Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Will Smith (Special Guest) - Kinda Funny Gamescast Ep. 119

Episode Date: May 12, 2017

Special guest Will Smith joins us to discuss VR, previous games of the year, Call of Duty, and Bloodbourne 2. (Released first to Patreon Supporters on 05.05.17) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up? It's me, Nick Scarpino, the producer slash seduce. You don't know how to be June 3? San Francisco, California for Kind of Funny Live 3. That's right. Kindof Funny.com slash KFL3 to get your tickets, son. Be cool or be square. So Mother's Day is like this weekend. If you're listening on Patreon, it's next weekend.

But if you're not, dude, it's this weekend. Luckily, this episode of the Games cast is brought to you by Sherry's Berries. Now, if you don't know Sherry's Barry's, some of our friends, namely Andy and Kevin, they, uh, they know Sherry's Berries really well. You should have seen Kevin take these things down. I'd say it was impressive, but it was more scary. But you can, you know, gift these to your mother

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You just got to click on that mic and you can make that things happen. This amazing deal won't last long and Mother's Day is coming soon. Don't disappoint her this year like you do every other year. What's up guys? Welcome to the first ever episode 119. The Kind of Funny Games cast as always.

I'm Tim Geddy's joined by. one of the coolest dudes in video games, Greg Miller. Hey. Hey. Hey. For the first time ever, joining us, Will Smith. Hi. Hello, Will Smith.

Did you guys know which Will Smith I was? Let's just get it out of the way. Did you know? How long is your life, you know, being Will Smith, but not being that Will Smith? Look, I'm a middle-aged white guy. My life is pretty easy. But you got the Twitter account. So you won the battle?

Look, I got the Twitter. All of the accounts. I have all of the accounts. Except for Snapchat, because who needs Snapchat? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm way too old for that. I'm way too old for Snapchat. Yeah, exactly.

But, yeah, it's basically when I go to a hotel and check in, I can tell how old the person by in the counter is by the joke that they make. So if, like, they hit me with a getting jiggy with it. That means they were in probably middle school in like 1999. And that means that now they're, you know, 17 years plus 19. Yeah, exactly. It's a lot of Scientology jokes. A lot of Jaden.

People on Twitter get really pissed off at Jaden Smith. Oh, yeah. Like unbelievably pissed. You will never hear the end of it. And it's always just like, get your son. Like they're just on that how shitty of a dad you are. And you're just like, man, I don't have a son. Leave me alone.

Your daughter? Your daughter. So how old is she now? She's four. Four. Oh my God. She's like a small human being. I used a picture of you to promote this.

Yeah. And she was a lot smaller than that. She was just in your own. Oh, I thought you were in the hand. I was like, damn, this is a small kid. They teach you to do that. They teach you, like, when you go to the parenting classes, you'll find this out soon. One day when you're, when you're not soon.

everybody. It's not a bargain information. One day. One day. And the time is right. But no, you go to the class and they're like, okay, you can do the football hold. You can do the bread basket. You can do the, and the head cup with the body strewn out along the arm is one of the recommended way is to do a one hand baby carry. The one hand baby carry. It's crazy to think that at one point all of us fit in someone's arm. And now she's like, she's like that tall. She runs around. She's riding a two-wheel bicycle now. Wow. We're a big girl. Wow. This is a big girl. What's up with those bicycles without the? Oh, the gliders?

Is that what they're called? So there's two school, man, this is a deep, deep topic. But there's two schools of thought. There's that you teach them how to balance with the glider and then they pedal later. Or you teach them how to pedal with the training wheels and they learn to balance later. Because I've been seeing, there's like a rise in popularity. Oh, yeah. Every time we go out, there's these kids cruising around.

They're like half scooter, half bike. So yeah, you're on the seat, but you're just moving your little feet around. And like you skip your feet off the grid. Yeah, like we went with the traditional. We went with training wheels. Okay. So I don't know what, I don't know what's up with the guys. There's now big, big boy, like our age, adult male or adult female, a little power, not power wheels.

What's the, not tricycles, but the ones that you pedal on? The big wheel. Big wheel. Thank you. Yeah. There's adult big wheels that come with a beverage holder that is meant for alcohol. I saw, I saw an electric adult big wheel the other day that the guy said was like 60 miles an hour. It sounds like it would be terrified.

That sounds too much. too much. Well, I was at, this weekend I was out at Kate O'Brien's down in Soma hanging out. Okay. It was on their little outdoor patio. And this guy and two girls rolled up on those things. And the bartender came out and shoot the shit with them and then they wrote off. And it was like the most traditional San Francisco conversation of like, oh yeah, he's the

CEO of some tech startup. And he just buys those for $100 off Amazon and rides them around the city. And then people steal them, but he has them and da-da-da-da-da-da. Fucking start-up. They're the worst. God damn money. Yeah. Yeah.

Now my next question, though. Yes, sir. Back to the Will Smith topic. Yeah. It's my favorite thing. It's my favorite thing. Never gets tired. Was there a weird moment for you?

Because you're friends with Gary Witta, friend of the show here. The most storied Game Over Gregory show guest. Really? Yeah, he's been here the most. We can't get rid of him. I mean,

he is like fungus. The legend is he might still be here this day. Has he done three full episodes? Yeah. Three full episodes of the show. He doesn't have time to hang out with me anymore. But he comes over here. It's been over the course of a couple years.

Well, this gives him an excuse to buy the weird British food and bring it in and make us eat it. Oh, is that what his thing is? Yeah, that's his thing. Yeah. He gave us his spotted dick once.

and then it just hung out forever and we never ate it. Has he made you eat cockles? I don't think we've had cockles. Oh, you should make him bring cockles next time. Okay. Yeah, they're delicious. Sounds like Gary's getting an invite soon. But was it when he did after Earth and stuff?

So Jesus, God. So there were two moments that were really weird. One is that like Will Smith got famous while I was in high school. And I grew up in a small town in the South. So everybody that I was in high school with I had known for like 10 years at that point. Nobody like nobody made that connection when the Fresh Prince of Bel Air was on TV. And the guy's name was Will Smith. I never heard a joke until I went to college.

Gotcha. And my freshman year in college, I was like, wait, this is going to be a problem. And then, and then, like, his career kind of spiked, and then it kind of waned. And by the end of the 90s, like, Wild Wild West, completely bombed. And I was like, thank God, I'm finally out of this nightmare hellscape. And then Independence Day hit. And I was like, shit. Okay.

So here we are. And he just keeps making the William came out. So, yeah, Gary wrote after Earth, which was one of Will, more recent kind of big budget action movies. And I kept, he kept just texting me pictures of him hanging out at Will Smith's place in L.A. Looks like I got a new,

I'm sorry. Oye, Gavin, it looks like I got a new Will Smith. Yeah, exactly. Spot on. So yeah, he, yeah, it's, that was a weird moment. The weirdest was at Comic Con that year when they were promoting after it.

They did a panel like two years before the movie came out. And I was there for tested stuff. Yeah, yeah. And like, Gary was like, hey, you want to come to my panel. Come to the lobby of the Omni. you can walk over with us and we'll take you in the in the green room. Will Smith wasn't there.

Okay. Oh, I was going to say. Here we go. No, it was like his overbook production team, all that. They were all there. So I met his brother-in-law, who's one of the producers on the film, introduced myself. And the dude just started laughing and fell on the ground. He was laughing.

Literally rolled on the ground laughing when I introduced myself as Will Smith. I was like, maybe I didn't need this right now. Thanks for bringing me, Gary. I'll talk to you later. This is lovely. But the panel was nice. Okay. If people don't know you, I guess we've done a shitty job.

But how would they know you? Test.com. That was your old gig. Yeah, I did, I started tested in 2010 with Norm Chan. We worked with the MythBusters the last few years. And we got to go do a bunch. Like, I stood on top of a nuclear reactor while it was running and looked down between my legs at the blue glow of Chernikov radiation.

Okay. This is a haunting, haunting color. You can only see it in a nuclear reactor. This is before after your daughter. Two weeks before she was conceived. So I'm hoping for superpowers. There's still a chance. Oh, ho.

Like, you know, that's fun. We'll see. What are you doing now? So now, about a year and a year and a, I started a company called FOO and that's F-O-O-O-V-R and we're building virtual reality sound stages basically so we we put on a vibe you get into our software we'll record your performance sound movements the whole thing and then we animate a character based on your movements in that in that spot so you can create 3D rendered

interactive VR stuff like the Foo show with just off-the-shelf hardware you can do it we could do it in this room right here we could make a cartoon version of this show if you wanted well this sounds like an excellent segue into our first topic but first and do the whole rigmarole. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the Kind of Funny Games cast, each and every week, get together,

top of all video games, all things we love about them. You can get it early on Patreon.com slash kind of funny games, or you can get it late at YouTube. com slash kind of funny games.

Either way, we appreciate you. And a little bit of, you know, housekeeping stuff. Greg's not going to be here next week on the show. Right, yeah.

Oh yeah. If you're watching this, if you watch this on YouTube, I won't be here the week it's posting on YouTube because I'll be in LA for E3 Judges Week. Oh.

This is a huge. honor. I've never gone to Judge's Week as a judge. Wow. I've gone to Judge's Week as I'm an IG and underling. Like a chud? Yeah, because they do the whole thing, if you're unfamiliar with Judges Week is that Jeff Keeley assembles the super friends of video game publications and invites them

there to see games early, that then they'll see other games at the show and then at the end of E3 they vote and they say hey, these are the best games of E3 as like one unified body outside of just your IGans, your game spots, whoever's. And so when I was at IGN, I'd go down there and do Judges Week, but it meant that Steve or Hillary or whoever was going to every event,

and then there'd be some events where they're like, let's, all right, the judge's part, portion is over. Judge's only. We'll throw you a bone and lift the velvet rope so you can come in and play whatever dragon game, somebody's crapping out. And you play it and then you write now

and stop about it and you feel like, oh man, if only I was a judge, but that's the ivory tower I'll never make it to. And this year, kind of funny has been, I guess they can't say anymore, we don't matter. Kind of funny is put its stamp on the world, it's placed on the map.

Fuck everybody. We're one of the companies they want voting on these things. Thank you. Thank you. It's a huge honor. It's a huge honor for us in this industry. So thank you so much. It's because of your support. I will now not work and probably just drink with Brandon Jones and Victor Lucas. Yeah. It's going to be fun. It's going to go down there. You can see all the games. And then the following week or whatever the embargoes live, which will probably be E3. We'll talk about it. But at the very least, we'll do a topic about your experience. Do you want to know what I'm planning on doing? I'm bringing the old school notebook. And I'm going to take copious notes on these games so that when

these embargoes do lift, we can either do topics or breakout segments or whatever. actions, as they call them here. You know, if you got one of those sticks that you put your phone on, you could hold it out in front of you after you do the thing and you could like, you could talk. I could do that. Yeah. And then you'd have video too. It's not having to write like some sort of puzzle. But then it's just me up in my hotel room doing that and I got people walking by behind me.

You would do it? No, I said I'm into it. Oh, you're into the stick? You're into the stick. You're into the one who's always bitching we had to use the wall more or whatever. Do you need to use the wall more. You're right. You're right.

All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. Thank you. Congrats to you and you and everybody.

Congrats to the best friends to make us happen. And also, congrats to Tom Bach, our Patreon producer for the month. Thank you very much for being an awesome dude. Let me just say these segways today. And you're a bitch and you're like, I think I'm getting sick. Look at you. I'm just right now. Okay, segue, let's take a little time travel trip back a second ago when we had a really good segue.

Today's topic is VR. Let's talk about it. The virtual reality. The future of it, but also the state of it in 2017. I like that a lot. So where we're at now? We get all the big guys are out. are out. Oculus officially out.

Sure. PlayStation VR been out for a while now. Half a year. Yeah. Vive is there too. Right. Yeah. Killing it, doing its own thing. What does this mean? Well, you can go to the store and buy them. It's true.

