Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Sonic Mania and Hellblade Review - Kinda Funny Gamescast Ep. 131

Episode Date: August 14, 2017

Special guest Robin Hunicke, Executive Producer of Journey, joins us to discuss Sonic, Metroid, Hellblade, and more. (Released first to Patreon Supporters on 08.14.17) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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It was super easy to get it to look great. Start your free trial today at Squarespace.com slash gamecast and enter offer code gamecast to get 10% off your first purchase. Squarespace make your next move. And Gamecast doesn't have an ass. It's just game cast. What's up guys? This is a little different than things we've normally done.

But Sonic Mania is now out. Well, tomorrow it's out. If you're listening to this the day that this video comes out. There's a lot of time stuff going on. At the time of us recording this, there was an embargo on the Sonic Mania. review, but I have not been more excited for a game than Sonic Mania in a very long time. Sure.

So I was like, I want to at least have a initial discussion of this. And when I say initially, I mean, I've almost beat this game. This morning, I died what I imagine is the final boss. So I played a lot of it. You suck. You're terrible. Get good. Yeah, I need to get good.

But I just ran out of time this morning before I came in. But I wanted to give at least my review of the game for people because at the end of the day, this is exactly what I said it was going to be. It is the best Sonic. game ever. Wow. I really, really believe that. And again, I haven't beat it yet. I, but it is just at the very end. I don't want to spoil anything. I think the most important thing for me to let you guys know is if you are a Sonic fan at all, please avoid spoilers and just go in. There are so

many fun moments, so many throwbacks. The balance between new and old levels and even the old levels, none of them are exactly the same. In fact, they're all better than the originals. They're all reimagined and designed with modern gameplay in mind. Okay. It's still the classic Sonic gameplay that I just feel like there's so few moments playing through this game that I'm like, oh, this is frustrating because of the design. Whereas Sonic, I recently played through Sonic 1, 2, 3 CD and Sonic 3 Knuckles. Sure.

Just to kind of like see where this one would fall. And I just think that like pound for pound, every level I'm playing, I'm just like, man, there was so much care put into. every aspect of this game that they really were like, all right, we're going to make the greatest hits. And I love, we always talk about, oh, it plays that we remember these games feeling like. This takes that to another level because it looks exactly like it. It sounds exactly like it. And the sound is an interesting thing because this game isn't it on on paper. It looks like, oh, what if Sonic had another game come out on the Genesis. But it's like, that's not what this is.

This is what Sonic would have been had there been a two D Sonic on the Sega Saturn. And the soundtrack, I think, has a lot to do with that, where it's not the 16-bit Genesis sound font. It is this amazing soundtrack that makes you feel what you remember Sonic sounding like. And I love that because the music is something is like one of the most important things to me as a huge fan of the game. Sure. The bosses are so creative. The bosses, it's a hodgepodge of greatest hits of the original games and some really great new ones. I have very little criticism of the core gameplay.

I think that towards the end, there are some design choices that I'm like, I feel like they're only doing this as a throwback to the shitty design choices of yesteryear. But as to make fun of it or as like, we just have to get this in there. For a while, I thought it was to like kind of just parody

and be like, remember when we had to do this shit? But then it kind of gets overused a little bit. And it does add to the difficulty, but it adds to the frustration in a not fun way. Gotcha. So that was a little. disappointing to me, but man, like even the bonus stages and the, um, the, the, the, the, the animations

between levels to like explain why you're getting going from one area to the next. Sonic three kind of introduced that and this one really just ran home with it where there's just such so much life in the game. There's so much, uh, care put into everything that it's just like, when I'm playing, I'm like, I feel respected as a Sonic fan, which is something I haven't felt. maybe my entire life. Yeah, I mean, for me, you know, as we always talk about, a lap Sega fan, not even burned Sega fan, right? But somebody who loved the Sonic on Genesis and stuff, since I've been playing this at preview events, judges week, stuff like that, it was the fan service shining through even for me, right? And to your point, I don't want to spoil it,

but you know what I'm talking about. That boss battle I came back from Judges Week where I was like, Tim, holy fucking shit. They told me, I can't tell you, but I'm going to tell you. And I told you what it was. And I was like, holy shit. And then even last night, I played for just a short minute. I went through a green hill zone where the I'm running from the guy stomping after me. Yeah, I know what I'm talking about? Okay. Yep.

Played through that boss fight. And even that. That boss fight alone is such a great. I mean, it's the first boss fight. It's in the second level. Yeah. That to me is an example of what this game is.

Yeah. It's like, we're going to throw this at you right from the get go. And you're going to be guessing every step of the way, what's next? Right. And I love it. And there's so many times where like they'd be like, what is the next zone going to be new or old?

And when I, when I found out, I was either like, man, I love the design of this new area. It's super, super cool and fresh. Or I was like, wow, we're going back here. And it really felt like, honestly, I feel like the best way for me to explain what Sonic Mania means to me and how much I feel like they nailed it. I have never felt the way I do about this game from a video game with one exception. And that is Metal Gear Solid 4.

Wow. When you go back to shadow Moses. Yeah. Like there are moments going back to other to random zone. and stuff where I'm like, it felt like revisiting a place I hadn't seen in 20 years. Sure. Even having just played through those games recently. And I love that.

Like that, that shows that there was care put into it. It wasn't just like, oh, hey, we're going back. It's a greatest taste where we're going match the levels. It's like, no, it's like, it feels like there's a reason that we're going to the areas that we're going to. Sure. Yeah. And but to my thing of like, well, how it was the boss battle that I was, I saw a judge would be the one throwaway piece or is every level packed with fan service like that.

I don't want you're you're being good about spoilers I'll be good too but when you go through the first giant ring in you know act one of green here hills on right and you pop out in that other place to play that other thing which I don't know if it's been shown or anything because I haven't been following this game closely but that was just like this makes me want to go play every level because I want to have these kind of experiences of jumping through and being like I don't know what the fuck's on the other end yeah it's not necessarily going to be what I've been doing it's going to be something different that I haven't seen it forever and I also love it because sonic is an interesting uh franchise where, you know, the people that grew up playing Sonic 1, 2, and 3 on the Genesis

love, love them and love those games for, for what they are. And then there's the fan base that is the adventure people. And then, you know, there's fan bases for the other stuff as well. But by and large, a lot of people can't, it's easy to shit on Sonic. There's the Sonic cycle. And the Sonic cycle has been broken. Generations broke it many moons ago. But when we got Sonic the Hed Chog 4, I was so excited that it was going to be what I wanted. And it totally wasn't. And then episode two came out and it was better, but it was not what I wanted.

This is Sonic the Hodgehog 4. And I say that proudly, not the way I talk about Tony Huck for Skater 5. Or you know, all these things that I was like, oh man, if they did it again, it'd be awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this is awesome because I really do believe it is better than those other games. Wow.

Like I believe that it has better music than Sonic 2, which was my favorite soundtrack of the series. It is just better level design than Sonic three, which definitely had the best level design of the, of the franchise. And it has more levels. I feel like Sonic 1 did a really good job. The pacing was fucking horrible. But it did a good job of having levels that were based purely on speed and momentum and the physics playground idea. And then there was levels that were a bit more slow paced and platform focused. And the pacing of how those levels played out in Sonic 1 was bad. Like Marble Zone.

being the second one like slow things to a fucking crawl and that's why everyone is so critical of sonic being like you're trying to go fast but why is to slow you down it's like no but there's platforming as well and i think that this game does the best job where every level has both of those in some way where it's like when you're moving forward you feel like you're you're doing it right and there's that sense of adrenaline when it's still just a quick time event or whatever of sonic going through shit and whatever you're excited to see what's on the other side and the fact that the There's a boss in every level, like whether it's a mini boss in Act 1 or a real boss in Act 2. And they're very creative with the bosses. There's so many throwbacks to other Sonic games, but also just other Sega franchises in general. Like I really don't want to spoil big things and surprises because they're awesome. But there's certain things that I feel like a lot of people won't know. For example, the announcer in this game, like when you do the time trial mode or the competitive mode is the announcer from Daytona 500.

And it's like, it's just things like that that are so awesome with the moment I heard him like, wow, they did it. You know, like they really went out of their way to make sure that everyone involved in this game is the right person for the thing. That's awesome. Even seeing the competitive mode where it's, it's squished and it looks just like it used to. It's like they really cared. And there's a lot of unlockable stuff that I still don't have yet.

So I don't even know all the, all the things that are in the game. But I am so through, I played it through on PlayStation. Station 4. Can't wait for my Switch one because that's where I really want to go in and get 100% of everything. There's no platinum on Switch though. You idiot. I get to play wherever I want. But man, I'm so happy that a game I'm excited for on this level finally delivered in this way, a retro. Pretty good year for you, Tim. It is, man. It is. Swinging to the fences and it's been working so far. Yeah. I'm hoping it keeps up Mario Odyssey. That's the one that everyone expects to be good. Yeah. But yeah, I really hope this game.

sells well. I hope that... I think it will. I think reviews are going to be like this where I think it's like, oh, this is what I, you know, people love about Sonic, not what they didn't like about Sonic. But what I'm, I'm really interested to see other people's reviews because the Sonic franchise is something that I care a lot about. Yeah. And I think that a lot of the websites are just going to have a fairly generic review that is, you know, they're going to give it a good, it's the best Sonic ever. And it's like, all right, cool. Do you really think that though? Are you just saying that? Because that's what you're supposed to say. Sure. And whatever. I'm, I'm, so you're calling to be clear. own some shade. To read what you're calling all major video game websites hacks.

I think in this scenario, yes. But I'm very excited to hear the actual real hardcore Sonic fans' opinions have at it because I'm sure that not everyone's going to agree with me that's the best one ever, but I think that it is by a mile. I think that this is the most fun, the most fair. And I played through it all in one sitting. And it was a very long sitting. But I enjoyed the entire time. How long was you sitting? It's hard to tell, but I want to say four hours, probably. And again, I'm not done yet. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You got unlockables and stuff to go back. Yeah, and all of that. But, and there's time trials, and I definitely don't have all the chaos emeralds and all that stuff. But, yeah, I'm so happy. Great. Yeah. Check it out. Now back to your regular games cast.

