Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Xbox Special Guest! - Kinda Funny Gamescast Ep. 42

Episode Date: October 29, 2015

Special guest Aaron Greenberg joins us to discuss the Xbox's holiday lineup, Aaron Greenberg explains how Xbox is looking to have an awesome 2016, Aaron Greenberg talks about how relevant Halo still is, and with Halloween right around the corner we talk about our favorite horror games. (Released 10.23.15) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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What's up, guys? Welcome to the first ever episode 42 of the kind of funny games cast. I'm Tim Getty's, as always joined by one of the coolest dudes in video games, Colin Moriarty. It's an overwhelming way of describing it. I'll never get used to it. I appreciate that. Yeah, the other half, Greg Miller off. In Nashville. Not really. Randomly.

Yeah. But we replaced him. but something way better. Way, way better. We got Aaron Greenberg, who is the head of first and third party game marketing for Xbox. That's a lot of things.

It is a lot of things. A lot of games and a lot of things. So this is going to be a very special Xbox-centered episode. I'm excited about it. I'm excited about it. You know, because usually people know us as

Nintendo and PlayStation fan boys. So I'm excited that we're going to kind of delve deep into the other side. Yeah. And I have, we have questions, as I've said many times. Even when we talk to D3,

everything looks so promising this year and next year for Xbox there's a lot of good games coming out. It seems like the schedule of first and second party games is nice and spread out. So you're covering a lot of territory and so like that. We have a lot of good questions. And also questions from the audience, which I'm going to be. Awesome. So this is going to be here.

How are you doing? I'm doing well. It's a crazy time of the year for us, but good to get down here and spend some time with you guys. I'm definitely a fan of the show. Thank you. Awesome. I feel like I've stepped into a little bit of like the Sony. I've got shoe behind me.

resistance and you're in the shrine huge fan of his I got to host him at E3 this year when they came through and see our stuff and just a first class guy

yeah definitely very awesome for those that don't know this is the Kind of Funny Games cast every week we talk about our passion about video games distributed over at YouTube.com slash kind of funny games

Monday through Thursday topic by topic full episode on Friday and on all the iTunes and all the different podcast services please go there rate comment, subscribe,

Do all that type of stuff. And then if you want this episode early, you can go to patreon.com slash kind of funny games. Throw a couple dollars that way. You can get the audio early, the video early, a whole bunch of other fancy fancy things. Oh, yeah. There's a whole.

Two bucks. I get it early. The audio is five. The video is 10 for a month. You get the whole month of it. So this episode will be going live tomorrow morning. Got it. A.k.a.

tonight really late. Yeah. Yeah. So it's going to be pretty. We have great support from our viewers and others. So we appreciate you. That's awesome. Very much so.

So getting right into it, topic number one is the holiday lineup for Xbox. Yes. You obviously are familiar as your shirt kind of says. Tell us about it. It's been an incredible lineup to be part of. I think it's many years in the making. You know, a lot of our big AAA games spend multiple years in development. And so a lot of seeds that were planted, frankly, a big investments that made more closely

time to when we launched the Xbox one and we started to look at what are the type of games we want to have one year, two years from now and to be able to have a year with, you know, we did rare replay to kind of kick off our holiday. Then we follow that up with Gears of War Ultimate Edition. Then we

follow that up with Forza Motorsport 6 and then now, of course, next week is Halo 5. And so, and then after that is Call of Duty and Tomb Raider and Fallout 4 and Battlefront. So there's Like no shortage of games as a gamer.

Hopefully you saved up all your money. Because there's a lot of great games. We're obviously, I think we have our strongest exclusive lineup we've had, which we're really excited about. But there's just a lot of great games, not only on our platform, but even from our third party partners.

Let's, I want to, before we even get into the guests, the games that are coming up, I want to start with, you mentioned rare replay. And we did an entire week, I think, of let's plays for this. And what I was really,

what I was really interested in is, is not only the heritage of that studio, but also the thought, This is what we were impressed with, I think, the most. The thought and the energy that was put into this. What was so impressive about rare replay to me was not that we get to play these games again, but there's a lot of production value here. There's a lot of thought and the achievements and presentation and replay value.