Can you, because this is the problem. Every time we talk about PlayStation VR, it comes up as, oh, people in chat, if we're doing on Twitch, I can't find it in my store. Yeah, but then there's other people who are just, I'm at Target and they take a photo and there's a wall PlayStation VR. And so I don't know what the line is to buy anymore because that was the thing when Andy House did that interview with Business Insider

or whoever was Business Times saying like, you know, we screwed up, we underestimated demand, we didn't get it much fast enough. So now I'm not sure where demand is anymore if that was a moment in time where everybody wanted it. Because, you know, with us being a, you know, our audience mainly PlayStation focus,

or at least me being a PlayStation voice, I don't know why I get, you know, I mean, I don't know what it could possibly be. Our audience, you know, they talked about how hard it was to find. They bought it at launch. and then for a while I thought people didn't care about it because like when we were doing PS I love you still

I'd be like nobody's at writing in questions about it but I don't hear people bitching about it and it was what I That's kind of what you want on a new hardware launch And that's what I had said for once I thought The tone had been set of hey PlayStation VR is coming It's Gen 1 and you're making an investment on unproven tech And you're not going to get a AAA game every month and blah blah And rather than not listen to that buy it and be pissed off

It seemed like the people who are hardcore enough to buy it and pre-order it knew what they were getting, bought it, and then just chilled out. But even now I do, now I am starting to see the crop of, well, what am I playing on this? Where is it going? Well, I mean, so, okay, so there's a, this is a lot, this is a big, you asked like a bunch of questions here. You could wrap it up in four minutes.

I'll give you, okay, I got four minutes. I'm working on it. It's, we're just now reaching the, if you think about, the way I think about VR, real VR has hands, right? Or at least a track controller. It's like the PlayStation, the way PSVR tracks the, with the dual shock. or even the track dual.

Like the move is good. The move is interesting because it's like really good on X and Y and it's not so great. And it's not so great in and out from the camera. The track dual shock is actually my kind of preferred PlayStation controller for most of the games that I played. You know, the, even like res and stuff like that. Sure. The hands are the real key. And Valve introduced the vibe at E3, 2015, which was just now two years ago.

I mean, sorry, GDC-2015, which is just now two years ago. So if we're talking about a game that somebody who didn't have early access to the hardware before announced, meaning like the job sim folks and the Northways making a fantastic contraption and stuff like that, then we're just now at a normal AAA game two-year development cycle. So we're just like, and you're seeing that stuff starting to come out, like Resident Evil 5 hit. What is it? Super Hot's coming out coming to Vive later this month. It seems like they started teasing that.

PlayStation's finally talking about Farpoint again. Farpoint looks cool. Farpoint's the shooter. the shooter that they showed at E3 a couple. That games, that looked, that was, that was one of the first things I played that had, like, movement, like a traditional game that I didn't immediately feel like I was going to throw up. So, you know, I think the games are a little bit slow, the kind of overall market, like, I have a startup, so I talk to investors and stuff like that.

You start a piece of weird. Where's your weird big wheel. Dot com. It's leather jacket wearing assholes. No, we, we're, like, people are looking at the games adoption on the desktop side, especially, but also the PSVR, and they're thinking that maybe this isn't going to be a new technology that's driven by games. They're starting to hedge and make bets about enterprise applications and stuff like that. So, you know, investments slowed down on consumer-focused stuff,

which is not great for video game people. But at the same time, the hardware is finally getting to a point where there's enough units out there that it's kind of a legitimate platform that's worth spending time on. Yeah. Between Oculus, if you're building a Steam VR game that works on Oculus Touch and Vibe and the upcoming LG headset and all the other stuff that's coming down the pipe, then we're looking at a million plus headsets now just now, which, you know, isn't a lot compared to, say, the Switch and nothing compared to PS4, Xbox, or, or Steam as a whole. So, you know, it's, it's a new market. We're, we're, we're still pre-Iphone days. Like, we're, remember the Palm Trio and the old Blackberries and all, like, that's what we're, we're, we're, we're

talking that's what we're using right now and we're working up to get to the point that we have that first moment where like you know you download the app that tells you what song is playing on the radio or in the department store or whatever and and we're not there yet that's a great point we just went and did the star trek bridge game how is that i haven't gotten to play it yeah it's fun it's all hell i really was like oh we're going to jump in there and we're going to have fun with it and it was like all right let's sit down we're going to walk you through 15 slides of powerpoint and then you have to do the tutorial and then you have to play them and like okay cool and so then we jump into the mission and it's still

because it's very much like you're a team based, you know, of what's going on, right? And I was running engines or whatever to shoot them off. But I totally forgot that I needed to tell the other guy that, you know, to move power around. So like when it was like, all right, Greg, take us over there. I'm like, all right. And like, and I'm like, I don't know why we're not moving fast. Honestly, I thought that they overcomplicated it. Yeah.

They didn't need to show. I think the slides confused the thing because I thought once we were in, when I was doing on the tutorials, like, oh my God, this seems overwhelming. Yeah. But then once we started doing, I'm like, we're fucking up because we're being assholes. Like if we were really paying attention, because it's not like each person has that much in front of them. It was just that thing of like, it's a really smart concept of to make you talk to each other, to make you look back at the other guy and be like, this is what I need. And it's to what you're talking about too.

Like for me, it was putting it on. And after having, you know, primarily done PlayStation stuff, putting it on. And, you know, we're looking at each other. And then we started like, you know, you're using your fingers and we're doing like guns and like this and crap like that. And then love and sex stuff moves and, you know, whatever. But it was like, this. This is cool, and it was that cool idea of, like, being in that space together, except for when I punched Tim Baikson. Well, and that's, I mean, that's one of those, like, like, the tutorial stuff, you've really punched him?

That happens. It was that thing of, boom, I'm on the bridge. These are my controls. And Tim's over there. And I was like, but do this. And he was like, as close as you on. I went, like, oh, God, I'm so sorry. Not the face.

It's one of those things that, like, the tutorial thing that you mentioned is a real key thing. Like, when we, when we make 2D video games that live on a TV screen, Like, they can steal UI prompts from stuff that's come 30 years before. When you're building a game like Bridge Commander and you need to get a lot of information out, there's not a good framework. Like, we don't know what the user interface and user experience should be like for those experiences in a 3D world. Because, like, in the real world, which is 3D is how we interact with everybody every day, if you need to convey a bunch of information, you send them an email or they look at a piece of paper or something like that. Reading isn't great in the goggles with the current resolution of the displays. So we're having to build all these interesting UI elements that are like kind of mimic real world objects.

Like for example, when we were building a fast forward interface for the Fushow, the Fus show is this virtual reality talk show I do. And we needed a way to fast forward and scrub through a timeline. And like we know how to do that in video. You just click the thing at the bottom of the video window and it fast forwards. But that was a bad experience when you're trying to aim like a laser pointer at it because your hands wobbly and it's not good. And we did a bunch of work to smooth it out and make it work better. but it still wasn't a great experience. Yeah.

We ended up just making a physical object that pops up in the world when you hit a button and you reach out and grab a ball and you move the ball with your hand across the line. Like you're scrubbing through a YouTube video. And at the same time, all the characters are Benny Hilling all around the world. And like, people get that immediately. It makes tons of sense.

And it's much better than like trying to recreate 2DUI. That's super smart because that was the thing with Arkham VR where Batman does and he replays the crime scene, but it was that putting your hand in and turning like That's actually pretty good. It was good, but it just took a second of, wait, I went, I'm doing, it wasn't that natural immediately. And then like, like, precision-wise, it wasn't.

But it's, it's kind of like every time you need to do some new user interaction that nobody's figured out before or that you think you could do better, people, it's like, it's like trying to build a car without knowing how to make a wheel, right? You're literally starting from ground zero and everything. So a lot of stuff is taking a lot more time, which is why we're always late with all of our Kickstarter rewards and stuff like that. Excuses. Are you still confident?

Like, you jumped in VR's as hotbed? Is it still there for you? I mean, we're in a really lucky spot because the, the, if we were selling consumer software, I'd be a little bit more worried. The fact that we also have this whole, we accidentally built a thing that's really great for making 2D animation inexpensively. Yeah. It puts us in a pretty okay situation for the indeterminate future.

So what do you see it being in terms of a future for gaming? Like, is it going to Wayne, is it going to Wayne? Do you think you're going to see PlayStation double down and do more with it or is this, Are they going to go quiet for a while? So there's enough headsets in the market that people are going to keep making games, right? Like, but I think we'll see instead of big AAA, like I think Resident Evil Five is kind of, seven, sorry. And it was odd, but I can never which one. Is, is kind of, five was the racist one, right?

Yeah. Okay. Well, aren't they all? Five was that. Okay. But some were more than, anyway. Well, sure. Five was the most.

Yeah. I think that we're going to see, I think we're going to see people making more smaller projects, right? I think, you know, stuff like Super Hot is a great example. I know if you guys have played that. Oh, it's awesome. But yeah, like, like something that's a relatively short, tight, really, really well-designed, really, really, really interesting thing. But we're not going to see a 500, 200-hour persona game come out in VR.

I kind of don't want that. Persona! 90 hours in this headset and be awesome. Oh, God. Yeah, I mean, we'll get there. The market's going to get there. The hardware works. It's good.

People are into it. Enough people bought headsets. Like, it's, but it's just, it takes a lot. Do you think, I mean, you'll see the smaller games usually speak to smaller developers, like the super hot team and stuff. Do you think they're going to, is it, are they going to make these games because someone's coming to them and contracting them and do it? Or are they going to do because that's what speaks to them?

Well, there are only a few million units in existence where I could go to PlayStation and then make something that goes to Xbox and PC and everything. Well, I mean, it remains to be seeing what's going to happen with Xbox and Scorpio and VR. You know, they have a partnership with Oculus, looking at the specs on the, that hardware, it seems like it should be capable of doing at least PSVR quality, if not much better resolution, even maybe with a desktop headset. I think that we're an interesting situation right now because all of the AAA kind of stuff that we've seen come out so far, the vast majority of it has been funded or at least subsidized

by either Sony or Oculus. I think when that money stops happening, if that money stops happening before the market is big enough to support those kinds of games, that's a kind of real dangerous inflection point, right? Because if if the money's not there to make the AAA games, but the audience has come to expect the AAA games, then we're in a not great situation. So a question from user Rory Binks is, how long do you think it'll take before we see the second iteration of the current VR headsets? Oh, hardware. So we're already, there's already rumors about like revisions to the existing hardware that make it lighter and stuff like that in terms of substantial like capability changes. So things like higher resolution screens or or. you know, eye tracking inside the headset or like there's even research projects that have come out of Sigraph where they put electrodes around the edges of the mask.

Oh my God. And it tracks the face face. The cheeks. It tracks the muscles contracting around the edges of your eyes and your and your cheeks. So it can detect smiles and stuff like that. It'll be a smile. Shoot them in the face. Well, I mean, think about playing something like werewolf though when you can see people's facial reactions versus right now when you kind of can.

And it's not as much fun when you have no tells of it. Smart. Smart. Anyway, I think we're going to get to that point sooner than we think. But I don't think this year. I think next year at the earliest. And maybe even the year after that, depending on hardware vendors. The Steam VR side's a little bit more wobbly, though, because it's more of an open platform.

So, you know, Oculus is building Oculus hardware. Anybody can build Steam VR hardware. And like if HTC decides they want to spend a new version of the vibe before Val thinks it's ready, they can go ahead and do it, I think. Do you see some of these people falling away and leaving the marketplace? The hardware people or the software people? Hardware mainly because I mean there's Oculus, there's PlayStation, there's V. Yeah, I mean, if I don't know what the attach rates like on the PlayStation side. Yeah. My guess is that people who bought a PSVR, a lot of them also went on and bought

PS4 pros last year. Yeah. And they're the true, the true believers, the hardcore faithful. I think, I mean, I don't know. I think if people keep buying games, then people keep making hardware. If people stop buying games on one platform or another, then the hardware will start to fall. off. Gotcha. And like on the on the on the steam VR side, we've seen it's that's closer to an analog to

Android, right? We've seen a lot of vendors come in and out of that space over the years more more come in than go out. But some people have definitely pulled out of out of out of, out of, uh, or gone out of business, you know, failed. Do you see a PSVR two happening? Greg? I mean, I, I want to see what happens this year.

This year's a big question mark for me because it was leading up to it. I thought their messaging was so great where it was shoe out in front. And I know for our long time listeners are so sick of this. Shoe out in front. This is to us what PlayStation 1, what one was to us. We are launching something that in 20 years will look different. We are committed to it. We know what's happening.