What's up, guys? Welcome to the first ever episode 131 of the kind of funny gamescast. As always, I'm Tim Getty's joined by one of the coolest dudes in video games, Greg Miller. Ola. And joining us for the first time, Robin Honeykey. That's right. Yay, Robin! For those out there that are unfamiliar,

yes. Why are you as cool as you are? Because you're very, very cool. And they need to know. Why am I as cool as am? Well, first of all, I'm a programmer by training. Hell yeah. So I have a degree in computer science.

Although, I dropped out of my PhD because I'm that cool to go work on video games. Sure. I worked on the Sims. That's what I dropped out of school to do. Then I made a game called Boomblocks, which was one of the best games on the Nintendo Wii. Yes, produced. What, what?

I loved that game. It was such a fun game to work on. And then I'd been at EA for about four years at that time, and I decided to fucking quit my job and blow up my life and go work on Journey. That's right. Take a little journey with that game company. A three-year journey, yeah. And so I was the executive producer of Journey,

which means that I built the team and helped get everybody to do. together and get the game out the door. And then after that was all done, I really missed being in San Francisco. So I moved back here and started my own studio. A new journey. That's right, a new journey. What is the studio called? My studio is called Phnomina. Do do do do do. But I don't know. I like that. I mean, because have you looked at it? Like I know you, so. Yeah. It's kind of, it's kind of an intelligence test. A lot of people read it as funamina. And it's fun with a nomina on it. It's the word phenomenon with an F-U-N. the front, right?

So, yeah. It's a little bit, like, you got to kind of think about it. Yeah. You know? So even though Robbins works on two fantastic games that are right in Greg Miller's wheelhouse. Yes.

Journey and boom blocks, which were fan fucking-tastic games. I'd never met you somehow. Or at least not. Yeah, no, I think that's true. And no, maybe in a passing,

something there, but never talked to you. Yeah. So when we went to judges, or when I went to judges week this week, I finally got to meet you when you showed your new game. Yeah. Luna.

Luna, which is the VR one. If you watched the top 10 things or top five things I had seen so far at E3 before E3 started. That was one of them. The VR game where you're in San Francisco, but it's not San Francisco and there's Natry and stuff, and it's really relaxing and cool. And talking to you, like, that was the thing.

It was like, Brandon Jones was the moron who put on the VR headset and was playing the game. And me and her just talked and talking to her. You're amazing. So then we finally made it happen to have her come on the show. Because I remember back when Journey was happening, was it, did you come on up or were you just there at IGN with Greg? Actually, I was.

You had the scarf. I remember this. I did do the interview for IGN. for the potential game of the year. Not knowing, not knowing that we were going to win. So I was kind of like, you know, that was actually really early on in the process when we had released the game, but none of the award shows had happened. And everyone kept nominating us for stuff and was like, well, we get noms because we're

an art game and people give you noms, but you're not going to win. You're not going to like win. You don't get a chicken dinner. No, you don't get to go home with a trophy. And then we ended up fucking winning everything. It was crazy. It was just a little bit. DICE as well.

We won so many awards at Dice. It was actually embarrassing. Like, you get up and you go, and then you get up on stage and then they go, quick, go back downstairs, go back down and sit so they can film you standing up again. And after the third time, that happens, you're just like, well, this is, can we have spaced these out a little bit? We tried to winning every category. It was really awful.

Like, you know, just, I mean, it was great, but it was also a little bit intimidating to win this huge awards, like, you know, best online experience against a game that cost like 10, 100 times what journey cost to make. Yeah. It was really kind of one of those moments that never happens in the life of a developer. And we were all just kind of like, all right, well, now what? So here's the thing, ladies and gentlemen. This gamescast is all types of messed up.

It's not going to be the standard format because there's some embargo stuff and things are all moved around and whatnot. I'm just going to lay it down right now. We're actually going to start with the topic of the show because I feel like this makes sense, which is Robin and Tommy, her experiences and all that. Then later, just so you know, Sonic Mania's review embargo is, is happening on Monday, which is, if you're watching live, we couldn't talk about it. If you get it early on Patreon, I couldn't talk about it.

So on the Monday episode of Gamescast that other people are watching right now, in the beginning of it will be the Sonic Mania review. Gotcha. And then after we're gonna do the topic of the show, and then we'll get into the show as normal. So thank you for appreciating us. What about my wife though?

Well, we'll get to that when that comes. Well, you're laying out to the show is different. Jen also makes an appearance. She reviews Hellblade later in the show. For every, everyone will get to see that. Fantastic. So thank you for that. This is a good time.

But let's get back to it, Robin. Yeah. So Journey. Yeah. Honestly, one of my favorite games of all time. Very special game. Yeah. What does it mean to you now, looking back on it?

You know, it's funny. This morning I was sipping some water out of my favorite mug, which is a fan-made ceramic mug with a journey character on it and two gravestones and a scar flying in the wind. And I was thinking about, like, just how, when I started working on the game, we had a lot of different ideas about what we thought it might be. We thought it might be a multiplayer game, like a massively multiplayer game. It might be a bunch of people taking a pilgrimage to a far off place. And then the more refined the game got and the simpler it got,

I think right around this time, it was about five years ago that we shipped the game right around this time in development, like the same time that I'm on Luna, like we're about two months away from finishing. About two months out on journey, I remember thinking like, this game is too simple. It's too basic. we're going to get just shredded by like the press and the fans. Everyone's going to say it's just, it's too basic, it's too simple. But we had had such ambitious ideas and it had gotten down to such a very classic and streamlined form

that it felt to me almost like it was too easy. Like it just every little piece fit together. And I felt like, well, it's so simple. I just don't know. And then when it went out, everybody was like, it's perfect. And so I think that it, I'm thinking right now a lot about Luna and getting it done and this feeling of like simple as good you know you don't have to put every single thing that you thought of into the game and it's probably better if you don't and to just really focus

down the ideas come so fast now on the team and the way that the game is coming together is so like and i i really love this moment in a process so on journey that feeling of like it's all coming together love the moment not such a fan of the anxiety that it's not going to work out and i think that that's like I'm remembering that feeling going, okay, this is normal. This is okay. Everything is unfolding exactly as I expected to. Totally okay with this feeling, which is kind of like both excited and totally fucking terrified. Did you work on flour at all? Did you come? No, I was a fan of flower. So I was finishing up Boon Block's bash party when we were making flour. And actually, that was when Genova and Kelly had started to kind of approach me and ask me if I would, you know,

be interested in joining the team. What does it mean to be an executive producer? Oh, man. In this case because that term gets thrown around and it can mean a lot of things. In movies we see Nolan, executive producer on the DC movies, but that just essentially means that he gets paid on. I'm co-producer on heel kick and I've done jack shit for it. Exactly. So it could mean a lot or it could mean nothing. What

did it mean for Journey? So on Journey when I got onto the team we were just doing our first playtest of a 2D build which had four players playing at the same time. So I helped organize that play test and start evaluating, okay, what is the feature set for the game? We'd already signed up with Sony for a budget and a timeline, which, surprise, actually were very accurate. So I was like, well, I guess we'll work with this until we have to change it.

So I didn't have to worry about scheduling it at first. But what I was really doing was evaluating, okay, what's the scope of the game? And then over time, there were seven of us, I think, when we started. I would supervise hiring, so bring people on to fill different positions, sometimes firing, organizing the schedule every day. But most importantly, kind of keeping track of the high-level vision for the project. and then collaborating with our partners at Sony when they would come and say to me,

why can't you see the other player's name? I go, well, see, here's the thing. It's going to be really nice, and like you're not going to know who they are. And then at the end of the game, when you see it was a person, you're going to be mind-blown because you're going to have thought

that we were the best AI programmers ever. Or the worst. Or the worst. Stop chirping, help me. So, yeah, so I did a lot of stuff like coming up with ways to test the game, for example, to fight griefing. So we got worried that people were going to grief each other in the game. So I would write a little piece of paper like a griefer, lover, or loner, and I put a bunch in a bag.

And then I go around to the team, you take one out, and then we'd all play together, and you had to play your role. So if you got the griefer role, you had to try to grieve other people. If you got the loner role, you had to try and play by yourself and, like, kind of stay away from other people. And if you're a lover, you were looking for, you know, looking for group. You know, just trying to hang out and be supportive of each other. And then whenever we would find a real bad exploit, we would cut it out. We would figure out a way to design around it. And so that's why it is actually pretty hard to grieve people in Journey.

For the record, I love it when the wall actually sinks up with the war talking about. It's just on random, but then Journey pops. It looks so cool. There you go. So, I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of questions about Journey and all that stuff. But I want to talk about Boomblocks. Oh, my God, Boomblocks. I love the game, too.

So, I didn't know you were a fan of Boomblocks. Dude, this is, I know what predates you at IG. But Boomblocks became the premier, hey, Damon and Greg are drinking. Let's have a party game. It's such a fun game. Oh, my God. Boomblocks, I think, was really important because it was one of the, well, the first third party Wii games that were like critically well received.

Yeah, that shit won a BAFTA. Yeah. I mean, and it was awesome, though. And I feel like there was a lot going into it. It was kind of like, what is this game? It's kind of like. It's Djenga meets Angry Birds, but I don't even think Angry Birds was out. Angry Birds was not out.

And let me tell you, we did. that are making a mobile version, and that's one of my biggest regrets is that we didn't actually end up pushing that through. But, you know, not everybody can win all the time. But for those of you that don't know, Boomblocks his game where, I mean, essentially it's Angry Birds, but in 3D and use the Wii remote to throw things. And it felt so satisfying. I felt like it was such a natural iteration from the people that got hooked with Wii

in the early days of the Wii. And this was like, no, but here's a game, though. Right. That was the thing. There's a challenge. There's a score. You feel like you're actually in control of what's happening. And it was so much fun.

It's actually a really interesting game because it's totally real physics. Like it's simulating the whole time. We used havoc. Shout out to havoc. And there were definitely exploits in the game. You could find places where if you hit it just the right way, you could take the whole puzzle out and one hit. And Steve, the designer on the game, was super, super good at designing these puzzles that were accessible for just like kids and fam. But if you were one of these people that was like, I know there's a way to do this, you could figure out the one shots.