It's rare how much replay value there was. Unintentional, but pertinent. So I'm curious, how did it, how was it received by gamers? Did it do well? And are you kind of looking at other catalogs that you might have in your control? control that to do something. I know you can't do something maybe as thorough as rare replay, but is this kind of give you thought that maybe it's time to re-release some old games as well? Well, you know, I was actually just out of rare last week. And I was there when they

first pitched the idea a little over a year ago. And we said, hey, you know, next year is our 30th anniversary. We have this vault of games and we think we can get them up and running on Xbox 1. And they actually had to go back into their sheds, you know, because they're on kind of like a big farm property. And we went through the stack of like these laminated cards that were basically the front and back a box of every game they've made. And it was hard to pick 30 because they've made so many great games over the years. But I'm really proud of what the team did. It was very much a passion project for them.

And really kind of, I think, celebrating what they've created over the years. And they did it in very lovingly way. And I think a lot of the video unlocks and a lot of the different things they did with special challenges. It was not just a compilation where they outsourced some company that's like, oh, we'll just put a bunch of things together and sell it. is a 30 game pack. They created it themselves as something special for the anniversary of of rare. So it did really well. It's ahead of our forecast.

We actually, even the first week at retail, we were sold out. So we had to restock. Yeah. It's not usually a problem you have where games are stocked out at retail anymore. It used to be that way. So that kind of surprised us. And it's doing really well, both in physical and digital. So we're excited.

I think, you know, we've got it. in one of our holiday bundles now. And we'll be doing some other promotional things with the title throughout the year. And then, but as far as other compilations, I would say this was pretty unique. So we're not now going to go run off

and create six other things. This was something special for rare. And I think it'll be a product that, frankly, I think we'll do really well. Long term is kind of an evergreen product. And secondarily, it's a product like for me as a gamer,

like I own, I want to have it. And it's not something where it's like, I play it and trade it back in or whatever. It's like you're just going to want to keep it. That's part of your museum. Totally. You want to have that as part of the collection.

Yeah. What about something like Gears? Like how's the reception of that been? Gears did really well too. So we were really lucky, you know, our first two titles and what we're calling the greatest games lineup in Xbox history. Good thing to call something. Yeah. Now we named that ourselves.

So we might be fans, you know, it's like looking in the mirror and saying, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough. Gosh darn it darn it. People like me. So, but the, it did really well. Both titles reviewed well. gears had the same issue. It's sold out in the first week at retail, selling well ahead of plan, which is just great to see, you know, Gears Nation kind of, you know, wake up. And I think the, what we do with the backward compatibility collection add-on, we kind of surprised fans with that at the end.

So knowing that Byser plays the game through this holiday, we'll get all the Xbox 360 Gears games as part of that via Back and Pat. And that really kind of sets up what is really the big title for next year, which is Gears of War IV. Which we're excited. I can't wait. Gears of War IV looks so cool when we saw it at E3. Just the presentation was exciting and that will certainly get me to go and play. I'm stoked about that game and that series living again and having kind of a different dynamic with a different studio and a different kind of take on on it all. I'm curious, you know, since we're recording this now, a lot of people won't hear this until the week Halo 5 comes out.

And obviously this is the big one, right? I mean, this is your big game. What is the buzz bin for Halo 5? It's something that, you know, I've remarked, we had worked at IGN forever, and I remember there being this massive crescendo of excitement in the months leading up to three and four. And it felt a little lighter this time around, but a lot of our Xbox fans out there have told me that I'm just not paying attention to the right places. So what kind of like, what are you seeing for the excitement with Halo 5? And, I mean, how stoked are you kind of just to finally get this out into the wild? Well, first, we're really excited.

The game is delivering. I don't know if you guys have played much yet. But I've played through the whole campaign. I think it is, you know, for 3, for three, what they'll tell you is this is the Halo game they've always wanted to make. It's on a whole new engine. And they really did a lot of innovation with this title that I think is well beyond what they've done in the past. And so personally, it is the best Halo game I've ever played. At least I played through a campaign.

And I think fans will react really well to it. And I think the innovation with multiplayer is there too with Warzone. From a campaign standpoint, you know, we started in the spring early. and we did the media spots with Locke and Chief. And kind of set up the whole Hunt the Truth. And then we did the whole podcast series. This podcast thing, by the way, seems to be taking off.

I know. People seem to like these things. They were alive and they kind of died. Now they're back again. So, and that did really well. And then, you know, it's, it's been kind of a dream game to market

because, you know, we have two heroes and there's a really rich story. And I think Halo feels like perhaps maybe the most anticipated game of the year because it's not a title that comes every year. You sort of wait. It's been a few years since, you know, Halo 4 and three years. And so I think, you know, when you start playing, at least for me,

it just reminded me what makes it so special. And, you know, you get just, you're in that sci-fi setting and the rich story and to be able to play as Locke in chief and new weapons and all, you know, the verticality of the design and some of the modernization of things you can do like ground pound and other things like that. I think just made the game really fun. And so for us, we did a lot of things. I think they were a little bit different.