They put it out. They're Batman. There's Star Wars. There's all these like franchises for you to grab onto and understand. And then there was a shortage. Andy admits that you're like, okay, there's going to be more. There's going to be games. There's going to be announcements.

There's not. But E3 is here. But E3 last year was AAA, AAA, AAA, AAA, AAA, they'd done. It wasn't, hey, let's talk about it. Are they going to do that? Is this where you come out and you're like, hey, everybody, PlayStation VR had a great year. You're seeing them in stores again. We're so excited. Here's how many units sold. And here are three big things from the first parties. Here's what we're doing that are big things. Or is it nothing. Is it a sizzle reel of things that look like job simulator? And then you're like, now I feel like this is Vita. And are we on that Vita

track where this is just like, go do your thing? More important than New New Next Gen headset, because the headset's shockingly capable for the price point, right? It's a really, really nice piece of hardware. It feels great too. I love the form factor. It's my most favorite to wear. I love that the little gaskets just press up and you're not getting a bunch of stuff matched onto your face.

The thing that that that platform has problems with is the hand controllers. Like the touch, like I said, the touch were great like what, five, six years ago. And eight years ago when they came out. But the fact that you can't go in and out that you lose that Z access makes it really hard for people who want to port games from Vive and Oculus over to that platform. And then the other thing is that it's much more expensive to develop for a closed platform like the PlayStation than it is to just

gym something up in Unity and jam it out on Steam. So like if they want to engage those small developers and get a lot of titles out on that platform then they either have to loosen up the restrictions but they also have to fix, they have to produce some better hand controllers.

And E3 is a great time to announce that. Well see and that's where I get scared is because it feels like what I've been talking about with PlayStation is that you know, PlayStation 3 made so many mistakes and then started coming back and then to launch PlayStation 4 announced that if they were event. They said all the right things. We're about games. We're about gamers. And that's why they're successful. But then it felt like this was coming back to the old PlayStation of like, all right,

now we can come back and just rely on our games. We don't have to put personalities out. We're not going to have shoe out there. We're not going to have a fun video with Adam. It's going to be very like old PlayStation was. An old PlayStation, how do you put during a conference that information out? I'd much rather see a blog post tomorrow that's like, hey, everybody, we are doing a pub fund again. And we are incubating for indie developers who are making, who have signed three game deals to make VR stuff and make cool. That would be amazing. Yeah, exactly. And we're still committed to this in this way. And the fact that they've been so quiet on that front is alarming to me of like, well, what does

this mean? And it was it, PlayStation's a big ship. And I feel like were we witnessing them changed that course while they were talking of like, we've been working on this forever and it's finally here and we're excited about it. But that's the old guard. And the new guard is like, well, why would we ever do this? We're selling consoles hand over fist. Well, I mean, the larger question about VR as a whole, though, like the technology is, transformative. I still believe that, right? When you talk about, a lot of game developers talk about verbs in terms of what you can map to controllers and verbs that are accessible to players when they're playing a game. So if

you're playing Call of Duty, you can jump by pressing the A button, you can shoot by pulling the trigger. You can aim down the sides by pulling the other trigger. Yeah. You can move. But there's not any very, when you have the ability to reach out and pick things up with your hands, all of a sudden a lot more verbs are accessible to you. And the variation inside those verbs is also much more available. So if you're talking about knifing somebody, you know, And Call Duty, if your cursor's in the right place and you're inside the distance for the check when you press the stab button,

you're going to stab the guy no matter what. But if you have hands, you can reach out, you can swipe down, you can jab, you can swipe across, you can swipe up from the bottom, you can block, you can throw your sword across the room and stab the guy with a flying sword. Probably don't want to do that with VR. I mean, don't let go to the controller, but otherwise,

yeah, exactly, it's all good. It's safe. It's perfectly, like, don't let your kid in the room when you're playing VR. That's a pro tip. Yeah, exactly. Daddy, why do you hit me? That hasn't happened for me. Then they tell all the kids at school.

No, they're knocking on the door. No, it's all bad. But yeah, so having the ability to interact with a software in a 3D, in a 3D sense, the same way that we interact with the 3D world, means things that like sculpting 3D objects are much easier in VR than they ever have been on a 2D desktop using that crappy 4 pane, you know, the CAD interface. So, I mean, the technology is good. It's here.

It's going to happen. My whole thing is I'm just worried about a chilling effect so we don't get to those games. We don't get to those experiences. It's a real concern. Because that's the thing where Star Trek Bridge Crew is a game that if it came to consoles and PC or whatever, I would look at it and be like, no. But to put it on, because I'm not Star Trek fan, I'm not interested in that kind of teamwork. But you put it on and you're like, oh, this is such an added dimension.

Like what you were just talking about, imagine if they did Gary's mob that way. And we were running around and one of us, you know what I mean? Not running around physically, but like moving around. our own hands and stuff. That's really cool because it'd be like, are you reaching for the gun right now? No, no, I was reaching out against the no, you're, you're the murder, no, I'm not, you know what I mean?

Like, it's like Rec Room. Have you played Rec Room? So Rec Room is an Oculus and Vive thing, and it's basically a bunch of mini games. It's not in a mini game, but it's all multiplayer. So you can go play ping pong, you play dodge ball, you play knee ball.

They recently rolled out a couple of quests. And they're, basically, you go with four players, you have guns, you have crossbows, you have bows and arrows, you have swords and shields, and you just kind of dungeon crawl through this maze with four friends. and it's a super, super simple game,

but it is so much more fun than any kind of TV-based video game would be just because you're literally like, hey, you need to come over and revive me, high-five me to revive me, and they come over and high-five you. You're literally ducking down behind cover. You know, all of that stuff makes it a much more deep game

than it would be if you were just trying to map those same controls to a game pad or a mouse and keyboard. Yeah, when VR is done right, it's so fantastic, and I'm just worried about people getting the legs. There's not a few units ship, so I'm not going to make a game that way I'm not going to do that. But I mean, the secret is if you look at stuff like,

what was the Ubisoft game about, grow up, grow home? Oh, grow home, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you look at these, these, even AAA games are starting to spin out little, little side projects. So rather than lose those people that want to go out and start their own studio, they're spinning them out into their own side projects. And I think we'll see a lot of really interesting stuff out of there.

And frankly, you need to be able to iterate quickly with the software right now. Because, like, a new game comes out. I see something, like, Breath of the Wild is a good example. If you're making an open world game in 2017 that's shipping after Breath of the Wild, and you can't climb up stuff. You've got to be really busting your ass right now

to get the ability to climb stuff in. And that happens with VR literally every week. See, and that's what you just said is the same pitch I've been making for Switch, where it's like, yeah, Ubisoft isn't going to port the next Assassin's Creed to Switch, but why not take some UB. arts people and let them make something to it?

And that's again where we get into the business model of like, well, there's a few million VR headsets out, but we know Switch has now sold two million, more than two million in the first month was it or whatever. So it's like, well, let's get out there. Yeah, if you can draft off of the art that's accessible to a Ubisoft studio and take up some of the slack time when when there's time between projects and all that.

Why wouldn't you make some VR games? Yeah. I think the thing with PSVR in particular is it was too little too late in terms of the game releases. And I think that now we're at a point where I don't think we're going to get much PSVR stuff at E3. And I think that we might have seen all the big AAA titles that it has. And we'll get some more experience. Like last year we got trailers for the, there was Batman, there was Final Fantasy 15.

Star Wars, Star Wars, whatever. And I think... Fawn Fancy still thinks not out. Which one? Oh, Final Fantasy 15. VR? I don't think it's out yet. But I'm not wrong.

Let me know in the comments. Yeah. I think in the same vein, I wouldn't be surprised. Like, next thing is Star, Star, Battlefront 2, and they come out and they're like, and guess what?

There is a VR component that's bigger, a little bit better. And I think that that's cool. I think that that's the right way to handle the bigger license things where it is just like smaller experiences because trying to shoehorn the Battlefront game into VR is just not going to work.

Yeah. But going back to what you're saying about the Sony needs new peripherals, I think if they were to do that, they had to have done it when it launched the thing. Because at this point, when they don't have the games, you can't expect people to buy more things to get things to work correctly, especially when that will segment the audience in the way that the Wii you did, where certain controllers worked for certain things and was a disaster. That was what was so interesting about the PlayStation VR is that they really didn't make a big deal about the move again.

We all thought it would be a big, oh, moves back in stores, da-da-da-da. And they really was like, oh, there's a bundle if you wanted or you just order them off Amazon. So they, and they didn't make you buy moves. Like, you don't have to buy the moves with the bundle even today. So, like, I think that there's still an opportunity to come out and say, hey, look, you dug out your moves from the closet. They were cheap if you bought them on Amazon, whatever. Let's let's make these good.

And let's roll out with a first party Sony thing that's just baller. Yeah. It uses these new hand controllers. And the other thing is like the hand controllers are going to change. The Oculus controllers are really good. The vibe controllers are kind of ambiguous. They showed some stuff at Steam Dev Days last year. So we're going to see some changes there.

And we'll see some incremental upgrades to that in the same way that you kind of upgrade your phone case or whatever. Probably they'll cost more than $35. Probably. Well, I'm one. I'm dropping $80 on pro controllers left and right, whatever. Well, I got one final question about VR. It's important.

This comes from more saying on Twitter. Do you think Armored Corps would make a good VR experience? Man, I was a Chromehounds guy. I don't know anything about it, armored core. There you go. There you go. A little history lesson on this. I thought we had an answer.

We finally answered. He's going to do an armwork. This is VR specific. This is for Will. Look. Yes. A giant mech tank game, VR. Right in the wheelhouse.

There you go, Chris. Yeah, there you're welcome. Let's make it happen. So what Konami should have done. I really want Chromehounds. I'd love to see you from Chromehounds to full VR with like all the weird communication stuff that they had in that game. That would have been the way to go with Metal Gear. If you're going to keep making Metal Gear and piss everybody off, make some kind of your metal gear simulator,

fighting game or whatever. Don't make this stupid zombie first person shooting. The Enders, VR. No, Zones sucks. Zone of the Enders sucks. Zone of the Enders we only ever bought Zone of the Enders to get our Metal Gear Solid 2 demo disc.

No. It's fucking awesome. Ordered the demo disc off eBay. PlayStation words. When full anime was great. Fantastic. All right. Second topic.

There was a tweet that went Twitter viral. I don't know. It was trending, I would say. From this dude named Post Mesmeric. And his tweet was, What's your Game of the Year? for the last five years.

Quote, tweet this and everyone share your thing. So I did that and we had a bunch of the best friends out there, share theirs. And I asked you guys to do it as well.

Sure. I thought it'd be a fun conversation. Sure. Because I think about this every once in a while. Back when we were at IGN, there was a rigorous debate over what the game of the year was, lots of discussions and so much would go into that.

When we started kind of funny every year, we have our game of the year discussion, but it's a bit more loose. We're usually exhausted by the end of it and we're just like, whatever. You guys get ordered pizza beer, just sit down, bare knuckle, box it out? No,

We just got to talk on the show. Yeah, we just do it. Yeah, we just do it. And then are we begrudgingly vote and somebody wins. I mean, last year, no one even won. Last year, while we were doing the conversation, there was a car alarm outside. Wow. They wouldn't stop going off the entire time.

So we just, people left at something. I think we got beers there. I think we got beers. Yeah, we did. So that was fun. But it's interesting to look back because I feel like, you know, in the moment you have your choices. But when you think back on games, it might change. Because, like, looking at this year, my show.

I was like, I stand by all these and these were what my game of the years were. But there's something that I'm like, oh man, did I, thinking of it, did I like Grand Theft Auto 5 more than Last of Us? I don't know. I think I like that. I mean, I probably would have said Grand Theft 305 at the time. But looking back, Last of Us was a much more memorable game and like the transformative game. And so my thing is back then and now, I still went with Last of Us. Sure.

So let me hit it off with my list. 2012, Journey. 2013, Last of Us. 2014 smash pros for Wii you 2015 Metal Gear Solid 5 2016 Overwatch Okay

What you got well I got Spalunky for Xbox 360 in 2012 Okay I still play Spelunky probably once a month Games amazing I got Super Mario Brothers 3D World and Zelda 3DS Which I think we're both 2013 Oh you are a man speaking to my own hearts

What you love them? Oh those are great games Love those games specifically Basically 3D world. They get shit on way too much. Man, I readiscovered that recently playing with my kid because she's like getting into Mario and likes platformers and stuff. That game is so, so tight.