And then we were able to give you really hardcore gold shot scores for a lot of the puzzles in the game. game. So, yeah, and we didn't just do one. We did two. So we built the engine and we made the editor. The initial editor for Boomblocks was actually a text-based editor. You would actually compose the puzzles in a text-based editor. Yeah, using Little Askey. It was just crazy. But eventually we built a 3D editor, yeah. And then the second game, we shipped the editor so that you could basically make your own puzzles and put them up online and we ran a server for about two years. Yeah. I mean, so this text thing brings me back to Journey now, jumping all over the place. It's fine. Earlier you said there was a

hooty version of it? Like what did that look like? Yeah, top down. It was called the dragon prototype. And it was basically a series of rooms. It was kind of like a dungeon crawler. It was top down and everybody was essentially a tank. So it was like a circle with a little arrow or dot pointing forward. There were four colors, red, green, blue, and yellow.

And what you did was you walked around in the space. And when you started off the camera was pretty close and there was a pretty heavy mask around you. And as you wandered around, the only thing you could do is hit the space bar. And when you hit the space bar, it would go, hey. Just like that. And then there was like a wind sound. So it was very quiet. Yeah.

And you walked around in this environment and then there were little pieces of cloth, which were little dots. You could go up and get them and that would make your scarf longer. And that would make you slide farther. So you could kind of move around in the space a little bit faster. But when you met somebody, then we would pull the camera out. You'd see a little bit more of the environment. And then there were some challenges that you could do that only two or three or four

people could solve. And so we really built a lot of kind of group puzzles. and played with the dynamics of like, what does it feel like when two people are playing with a third or two in two and one and three? And we realize that the dynamics of that kind of a space is really complicated, and in a lot of cases it becomes very competitive

and not very supportive. And so we ended up axing the last two players and just focusing on two people because it's much easier to build a relationship with one other person over a series of games or a series of experiences as opposed to multiple, which is, I mean, no comment on the San Francisco Poly community, but, you know, having more than one partner can be difficult.

Well, that, you know, to jump from what the prototype was of the finished product, that's always, I remember that being so many people having that wool pulled off their eyes at the end. They're like, I've gone through this entire game with this one person and one, and you'd get there and you played with like five people. You're like, what the hell, how? Yeah, yeah. And then the next time you go through, you realize that they have different symbols. You start to see the people as people and as different experiences.

as opposed to when you first go in the game, I think a lot of people see the other journeyer as like a means to an end. And this is like very deliberate, right? We really wanted people to think about, well, like, how do we see each other in online games? Like the whole point that Genova was making with the design, I think, is that online games can be about more than just like using another person to get the goods and the things that you want. And our relationships in life can be more than that too. And that's why I think a lot of people were moved by it because even though we weren't like beating you over the head with that point, it comes through. and all the mechanics. How much thought was there put into people that are going to play it just by themselves and not even connect to the internet at all? Quite a bit, actually. At that first prototype play test, Tracy Fullerton, who has always been a good friend and advisor,

she was the person that wanted to go slow and look at everything and just like, oh, cool, what's this do? And so while she was playing, people kept coming over and be like, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. And she was just like, fucking leave me alone, you know? So at the end, when we did our debrief, she said, you know, I'm a story poker hunter type person. I like to know what's going on in the world.

And I don't want to feel like I'm holding back someone else. And we thought about that a lot as we developed the title. And so the whole idea was, well, think about it like this. It's like it's a ruin. Like it's like if you go to, you know, Greece and you see, you know, the Acropolis or something. Think of Journey as like a place like that. The first time it gets found and discovered and unveiled to the public, there'll be a lot of people there, right? People will go and they'll be talking and there'll be a lot of buzz, but like, let's

say five, ten years after that place has been discovered, it'd be very common for you to be wandering alone through the landscapes, you know, just kind of maybe sit down and do some sketching. And then as someone came over, it'd be really special. So we thought about the single player experience specifically because we knew that over time, less and less people would play it and we wanted to still feel epic for the lonely visitor, the person that visited journey, you know, say five or ten years after we'd shipped. But, you know, to be honest, but, you know, to be honest, but, you know, to be honest, we had someone in the office the other day from Microsoft, and he was like, you know, I've never played Journey. So, well, that's okay. It's on the computer. You can just go over to

the PlayStation and load up. We're done talking, you go. He's a sweet guy. But he played it, and I swear to God, he got halfway through the Bridges level and a white, you know, gown, journeyer came in, and traveler came in and started showing him all the secrets. And so people are still online playing it, which is really heartwarming. And also kind of insane. Like, it's a five-year-old game. You know, how many of those still gets played, you know, that aren't, you know, a constant drops, you know, expansion-pack kind of experience. I mean, journey is a two-hour experience, you know. My question then stems from that, but bridges into going on and doing Funimation.

Phenomena. Phenomena. Phenomena. It's, it throws me when I still overthinking. There you go. Phenomena. Because the reason I knew the song immediately is because when I was doing the video, I went to look up how to say it.

I was like, this is going to be the hardest thing to figure out. And on their website, they're like, click this if you can't, if you don't know how to say it. That's awesome. It's the monominole. I was like, damn, you guys are on it.

When I, when we first launched kind of funny, and that first GDC where we were down at the Patreon office doing things, Genova came in and we talked to him. Yeah, he's so awesome. And I've known him for years. And it was that thing.

I'm just like, so yeah, that next game's taking a while. And he's like, you have no idea how difficult this is. The stress we're under. And like, we know we have to follow this up with something that is part of this lineage.

Yeah. For you going off starting your studio, starting this own thing, were you crippled by that as well? How do I, how do I, following follow-up journey. Actually, so it's kind of, it's related to your question about Dice. So when Dice Awards were getting announced, and nominations were getting announced, I'm on a

mailing list of a bunch of people that are in the industry and they were like, oh, Robin, are you going to be going to Dice? And I had never been because I didn't run a business at that time. And I just started running the business. So I thought, okay, well, no, I don't really go to that thing. It's a biz dev conference. They're like, well, you're a CEO now. I was like, oh, yeah, I guess I am. Doesn't seem that way, but I guess I'll put on a tie. So Martin and I, drove from Los Angeles to Dice because we were like, well, we can get like a cheap flight and then drive and then we'll go on vacation. We'll go to the Grand Canyon, right? And then it won't be a waste because we were really under the impression that we weren't going to win. So we went, we met Genova

and Kelly there and we won all the awards that we were nominated for except one, I think. And then we were just like, holy shit. So we got in the car and we started driving to the Grand Canyon and there was a huge storm coming. And it was a snowstorm. So we barely beat the snowstorm. We got in and bedded down for the night. It was like, you know, snow got up in the morning and we were sitting eating pancakes, looking out the Grand Canyon, except there was no Grand Canyon.

It was just this empty, white field, as far as you could see. And we were sitting there, and then the clouds started to break, and the sun came out, and you could see the snow settling into the canyon. It was super beautiful. And Martin turned to me, and he was like, okay, now we have to start over.

Like, that's it. Like, the next thing that we do has to be whatever we want, and we cannot hold ourselves responsible for having done that because that was fucked up. You know, that was like, that was not what I expected. And I was like, yeah, man, like, if it goes like this for the rest of the season, I mean, we're just going to take everything. And then, like, it'll just become one of those things that everybody knows about.

And, like, that's not something that you ever expect. So, okay, we're just going to, right now, we're cutting the tape and we're starting a new tape. And the new tape is like, we'll probably totally fucking fail. And that was really the only way, I think, to process it for us was to just go, okay, this is amazing and terrifying at the same time. And the next game that we ship will be amazing and terrifying at the same time. But they're not the same thing and they're not connected. And I think being a new studio, starting fresh, moving back to San Francisco where all my friends were, like I had really been missing living in the Bay Area.

L.A. is awesome. But I lived in Santa Monica and everyone in Santa Monica is super tall and super fit and, like, incredibly young. And I was starting to feel like, I'm an old lady. I'm just shriveling up. You know, I was ready to be back in a town full of nerds and people that were just like, let's do it. So I think starting over... It's 60 degrees out.

Yeah. It's almost sunny. Like, that was a good deal for us. And, you know, really, in life, I think it's sort of messed up. But Luna, in some ways, is about the fact that in life, not everything goes well. And it's personally inspired by, you know, by some events in my personal life, but now everyone on the team,

We all go through experiences in life where we think, you know, that was wondering too many. Or I really shouldn't have sent that text message. Sometimes those things are connected. Or, you know, that person, you know, they're married and I shouldn't have a crush on them or all kinds of stuff that we do. We do things that we know are not good for us, and yet we still do them. And you can't just go back in time and erase them. You can't just get rid of them. You've got to actually incorporate them into your life and turn them into who you are.

And so in a way, that's just as true for the bad things or the difficult things or the unexpected things as it is for the good things. You know, Journey was a, whoo, just like an amazing event. But now it has to become part of a story moving forward. It can't be the only story that we tell about ourselves. Otherwise, then you're just crippled by your success and you'll feel like trapped, you know? Yeah, nothing's ever good enough, right? Well, yeah.

And I mean, that happens to a lot of people, right? Sophomber slump? Yeah. You know, just like, ooh, you know. I think it's easier for Martin because he worked on all three games. So he did Flow, Flower, and Journey. So Luna is his fourth title, and it's my sixth title. So, I mean, you know, when I made my Sims, the very first game I ever designed and made at EA,

it was the very first wee title we ever released at EA. Not a lot of gamers knew about it. It didn't come out as great as I wanted. But I got to see it on the shelf at GameStop. And I was just like, look, I have my little characters on the cover of this disc. You know, and for me, it was just about that. It was a little bump, right? So not every game that you release is amazing, you know, record-breaking award-winning, you know, heart-inspiring game, but that's okay.

Yeah. It's the journey. Yeah. Not the end. Not the Luna. So Luna, what is the game? Okay. So in Luna, you are, you start playing, it's PC and VR-enabled.

So it's a PC title that supports VR play. And so I think that a lot of people think it's just a VR title, but it's actually a PC title. When you get into the game, you see a little scene where this little bird swallows the moon and then is blown off course. That's right. That would happen. Yeah, this owl convinces the bird to swallow the moon and it's blown off course. And when the bird wakes up, it's in a frozen landscape. And what you do is you untangle its memories, which are little stars in the sky, kind of like untangling a necklace that's knotted up or like a ball of string.

