really been able to...

What would you put on that list? Like, Mad World, obviously, but... Oh, yeah, Mad World, but I mean... They didn't publish Bayonetta, did they? They just... Nintendo... It was exclusive for... Nintendo has some kind of publishing deal with Bayonetta. I think they funded it. They might not have published it, but they definitely threw money at it. published last story in the States? Yes, they did.

They did. I'm trying to think there are... Those are examples. I'm just floating out the... I just wanted to... Right. And, you know, comparing them to the Nintendo of old that didn't allow blood,

you know, censored Mortal Kombat, that kind of thing. You know, Nintendo's come a long way in that regard, but has still managed to maintain that they're the family choice. And so I think that that's something that Sony and Microsoft

could really do a bit better with. Yeah. Yeah, I guess that's the interesting thing is I feel there's this weird gap where I think Nintendo gets them young right and can be there and everybody loves it and then I feel like in it don't get wrong they have Minecraft and they have Fortnite but I feel like that's where

you get into that tween age that's the kind of games people are look that it seems like kids are looking for I don't fucking I don't have a kid or anything but you know it seems like that's where they're all about right and then you get a little bit older and it's either you know your PC gaming or your console gaming or you're back on the Nintendo train and something that's you say back on the Nintendo train that would be two that I'd add to your list one is that Nintendo is something other people could learn from is better at anybody

and I think this has a lot to do with their confidence in selling you the same thing over and over again. Nintendo knows the guy... Making you excited about it. Yes. Another Animal Crossing where I'm going to own a house that I have to pay this fucking record for? That's one of it.

Another Animal Crossing, but the second is that they will sell you, the original Animal Crossing, four times in your lifespan. They will sell you Mario 1 10 times. They will sell you Mario 64, five times before you're dead. And they're going to... We tend to think of that because we're old as those old games, But the games they're releasing right now, you know, Mario Odyssey will be available somewhere else again,

and people will be thrilled to see it. And even if they dropped off in their tweens, when they get in their 20s and they get a little more nostalgic, then they'll look at me and wait, I can get Mario Odyssey again, and they know you're going to buy it again. And then they know you're going to buy it again 10 years after that when it comes out on something else. And they've gotten so good at this that somehow with Switch,

they're selling us other people's games again, games we bought other places. And they're just selling them to us again. And we're buying them. And I like it, but that's one thing we can learn from. The other to steal from Jeremy Parrish, Nintendo with the Kings of Good Enough. They understand how to release things at the perfect juncture of capability and price point.

And they like, is it fun? Yes. Is it cutting edge? No. Is it good enough that people are going to buy it? Yes. Then who cares? Go for it.

We don't have to rule the market. We don't have to own the marketplace. We don't even have to compete so much with Microsoft and Sony. we just got to make money. And we look at every decision. Is it fun? Does it fit our corporate culture? Is it a toy?

Does it make money? Yes, yes, yes, yes. We make it. Good point. Yeah. The last thing I'd add is that one thing developers, I mean, not just Sony or Microsoftkins have kind of been picking on them, developers in general could learn from Nintendo is to not be unafraid or not be afraid

to reinvent their franchises. Zelda is a prime example of Nintendo just making broad decisions about where the series is going to go, changing the art style, changing the narrative, changing the control scheme. You know, Zelda seems to be like Nintendo's favorite place to experiment. Sure. And I think. Well, even Mario, right, going from, if there's going to be a 2D Mario or 3D Mario, what's it going to, you know what I mean, the fact that they are. Right.

I would agree. I would think that Nintendo takes it further with Zelda, though. Oh, no, I'm not arguing. Yes, you're 100% correct. If you look at how piss off they made the internet when Windwaker was first announced that that first cell shaded trailer, like, everyone's like, this game is the fucking worst and I'm never going to buy it. And then nine months later, they all bought it. And nine years later, they all bought it. And they will continue to buy it again and again.

And you're right. I agree with you there. They've done everything from, you know, have Oracle of Seasons and Ages, effectively Pokemon. Right, red and blue. To Minish Cap, a game about shrinking down. They've had chain chomps in them. They've had touch-based Zelda's that you couldn't control directly.

They really love to experiment there. You're right. Yeah, it's fantastic. And I wish more franchises would do it. I'm really happy to see that they did that with God of War. Right. You know, they really changed what that game was all about. And it was the first one that I played and enjoyed.

I did not like the previous entries, but this new one was fantastic. Now I'm just ready for my gritty para reboot. Oh, man. Yeah, you sound with parapa. Kevin, are you ready? It's. What's up, everybody? Welcome to the game show within the Kind of Funny Games cast.

It's called Mobile Game or Bullshit. Each and every week, Jared Petty brings five titles to us, and we decide if they are mobile games or if they are, in fact, bull. shit. Sharon, what are we playing today? Today's episode of Bull Game or Bullshit is Mobile Game or Mayfair Games board game product. Respected, Mayfair Games,

creator of Settlers of Katan and other such things. Gotcha. All right, but they've been around for a very, very long time. Is this a product produced by Mayfair games or is this a mobile game? The answers may be more difficult than you think.

Do we have one that is both? We do. We have one that is both. Oh, God. So there you go. So you get to guess. We'll go back. at the end, you guessed the both one.