Like there's all the depth of all the old Mario games and it's this giant open world. Like each level is this giant open world big enough for four. It's a great game. It's a 2D platformer. It's a 2D Mario game in 3D. And then like thinking about Zelda going back now and looking at Breath of the Wild what they did next and thinking, oh, oh, right. They were testing some different link between worlds.

Link between worlds. Yeah. Such a great game. They were thinking about different, different ways to re-invigorate that. And they kind of went a little bit with that. And then they just blew it all over the rest of the wild. Yeah. Yeah.

Whatever. We don't care. Do what you want. So 2013. That was the same year. GTA 5 and Last of Us came out. Yeah. So I didn't play GTA 5 in 2013 because I was waiting for PC because I'm that guy.

I did play Last of Us, but I probably finished Last of Us the next year if I had to guess. Got it. Because it was kind of late in the year. And that time of year is always busy. Yeah. And then they re-released on PS4, like super soon. but last of us like last of us like the thing that I loved about last of us I was bad at stealth games for a really long time then I played um dishonored one and um oh god what's the clay game uh the 2d side scroller clay fighter no no no no no no the guys who do like don't starve and all that yeah um fuck sorry the ninja one or the ninja ninja ninja yeah okay blade of the ninja mark of the ninja mark of the ninja pretty much taught me how to play um

stealth games. Gotcha. I was always garbage. Like I played thief. I was garbage at it before. And that taught me how to play that. And then I went right from there into Last of Us.

And I was like, oh, this is a stealth game. I can do this. Yeah. I know this. So I love Last of Us. I'm stoked for the Laster of Us or whatever. The Last Year of whatever I'm going to call it. Yeah, exactly.

2014, I got Mario Kart 8 because that game's amazing still. It turns out. Oh, yeah. Rocket League. Yeah, it is a lot. Yeah. Two, you can hold two things. Yeah.

And, and butt dragon a shell, totally, totally guards now. It didn't before. It was total bullshit back in the day. Battle mode is so good,

man. I am such garbage at battle mode. Really? It's frustrating more than fun. Dude, battle mode is so good. And in Mario Cardi, I haven't put too much time

into the new one, but the little time I'll have like, we need to do let's plays of this. It is just so awesome. If I, if I'm playing multiplayer right now, it's a player and on the battlegrounds,

probably, but that's a whole different. It's a different topic. Yeah. Yeah. Um, uh, Rocket League 2015. Oh. I mean, damn.

And then I got, I, I wrote Overwatch and Dishonored 2 for 2016. Man, I love Overwatch and man, I love Dishonored 2. Give the fight for Dishonor 2 because we're not dishonored guys. What? No. Do you like, do you just hate things that are good? Yeah, pretty much. Okay.

So Dishonored 2 had two. It takes, you probably aren't DASX guys then either, right? No, Nick was. Nick is. Okay. Nick is. Nick heard his back, so I talk like he's dead. Okay.

But he's a lot of, I think. If you, if you, if you, my wife heard her back a few years, she might as well be. Exactly. Because you pray for the early death at this point. Um, it's, it's, it's, it's open. It's a, it's a critical path game where you can go to this path. The way you traverse that path is going to be different for everybody. Because if you want to play it like a stealth game, you can play like a stealth game.

If you want to hack a bunch of shit and just murder everybody, you can do that. If you just want to go through guns blazing and kill people, you can do that too. And instead of kind of leading you by the nose, like a traditional kind of RPG or, I'm trying to think, pray is the next game by those guys at Arcane. Yeah. It's,

it's, you see, you begin to look at the world. You know that moment in the Matrix when Neil looks down the hallway and it bulges and he sees the code underneath? Yeah. You get that moment about two levels into dishonored, right?

And the second one, they went so fucking crazy bonkers with level design. Like, I kind of want to spoil it because it'll, it'll sell you on the, the game. I solidize in advance. There's a level in the first bonkers level design you hit.

It's called the Clockwork Mansion. You go in, there's nobody there. It's a completely empty level. You pull a lever and all of a sudden the rooms, like the walls start pulling back and they're all like mechanically steampunking falling away from you. And then they close back in in a different configuration. And you're like, oh, I have to figure out how to set up the walls to do the maze. And then you realize, oh, wait, no, no.

While the walls are configuring, you can actually just jump behind the walls and bypass past the entire core loop of that, what you initially think is the core loop of that level. You interstellar it. It's, it is, it is, it is, Marf, it's, it's so good. It's everybody's good as interstellar. Huh. I like interstellar. I'm in interstellar.

Oh, we like interstellar. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay. We said Miller's Planet all the time. He'd work it in a conversation, drove me crazy. Miller's Planet. Yeah, okay, I can see that. It's a good planet.

Time passing. Good planet. Yeah, I mean, yeah, everybody else Miller's Planet. Yeah. Yeah. Overwatch. It's like TF2. modernized and awesome, and I played thousands of hours of TF2 back

in the day. Look, you jump in, the secret of Overwatch is actually the matchmaking. Like, the mechanics of each character are great. They balanced it really well because it's Blizzard, and that's what they do. But the fact that they made matchmaking really, really good, and it's a little bit different on the consoles than it's on PC. I'm a PC guy again.

But you always get good games, right? Like, I'm always matched against people that are close to at the same skill level because they ask me to say, hey, who is the best player on this round? Then then they can filter that end of the matchmaking and match me with people that play like that person. And they build this profile of me. It's like in the same way that Amazon and Netflix and everybody does.

But they know what I want. They know I want to have two healers and they don't want to have a couple of tanks and then I want to have some baller DPS and they know I want to go in and wreck house. And that's what I do every time I play. So that was a hard one for me because Uncharted 4 is fantastic. It's a good game. But I got to give it to Overwatch even though I'm trash at the game. Yeah.

I don't really have a great grasp of it overall. I don't know which characters to use and which scenarios overall. But it reminds me of Smash Bros. If it was a first person shooter. You don't have to know the meta to be fun. Exactly. It's so fun though. And every time I jump in, it's like I always gives me the satisfaction that I kind of know what I'm doing.

And I'm like, all right, cool. Okay. Because it reminds me of time splinters back in the day. I never got into Team Fortress because I'm not a PC guy. But it reminds me of the fun of time splitters and the characters and the wackiness. But it's so polished. Oh, yeah. And it's like I, because I'm not a PC guy, I've never really been down the Blizzard train.

But it just opened my eyes to be like, man, there's something really special here. And I knew that I would like Uncharted. Whereas Overwatch to me, I'm like, it's just the total package of awesomeness. I wish there was some single player shit that I feel like I really enjoy that. Is the first thing I've played. Like, it's the first Uncharted game that I finished. Right? It is an amazing uncharted game.

I always bounce off at the blue aliens. I bounced off at like some bad guy closet with these through like. Sure. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I was doing a genocide. Oh, man. I kill all these pirates.

Oh, more pirates. They're coming over the walls. Yeah. So, so like, I love Uncharted 4. I thought it was an amazing game. But, but Overwatch, I'll be, I'll be playing Overwatch for years. And they do, they do such neat stuff around that game, too. Like they do events where they do like a PVE event, where they take the players that aren't getting used in the meta very much.

And they dump them in and, you know, make you use them, make you learn how to use them with the encounters they get. It's a super smart game. And those guys have all the levers and know how to pull them. Yeah, they're good at that. Greg. Hi. Give me your five. So here's the thing.

Right now we stop the top. I can give a shout out to one giant bomb who when I was, when you said this was the thing I was like, oh, easy. And I just put Greg Miller favorite games. I did the same thing. Giant bomb and all the years. Fucked myself over because they didn't ask me to do it, I guess, in 2014. So that was the first one where I was like, what did I pick? And I guess

2014 was a bad year for games, but I'll get that. I'm going to go in reverse. Oh. I'm going to go present or whatever, most recent, least recent. So Uncharted 4 is what I picked last year, obviously. You know, a sucker for Uncharted. It was the end of it. It's like I always say, I think it's an unfair fight because it's not.

uncharted for I'm saying it's you know every uncharted up until that point has fed into me thinking that's the best uncharted at the time and why I love it but similarly and then we'll get to this in a little bit I thought find it interesting you brought up the fact of like you want you could have given it to uncharted but overwatches the whole package right and when we broke away and started doing this and then even list I was doing on giant bomb I found I was doing very I was in my as I get to number one because I would rank them like a man look look I once ranked a hundred consumer technologies it was a week long long process was cover of maximum PC magazine in like 20, 2009 probably.

I'd never making an order list again. But like when I get down to 2013, I was reading it. My description is like justifying why I picked this number. And I'm like, I'm picking this game because of the impact it's had on me. I understand that if I had to vote like we used to it or what, and I can say the thing when we vote at IG and I'm voting for this because of the complete package and this.

But blah. So uncharted for me. Again, unfair though. You know, I love it. Look, I've never climbed stuff as good as I did in that game. Exactly.

Right. Well, that's not true. Breath of the Wild. Well, then. Well, that, you don't know that. Then, yeah. Maybe Assassin's Creek.

No, Assassin's Creek, you always didn't think where you went up and then you just, at some point, pivot off the wall and show up to your death. Like, damn it. Fuck. That's part of the Charter. Yeah, exactly. But Uncharted 4, great. It was what I want. I love the story.

I love the narrative. I like the characters. They gave me all that. They were answering my questions as we played. And it's uncharted. It's so great. 2015 was Metal Gear Solid 5. That, you know, game ate up so much time.

And it's inverse of what I just said, where I don't know what the fuck the story is, but I'm playing this gameplay loop over and over and over again. And I'm getting better. And I'm unlocking this. And I'm earning that. And I'm upgrading. You know, I always say, right, it was HD Peace Walker mechanics. And I loved Peace Walker so goddamn much, right? And that's why it has to get the nod and why it goes there.

And it matters so much to me. 2014 was the, like I said, the first year I don't have a giant bomb list on this. And I went and looked around and I was like, God, I gave last year a lot of shit for, like, not being a lot of Greg Miller games. And I'm looking through 2014 list and I wasn't finding Greg Miller games there that like, this is the year of Mario Card 8 smash. Yeah.

Yeah. And you know what? Nintendo garbage. No, no, no. I'm a huge Mario Kart fan. I just had such a dislike for the Wii U that I didn't play that much Mario Kart 8, which is why now I'm like so into the Switch version

and I'm kicking over his ass online. I'm better than Tim and I'm better than maybe. I think there was also Tropical Freeze this year. Fuck tropical freeze. What the fuck? I will fight you. What don't you like about that game? I don't like Donkey Kong country.

Okay. Okay. That is a fair. assessment of that. Why is he wearing a tie? You're wrong. He's not a man. Have you played Donkong country too? Because you're wrong. The SNS one? Yeah. So I'm

I'm old. I was in college when those games came out. I'd already bounced off of the SNS and was playing quake like a man. Okay, got it. So like I was murdering people on DM3 for like three years by that point. I got no time for donkeys dressing up calling themselves monkeys. I did play

N-64 Donkey Kong. That game's okay. Or the rhinos. So 24. I hate you. No, no, no. Just kidding. Okay, thank you. Good, because we're not going to let that. How much stuff can we collect? I love it.

Oh, my God. Give you all the pieces. 2014, then I'm giving to it's South Park Stick of Truth. Oh, that game is great. Yeah. That is a solid answer. All right. Still, I don't know.

I haven't thought about it in a long time, but we know one of, if not the funniest game I've ever played. Best video game sex scene I've ever seen. Of course. Yeah. And that was the thing. Most real, too. You never, 100%. You never knew what was about to happen next in that game.

And they did turn it out its head and do so many cruel things. and that's why I can't wait for fracture but hold, moving it into the superhero and, you know, riffing on that, which is way more my speed than Lord of the Rings and that kind of stuff. Yeah. But still a great game. Now, here's where it gets interesting.

2013 is when I justify my pick. And in my pick for number one, I justify that Last of Us is the game I'm going to vote for. I think that's the better game of this year. But in terms of favorites, in terms of impact, I'm saying gone home. And I think four years later, I stand by that more than ever.