You're slowly untangling those puzzles and they reveal shapes. when the shapes are all revealed to you, you get to take them and use a little palette, you can place them into a world and build that world back up. And then after you've built the world back up, we take you down inside the world where you meet another character who's also been convinced by the owl to swallow the mint,

and you help it free its peace. So the way that you help the bird find its way home is also the way that you heal all the other animals in the forest, which is helping them sing their pieces out and up to the moon, which is really a metaphor for letting go of the troubles that you feel, sort of, the metaphor we use is a scribble in your belly when you have that uh feeling i know it sounds so artsy and it is it is really it is really arcy let's be honest but i want to you know how our

somebody's listening right now who's you know just like console games or whatever like i understand what it sounds like when brandon was playing it and even just watching it it was so relaxing of just like it's it can i can totally envision coming home sliding it on or playing it on just the PC and just breathing because that's what it is. Yeah. Because the way your voice sounds is how the game plays. It's like super chill and soothing and everything is great. And it's going to be,

and it's like, yeah. And it reminded me so much, even if I didn't know your lineage at that point, right, it would have been like, I get vibes of journey from this, tear away from this.

I'm not just tearing something down. I'm creating. I'm fixing. I'm having experience. I'm a Sims type person. I love systems and I love, I love thinking about the way that systems interact. with one another, but we really wanted to build something in this first effort to kind of make

something that was VR enabling and also like bringing people into the VR experience. Really wanted to do something that was a little bit more chill because a lot of what we're seeing in that space with VR and mixed reality as well and AR is intense. It's like a lot of intensity. And so actually at Judges Week, a lot of people were like, oh, a VR title. I was like, well, it's PC title. It'll be up on Steam. But it's also, you know, if you've got the headset and like, or if you buy one of the ones that's coming out at Christmas, it'll be in the headset. And there was a reluctance.

People were like, oh, you know, I don't know. And then they put the headset on and be like, this is so nice. It's really beautiful. At that point, I think we'd already done so many Oculus demos where it was, we're running around, you're shooting, reload, blah. Yeah, exactly.

Well, you know, and the thing is, is everybody loves those games. It's not like, it's not fun to do those things. But when you put something on your face and you do it, and it's all around you, it's a different experience. And I think, especially for, you know, for spouses, partners, older friends, younger friends,

people that really want to try and see what the magic of VR or mixed reality is like, it's just, it's a little much to ask them to also know all the buttons and like, you know, everything's happening all at once. It gives them the feeling of shit. So yeah, it's a chill creation or like gardening game where you get to see a beautiful little fairy tale story. So a lot of devs we've talked to,

talk about the challenges of creating a game that works in VR and outside of Vieter. are? Yeah. Like how do you kind of balance that? So we actually started building the game for the PC. A phenomena is kind of like a research company. So what we end up doing is we partner with folks who are building new technologies. They come to us and say, we have this new thing and it does this and we want people to enjoy it. So we go, okay, let's take it and play with it. And then we come up with a concept. And then usually we build that out for them. And Luna started off as a collaboration with Intel for the Real Sense camera, which is like you put the camera in front of the computer.

and then maybe you could use your hands to control a PC title. And I thought that was just a cool idea. So I was always kind of halfway in the computer and halfway out. I always wanted to be able to use the hands to do stuff in the game and feel like it was tactile. But as we work with that technology and kept pushing it forward, then we realized, oh, wait, hand-tracked VR controllers are coming out. What? And so we got a really early version of the Oculus controllers.

And as soon as we had it in touch, the artists just, they went nuts. we're like, this is what it looks like in Maya. Like, this is what looks like in my head, right? You know? And so for me, it's like the PC title, it's so easy because you get the camera and you can just put the camera. I'm like, oh, I want you to pay attention to the owl, you know? And we move the camera there and then what?

It's the bird over here, right? And that's really easy. Well, in VR, you can't do that. In VR, the camera is on the head of the player because if you do anything, right, they'll get sick. So it's been about learning how to block out the scene so that when I have a camera, I can do it. But if the player is the camera,

they don't have to move too much, but they definitely set the tone with where they look, right? And I think a lot of it is about reimagining the camera and also the player's body position in the scene as a director, almost like you're designing for theater

for like a dramatic stage play as opposed to, and for the actors in a stage play. So it's a little bit more like blocking a stage play than it is like just thinking of a film, you know, a flat film where you set up the things

and then you compose the shot. So, you know, if you're going to really, really try and do it, it, the other thing you have to think about is, right, you've got your hands in the space. And so you can do all this stuff. Well, if you're, you know, holding a controller, it's a very different experience. So designing mechanics, like placing something to have anchors and use audio feedback to show

you where the cursor needs to go, things like that so that you don't get into this weird never, never land of like, oh, it's great on the hands, but it sucks on the other controls. Yeah. So it's a lot of actually like sitting down, drawing out maps, having a lot of conversations with the developers about like, well, should we try this or this? And just a lot of iterating. I think making new games is always that way, though, right? I mean, you just got to crank through it.

You just have to keep coming up with stupid ideas until one of them isn't stupid. You're writing the book on it, right? I mean, that's the craziest thing about VR right now, I feel like is everybody has to learn these lessons and there isn't, well, I have 20 years to fall back on on what other people have done with it. Which is painful, honestly, as a designer, because you go, well, what if we, oh. Nah, not going work. What about, ugh? And so you have those meetings where everyone's just kind of like, and everyone looks over when you hear someone like, maybe, no, okay.

And then I guess we still have to keep talking about this. They're all dutling on our stickies, you know, like, making random stress drawings, you know, or playing with Legos. But yeah, I think that, you know, making a new game is always hard. You know, it's never easy, but that's okay. It's what it's what weird indie nerds were born to do, I guess. That's what I would say. So what's the deal with Luna?

When can people get their hands on it? Well, so that's the thing. We can't announce the announced date yet because it's embargoed, unfortunately. So embargoed. I don't have bargains on this episode. I can say that it's coming out this fall for sure. And that will be making announcements probably at Gamescommon packs. Oh, nice.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Stay tuned for that. Fantastic. Very exciting. And before we move on, I brought you guys some stuff. Oh, what did? I did. Bring me an out.

I've always wanted to now. bag. Oh, we left the owl in the bag too. That's right. That's right. I brought you

a fat stack of t-shirt. Hell yeah. Yeah. We have girl-sized t-shirts because we're awesome which show all the

animals. Ooh. And I also brought a whole bunch of buttons. We've got world buttons and Luna buttons. Cool Greg's going to love this.

And there's like a million, bazillion of them. Nice. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming by. Thanks for being fascinating.

Thanks for talking about everything. This is, you know, making video games is the best, but talking about making video games. You should try just talking and that's all you do. It's pretty great too. Really, you have no redeemable talents and it's awesome. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the Kind of Funny Games cast each and every week. We get together, talk about video games and all things we love about them. You can get it early by going to patreon.com slash kind of funny games where you can watch it live along with us or you can get it early then on Friday.

It comes out as for the public on Monday. I'm all thrown. You walked really. This is you stumbled into this one. Yeah, I did. But you guys know. Patreon.com slash kind of funny games.

You can watch early. How early? This early. You're watching it right now as you're recording. If not Friday, audio and video and video, Patreon.com slash kind of funny.

And if not that, YouTube. com slash kind of funny games and podcast services around the globe. Absolutely. Now it's time for this week in gaming history.

No, it's not. I was going to say, don't you want to... All this stuff, guys. I'm sorry. Now we're talking about what have we been playing.

Craig? What have you been playing? I'm here. What I want to toss out number one is I was going to tell you off the air. But if you're all messed up, I'll just tell you right now. Yeah. My God, Robin, I've worked with him a long time. Yeah. You are so fucking good at interviews now. No. I didn't have to do anything that entire time. Every time I was about to ask what I was about. I was like, well, I'm just lying for the ride. I just copy Greg a lot. If I'm being completely honest, he's the best. You're great. Thank you. That does mean a lot. What I've been playing is a lot of embargoed stuff, Tim. A lot of embargoed stuff. So I'm up that same thing where I was just like, well, can't talk about any of that stuff. So I played all. I played all. I've been playing all. I played all. the way through twice now, Batman, the enemy within. Wow. No, evil within. No, evil within's a different game. The Enemy Within.

Episode one there. I did it as the bad Batman. Then I went with Troy and Anthony, the videos up on YouTube.com, such kind of funny games. And then I went home, played it with Jen. Love my life. Yes. My wife. Shout out.

And I wanted to be good Batman there because I had my Batman save. Still ended up in hot water with Commissioner Gordon at the end of episode. And now I'm legitimately like, do I play it a third time to correct? this one thing. I'm obsessive that way I would. See, I would, but then I kind of like the idea of I rolled the dice and that's what it is. And now I, as Batman, Bruce Wayne

have to live with it. Do you know that there is a different ending to that? Oh, yeah. Okay. Because, I mean, it does the telltale thing at the end of like you and X number of people or a percentage of people, you know, ended on this relationship with Jim Gordon. And I made the choice. I'm not going to spoil anything. No spoilers. I made a choice that I was like, he's going to

be mad, but if I get results as a good guy, it'll be okay. And he was still just mad about it. It's just like, well, God damn it, Jim. We've been through so much. How can you be mad about this? Come on, Camish. We live through the Catwoman, Harvey Dance. Great episode.

What a great episode. That's cool. What a great series that is. I'm so excited to see what they do with this. I feel like there's feedback from season one's really been taking into an account. In the way, at the end, there was way more action of season one in terms of like we're actually being Batman. But there's a bunch of really great fight scenes in this one. As usual, you never know.

But for a telltale game running on PlayStation 4, I didn't have, I mean, I had occasional like, you know, pause thing, but not a hard crash, not a frozen screen, not, it's, you know, none of the normal this is at the end of this, but testers doing their job. Exactly, exactly, exactly. So yeah, it's about time. I'm super into it. Hey, dude, they get a, they get a bad rap. They work so hard. Oh yeah. We know they work hard. Yeah. Half the time they say, this is broken and we're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll fix it later. We'll play that. That was great. Um, played something last night. Well, we, we played somersonic. We talked about that on Monday. Um, play, I, I've, I've watched the Hellblade thing, but I talk about that.