What's that, Kevin? You're keeping track. I'm on it, as always. It's me versus Steve. Of course, I have never lost to Tim Getty's, and we won't talk about my record outside of that. I hate Nick Scarpano. All right.

Steve, you're going first here? All right. Pac-Man. Ralph breaks the maze. Reck at Ralph and his gutsy friend Vanellope meet Arcade icon Pac-Man in this remastered chasing adventure. Is that a mobile game or a board game?

I'm going to go with mobile game I'm going with mobile game I too am going with a mobile game Mobile game Number two Greg Miller Hordes of enemies Description It's an ambush

I hate you Hordes of enemies I'm saying mobile game Sam mobile game I'm saying board game Board game A little bit of both here we just got one split back to Steve. Number three,

Rollaids, and that's spelled R-O-L-E. RPGs have never been so easy. Mobile game. Mobile game. I'm saying board game. Board game. Oh, shit. One of us is losing for sure. Number four, cosmic encounter.

Invite your friends to join the UFO party with customized flying saucers and special weapons. Cosmic Encounter. Is it me? That's you. I'm going to say Cosmic Encounter is a board game. Board game. But right now it's also my frontrunner for both.

Yeah, I'm kind of with Greg that is both. I'm going to say board game though. Board game. And finally, Steve, Saboteur. Saboteur is back in the extended and enhanced ninja game for your iOS device. Oh, come on. That's mobile game. Mobile game.

Well, the descriptions are made up sometimes. The descriptions are made up. Oh, I'm sorry. No, it's fine. It's fine. We should have told us that at the beginning. Sorry. Do you want to change any of your answers based on that?

I'm gonna, well, I'm gonna change that one to board game. Sabotor just sounds like a board game. Fuck. See, now Sabatar, that could easily be both. I'm gonna say mobile game on Sabatour. Mobile game. Shut up, Kevin. You're gonna lose again, you loser.

We have five here again. Pac-Man, Ralph breaks the internet. Or, pardon me, Pac-Man Ralph breaks the maze. Hordes of enemies, roll aids, cosmic encounter, Saboteur. Greg, which of those is both? Saboteurs both. Saboteur is both.

I agree with Greg. Saboteurs both. Ladies and gentlemen, mobile gamer bullshit, here we go. Pac-Man, Ralph breaks the maze. That's the gimmy. That is in fact the tie-in mobile game. Tie-end to the movie. Pac-Man featuring Vanelope.

What's the score so far? I'm sorry. Yeah, we both got one point on that one. Number two, hordes of enemies. It's an ambush. Mobile game. Yeah, plus one, Greg. No points for Steve.

Damn it, you idiot. How could I be mistaken? Number three, roll aids. RPGs have never been so easy. Roll-Aids, Mayfair game product. Oh, my God, another plus one for Greg. Steve, said mobile. Greg is up three to one.

Look at this. Number four. Cosmic Encounter, invite your friends to join the UFO party with customized flying saucers and special weapons. Cosmic Encounter, the famous Mayfair Games board game. We both got one on that one as well. Nicely done. So now, yeah, right now, it's four to two.

Four to two. And finally, Saboteur. Saboteur's back in the extended and enhanced ninja game for your iOS device. Saboteur, the famous Mayfair games, board game. And the iOS game about a ninja. That's right.

It's both. Wow. Ladies and gentlemen, I won't lie to you. I'm impressed. Because this is not only I'm impressed myself Not only did I Is this my second perfect game of all time Yeah

This is the first time since we introduced To the two pointer That I got it as well Meaning I have one two three Four five six points I am a winner I think that deserves right of a pass Thank you

Steve has four points A hundred percent And the daily double That's a really good performance Fuck off Kevin play the song Are you verified it? It's more game bullshit

It's no game Ladies and gentlemen, we're looking for ideas for mobile gamer bullshit. So, hey, shoot me a tweet with your idea. And maybe that'll be next week's topic. With all due respects, we played the outro song. We were done talking about mobile gamer bullshit. You keep your shit inside the fucking parameters. That's your lane right there.

You know what? I do it a wild. Steve, you've been amazing this episode. Thank you so much for hanging out with us today. Thank you for having me. It was fun. Where can people keep up with you and all your work? You can follow me on Twitter at Steve M. Bowling

or follow me on NintendoLife. NintendoLife.com for all the latest Nintendo News and tidbits, along with the occasional rumor and a daily YouTube video by our man Alex Olney. Awesome. Ladies and gentlemen, this has been the Kind of Funny Games cast. Remember each and every week, we come to you with all the things we love in video games. You can get it each and every Friday on Patreon.com slash Kind of Funny Games. You can also get it live on Patreon.com slash Kind of Funny Games,

usually Thursday when we record it for just a buck. However, if you have no money to toss our way, no big deal. Head over to YouTube.com slash kind of funny games or podcast services around the globe to get it for free. However, you don't get the pre-impost show, the post show where we're about to unbox the C-64 Mini and this centipede arcade machine.

Until next time, Tim Gettys is still probably dead in a monkey forest. We've been your hosts. We'll see you around. Oh, I hope he has monkey stories. Oh, he's going to have monkey stories.