Because how many times have I talked about fucking gone home and the narrative and the surprise of it not being a horror game. And like the way it not only changed my interpretation of, oh man, what a great game this was. And I didn't expect that. The way it totally turned, I think, indie games on their head. And like we've seen so many walking simulators, but so many people telling stories in different interesting ways, whether that be something like Seibel or it be something like Gone Home or, you know, what they're doing now with Tacoma.

Like it was a big deal that that game hit and hit the way it did. And Last of Us, still amazing. I still think the better, hey, you need an all-around. on package. You need a game. You're spending $60 on and you're going to get all your money's worth. Got great multiplayer. It's got a great story. It's got great combat. But gone home is still the game that I think about a lot. I talk about a lot. Granted, I'm a broken record. And also, everyone else is beating the last of its drum. It's not like you need me there telling you. It's awesome. I mean, it's a stealth game. It's a shooter. There's giant plant monsters. Yeah.

You get to play as the girl for one level. Spoilers. So many people were about to do it. It just came out on PS4 like two years ago, too. You just sank it. You just sank that game's chance. Don't be pissed about that. Go play dishonored. That's the thing you should do. Now, here's 2012. Now, 2012 is an interesting one because at first glance, I was like, oh, I know where your answer is. It's my, really? Go ahead and say it. Walking dead. I looked at it and I'm like, oh, this is a chance for me to write a wrong, a wrong that I perpetrated and I fucked up. I admit it. People always ask you, you regret your review scores. No, I don't regret any of my review scores. I'm alive sucked. Later, it was garbage. Uncharted

the three is a great game. But, uncharted is a great game. It's a fantastic game. Maybe I should have been, maybe I should have been allowed on a review on charted two and then we would have had some parody

in the reviews and it would have mattered. But it doesn't matter. Uncharity is better than Unchart 3 is better than Uncharty. What matters is that that year, we got in this fucking room, let's make top list, let's pick the best game for the PlayStation Vita.

What? There was, they were still made games. This is a big deal. This is a big year for PlayStation Vita in 2012. And it was, it came down to, is it going to be Little Big Planet? Or is it going to be

Persona 4 Golden? Oh God, there's no, there's no choice here. No cover. Like, I love some Little Big Planet. Right. I love Little Big Planet. Yeah, I know. But it was a bad little Big Planet. No, that's not good. That's not true. It was not as good as the other Little Big Planet. Well, of course not. It's on the Vita. Nothing's going to be as good as

except for Persona 4. Pesota 4 is as good as it was on PS2. I don't even like Persona Games and that's an amazing game. I bought Persona 5. I don't get it. That's another topic. Yeah. But we got to it, and the problem was, of course, that neither of these are calling games, and we're the only people who give a shit about Vita.

So it was solely on my shoulders to figure out what I wanted to do and make a case for what it was. And what I did is I went mainstream and said, Little Big Planet. With the idea being that it's literally infinitely replayable. You're going to make your own levels. This, not only are you making your own levels, if you want to, there's now an infinite supply of levels for you to go and download and bring in. I'm rusty, but I want to say this is the one that introduced the Savinator or whatever,

where you could make an RPG kind of level and then come back and have progress over and over again. But even if I'm wrong, and that's two. Now, it must have been Vita, right? Anyways, it doesn't matter. They actually put new shit into this one. And not Little Big Planet 3 is like, they had a dog, sock characters.

That was Little Planet 3. Yeah, a little bit of socks and all this dumb shit. Yeah, of course. It's more little Big Planet. Yeah. Exactly. But it was like the full-fledged little big planet, it goes in your pocket, do whatever the hell you want to. And I was like, wow, that's pretty awesome. And persona for Golden was, hey, this is an amazing JRP. And if you're not into JRP's like, this is not going to work for you. It's not going to speak to you.

And I don't know. I mean, granted, I mean, his time will tell it pulled in plenty of people who didn't care about JRP's at the time. Ty Root's still playing the game. You know what I mean? Like it found people and got them in and did all these different things. and it was this thing that led to the success that persona 5 seeing and will continue to see and made this, but at the time, I didn't know how to balance those and what it was, because that was really honestly,

for me, one of those trying to be the unbiased, which is impossible, but unbiased, I'm trying to speak for IGN here. And I thought, I went a little big planet because I'm a bigger persona fan

than I am a little big planet and I do love Little Big Planet, but you know, whatever. So I fucked it over, said Little Big Planet. And so then I'm like, no sweat, Persona 4 Golden's going to be my pick for this.

And then Walking Dead Season 1 came out. Walking Dead Season 1 is amazing. And I think it's the same thing is I love persona and I think persona is the better game and on every front I would recommend you play persona and do all these different things

but again in terms I don't think we just did the telltale topic last week. You can't sit there and look at Walking Dead and not talk about how it changed telltale forever, how it changed narratives forever, how it changed adventure games forever,

how it changed the emotions people get. I think a whole bunch of people involved with that project. Dave Finoi and Melissa and all these different and even Gavin will give me too much credit and up at noon too much credit of bringing voice actors on and then making them names

and making them into things. But that is one of those games where that was happening at the same time everything, you know, Troy Baker's happening and Nolan was already really popular but it was like, hey, these guys are actually acting and doing something completely awesome and different and pouring their heart and souls into it

where it was all of a sudden that, oh cool, we know their names, we want them to come to conventions, we want them to sign. You know, every time I do the Walking Dead panel and Melissa's on it and she goes from regular old Melissa voice to doing Clem in the audience gasps.

You know what I mean? Like it was such an awesome thing in a moment. Well, and at the same time, that game, like that game is directly responsible. There's a through line from there for all the games since then that actually paid attention to dialogue. So the voice acting is half of it.

The writing is the other half. And that game had fantastic dialogue. And the fact that those guys realized, hey, we don't have to give people a good choice and a bad choice. We can just give them two awful choices. Yeah. Maintain that straight critical path through the game

and make it feel like they've actually done something, you know, they've had more agency that they had. It's a trick, but it works really well. And it's, there's nothing wrong with tricks. And it gets you invested. You know what I mean? And it was like such a way to turn it all on its head of what Telltale was,

which was, hey, we're making weird adventure games sometimes like Sam and Max, but then cool, back to the future, which was this weird half step that was a bad back to the future story. Here's Jurassic Park, which was just bad.

And it was like, all right, cool. And it was, oh man, you guys are taking out one of my favorite franchises, don't fuck this up. And they didn't fuck it up. And I was like,

oh shit, this is awesome. Andy Cortez Big old Andy Cortez Stop looking at your Gandems and come in here Your Gandums You're always looking at Gondoms Are those giant robots?

Yeah he's a big Gundam fan What are your Game of the year for the last five years? Are we starting from 2012 or 2016? 2012 Oh man I'm about to piss a lot of people off here Mass Effect 3 is my 2012

game It's a fine game It's about the journey. It's not about the destination, all right? That's what I feel about Mass Effect 3. Love everything about it on the way. Oh, 2013 is really hard for me, guys. And I really want to put Bioshock Infinite above the Last of Us.

And are you going to kill me if I do it? No. You're allowed to be wrong. I'm going to put Bioshock Infinite over the last of us. Such an idiot. It's stupid. It's so stupid. What's so great about Bioshock Infinite?

Eating hot dogs out of toilet? What's just the way the whole ending sequence is just it fucking blew my mind incredible. I wish I was like on some hallucinogenic drugs while I was doing it. I was like calling everybody like gosh check out this ending and like nobody knew what the fuck I was talking about it felt very lonely. 2014 shovel night. Oh that's a good game. That's good one. I forgot about that. Now here's the thing though. I didn't play shovel night until the end of 2015. So I still stand by my smash roast but oh shout out to shovel night. Yeah. Um, 2015, Metal Gear Solid 5. Never heard of that? Greg? I've heard of it, yeah.

I've heard of it, big fan. I've never played those games. Are they good? Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's something you should check out. Should I start with Metal Gear 1 on the Ness or like, okay? Sure.

Why not? Just work my way forward. Somebody's done that, I think, right? Oh, yeah. A few YouTube channels. And then 2016, Overwatch. Again, just such a complete game. Love it.

Thanks for having me on, guys. Appreciate it. Check out my Patreon. No, I'm kidding. I just left my job. Fantastic. Cool. want to give a couple shoutouts to a bunch of the best friends out there who left some of their answers.

I mean, just named the interesting, the ones that are different than some of our picks. Daniel Burke, 2012, giving a shout out to Hotline Miami. Oh, that's a good game. And 2016 to Inside. Okay, it's up there, but it's not over. A lot of people love Inside, that's one of those ones that, like, I didn't appreciate until I started trying to make games, and I realize the stuff that they do in there that is, that you completely ignore as a normal player, it's so hard.

Like when you walk up, when your little guy walks up and he grabs those crates and he grabs them differently depending on how you're walking up, how fast you're walking up, the angle you come at and all that. It's incredible. It is a masterfully done game. There you go. Last Geeks dying has 2012 Silent Hill downpour. That's interesting. Okay. That was a joke one.

You just read a joke one. See, I don't think it's a joke. Bob, Bow, Bowie. Because in 2013, he put beyond two souls as it. So it's like, this seems like a joke. He's joking. Then 2014 Shovel Night, 2015, Middle Year Solid 5 in 2016, Life is Strange. Everybody likes different stuff, Greg.

It doesn't mean he's a bad person. Don't think they're jokes. There's got to be some test here. Kevin Delante, giving a shout to Bloodborn in 2015 and Dark Souls 3 in 2016. Curtis Dillon, giving life as strange to 2015. Alan, Alex Fad Aiken, my dude, 2012 Halo 4. Child of Light in 2014. Rise of the Tomb Raider, 2015.

Hell yeah, Rise the Tomb Raider. All right, go ahead. Get it on. It's the second one or the first one. Gage. Jay J. Semster giving it to Titanfall in 2014. Dying Light in 2015. Dying light was really good.

The zombie thing, the piece is on with the day night cycle. That game was scary as hell. I couldn't play the night part. I just went to hit. It's about to be nightfall. I don't want to be here. No, thank you, sir. Browncoat 24 in 2012 gave it to FTL.

Oh, great game. In IGN's like judgment day. Judgment day. Yeah. That was on my list. And then tomorrow 3D world in 2014, or 13. Yeah, 2013, which makes sense. And then Hardstone, 2014.

Yeah. Thought that would get a bit more, more love out there. But he's the only one I saw with it. We have an audience. 2015. Hi, guys. The Harthstone crowd, not dealing too much and kind of funny. I don't.

That's too much meta for me. Sure. Sure. I'm not smart enough to play that game. Yeah, that's the thing when I do it. And I would start and I was trying to get into it and you just get beat by what's an easy move. And why didn't I see that coming? I should have been able to fuck this.

It's because I didn't have all 3,000 cards memorized, I guess. What a loser I am. Aria Bonzerk gave it to Dragon Age Inquisition in 2014. And then Tasmania, Mass Effectory, shout out to Andy Cortez on that one. And Ratchet and Clank in 2016. Oh. Which is, as much as I love that game. I don't know if I'd give a game of the year, especially because it is just a remake.

Maybe it's his first Ratchet Clank. Oh, in that case. It's my first Ratchet and Klank. Really? What did you think? I thought it was okay. I liked it. I enjoyed it.

It was a game that it was unexpected. Mm-hmm. I love it. So you're just playing Carmen, San Diego all the time. Look, dude, I didn't, I didn't, I was, I was, I didn't have a console. I had an N64. I had a SNS. I had a Ness.

And then I went straight to like the GameCube late PS2 Xbox, original Xbox one. And then I consoleed up after there. Okay. So I missed most. Most of the PS2 and all of the PS1. Gotcha. And I had a Dreamcast for Samadamey Meigo and like two other games.

Sure. Choo Choochoo Rocket. Crazy Taxi. No. No? I played Crazy Taxi came out on PC. Oh, Jesus. That's the way you want to play.

Take me to Pizza Hut. Let me tell you. Wazda. Click, right. You're going to Pizza Hut. It's a little thing that they invented. It's called a game pad. It's the same thing.

Sure. You plugged into the MIDI. You're playing with one of those jet flight sticks. Look. Take me to Pizza Hut. I don't remember. My thrustmaster FLCS 16. Got.

Did you have a throttle on your little thumb thing? Oh, no, I thought it was on my PC stupid thing. You get Ace Combat or whatever. You're like, yeah, I'll invest in the stupid stick too. I have all these sticks I never used. Elite Dangerous came out. I got the goggles. I was like, gee, I've got a fight stick again.