I play his Hellblade and I talk to me about that. You know what? Let's do it. We'll do now, Kevin. If you could make the note. We recorded Jen's review of Hellblade where Greg gives him his impressions as well. So I'm a toss to you, Tim. So Jen, what?

You are now joining us via the power of editing. Thank you for being here. You have beat Hellblade. I have a lot of free time. Yeah. How much have you played it, this, Greg? I would say 15, 20 minutes. Yeah, you played through the.

intro. With the code dropped, we got the code last week and it was that night where I wanted to play a night in the woods or night in the woods. So I came home and actually didn't own night in the woods. So I had to download it. And so while it was downloading, I started this up. And so first and foremost, like, I didn't know anything about this game. You know what I mean? Did you know? No, I had no idea. It was one of those games that I know, Ninja Theory. Okay, great. I like what they've done. Obviously, you know, I'm a fan of their work. And then I was like, I, when people were talking about it on Kind of Funny Games Daily, the Gamescast, like, oh, why is no one talking about this game, I went and watched videos to see what it was all about.

It was like, oh, it looks like their normal action game, Heavenly Sword, right? Like it's just Noriko or whatever running through chopping things up. And so to start that game and have you seen anything from it? Yeah. And my thing is, I haven't played it yet. Yeah. I was very interested in it just because I am a fan of Edge theory. Not the biggest fan of Heavenly Sword.

I did like. Inslave. D.M.C. and enslaved, definitely. But I was shocked to see the, the camera. Seems a little close. It is close. That's what I took away from the action. stuff we had seen. So to start the game and you come in and the credits start rolling and they

start making a like a big deal. First off there's the whole thing of like, oh, they didn't say that yes, I guess about the permadeff business. But like they, one of the first things they go is like, when they're doing the credits is like mental health supervisor. And it's like, what? Like, why is there a mental health supervisor in this game and you get gum and it's just like it's a long intro. Oh yeah. It's a solid like seven minutes. Her on a boat doing this and you going through the titles and you hear like the whispers and like the thing. And like there's voices in your head this entire game. And it was very clear too. I give them credit of like,

Ninja Theory has a vision for how this game is to be played. In the beginning, correct me if I'm wrong, it popped up and it was like, it recommended you play it with 3D headphones. Like, it's like, this is the best experience you can get out of this game,

which would be, and then when it started like, oh, it's going to be a creepy game. Didn't realize it's going to be like super, creep town. And so you went in, there's bodies on spikes and all those different things.

And like, yeah, there's the voices in your head and stuff. And for me, in those 15, 20 minutes, it was like, we were playing, you were watching, we were both interested,

in what's happening. I got to the first stone or whatever to learn how the puzzle system works. But it was that I ran into this boss, not boss, but three times over fight these dudes. The first combat. Sure. The first wave of combat people. And the fact they were the same people. I was like, oh, that's interesting. I was like, I felt like from the jump, it wasn't that hard. And it was like, oh, it's like, dark souls just keep flanking around their size. And the fact that the first three fights were the exact same way. I was like, no, this doesn't sound super interesting. And I got her first puzzle. And the night in the wood finished in song. I was like, bye. Yeah. And then I was, I was like, bye. Yeah. And then I was. thought we were done with Hellblade until Jean-Vos St. D'Aung. Well, so I was interested in it because, like, this sounds like a very Tim Getty's game, shorter, more budget title.

It looks beautiful. It looks shockingly good for the kind of niche that it's hitting. But I, and I think I said this on Games Daily last week, we talked about it. I was like, I want to wait for the reviews. This is one of those games that if it's getting critically acclaimed, I'm way more interested than, you know,

if it would just come out, I don't really care. It'd be the one guy that fucking played it, right? But the reviews are all amazing. So what is your review? It's really good. And like, again, we talked about it briefly, right? The combat to me is not the core of the game.

So I was fine with it being kind of redundant, where at the end of the game, you're only going to face maybe five different types of enemies. And then you get bus fights. And then that gets more interesting because then you get more of a strategy to it, but not really. Like the core of the game is really you're living this story with her. Like you're not through her eyes because the narrator is speaking to you. and then sometimes she has like backflashes through old friends that she's met and then they're talking to her but you're there as like an entity you don't know what you are you are but you follow the story and I really liked it like at first I'm like all right the combat system kind of sucks there's no inventory there's no loot there's nothing it's really just a narrative but to me the way the story was delivered which is in one shot there's no loading screens it's just one place to another and then you go deeper and deeper into the underworld, the underworld, English.

It's really good in a way that story delivery is awesome. How long was your experience with it? It's six hours. So I love that. I love that I don't have to, you know, just like grind and grind and grind. You just keep going and the story keeps on. It's very vague at the beginning, but then the more you explore stages, you go into this kind of flesh, like universe at once with people trying to grab you.

It's really cool. Like, it's got really amazing shots. Is it scary? Oh, it's so spooky. Like, I come home, she plays music and it's on mute.

She's playing the game, but it's on mute with subtitles on. If I understand people saying, I can see this as being a terrifying experience if you're playing with headphones on. Because the voices are nonstop. And they're contradicting you and contradicting themselves

and they're yelling and they're crying. And it's really scary. Hmm. Yeah. And you were talking about, like, when I got there last night, when you were finishing up,

you were at one point, right where the enemies only came at you. It was in the dark, right? Let me tell you a story. Lay it on me, babe. There's only a few things in life that terrify me. You coming at me at full speed is one. Um, mascot.

And then the idea of being chased in the dark is something like my sister and I, when we were kids, um, we accidentally walked into our dad watching it, the movie with clowns. And then ever since we were like, just, just playing games on each other, chasing each other in the dark, but that developed this huge fear within me of being chased by something in the dark. And this game,

and its psychological view of things, is playing on all your fears and weaknesses. Like, there is this... Mascots in the game? No. There is a... It reads your Facebook profile and comes up with things don't only terrify you. It could. No, but there's some puzzles

that are entirely played out in the dark where you need to run to light spots. Otherwise, the thing that's lurking and the dark is going to get you. Or there's this whole puzzle where you're trying to avoid things and not making you sound because if they hear you, they're going to eat you. Or like just running through fire or like, it's really, really scary. How much puzzles are there?

A lot. I love it. I love it because, again, like, I'm a puzzle person. Go games, huh? Yeah. But it's mostly puzzle based. There's a lot of... That's interesting.

...based on their pedigree of games. But it's great. And like, I love that combat is isolated to specific areas. So you're never running into enemies that are trying to kill you. You know exactly when you're like, oh, I'm walking into this arena. So it's very story-based for why there's enemies. The core of the game itself is a story, which is good. It's a really good story.

What I found interesting and actually got me more, and this is before you fell head over heels with it. We're playing nonstop. The first person to say something that got me more on path. Because, like, review embargo lifted, right? And it was. Everybody's giving me great reviews. All of our friends are on Twitter. talking about how amazing it is.

And I saw Dan Reicher pop up, who was when we installed the game, he was playing it too on my PSN. I saw him. And he was a guy of just like, hey, I don't like it as much as other people do. I feel like it's kind of repetitive. And I chimed in. I'm like, I don't have solid opinions yet, but I'm like, from the little bit I played, that was my fear. And it was Marty from I gene who popped up. And he was like, combat's not this thing. This is really, he didn't say it, like, he didn't say glorified, but he's, the way he made it sound was, this is a glorified walking simulator. This is a walking simulator in an action games closed. Like, it actually is, is about getting in there and going through and experiencing the story.

And facing, because the gist of it is she's facing her own fears and like going through her own darkness and like with the voices and everything. Like if you do the whole experience with headphones, man, like it's a great way to do storytelling. It's just creepy again, for me a little bit with her in the boat,

which is like a hollowed out log, right? Like when the voices start up and she starts looking around, there's this one point where the voice, the narrator who's talking to you, but you don't know it at that moment or whatever. I mean, you put it together real quick.

And then she's like the, she's, what, Sasuna? Is that how I say it? Senua. Senua. Seenua. I am Setsuna's fucking me up. This morning I got up and like, are you gonna platinum? Am Setsuna?

She's like, yeah. And then we both did the thing of like, no wait. No, wait. No, no, I don't know what the, and then she like makes what your eye contact would be as you look at the screen. She like stops and like walks into the screen to look at you like all pissed off. Yeah. And then it was, uh, she's got this head in a bag on her waistband.

And like when the voices start kicking up and you're sliding down the river, the first time, she hears breathing. She looks down, the bags going out and coming in, like, the head's breathing on its own. And it was like, is this because of the area I'm in? Or is it that there's something going on in my head? It's all in her head. Yeah. Well, it's not all in her head, but like, she's carrying this head essentially because

she wants to go and save Dillian's soul, which she, Dillian is her lover. And he's been taken away by a bunch of Northmen through a raid. This game is super Norse, which I didn't know anything about. Like, we walked in there not knowing what it was about, but it's got. so much Norse mythology. It's really interesting. But yeah, back to the, when she speaks to you, there's also this scene where she has this vision of Dillian and you're Dillian, like you're speaking with her and you have this interaction with her that makes her so much more than a video game character. Like you're

actually reading emotion on her face. I feel like that's where a lot of the screenshots I've been seeing of like the super detailed faces where I'm like, what the hell? How does this look that good? And holy shit, this, like the, the, the, the actress, I guess, that Senua is like, she's amazing. And I think she's video editor at Ninja Theory. Like, she's not, yeah, I read something like that. I'm not sure we should double check, but she's amazing. Tim, can I talk to my client off my second? Thank you very much. No, it's not. They say it at the beginning, pretty much. Okay, just making sure. I didn't realize, in the, the brief part I had seen, I didn't know this is going to happen.

If you had stuck around for five more minutes. Oh, really? There you go. They mixed live action in with it. Oh, yeah. Where there's like live. action video of people talking and doing stuff. Like twisted metal. Yeah. And so like I had seen it like later in her game where I popped up and I was like, what is this? And it was it's all interest.