And then we also did the whole UNSC propaganda, Chief is Dead message, which would sort of be like when the government comes out and tells you something. There was a bombing in some country. You're kind of like, I don't know if that's a real story or not, but it's what they're telling us. And then the second ad that came out was, the official story is that Chief is dead. The unofficial story is Locke, you're on a mission to hunt him down. And so that really sets up and drops people off at sort of what is the narrative of the game. And so we wanted to kind of build that naturally through the campaign. We're seeing record engagement as far as we look at conversations, views, all the types of things around the creative.

And so we've been really happy with the response. And then the other thing we're doing is, you know, we'll have a lot of retailers that will do events and stuff like that. But so many people, you know, will buy, whether they buy at retail, the, LCE offering or the Halo console or they digitally download. They're going to already have the game pre-installed and ready to go. So we wanted to kind of create an unusual launch event. So we're actually creating a launch event on the 26th. We're doing it on YouTube.

We're actually partnering with YouTube with this. And it's called Halo 5 Live. It'll run from 3 to 9 p.m. Pacific time on the 26th. And it's going to be TV quality six-hour show. It'll be very much like a New Year's Eve kind of thing. We'll see Australia go first and then Europe. And then North America and there'll be celebrity stuff. And there'll be, you know, a lot of folks from three for three, some map reveals, weapons, details.

It'll be like an entertainment show. And we want to do is bring millions of Halo fans together around the world to celebrate launch in a way that we couldn't physically do at like a just standing outside of retail store. Have you guys been working with rooster teeth at all? We have. Awesome. Yep. They're going to be in the show as well. Yeah.

Yeah. We're going to do some fun like celebrity gameplay. And I think they're like, you know, putting them on a. small map with all like rocket launchers and that kind of thing. Yeah. So they're gonna do some fun stuff like that. What about like in terms of like something like red versus blue like obviously like to me as some like like red versus blue has always been a huge deal to to me and like that's kind of a big part

of the Halo experience is seeing how they kind of take each game and kind of use it in unique ways. Do you guys work with them like like like with Halo 5 like have have there been like meetings or anything or discussions about that type of stuff that's not so much gameplay specific but more like experience driven? Yeah. I mean, we've always had a good relation with them. I don't personally engage in them directly.

It's other folks on the team. And then I know they have good relationships with the folks at 343. And so I think the spirit of what they do is like, it's true to Halo. It's really entertaining. And so we want to celebrate that type of stuff. And so I know there's a lot of integration. I don't know the specifics of like how much they were brought in early, but they're definitely a partner. And we're going to have them featured in the show for launch for sure.

That's cool. With Halo 5, one of the questions we had brought up in the past, and people have brought up in our community, and we've certainly talked about, is there 100% confidence in, with the experience with Master Chief Collection not working right at launch, is, are you guys confident that, hey, those problems have been, you know, they've learned, you know,

whatever they needed to learn to make Halo 5 run. Are you guys worried about getting slammed the first week with players and suffering similar problems? And by the way, this is not exclusive to Microsoft. This happened to Sony with Drive Club and a bunch of other studios as well. So, I mean, how are you guys feeling about that particular aspect? Yeah, it's super important to us. I think a few things that we've done.

You know, obviously, we did the Halo 5 beta last holiday, which went really well. We've done a lot of things. You know, the engine and the infrastructure that Halo 5 built on is an all new engine, all new infrastructure. And you can imagine that was already built and designed in a way that Master Chief Collection wasn't. And, of course, after the issues of Master Chief Collection, the team has done, you know, a lot extra check. checking and testing and, you know, so the team feels like it's a product they're confident they can stand behind. And I think people will have a great experience. It's a lot of innovation. I mean, leveraging Azure in the cloud, the kind of jump in, jump out, co-op, instantly

be able to jump in and play co-op with a friend and leave. Not many games are really doing that. People call it, drop it, but it's literally drop in, drop in, drop out, co-op, which I think will be, which will be great. You want to drop in for five minutes, play through buddies and drop out, switch right back to AI. The tech behind that, I think. think is pretty innovative. But the team, the team feels good about the product and, uh, and expected reliability. Um, so then we move into November. And November is, for me, a big one because of fallout obviously. But you guys also have rise of the Tomb Raider coming out November 10th. Yeah. How are you, you're, you're the marketing guy. So it's like, how do you, this is something that's actually been

quite puzzling to me is, was there ever any thought of moving Tomb Raider out of the way? Because Fallout 4 to me is going to cannibalize everything. Are you guys worried about it cannibalizing your own exclusive game on that same day? Or is it more important to kind of stay the course? And these might be for two different audiences anyway. I mean, how is that all going to shake out on November 10th? Sure. No, we worked closely with like a lot of our internal studios on like, you know,

the Halo launch date, for example, when that's happening. And we talked with Crystal on Tomb Raider. You know, the challenge is is you want to, you have to look at the production schedule. You want to make sure that you don't rush the game so that it's not done and not at high quality. Like that's always the number one priority. The challenge with Tomb Raider is. if you go a week later, you're against Battlefront. You go a week earlier, you're against Call of Duty.