I got it. It's been in my garage for two years now. Exactly. Such an asshole. So let us know in the comments what your last five game of the years are from 2012 to 2016. Kevin will go through on the Kind of Funny Games account in Hart, the ones he agrees with. Ooh.

He wouldn't agree with any of them. so I'm sure it won't be too much work for him. Topic three of the show is Call of Duty, World War II officially announced now. We got release dates coming. We got all that stuff. Going back to World War II. First time in a very long time. Sledgehammer did advanced

warfighter. No. It would have been... Oh, shit, here we go. Or did they do... I want to run the bathroom. Well, you talk about this. Well, I want to sort it out without using my computer because I hate that. You know how you... It's fact-checking ruins podcast. It's scientific facts. So, hold on. We can do this. We can do this. We can do this. We can do this.

Okay. So Black Ops is Infinity War, correct? No, that's Traiark. Shit. Black Ops is Trairc because it has all the gadgets and has zombies. Exactly. And so we go back one, call of duty, infant warfare was just put out by Infinity War in which is confusing.

Yeah. And then was advanced. So Sledgehammer was Ghosts. Oh, Ghost was okay. At the PlayStation 4 launch. That was the first next gen one. Yeah. Yeah.

And advanced warfighter was the year after ghost. So that has to be, it has to, no. Was it an advanced warfighter? It was graaw, but it was caudaw. And that's the one with the, they put him in this, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Troy Baker is one of the guys, right? Kevin Spacey year.

That's Kevin Spacey year. Okay. No, Kevin Spacey's, yeah, because Kevin Spacey was the year after Ghosts. Fuck, I like this game. I like this game. We're trying to remember everything. Yeah, this is the old man. Wait a second.

You're from, you're from Missouri. Do you know Bob Hoskins? Oh, Mario, yeah. Yeah, yeah, down at the pizza. Yeah, yeah, down at the pizza. Oh, yeah, of course. Of course, got his sister June. Oh, she runs that bakery.

Her daughter's got married. Advanced Warfighter doesn't sound right, though, was it? I thought it was Advanced Warfighter. Oh, I don't want to look at it yet. Advanced Warfare. Advanced Warfare. Warfighter was Graw. There you go.

God, oh, Grau. So we got it back to Ghosts, was Sludgehammer's last call duty. Ghost was okay. Yeah, Brian and Ralph in it. Superman himself. Yeah, but the thing about Ghosts was the first one on the new platform. They got to bring all their stuff up to speed. Of course.

It's not great, but it was serviceable. Sure. What gets me excited about this one is the same thing that tricks me about every call of duty, is they talk about having a focus on single player story, and they're going to really double down it and make it a big deal. And when they start talking about this one, WW2, I don't like calling it World War II because they don't have, they don't spell it out.

You know, it's WW2. WW2 means World War II. You know, it's a commonly, I'll believe when I see it. Okay. But I like the, I like what they're talking about here of like, we're not, what always turned me off about Call of Duty games, World War II games was like just jumping around. I think you mean WW2 games.

I fucking does like you. Why do we invite you on? Jumping around all the different things, playing them all the same time, but you know what I mean? Like never having a narrative to it. So the idea of what they're talking about with World War II here, WW2, Call of Duty, WW2 officially trademark Activision, is the fact that, hey, this isn't going to take you all around the battlefields. It's going to focus on these very specific things and this very specific narrative that only spans, I think, two years or whatever.

We're going to stick with these characters. which starts getting me excited for like a band of brothers vibe. And they again have great actors involved with it. So it's like, okay, maybe this is going to be what I want. And I think I'm not alone in that. That's what it seemed like Battlefield did last year with Battlefield One.

That's my thing is I liked, I loved Battlefield One's single player last year. The little vignette stories, I thought that that was such a great way to do the single player, especially because World War I was never really tackled. Yeah. In a game, especially not on that level.

Like, we didn't even learn about in history class, really. Yeah. They were like, hey, there was this big war, a bunch of people died, then there was a Spanish flu.

and oh, by the way, Nazis. Yeah, Colton told me that. But, but yeah, no, I loved last years and not all of the vignettes were as good as the rest of them. But with this is, I don't know, watching the story trailer, I mean, I've never been a Call of Duty guy, but watching the Infinite Warfare story trailers, this seems interesting a bit.

The advanced war fighter, or war, damn, sorry, advanced warfare. With Kevin Spacey. I'm like, all right, cool. This, the narrative sounds interesting. This one, I'm like, this really just seemed. as generic as you can possibly get. But is it generic if it's going to actually achieve what we want?

Hey, here is the band of brothers, this crew you're with. You're going to get to know them. You're going to get to care about them. A couple of them. We're going to die, of course. We're going to take you from point A to point B and tell you story. Yeah. That's the one where, because my whole thing with like the Kevin Spacey, I was like,

oh, fuck, I'm on such a house of cards role right now. I was really looking forward to nine lives. That cat movie wasn't announced yet. But I was like, I like Kevin Spacey in this moment. I'm excited for this. And then I looked at reviews and I was like, oh, I didn't really deliver

he's in it for like 20 minutes or whatever. Not gonna do it. Now, same thing to be said is that infinite warfare. Oh, hey, we got a couple guys from Naughty Dog. We're doing these different things.

Like, the story's written. I host the panel. I was like, I'm interested in this. And I played through the first five or six hours and it was like, all right, cool, but it's a little too sci-fi techie

right now for me. And it's also way too, all right, Admiral, blah, blah, and I'm just, I can't get down with that kind of military storytelling usually. but then what I liked about Band of Brothers so much watching it was like the interpersonal connection.

And it wasn't about like, you know, even though there's moments like you always salute the rank, not the person, not that jazz. Like, so like my problem, my worry is a little more meta, right? Like at the start of 2016, if you had said, hey, let's go back to World War II and shoot some Nazis and a multiplayer shooter again, I'd be like, yes, I have a lot of good memories of shooting Nazis and multiplayer shooters. in 2017, not to get too real, but like, I kind of don't want to expose myself to Nazis in a video game. And we got enough Nazis here. We're full. Like, the Nazi store.

I hope, like, I don't know that it's a good idea to empower the neo-Nazi movement that's happening in America with the ability to play Nazis in a video game right now. Like, I know it's a dumb thing to say. It sounds like a dumb thing to say, but like it's bad enough when somebody's calling me a cock sucker on the internet. I don't want them. Oh, sorry. Sorry, is that?

No, you're not. I'm saying they won't. He's just being great. I just, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to have actual neo-Nazis yelling at me playing Nazis in a video game. Yeah. And, and, like, I don't know. I hope they do something ridiculous, like, only let you play the American side in multiplayer and everybody just, the other side just is skinned Nazi. Yeah.

I think that would be really fun. Well, the ridiculous thing now is the whole, the tweets go around like Jason Schreier's tweet where, do you know what I'm talking about? No, no. Jason Schreier from Kataku tweeted out this. image of a tweet conversation about people bitching about like, oh, why are you including women in the game? Because that's not factually accurate World War II or whatever. And then he screenshotsed the same guy that was bitching about it saying, oh, zombies confirmed for World War II, right? So funny. All right, we fucked up. I got bad news, everybody.

It was Infinity War did ghosts and Sledgehammer did advance warfare. Exactly, exactly. Advanced Warfare was, I remember thinking Sledgehammer came out of the ball, out of the gate with a big one. Yeah. Yeah. The last one I played was, uh, Modern Warfare 2. Oh, really? Yeah. So it was a long, we've been gone on.

I played a couple of it. I mean, like, like, like beat actually. Oh, okay, okay, okay. So I jump in for everyone, but I feel like I, inevitably, it's just like, all right, this is, I'm just going to go do someone else. Well, I love, like, Modern Warfare one was, is amazing. It's still good. Like, they released last year. I played it again.

I was like, this is a great game. The second one, they got kind of cartoony, right? And it felt real. Like the old school World War II call duties felt real. And then modern warfare felt real. And they killed the, they killed the character. You're like,

holy shit. That was awesome. Yeah. It's amazing. And then they kind of, then next thing I know, I'm fighting in like a pizza hut and a Burger King and suburban America and it's World War III.

And that was maybe not the way the real I was looking for at the time. So I don't know. I mean, if this is like, it went from kind of not celebrating, but honoring the, the World War II to making this arcade shooter. And like,

that was where I kind of fell off. Sure. At the very least, it's a smart move to differentiate all the studios. Because that is the problem. As we sit here and like, wait, well, who is doing what? And blah, if you can boil it down to, well, Black Ops is Trey Arc, gadgets and all this stuff. Infinity Ward is moving on whatever they're going to move on, how they want to, if they want to keep going to the future. And if you go Sledgehammer's is World War II or past wars or something like that, there's a vibe to it that it keeps a little bit more easy.

I love the idea of the band of brothers, like taking, like following through two or three games, this same group of people as they spend four years fighting in Europe. And that's why I think there's something to be said if they deliver on that. And that was the whole thing where I think advanced warfare, again, it was, okay, they're bringing me with Kevin Spacey, but it's not really, he's not really into it the way it is. If you're going to be able to deliver characters that I care about and go with it, great. And that's what, you know, it's always interesting when you talk to the Call of Duty Studios, you know, Colleenie Star Wars, Harpon Raven, how much we loved Raven or whatever. With singularity and then for me, XMen and Origins Wolverine, the gameplay of it.

And then Activation gets them. It's like just, you know, do Call of Duty cleanup and do that stuff. Yeah. Keep making Matt. And it's the same thing when you talk about, you know, Glenn and Conjury, who were over there making Sledgehammer games a thing, where these are the guys who did Dead Space. Like, they love games. They're not out for a bro shooter. And that's why it's the hope every time of, like, you have these studios that you hope are pulling it together in a way that we're going to deliver on the promise of what these games could be.

And because, like, it is that thing of, like, you know, who loves World War II movies, saving Private Ryan, and shows like Band of Brothers. There's an audience there for them if they can get that into the game medium and make you care about it that way. Well, and when they first rolled out, like, Medal of Honor was a thing. Some of those guys split off and started Infinity Ward and launched the first Call of Duty. I went to, they brought it to my office. I was at Maximum PC then. They brought it to the office and they came in with the game guys. And they also had a guy who's like 70 years old and was a World War II expert.

Yeah. It's like, you know, they always, they still do that. They still bring an expert around. But like, it felt like they were there for the right reasons rather than making a thing that kind of, they get celebrated violence in a good way instead of in a, in a, in a, I don't know. I'm not, I'm not explaining myself well,

but this feels a little bit different, at least what I've seen so far. So I don't know, we'll see. Going back to what you're talking about with the movies and stuff, it's just, to me,

it seems like such an old era. Like, we don't necessarily need to go back to it because we, I associate the PS2 and Xbox, original Xbox generation with World War II so much.

Sure. It's like, I don't think that these games can elicit the memories I have of those games. I'm sure that if I were to go, back now they wouldn't go to go at all. But I remember them being so epic. And it's just like the Normandy Beach is just like that is one of those iconic video

game moments I think specifically I'm talking about Medal of Honor. But as I remember my friend was so, Curran was so into Call of Duty One on PC and like I remember seeing him play it. I was just like all right. And then all of a sudden like a couple of years passed and Call Duty 2 was a launch title on a Xbox 360 which is the only reason we even really gave it a shot because it wasn't much going on besides King Kong. And then eventually three and whatever.

But once it got to modern warfare, that's when everything changed. And it was like, that was the new era. We're moving past World War II. Everyone's done this too much. It's totally overdone. There's nothing new to be seen there. And I feel like now it is just kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel of like

doing it again. Don't get me wrong. On paper, I was with you. It was, oh, remember, it was the next call of dudes. He's going back,

like, do we need to. But I think the argument can be made that enough times past, that it has been, it has been generations. And it is the fact of when I think back to, you know, Po was just in town for my wedding, right? My best friend growing up.

And he made the comment, he was, like, I made some comment about being frozen by indecision. And he goes, shoot the fucking gun. And that is a call back to high school when I was playing Medal of Honor sniping. And like, my guys were both getting attacked by separate people. And rather than just choose when I just sat in the middle, I don't know what to do. And he's like, shoot the fucking guy. And I reviewed Medal of Honor one, Greg. Sorry, bro.