It's all used very artistically and interesting. And I don't want to talk about any stuff I saw because I saw late game stuff. So I was bringing this up in the beginning of the conversation that the camera seemed interesting to me. But based on this, it sounds like the comment isn't that big of a deal. But did the camera get in your way or did it enhance the narrative? Uh, combat wise or like in terms of your experience with the game. It made combat sometimes really annoying because like, like,

You get stuck in this one direction and sometimes enemies will spawn behind you and you're like, fuck. And then you can't do anything. But it does help immerse you in the story. I didn't. I liked it. I really did. All right. Well, pro tip.

Pretty sold on it now. Pro tip for you. I know you don't care so you won't do it. But pro tip for anybody else out there. Oh my God. The platinum is super easy. You have 90% of the trophies minus one and all that 90% pop just by you playing normally. But the last one is to get all of the, whatever.

they call lore stones. And there's 44 of them, which aren't bad. But if you miss them, it's totally convoluted to go back and try to get them. There's no chapter select. And once you finish it, you can't just go back in the universe. You need to start the whole game again. And you lose all your powers. Like, not that many, but.

So, yeah. And then if you keep your progress, right? If you had 43 stones, you only have one to find. But if you've missed one in the beginning and then you're only missing, like, it's a wheel, right? And if you're missing some later down the road, because it's following the chapters. it might not be the ones that that's actually that would be showcased in the tutorial online because if you miss one it's going to skip it and then show another one

and then it messes up your whole progress there's no way to be like I've missed number 13 out of whatever by the time you get to that number 13 it might not be you need to do them like even the ones you already unlocked you need to just hit them again and again again to just to make sure you're not missing ones from the early beginning are you planning to go back and I did that this morning and then I realized that The M that was an S that I was missing was one from the early, early stages that I just passed. And I'm like, fuck.

I'm missing four. So, but it doesn't sync up or not sync up? Fingers crossed, we'll see. Now I have to go through like three other chapters to figure out if it's synced, but I'm still going to unlock everything. Whatever. I'm going to tap everything again. Well, Jen, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for inviting me.

Yeah. All right. Back to you, Tim. And now we're back. Thanks, Tim. And also thank you, Tom Bach, Patreon producer for this episode. You make the wheels turn on this big, beautiful bus. Wow.

Yeah. All right. All right. Yeah. I didn't know where you're going. You jumped off the trapeze, but you grabbed the bar. You did great. I didn't need you at all on that one.

So what's exciting, of course, is that, you know, we're so busy running around playing on these games we can't talk about. We go to Vegas tomorrow. We're all very excited for this trip. So exciting. I'm a lot. I'm very excited, of course, to be back on a Virgin America plane, my natural habitat. And I'm going to get to play some switch.

I'm very excited to play new things on Switch I need to figure out what it is I need to do it I went to turn Do you know what you're playing on Switch? I want to play Sonic but I only have it on PS4 right now What if I'm grateful? What if I'm grateful? What if I told you I could

I could soften the bloke? I don't have Sonic, don't look at that I don't have Sonic I don't have Sonic I can soften the blow You want to the blow softened Something I brought gifts as well for a change This is a presence episode Now Tim

Yeah it feels like Many a moon ago Uh huh Because it was We did a thing about man, switch cases. Those sure suck. And we couldn't find any good ones.

And of course, we talked about Waterfield Way. SFBags.com. SFBags on Twitter and how they make that city slicker one. They finally had some to send us. Oh, my God. At SF bags on that thing. They sent them off. If you remember my old Vita case, it's that, but it's bigger.

So we got these different ones here. We got the fancy ones. You got the one here, the red one. You get to pick what you want. I'm going to let you pick. Are these the only two? Yeah, they send these two. So the city slicker ones.

You got that one from Waterfield. throat up. It's got the nice, got the nice shammies in there. It's not the nice, you put all your cards right there. No screens, I know. I'm all about it. Yeah. You're on the back, you put whatever you want in there, put your headphones, put your charger. Fantastic. Put your weed in it. Put your weed in there. Don't do that on the plane. Then this is the more

like low key one. Hey, I'm going out, but still build for the switch. Got all your things. I'm like that's got that kind of like rough man's shaving kit look. Sure. Yeah. And we are all rough men with our Nintendo handheld. It'd be especially nice for beard trimming stuff. But I guess Kevin's not going to need that. Show the people. Show the people what you did.

Show them what you did, Kevin. There he is. Look at that. There you. You have to see how to stuff that guy's in there too. Oh, yeah. I want to put my stuff. Yeah.

So, yeah, they finally had more in stock. They sent them over here. If you're watching live, they have one more day where you can pre-order or you can order one of these and you get the Namcoe museum in there for free to. What? Oh, really?

Yeah. That's super random. Yeah. I want to say, I've been waiting for them to come back in stock. Yeah. Because I want the blue one. I'm going to buy the blue one.

Okay. I want that. All right. So for this trip, you don't want either. No, you can have them. Both of them. I only have one switch. Yeah, Andy has a switch.

Oh, cool. I'm going to get that, but I want it in blue. All right. Then I'll take the red one. Don't want it. Matches your hair. Is it your favorite color? Blue is very much my favorite color.

All right. Yeah. I love your hair, by the way. Now that we're talking about it, I've never seen the black as like an accent color. That's right. That's like a cool. It's because I'm a witch.

Oh, my God. Things got really real. What else are you playing, Greg? That's the big stuff that I can't talk about. God damn, look at that thing. Oh, my neon switch thing. Atomic. Yeah, that's right.

What about it? It's a really, like, day glow. Yeah, right. I thought I hate him. I really did when they debuted them. And then when I got them, I was like, hey, you know what? It reminds me of Bilobong bathing suits from like 1980.

I'll take it. That's what it's reminding. Well, the problem is that, you know, Tim loves blue so much in our kind of funny logo is blue. He got the blue joycons. And I just feel like I can't copy him. It is beautiful. I just feel like I can copy it.

I get it. So I got to be different this way. I'm embargoed on any impression. but I put it out there that I got my city skylines code for a PS4. I was playing that last night. Can't think about it. I played more Marvel Heroes Omega because I'm addicted and can't stop. Starting to look, you know, who do I do next?

I bought the back in black Spider-Man costume because I love being Spider-Gwen. But after a while, I hear the Ashley Johnson quips enough. I'm like, it's time to get some new ones. Did that? No, Ashley Johnson was Spider-Wing there. That's cool. Yeah. Very cool.

Yeah. That's the big stuff that I can talk about. I'm hand-strung this week. Next week I'll be a deluge of information for you. The one game that's kind of like your Marvel Heroes that I've just been playing all the time. Player Unknown's Battlegrounds. You're still playing.

Me and Andy, it's been like every day after work. It's like, yo. It's a very cool game. It is such a cool game. And it's so addicting. I love so much that every match feels fresh. And every single time, like I like it because I know that I'm not good. But it doesn't matter because it's drama every time, right?

Like, someone's going to like, I get farther than I should every single time, and that's satisfying. You're scheming. I'm scheming. And I'm like, oh, this is a Tim Getty's game in a lot of ways. But no, it's fun partnering up with Andy because we end up getting way farther than we think we will. And like every time in every match, there reaches that point where it goes from zero to 60. Yeah. And I haven't experienced that in a long time.

It's really cool. Are you playing too? Well, no, actually, I was watching a friend stream it recently. And they got everybody, I think they, a guy came in and shot them all. So they were all down. But they were in a stairwell. So the guy couldn't escape. So they had their other friend come all the way across the map and shoot that guy.

And then his friend came in and murdered them all. Jesus. So it was a very funny moment. But I think in general, I actually interviewed Player Unknown at E3 on Jeff Keely's show. And he was super cool. And basically, as an indie, he said, I've just. just, I wanted to make the game that I wanted to play. It wasn't, it wasn't a game about recovering for mistakes or like,

connecting with strangers online. It's for when you have scribbles and you tell me and you want to shoot him in the head. Exactly, exactly. Drag your emotions into the street and mob rule, beat them to death, funny. He's like, so I'm definitely not you. I was like, that's cool. That's cool. But he's a great game designer.

That game is very well designed. It is. And I love, I love the jank. I love everything of that is just so much fun. And I love that there's just so many. stories. Like, I forget if I told this story, I didn't on games cast, I might have on another show, so I apologize if you're hearing this again. But I had a bunch of my friends come over and all of them are different levels of gamer. Some of them, like my friend Curran, who is

like used to be all MLGCS on the PC. So he's really good at first person shooters and third person shooters on PC. My other friend Vincent who plays Battle Grants. He's the one he was like, hey Tim, we should play this, Mike, let's do it. And my friend Danny, who does not play games at all. And then there's me who I just I'm not good. But I was like, we got PCs here. We can all play together. Like we're lucky that we have the studio where it's like this is kind of like old school land party. Yeah, exactly.

I'm like, let's do it. So we all, they all came over and we were playing. And we're just following Vincent's lead. And he's telling us, oh, let's do all this. He gets in the car. We all get in the car. And as we're going, my friend Danny, who doesn't play has a sickle. And he's just like, you guys all have guns.

I only have this sickle. And he's just like, yeah, like, wait, what do I use it though? No, no, no. And then Vincent was in one room. The rest of us were in the other, which is a bad idea when we're following his lead. We're just driving. And all of a sudden, I just noticed they were driving in a really weird direction. And we're just like, what the hell?

Like, where are you going, Vince? And we just hear Vince from the other room go, guys, guys, get me, get me. And we look at the map. Danny had sickled Vince, which knocked him out. So he was like bleeding out in this field. The car was on a hill. So we're three of us in a car Just aimlessly going down

And we had to go back and get him And it was just like one of those moments We're like we aren't even engaging with enemies And there's just a story You're told There's something to happen and it was just so much fun That's why that game Today on the game rocks

I'm kind of funny games daily Somebody wrote in today Who hasn't played it And was like I don't get it Why is this game taking off like this? It's the meta narrative totally Totally People I don't understand

Like if you jump in there It's the same thing with like me with Friday the 13th where it's like you play that game and sure getting away from Jason's the story but like the interaction you have with this one guy who does this or leaving them in the boat or when we did play player on ground and we followed Andy and I was like all right cool and then we died I'm like fuck you Andy I'm doing it by myself from here and out like a little thing of like how I'm going but I can see you guys on the horizon it's weird stuff like that yeah it's it's so much fun and then the other game that I got to play that the embargo is up so I could

actually talk about is Metroid Oh yeah wow. I got to play the Let's Play that is now up on YouTube.com slash kind of funny games. That was 10 minutes of it. And I highly recommend you watch it if you're a Metroid fan because this game is a lot different than I expected it to be. Really? You a big Metroid fan? I am actually, yeah.