You go two weeks earlier, you're against Halo. So, you know, and then you go late and you're like, well, the consumers still have money left to buy the game. Right. That's a good point. So, you know, so there wasn't a better scenario for us, except that that was the week that it wasn't going head to head against Call of Duty or Star Wars.

We felt like the Fallout audience and game, while both fantastic games, they're not direct competitors per se, but you're right. It's two big, big titles launching at the same time. And we hope people will buy both. Yeah, it's interesting. I had not, you know, that's a really, that's a really great and interesting explanation.

Because I had not thought about pivoting out of the way even one or two weeks actually just makes it even worse for the game. I mean, it's crazy. Like there's just so many games coming out for all the systems and stuff. But even just Xbox specifically, all those games. Totally. If you're an Xbox owner and gamer, like, you know, you're kind of screwed. Yeah, yeah. And most teams do.

Most teams do. I mean, first party, we know what our dates are. but most teams pick their date, not knowing what else is going to be there. So, you know, and then once you know, it's like, well, would you rather launch against Call of Duty, Star Wars, or Fallout? I don't think there's a better... Yeah, that's the ultimate, like, hops and choice. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So you just got to launch and stick with your date and feel confident that the game will stand up, and we believe it will. It's a fantastic title. Yeah. I mean, we've got to play it a little bit at an event a couple weeks ago. And, like, it's fun, man.

It's definitely it's awesome. I think it's so far better than the first one, and I really enjoyed the first one, so I'm excited for it. And you're right, I think it is a different enough game that the real big problems, the money and people having enough money to enjoy both,

but it's not that they don't want both. So I think that's the thing. Yeah. We'll see. It should be interesting. The second topic of the day, moving forward a little bit farther into the future, 2016.

Specifically, how will the Xbox one stack up against the PS4 in 2016? Well, I think you saw, saw a little bit of our 2016 lineup and what we showed at gamescom, but most people, even internally, as we've been meeting and kind of planning for next year, people are like, okay, this year we have Halo 5, we've got Forza, we've got, you know, like this must be like our peak year and then like next year must be down relative. But actually, we expect to sell more games next year and we actually have more game titles releasing next year than we do this year. And if you start to look at that

list of things that are coming, so we have quantum break in, you know, coming in April, uh, we've got a killer instinct season three we've got uh as you go throughout the year we've got things like recor scale bound crackdown sea of thieves halo wars two gears of war four and probably some things we haven't announced so that's an extraordinary lineup yeah i need my cup head what am i getting cup heads come that uh next year coming yeah good yeah no the team we're actually uh investing more in that title to make sure it is great as it as it should be and have a great partnership with the guys that are building that title. So you'll get your Cuphead along with your Gears of War IV games of all sizes.

Yeah, that's incredible because now what I'm wondering, I didn't even consider half of those games when I'm doing my mental account. Because you get into the quantum breaks, you're getting the scale bounds, of course. But yeah, killer instinct. Yeah, that's coming. Yeah, that's coming. So what are you guys, are you going to call next year the best games lineup in Xbox history again? Well, you've got to just keep doing that, you know?

Why not? See you like the Roman numerals too The one thing I'm You know Aaron you've been in this industry a long time I've been on Microsoft a long time You're smart dude You understand this industry I was reading MPD

Earlier this week And the numbers continue to stagger me For both consoles Yeah Now Xbox 1 and PlayStation 4 Outselling their predecessors Same you know Month over month on the market

For 24 months by 40% Yeah What does this mean to you I mean what are you taking away from this Because this is such heartening news To me as a core console gamer I don't want to play games on my mobile phone. I'm not much of a PC gamer,

although I lose myself to Civilization 5 and stuff like that, but mostly I'm a console guy. I'm a core console guy. What does this mean to you? Because obviously your competitor is doing very well, but you guys are also outpacing Xbox 360, and I feel like that is sometimes lost. Yeah, it's a great point.