I was in my basement. Probably in high school, maybe in grade. in junior high still. But it was that thing of like, I remember the gameplay of it in those like, you know, water cool, it's or whatever you want to talk about.

And I remember the first, I guess I don't remember, but I remember what was the, the one where we got to do Pearl Harbor, where it was like, Medal of Honor Pacific Assault. Exactly. And I remember that being a big deal

and like, okay, cool. I'm not excited for, nothing about the trailer excites me about, oh, the battle of the bulge like they're talking about. I don't care about the battle.

I care about, oh, you brought in that actor I like and you want to tell a cool story. And if they're actually doing that. And of course, the problem is always that it's Activision. It's like, well, did they give them enough time? Did they rush them through everything?

Did they actually care? But, like, that's what I'd want. And hopefully that gets away from where, and I, you know, these are all Greg Miller problems, not the world's problems. But like infinite warfare was of like, oh, cool, I like these people. I like the people in the game. Oh, we're up in space and this is weird. And it's all admiral this and admiral that and jackals.

And I'm like, okay. Like, well, I mean, for me playing like Medal of Honor, first PC, metal of honor, playing Cold Duty One, like, those gave me an appreciation. those made me go out and seek out more. I went and read about World War II because of those books. I read Band of Brothers. I read a bunch of, oh God, what's the guy's name who wrote all those? Comic books.

Yeah, comic books. George Railroad Martin. No, no. The oral history guy who wrote Band of Brothers and who wrote the Lewis and Clark book, Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose. God, we need column more than ever. Yeah. So, anyway, the, you.

You go out and you get those stories. And like, you can read the book, but then getting off of a barge in Stalingrad and having, being chained to another, an NPC, and then handing you an extra clip and handing the NPC a gun, and you having to wait until that person that you're tied to is shot to grab the gun from them

because they had one gun for every other soldier, and this was what they thought was a good way to handle this. It gives you a real appreciate, like it puts you in a situation where you can experience something that would otherwise be impossible to experience, which is the neat thing about going back in visiting historical locations again.

Sure. Sure. I don't know. Yeah. No. I mean, they couldn't sell me on this if they tried, but I'm not the audience. But now, but for Battlefield 1, were you excited for that when you heard and saw that

originally? See, my thing was for Battlefield 1, from the moment I saw the story trailer, I'm like, I'm in. Oh, wow. Okay. Like, there's that story trailer, I was like, they edited that trailer so well that I'm like, I'm sold by the hype of this. Like, this looks interesting. It looks super varied in a way that it looks like it'll make sense.

And going into, once the, once I started playing it, once I started hearing it, once I started hearing what everyone else was saying where they're like, oh, these vignettes are not that long. You can get through them. They each tell their own self-contained story. I'm like, oh, you are speaking to me. Like, this sounds great. I wish they were more of those rather than just like one per kind of area when I was playing battlefield. Oh yeah? Yeah, if I was just buying that for single player, it was a little short. See, it's enough for me. I don't know. I just like, I'm not the multiplayer shooter guy. So it's like for me, I'm more of a battlefront guy. I like a little more top level. I love Star Wars. So it's like this is just cool and fun. And the idea that

Battlefront 2 is going to have single player and like I am so sold based on this trailer that's more up my alley but yeah Battlefield 1 did win me over in a way that watching the World War II trailer I was like oh like it not only won didn't win me over it I'm like no definitely not push you away okay interesting interesting what if I tell you

there's pigeons in it pigeons oh the pigeons were a big cell for me for that pigeon's the pigeons I mean this is World War II so they must have you will you are around at the time right yeah they had the cell phones that like connected to the giant crank the thing and then you have a back backpack and the guy gets shot in the backpack and your radio doesn't work anymore. Yeah. You just designed a level.

You just designed a level. Look, I can't stop making games. I don't even make games. I just make shows about games. Are you guys hyped though? World War II, you think you're going to play it? I mean, I'll play it, but I'm not. I play everything, though.

I'm a bad person. I feel like it'll be the same thing for me as usual. Oh, Call of Duties here. And I'll pop it in and I'll start the campaign. And I'm hoping, though, it'll have a hook that grabs me and keeps me in. You know what I really want? I just want a game that's headquarters. headquarters mode on that little tiny map with the crates from modern warfare one uh-huh that's i just

want to play that that's all the call of duty i need i should blow that up for like every two or three years yeah get like 16 people in there have a grenade spam frenzy call it a day just call it call of duty pentagon yeah oh man all right final topic of the day as always brought to you by you you can go to kind of funny dot com slash gamescast topic and leave your topic for us to answer just like all these beautiful people did this comes from from soft dude oh i thought it's from soft i was leaving a question. Nope, but it's about it. Listening back to your E3 predictions, the early ones, not the final ones, which we

will be doing after Gray comes back from Judges Week. And then let me tell you, those predictions are going to be pretty spot on. Hold on. That seems... No, we do a thing. We get in trouble where we never make a prediction if we actually know the answer. But then it gets really interesting when we've been talking about predictions for a long time and then we go quiet for like three weeks and like,

why aren't you talking about Spider-Man anymore? I'm like, don't know. Interesting. Wow, what a coincidence. I was kind of sad. None of you mentioned the possibility of a blood-borne sequel. What do you Did we really not? We did it. Bloodborn 2 at Pete, the PlayStation E3 press conference. Okay.

Which I'll be Saturday announced for the same time spot that it always is. Monday night. So it's before Microsoft again? Now this is the last one. Well, this is the last one on Monday. Monday's night finale before Nintendo. Yeah. Nintendo probably on Tuesday.

They said no press conference, so it's probably going to be direct, followed by Tupets. Treehouse thing. We ain't good with no puppets, Greg. Meebles for sure. sure. Many. I want some arms amoebo.

Dry bones. Oh, we're getting arms amoevos. Yeah. Don't worry about it. No. Maybe the arms will be, each arm will be its own amoebo. So you get like a right arm amoebo, a left arm amoebo. What'd you hit me up, Greg?

No, I got to check embargoes before I, before you say some something. Anyway, Bloodborn 2, I think is a surefire bet. Like when you look at PlayStation's lineup and what they did at E3 the past couple years, they have just knocked it out of the park. And I know that those guys. want to outdo themselves even if they can't when did the last one come out it's only two years right 14 14 15 so it was 2015 if it's a three-year cycle there on the window right it makes sense and when you look at what games they announced two years ago what games they announced

last year and the ones that have already come out the ones that we know their release dates are coming soon like horizons out now which means that the next wave is going to start coming and we know that we have the god award to look at we have Detroit we have um last first part two we We have death stranding in the far far. So it's like, all right, cool. We need new announcements of new things we don't know about. And I think Bloodborn 2 is the easy answer. That makes sense to me.

Yeah. You know what you think, great. I'm trying to see what I can say about an embargo. So until I get an answer, I have nothing to say. It wasn't about Bloodborn. Okay. Okay. Cool.

I'm surprised because I thought we would have said that, yeah, it seems like if there's going to be a Bloodborn, then, or a Bloodborn, too, I think there'd be a Bloodborn announcement at the PlayStation Conference. Because that'll fucking bring the house down. Yeah. You know, I'd love to. see a Souls game that's a science fiction game instead of like a gritty past. That'd be really cool.

Science fiction world that's all broken down and ruined. Yeah, that was my thing. I mean, again, being, you know, just Greg Miller problems of like Dark Souls being in a place I don't really care about. I'm bloodborn being a bit further, like, you know, being that gothicy thing. I was like, all right, cool. Yeah, I think steampunk Gothic and I think Greg Miller. Yeah, exactly.

That's what I am. Pirate hats and four corner. Yeah, weird, weird glasses with like cranks on. Exactly. Yeah, really ugly characters. Ugly ass characters. Yeah, dirty faces everywhere. Delvatron.

Oh, I love a good. Chimmy sweep, that's what I want. Big Nose wants to know, Will, what games are you playing? And what do you think of the Nintendo Switch? I, what an amazing coincidence. I am playing, I've been playing Mario Card 8. About three weeks ago, I said, no, I'm not going to buy this because I bought it on the Wii. I played dozens of hours like my wife and I, some of the biggest fights of our relationship over Mario Card 8.

So that was good. Good. Oh, yeah. Way to test the marriage. And then I was like, no, I'm not going to buy it. And then I talked to Gary and I talked a bunch of other people this weekend. And they pulled out their switches. is at brunch and they fucking sat and played Mario at brunch.

And I was just like, God damn it. And then I spent $60 and I had Mario Card 8 and it's really, really good. It's so fucking good. And that tumble seed. Tumble seed, like I love Spalunky. I love, I love rogue likes. If you haven't played it, it's basically like a kid's ball maze where you have like the holes in the holes on the table and you have to kind of balance the seed up

between a bar by rocking it up up up up. Important to say not the motion control. It's not motion control. Everybody asks that. When I was sticks. I played it only at the Nindi event of GDC. And when I walked in, I saw it was like, oh, no, no, use the sticks. I'm like, oh, all right, cool.

I'm in. Well, and the other thing about it is it has the best HD rumble. I haven't played once you switch because I'm not, it's not my thing. But it has the best HD rumble of anything I've played by date. Like when you, so the, the seeds roll on this stick back and forth across this this thing. And the different, you can use different seeds. You plant different seeds as you go and some of them like let you reset your spawn point.

some of them give you more hell, some of them collect currency, yada yada. They all roll differently and you feel it on the on the joycons. And it's just, it's the dumbest thing, but it feels so good.

And the controls are super tight. It's the, the controls on the switch especially, I haven't played the PC version yet, but are really, really, really, like precise and well done. It's like such a finesse game.

And correct me if I'm wrong. It was doing, I'm thinking of the, when I got the demo, I mean, I know I think of the right game, but it gives you your progress through helps you the next time. No, right? Don't you fall and then... So... Or does it start from scratch every time? Because you have to get, you get the gems to get the

thing. Yeah, so you get the gems. The gems and the hearts reset each time you die. Okay. There are some quest things that you can do. Similar to Spalunkey, you know, you get to the end of the first level in Spelunky and you bring the guy a bomb, you bring him in some other stuff. Eventually you have a shortcut that takes you to the start of the second world. Gotcha. You can do stuff like that. It's, it is super tight. And then player unknown battlegrounds is fucking awesome if you guys haven't played that. is this? Oh my God. Have you seen Battle Royale? Yeah. The Japanese movie about

the kids that get put on the island and they have to all murder each other one other time? Yeah, it's like Hunger Games but good. Yeah. Not that I mean, Hunger Games. Not to hate on Hunger Games. You both just did for the record. Like, look, I like Hunger Games. Jennifer Lawrence is an amazing actress. It's great. It's terrific. Battle Royals

much better. Fantastic. Like one to get, the difference, so this, you start a hundred people. It's a PC game. 100 people start on an island. There's a giant cargo plane. You load everybody in the cargo plane with Nothing. Just the clothes on your back. No weapons, no spoon. Nothing. They fly you over this big ass, like, Arma-sized island. And then people, you choose where you're going to jump out, and you can kind of parachute over to places on either side of the airplanes track through the

island. Then you have to scrounge through houses, buildings, whatever you find, collect guns, armor, more backpacks, grenades, all sorts of other kind of accoutrements of death. And then you have to murder everybody else on the island. Hell yeah. And there's a, you know, it's a big giant island, not like, not like Breath of the Wild big, but a big island. And there's a series of circles. So there's a white circle that you have to be in basically all the time that the white

circle's live. And if you're outside of it, then you take damage slowly. So they use that circle to kind of concentrate the action of the game. So the matches take like 20, 30. Well, I mean, if you're bad, matches take like two minutes. Yeah, two seconds. Yeah. If you're good, then they'll go like 20 minutes.

And you get these ridiculous moments. Like, you parachute down. you see another guy parachute down right next to you. Yeah. And you're like, neither of you have a gun. And you're just sitting there beating the shit out of each other until one of you's dead. And then you have to go find health and guns and armor and all this stuff. What's the king of the kill, right?

H1Z1. H1. Yeah. So Player Unknown is the guy's name who made the, there was an article in New York Mag today about him. But he made mods for H1Z1 and I think Arma that were the same kind of mechanic. They credited him as the inventor of the battle royale game. Gotcha.