So I have beaten every Metroid game with the exception of two. Okay. And this being a remake of two, I'm really excited to get my hands on it now, but I wasn't when this game was first announced. At E3, Metroid Prime 4, I lose my mind. Super excited about that. And then after the direct, they're like, oh, yeah, also we're making a new 2D Metroid game on the 3DS. And I was like, awesome. I guess.

That's great. Don't really want to play my 3DS. Yeah. Metroid 2 didn't beat it for a reason. Like, I'm sure they're going to update it. It'll be great. But I was like, eh, like, I don't necessarily need to play this game. And then playing it now, I'm like, oh, I'm having way too much damn fun.

And you can see it in the let's play. Like, there's just moments where I'm like, oh, they got me. Like, this is a quality game. And I feel like they made so many wise decisions where they included this melee counter option. Oh. So they changed. So the thing is, Metroid 2 originally came out on the Game Boy, which meant that the screen was very small and Sammis' spry. It was very big.

And when you're modernizing game for that like that with a widescreen, that's going to, there we go. Happened again. What's what I'm talking about on the wall works. It changes how the level design plays and where the enemy locations go, where it's like, it would totally break the game. Something that interests me is the original game was only like four hours long. So I wonder if there's going to be a lot of padding in this. When they remade the first Metroid on the Game Boy Advance and Zero Mission,

they added a bunch of stuff with that. So I imagine that they're going to here as well. I would think so. But I think that they did a really good job, even so far of what I've played, of changing up the enemy placements and changing the enemy's attack patterns to make this counter be a very integral part of the gameplay. And every time that I would counter it the right time when they'd come at me and then I'd blast them, it felt so satisfying. And I was like, this is what Metroid is about.

Yes, of course, there's the adventuring and the exploration and the sense of just being alone on this new area. But the fun of just feeling like a badass. You know, I'm a badass bounty hunter. This game, it makes me feel in a way that I think other M to its credit attempted to do. Like that was the one good thing about other M. But everything else about that was a disaster. I always feel bad when a game is a disaster. Yeah, lots of talks to me.

But no, I'm really excited for it. And I was playing with the 3D slider on, which I haven't done since Mario 3D land on the 3DS. And I was very impressed by the look of the game. A big thing that I keep harping on about this game is I don't like the way 3DS games look. So explain that. Why? So there's something about it where just the resolution of the screen, especially when you're playing on an Excel, which I feel like is the only way to actually do it.

Everything's a little, it always seems blurry. A little blurry. Even if the slider is off, it always looks like smudged a bit. It reminds me of how N64 games looked compared to PlayStation games. Right. You know? Sure. Where it's like comparing the Vita to the 3DS.

And I understand that there's a lot of hardware. There's no comparison. Well, yeah. hardware difference there. Yeah. But it's like it's the the smudge is that always bothers me. But even more than that, it's the insistence on a polygonal art style. It's like I'm a sucker and I know we've discussed this a million times with it Sprite.

Like hand drawn sprites take a lot of time. Maybe not worth doing probably and that's why they do this is this more Metroid. Yeah it is. They have that appeal though, right? They just do. Yeah. And there's something special about it. But it's like with this I can tell.

that it's easier to do, and that's just the way it has to be. But I just, I don't really like it. But with the 3D hon, I was like, I can't even hate on this. This actually looks really good. A problem that I did have that I didn't talk about it all in the let's play is I was fumbling with the controls a lot because of how it looks. It reminds me too much of Smash Brothers. And I can't turn my brain off.

You've got your Smash Brothers control schemes in your head. So it's like, especially now that there's like melee attacks that she didn't have before. the countering system and the way I keep trying to use the shoulder button to like dodge and that wouldn't work and just the way you jump and shoot I kept hitting the wrong buttons

and I'm sure that if I were to sit with the game that I would be able to like turn that off but I'm not sure I fully could and I think that's attributed to the look of the game and how similar it looks to Smash Bros. Yeah, yeah. But I went from oh I'm happy this game's happening to

oh I can't wait to play this game. Nice. That's cool. Very excited for that. What have you been playing? I actually just finished Edith Finch. Oh, very nice.

Sounds like a very you game. Yeah, so I mean, I'm friends of the developers and I had been watching it come along throughout its career as a game. And it's just always nice to see something that a bunch of people that you care about worked on really hard.

Yeah. And I really found it to be, it was just very beautiful. Like, it's a really immersive and beautiful world. And I really enjoyed playing through it. At the end, I felt a little bit like, oh, I wish I could have, I don't know.

I wish I could have, you know, done something. You know, I don't want to change the outcome. I just don't want to, yeah, I don't want to spoil it. So I had a little bit of like a forlorn feeling at the end. But in the same way that I did when I finished Firewatch, like, oh, you know, I'm a hopeless romantic, I guess. But I really enjoyed it. And then I'm always playing La Citi's with Tim Schaefer on my iPhone, always. And we are in a dead tie right now.

I don't know what Lost Cities is. Oh, my God. You don't know Lost Cities? No. What? What? What? Okay, it's basically gin.

You're playing cards, and you want to get to a certain number of cards in your hand. There are five colors, and there are only 10 cards of each color, and you're both trying to put down the right number of cards. So if I invest in red, and you invest in red, well, then we're going toe to toe. Gotcha. And so you get the cards, you get to spread of cards, and then you can decide where to put them down, but you're also watching your opponent to see where they put their cards down,

just trying to make sure that you don't let them get the 20 points. before you do. And Tim, bless his heart, has the best fucking endgame strategies. He's always beating me in the last four cards. It's just like, oh, kills me every time. So this last couple of games we played, I have totally crushed him. And we're back at, we're at 10 and 10. So we played 20 games and we're tied to 10 and 10.

And so actually, I made a move right before I came over. So I'm really hoping. I'm not going to say what I'm playing because I don't want him to be watching this and get any hints. That would be awesome. But, uh, he saw my tweet. He went to Patreon subscribe just in case this came up. It came up that I made a move in last day.

Now here's, here's the, let's scheme real quick. All right. Can you, how could we throw a red herring at him? Because our audience will tweet at him whatever we asked him to do. So if you, drop some false info. If we haven't tweet at Tim of Legend, be like, oh man, Robin's about the X, YNC. Just going blue. Definitely, definitely throw down those high white cards.

There you go. There you go. There it is. Just randomly tweet that at him. I'm sure. I love that. I'm like, what the fuck? But yeah, actually it's one of the highlights of my morning as I get up in the morning

and I'm like, you know, drinking my coffee and then I open it up and I'm like, ooh, Tim's made a move. And then there's a little, you can make a little face. There's like the only way you communicate with the person you're playing is you put a little face and their little emoji. And so sometimes he makes that like angry one. I do the really funny one. And it's nice to just, we have this little joke going back and forth.

But yeah, I've really, I've never been a game ahead of Tim Schaefer in this game. And it's really, it's, I'm a really. a competitive person. I believe in you. It's kind of eating me alive inside. Question for you. Back to Giant Sparrow. Yeah.

You like that game. That's great. You know them. What do you do when you play somebody's game that you don't like? You know them. You love them. And then you play the game like, oh,

this didn't come together. Oh, I'm trying to think of a last time. Yeah. Maybe you just keep such good company. I know. I'm trying to think the last time that happened. Well, actually, you know, I liked Firewatch, but I didn't really like the way that the character moved in the game.

It made me kind of sick. Like I tried to play it on my laptop and it over Steam and then I try to play device. Steam Connect on the television and just didn't work whatever. So then I just downloaded it. Yeah. Yeah. It was fine. Generally, if someone's making a game and I don't like it and I've tested it, they know

because I'm usually pretty brutal. That's what you guys want. Yeah. When someone comes to me and it's like, well, you play this, I'll say like, this isn't going to scale or I'm already bored or like, why am I doing it? this or why should I care? And I will just say that because, I mean, if I didn't say that, that would be really dishonest. And then if a game is really good and I really like it, I usually try not to play it for a long time.

So like the witness, John and I had a long conversation. Oh man, it was like four years ago or whatever when he first started working on it, about the difficulty ramp in the game. And he put a really difficult puzzle like maybe three or four puzzles in. And I was just like, why are you giving the player the middle finger, like, right at the beginning of the game? And he was like, the game is going to be hard. If you don't want to think your way through it, then screw you. Don't buy my game.

And I was like, well, you're a millionaire, so you can say that. But that's fine. But, I mean, I'm really like a love the player, like, lead them in. And then if you really want to make them think hard, give them an opportunity to feel like that they really want to struggle through it. You know, ramp them up. You know, like, ease into it, you know. I'm not just like, you know, come on in. Bam, you know.

Like, this is really. Thanks for the money. Yeah. Thanks for the money. And like in Luna, I actually did design some puzzles that, like ways of solving the puzzles that were really, really difficult and actually like computationally,

they're like NP hard. You could easily get into a place where you can't solve the puzzle and have to reset it a bunch of times to solve it. And I just took those out because I just thought, you know, this isn't the audience that I'm going for. So we disagreed about the difficulty curve. And I don't think he changed it.

But then I didn't play the game for a long time. And then when I went back and played it, I played it for a little while. And I got to a point where I was like, okay, this is really hard. He's given me the middle finger. He's giving me the little finger. I have a game to ship.

I am going to put this game down. And then in a year, when I have time, I'm going to binge play it. And I'm going to keep a notebook. I'm going to do the whole things. And I'm going to beat it. And I'm going to get all the endings and do all the things. But I just didn't have the bandwidth. You know, and like, yeah, it's fine.

I mean, I don't think that John cares if I finish his game. Sure. But, you know, I did pay like, what, $60 for it. So I'm going to finish it. God damn right. Your money's worth out of this thing. I'm not wasting that money. But yeah, I'm usually pretty honest with people

because otherwise, you know. What's the point? Yeah, I mean, whatever. And no, I mean, I don't like a lot of games. A lot of games come out and I play them and I'm like, you know, that's the thing with Battlegrounds. Yeah, you know, with Player Unknown. Like, that game has a cool series of mechanics that make it interesting to shoot people.

Like most games where you shoot people are not that interesting to me as a game designer because I've played them. You know, I used to do Halo Land parties when you have to like put all the Xboxes together in one room. You know, I love that shit. But after a while, it's like, as a game designer, I'm always looking for the new thing. So I get inspired by sculpture or reading a book or going to a film or like sleep no more and stuff like that.

That's what gives me new ideas and playing like a kind of standard franchise extension or doing this or doing that. It's not going to give me a lot of new ideas. However, there was something that just came up recently. It was also, it was with Dave Lang. Dave Lang was a guy was watching a stream PubG. So sorry you had to hang out with Dave Line. Sorry. He's a funny man.

We were talking about it. And one of the things that's true is that games, like, as they get into later and later into franchise extensions, they get better and better at what they do, right? So in some cases, a game is, like, it's like fifth or eighth or tenth, you know, release, but it gets so good at, like, being hitman or whatever. And I think that that's actually something that is kind of unsung in the industry, you know, from, you know, at the level of game designers. There's something really great about working on something that's got such a legacy and being able to, like you say, basically, like, go back to Metroid 2 and go, Hmm. What do we do now? What do we really do to make this an enjoyable experience for everybody and to kind of,

you know, smooth over some of those bumps? That's actually often very hard because you have to respect all the boundaries in that game and all the spaces and, like, to do it and to really succeed. The designers that worked on that worked really hard to make your experience better. So I think that's actually, in some ways, it's just as hard as coming up with a new game. Well, there you go. Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, after a false start, now it actually is time.

All right. For this week in gaming history. two years ago. Yeah. This one's for you, Greg. Thank you. If we're in like the, I feel like if we're eight years to two years, it's going to be something good. Something for Greg.

And then we get way into Nintendo shit, I don't understand. Yeah, it's usually how it goes. Two years ago on August 6th, 2015, Galgun Double Peace came out on the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita. It's definitely the one. You're familiar with this game? Yes. It is a disaster of a game. Disaster of a game.

I would say so. You're shooting. I had to sit next to a plane while you played it. So yeah, I would call it a disaster. We can't be two years ago. Were you in pain? Two years? No, no.

I was in ecstasy. Seven years ago on August 10th, 2010. Scott Pilgrim versus the world. Oh. Came out on PlayStation 3. You guys having memories of that guy? Oh, man. Scott Pilgrim.

Well, I mean, like, I read all the comics. Did you play the game at all? No, I didn't play the game. I just, I remember reading the comics. Oh, yeah. That was another one that everybody at IGN loved. So, we would bring it over all the time to do, like, less plays or whatever and we'd all play and it was great.

And then it was like, wait, there's no online play. Because that's what, like, you talk about like a moment in time. That was still part of the time where we're like, we love these kind of games. Let's play them. Oh, I can't play online. Like, who's going to go hang out of each other's house? You know what I mean? Like that wasn't a thing.

Whereas now it's like Mario Kart's back and there's all these different reasons to get together. And we've had long enough where we missed that part of our child that are gaming. And so that was one of those. Yeah, it was great and it was awesome. And we played it a lot in the office. And then when it finally came out, not many people went home and played it with each other. Yeah. Now, I looked forward to it so much.

Loved the comics, loved the movie. So for the game, I'm like, of course, this is, I'm all about this. And I feel like from a presentation standpoint, they did such a good job. They introduced me to Onamonaguchi, the people that did this out show. Love them now. Yeah, they're great. So that was great. And just the look at the game and the way they decided to have the boss of heights and all that stuff was so great.

But at the end of the day, when I was actually playing it, I think I was talking about this a couple weeks ago. Those type of games just don't hold up. Like the kind of side-scroller beat them ups. It's just like there's not much there. What about Beautiful Joe? Have you gone back and played that one? Well, that's different though. Because that one was a badass game.

That totally, but that there's a lot more game to that than these words just kind of just go and it's punch punch or throw. Yeah. And that's kind of it. And you're just facing waves and waves of the same. And Beautiful Joe is a bit more of a beautiful. Beautiful Joe has some great. There was a lot of good progression there too. Yeah.

And talk about fantastic animation. It had super, super, super beautiful. Yeah. Really well done. Wonderful. Ever get another one for all. Oh, man. I really.

That would be so great. Never disqualify it. I feel like that is one that there's enough people to talk about that to make it actually happen. It's something for the film or fashion. Oh, and if we're going to do that, then I want an incredible crisis three. I want disaster report. Of course. You and Steve did.

And what else? Mr. Mosquito too. Oh, yeah. Let's go there. Let's go there. All right.

And you can throw in mad maestro too if you really want to go there. I mean, like, that's like just, you know. Now what I'd like to point out. What are you got? I'm not saying you're wrong necessarily, even like. you clearly are, is that I unlocked the feeling of the dokey dokey trophy in Galgun Double Peace

on July 26th, 2016. So you said two years ago, maybe the Japanese release of this game in two years. Just throwing it out there. You have a keen sense of time passing. I always can track my trophies. Thanks to you, PlayStation Vita. The site that I use usually does denote

if it's from Japan and it didn't for this, but... Could be. Could be. Definitely could be. But the thing about Scott Pilgrim is I was just kind of hitting on it for a second but the boss fights I did really enjoy and I thought that they kind of and again even Ninja Turtles and Simpsons and all that did a great job with the with boss fights as well but I feel like for a game coming out in 2010 it did a great job but it was really damn hard it was brutally hard and I I felt like I needed multiple people to play with me because

doing a single player I never beat it and then here's some fun facts for you on December 30th maybe that's a not fun fact oh not so December 30th 2014 Scott Pilgrim versus the world the game and its DLC were delisted from the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network, possibly due to license expiring. They don't really know why. However, the game is technically still available should one find a download code

due to their inability to expire. So that's interesting. And then on August 10th, 2016, so last year, six years ago after the game's initial launch, Scott Pilgrim creator Brian Leo Malley created a post on Twitter stating that his number one goal in life is to get Scott Pilgrim versus the world the game re-released.

So there is a hope. I feel like he can make. make that happen. Yeah. Or just remake it with somebody else. He's a super nice guy. I set at a table with him at a wedding and he was really, really cool. When was the wedding?

The whole time. It was a while back. He's dating one of my really good friends, best friends. Cool. Cool. Yeah. I think he was there with a fellow comics creator and she had on amazing gold shoes. I'm a shoe person. I remember.

Who's wedding? It was Kelly Santiago's wedding. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. And I was like, oh, your shoes are amazing. I'll never forget this. I made Scott Pilgrim.

I don't care about Scott Pilgrim. Where did you get in shoes? They were beautiful. If you're not, you should read Snock Girl. We should make Snock Girl a required reading. Snock Girl's really good. We'll do that. We'll do that.

Nine years ago on August 7, 2008, Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon came out on a Nintendo DS. It is a great game, but I had some issues with it. Oh, why? So here's my thing. It was my first handheld firearm game that I played. This was, if you don't know, a remake of the first Fire

Boom game on the NES. And my first Fire Lim experience was Super Smash Bros. Melee when I was introduced to Martha Roy. And I loved how they played. So I was like, I need to play these games. There was, in America, the only one that was released was on Game Boy Advance. I just didn't get into it. But then when

Path of Radiance came out on GameCube, I was all about that. To the day, my favorite Firenable game. So then when this one came out, I felt like it was a step back, being a remake of the first one. Yeah. And it's on its, you know. Yeah. See, I hadn't had that experience, and I was like, this is so juicy.

Yeah. I loved it. And the idea of playing a Firebloom game with the touchscreen seemed so amazing. Yeah. And I feel like they didn't actually master that until the 3DS games. So it's like, that Shadow Dragon in me is a little bit iffy. But it is Mark's story, if you ever wondered. It's probably not unlikely that they weren't actually developing it for Penn gameplay, and the last minute, we're told.

We got to figure this out. Yeah. You know. 11 years ago. 11 years ago on August. 8th, 2006, Dead Rising. Hey! Came out on the Xbox 360.

I didn't ever played it. You're an idiot. I've actually never played it either. You're an idiot. You're all idiots. No, no. You're all very smart people here. I'm sensitive artists.

It would give you nightmares. No, that was one of the first games I, that was among the first games I ever got as a games industry person. When I sold the Columbia Daily Tribune, and I tricked him into giving me that column and blog, I then immediately hit up everybody and Capcom was really, oh, sure, okay. And they sent it to me and I was such a zombie fan and I popped it in.

And yeah, that was in, it's one of those things of like I don't care about achievements. Right. I'm obsessed with trophies now. Yeah. But back then, I was like, oh, these are cool little things, whatever. And there was a good week where, yep, came home from work every night, took off the shirt and tie, sat down and just drove that loop in the basement of the mall, killing zombies to get the zombie genocide achievement that I just had. And then I just had it and I was like, all right, that's cool. That's what started the monster.

And I was just like, oh, I have it. Cool. And then there was other. I didn't get a thousand points in that game. There was other trophies. And there was just like, I'm not going to do that. But for some achievements. That achievement, I was like, I'm going to get that achievement.

That sounds great. But I remember too, because I was playing on a tube TV, of course. I didn't have a HD TV or anything. And like the captions were so small. Like there was no way to like leaning in trying to read what the fuck's happening. If I couldn't hear what they were saying. Great game. The fun game.

Cool. And then finally, this one's very topical. 31 years ago on August 6, 1986, 1986. Metroid came out. Wow. In Japan. Well done. Well done.

31 years. It's older than me. Way older than me. It's older. You can just leave it with that. You don't have to say way older. Way older. Robin, thank you for joining.

This has been a very interesting episode. I'm sorry that it was kind of all out of order and weird. I don't care. They had fun. But you were an amazing guest. Thank you. I love being on shows. It turns out.

Good. We do a lot of them. If you ever want to have me back. Absolutely. Maybe next time I'll wear a funny hat. Yeah. A funny hat? Yeah.

Okay. Yeah, maybe I'll shave. Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us for this episode. Let us know in the comments below if you're excited for Metroid, Sammis, returns. Until next time, I love you. See you. Bye.

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