Gotcha. And it also is squad base, too. So if you matchmake as a single player, you can matchmake into one versus 100 basically, where nobody teams up and it's just every man for himself. That's really tense and awful. But you can do duos or up to four player squads as well. And when you do that, then you like,

you parachute in with your guys all in one spot. You find a, you armor up, and then you find a good place to hide out and what you think is gonna end up being the center of the map at the end. And like everybody watches one corner of the building and you're all in voice and it's just, it sounds awesome.

Sure. We got to do a less place. on this. Is it PC only? It's PC only right now. Hey, guys, we'll figure it out. I run a virtual reality company. I have three portable PCs that I can bring over here

anytime you would like. We have to have monitors to plug them in. You've got to get some capture business. Sure, yeah, of course. What kind of sets that makes it a lot of? Well, Kevin's not a is supposed, but yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's, it is worth it?

It's good. We should do it. It's only like 30 bucks too. There's two million people. Is it better than, or is it just so similar to H-1Z1 King of the King? I'm saying it was King of the King of King?

kill, right? They broke it into two. H1Z1, King of the Kela. So I never played those games because they, like, my understanding of Arma is like to have a fun Arma game. You have to spend like six hours. Sure. I have a kid. I can't spend six hours. That's just it's not in my life. Yeah. So when somebody told me that I could play this in like 20 minutes with

four friends, I was like, fuck yeah. Okay, cool. That's great. All right. Yeah. I'm in. I'm so sold. If you have a one-to-one kill-death ratio at the end of like 10, 10 games, you've done really well. Okay. So. You should come over and play with this then. I'll totally come over and anytime. Next question comes from Parker B.

Good day, kind of funny crew. Let me cut to the chase. I, like many, was unable to get my hands on the Nintendo Switch on launch. Because you're a non-believer. That's the thing now I don't like, well, I can't find it.

Well, it's like, you should have fucking read the tea leaves. We all saw it. We all thought it looked cool. We bought it. With the limited variety of games and no bundles just yet, what should consumers like myself do?

Should we wait until bundles or models with a larger memory come out to save a little money since we missed the early adopter window? When do you think we'll start seeing a variety of models in bundles? or do you think it'll be a long time? I have a new job starting in the fall that requires a lot of travel

and I'd love for the plane rides. I'll be playing Horizon and whipping some Dino Robot ass while awaiting your response. You guys are most dope. Thanks. You're pretty dope too. I appreciate that.

Should have bought it early. I don't think you should wait for one with more memory. Memory is so cheap. Those cards are like 30 bucks for me. The micro-dusty. 30 bucks will get you a lot. You can find something like $10.

Kevin, do we ever thank the guy who sent in the memory cards? Yeah, so apparently if Amazon will fuck up sometimes, you order one memory card and they'll send you five. And then you send the other 40, your friends are kind of funny.

And then we all have switched memory cards now. That's nice. Kevin, do you remember the guy's name? Chester. Chester. Thank you, Chester.

Thank you very much. But no, those cards are so, so damn cheap. And I think that they're only going to get cheaper. So that's not a worry for me. In terms of bundles, yeah, you can totally wait. There will be bundles.

I would predict there's going to be a bundle, at least a bundle by the end of the year. Like, once going into Black Friday, there'll be a Black Friday bundle. There'll probably be a holidays bundle. I assume Mario Kart will be, will come with it at some point. It seems like they held a bunch of,

it seems like the retailers were holding units for Mario car release and now those are gone. And that seems to be the strategy where I imagine they're going to do that again for arms and for Spatoon and whatever else they got. I'm really pleased with like, I kind of didn't expect to like that hardware and I sat right before it shipped.

I told you this before the show and kind of was like, I'm going to cancel my Amazon pre-order because I'm just going to get Breath of the Wild on Wii and that'll be good enough. And I'll wait and, you know, this fall when Mario comes out, I'll get a sweat. And then I forgot to do it and it shipped and I was like well I'd have to return it. I might as well just open it and play anyway I was a good choice. I man I'm I'm so blown away by how much I love it because I got it and I was there it's with me all time

and I was and I was going to be like all right cool it'll be I'll play Zelda and I'll play some cart and I'm like it's all I'm like I'm like all I mean because granted we travel so much it's just easier to do but then I play persona way get home but like right now in the middle of a move in the middle of all this traveling all this other stuff it's like yep I mean that's it's it Like I wish I could play persona on something like that. 100%. It wasn't a V-D. And this is the problem I had when like they announced it. And then when I got, like, oh, was when it was like, nope, it's still going to be Nintendo where they're making Nintendo games and indie stuff will be on it. And no, you can't port third party stuff.

Because my whole thing had been like, how rad would it have been? And this is going backwards. But when they were talking about dates, they put it out and they put it out next to Mass Effect. And you can play Mass Effect on it. And my thought process was it would be a game changer, even though I love trophies of being able to take open world RPGs with me. Maybe giant games with me anywhere and play them. Now granted the mass effect wasn't that you know yeah but I was thinking about this this morning when I was thinking back at the last topic the game of the year one yeah people were

saying persona for golden is there a chance at a persona five golden or whatever red I guess it's a red sure thing right I mean I don't I would imagine so I don't know what if any the deal is with Atlas and PlayStation for persona five exclusivity window or forever or anything like that but I could easily see that happening. And it granted is down reshing and this, that and the other, but I mean, the PS3 version though. Yeah. What? Oh, right, the PS3 version. Yeah, yeah. I, even

there, I think there's going to be concessions made, but I think they'd be worthy. They'd be awesome. Because I, that's the whole thing about persona for Golden is like, it was good looking, but it wasn't the best looking game on the market and nobody gave a shit. Like, it was awesome. Yeah. I mean, you don't play that kind of game for, I play for story and weird shit. Honestly, I think you're more than likely going to get something like Persona Q

where they do something for the switch that is the switch. Whatever, it's more persona. Fuck you. Don't do that. Yeah. Don't do that goddamn single player dungeon crawling crap and like just go. Yeah. Okay.

But I could see that happening because that is like you talk about, man, who's the Switch's audience? It's like, oh, anybody who plays Atlas games. So yeah, why not? But like my wife, like, it came out the other night after playing some battle royale. And my wife was playing Mario card at the couch. She never plays games if I'm not like, hey, you want to play some Mario. Yeah.

I'm always the instigator. Yeah. I'm just seeing her pick up the Switch and play it because it was there and it was easy. It was super cool. Exactly. Exactly. Final question. From Joey B.

Joy B! How often do you guys read video game websites and forums? Great question. I never read forums anymore. I would go to Reddit sometimes. Yeah, it was a Reddit count, yeah. Reddit's a forum, right? It's the form.

All the forms on the internet became Reddit or NeoGaf. Yeah. Or maybe something awful, I guess. Yeah, maybe something. Shout out for Lotex. Now, I mean, we check the sites every day, but that's part of the morning show. That's when I'm usually doing it. And then it'll be, it's still that, you know, it was funny when we were at IGN.

People, we were always not worried, but like cognizant of that, IGN.com. the main page traffic was down and it was social sharing. And now that's how it is for me with Waypoint. It is with IGN where it's like, oh, Patrick wrote something interesting and quote tweeted his link on the Waypoint and explains why I should read it. And I click it. I'm like, oh, it was a great read.

But I've never gone to Waypoint.com to read anything. The Twitter filters up the best. Yeah. I live on forums and websites. I don't think I'll ever stop that. I think that's one of those things that the generation that comes after me is going to like totally only be on the social stuff. But I am so embedded in the lifestyle of it's just part of my routine to go on NeoGath.

Anytime I have a free moment just to see if something new happened. And like, yeah, there's the Twitter account for the new thread or whatever. But it's like there's just something about just like looking through and seeing that stuff and going through. Like I go to IGN every day, Kotaku every day. And just like scrolling through and seeing what they're talking about. Like it's not even just like a business thing where I'm looking to like know what everyone else is doing. Which that feeds into it as well. But it's also like I still genuinely enjoy the content and I like reading it and as much of a video guy as I am.

I read and at least just kind of glance at things a lot more than I watch videos. But I love the shit. I mean, the thing that's happened in the last five or ten years is that it used to be that like stuff started on like Chan boards and something awful and all the kind of deep dark message boards of the internet and then filtered up over a period of weeks until my mom saw like somebody get Rick rolled on the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. and was like, started sending me Rickroll links. Yeah, and then that took like a year probably. And now it's like a three-day window

from when something pops up on Reddit because all of the producers at the Today Show and that late night and all the places that people watch mainstream media all are watching the same. They all know, hey, it all comes from Reddit now. Yeah, that was the weird thing is when I, when my Reddit story starts the first time

when Scott Bromley back in there was like, hey, did you know your Dead Space Two reviews? Been on the front page of Reddit forever. I'm like, or for two days, they're like, no, that's awesome. What's Reddit? And then I went there, just everybody being mean to me. Like, oh, fuck. And I didn't even know what this was.

And now I'm on Reddit three times a day because it's the commute to work. It's the commute home from work. And then a final check in and just looking through. And it's weird how it is that everything, how I've subscribed to so many subredits that it's like, oh, well, here's a what the fuck thing. And here's a funny gif. And then here's a video game news. And here's some awesome Witcher 3 cosplay because I'm still subscribed to that for some reason.

Here's what's happening persona. And here's Mario Kart Strategies. It's like, that's where I find it all. Do you subscribe to the subredits for individual games? I do. I was just to say that, like, once I realize I should be doing that, like, Overwatch, Destiny, all those kind of living games, Hitman. Yep.

Like, those subredits tell me when I need to be paying attention to a game that I might not otherwise load up and check out. Yeah, that's the thing of like when I, that's like now the highest compliment. I think I can play a game of like, I liked you so much. I'm going to follow your subreddit. Like, I still follow Watchdogs 2 subreddit. It's just like, what's happening? Just let me know and show me some of your deadset cosplay.

I love Reddit too. But my issue with it is there, I haven't found a. subreddit for like video games that works for me like like for over an overall thing like in the same way that I go to NeoGaf for news and stuff. Yeah. Is there an equivalent? There's games. But they're too big. It's like yeah it's like too much of it too memes.

Well I mean for I mean I'm on the PlayStation 4 one the PlayStation Vita one and those are those are basically our PSI love you fans of like yeah they're so into it. They're talking about very specific things about that. Interesting. I should probably look up to switch one. And the individual game ones are really good like like if you Mario Kart's awesome. The match grows I used to look at all the Yeah, a breath of the Zelda one, the Breath of the Wild one was really useful, but a little spoiler, so you kind of got to be careful.

But like, especially like when I was deep into Hitman last year, like that was great because it would be like, hey, there's a new, there's a new contract. New contract coming up. There's new targets. What are those? The ones that go away. High value targets. No, the, the, the, the things that you have like two days or a week or whatever to kill and you get one shot at. Yeah, yeah.

Like, that stuff is really good and super useful. Overwatch is the same way. So yeah, I like that stuff. Awesome. Well, thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for having me. This has been really fun. Where can people find you and support you and do all that stuff?

I'm on the Twitters at Will Smith. And if you want to know more about the Foo Show or watch the Foo Show yourself if you have a VR headset or if you don't have a VR headset, you can do that by just using a game pad and a normal PC. You can find us on Steam. Just search for the F-O-O-S-H-O-W. And I talk to people who make games. So I talk to people who make games while we're inside.

their actual games. You load it up, you put the headset on, you're standing in the watch tower from Firewatch talking to Jake and Sean from Campo Santo with me. And you can pick stuff up, you can look at it, they tell stories about how the game's made. I've done an episode with Brendan Chung of Quadrado Cowboy. And then also, the next one that's coming up, hopefully by the time you guys, probably not by the time this airs, but within the next week or so, I'm talking to a biophysical chemist who makes nanomachines out of DNA. Nanomachines. It's not like metal gear. It's not like metal gear. It's like you can believe.

But we go all the way down. So, like, we start out in his lab, and then we chunk down into, like, some of his equipment. And then we chunk down again into, like, a microscopic scale. We can see cells, like, like, E. coli is swimming around. And then we chunk down one more time until we see the DNA coming out of the Ecoli.

It's really cool. So you might learn something. It's dangerous. We'll get hyped. Get in there. Until next time. I love you. Fox stop!