I mean, people don't realize that. And not just from NPD in the U.S., but even globally, if you look at Xbox One sales month by month, how we stacked against where Xbox 360 was. And I think Xbox 360 was, widely regarded as a huge success and, you know, was a, I think, a great platform for us.

But we are month by month selling more Xbox ones. We did Xbox 360. And we're actually widening that gap. So as we rate ourselves against ourselves, we're doing very well. We're also selling more games than we sold last gen. So we're seeing the console market being extremely healthy and any of the early

naysayers who went to this generation of, oh, you know, because it is cyclical. I mean, the console market tends to go down as you get into the later years, but then where gamers come back and they buy new consoles and they buy new games, and then there's your other sort of segments

that come in after that. And so we're seeing really, really healthy. And if you look at the games lineup this year, you look at the games lineup next year, we think, well, Halo will clearly sell a lot of consoles. Gears will sell a lot of consoles next year. So for us, it's been really healthy. And Sony's the same, absolutely.

So, you know, we're seeing the industry all up, doing really well. Our third-party partners are doing really well. Activision, EA, those folks, are, you know, having great years. And so I think that, you know, it's good. As a console gamer, myself, I'm with you, and it's great to see a lot of innovation,

a lot of great games, and the industry thriving. Do you guys, how much do you, you know, keep on the blinders when you're at, you know, when you're at Microsoft or when you're at any other company in terms of we can't really worry about what the other guys are doing. We can't really worry about. We've got to kind of focus on that. How important is it to watch the competition

and what they're doing? Because it seems like 2016 is going to be the year when Sony springs to life a little bit in terms of their exclusives because they were very quiet. This past year we had Shuehay Yoshida on one of our other podcast, PS, I Love You. And we were talking about, I just came to the revelation that they actually didn't release a first-party game all year this year. All their published games actually were from second parties. So it seems like they're going to spring to life soon.

So is that important to you guys at all? Are you just being like, we have to just stay on our road in our lane and figure things out? We largely stay in our lane. We obviously watch and monitor and see what they do. And yeah. So I think we have, we were. surprised that they didn't have more games this holiday. You know, we knew this is the third holiday.

This tends to be a really big selling season. And so our focus has been on, you know, focusing on our fans, delivering the games that they want. And we're doing that this year and we're doing it again next year. So I think we'll be very competitive. I mean, right now I think most people would say we're the console with the best games. And so that's really what we want to hang our hat on and having the best online service, the best community for our fans.

And so we're going to continue to invest there as a first party team as well as working with top third party partners as well. And I'm curious, you know, since it's, it's, it's, I don't know if it's unusual, but it's interesting that you control the, you kind of the marketing for first and third party. So you're kind of controlling both things. How do you balance that when you're, when you, you know, you're looking at the games line of, well, even this, even though we're not talking about the 2015 games anymore,

you do have, you know, your games like Tomb Raider and Halo, but you also have battlefront or whatever called duty. How do you kind of balance marketing in terms like, what is, is the, is the priority to sell more first party games or is the priority to sell more consoles and more and more games? And it doesn't matter if Battlefront outsells Halo as long as you're selling the games. Yeah. So just organizationally, our first party and third party teams actually set on opposite sides of the building. All of our third party folks sit in closed offices because if they're working with Ubisoft or EA or, you know, whoever it may be, you know, they have confidence.

So we keep all that stuff confidential. So, you know, the person that's working, you know, on trying to think of like a key competitive title. but if someone's working on a competitive shooter, whether they're working with EA or they're working with Activision won't be talking to the gears or Halo team, for example. So we're really serious about that. We just look at the business all up.

So we're definitely trying to sell consoles. We're trying to get as many gamers to play our titles. And so that's really the big focus. And we know that we'll deliver, you know, some percentage, maybe 20% of the game sales, but 80% of them will come from our third party partners. So they play a very, very critical role. And some of those are just multi-platform games that wherever some of them are things where we do strategic investments with them or we're a marketing partner with them or some cases we help invest and make the game happen.

So just a variety of different ways that we that we interact with them. And now shooting back to 2016, let's talk about some of these games. I mean, what are the games that you're excited about? I mean, tell us about, you know, quantum brake looks really, really good. Yeah. And, you know, scale bound obviously coming together. Platinum's kind of doing everything over there. We're waiting to see more about that.

So like what how does this? What's 2016 kind of mean to you and kind of run us? We ran through the names of the games. So tell us a little bit about what games you're excited about. Yeah, I'm, I would say first and foremost, I'm really excited about Quantum. I am much more of a story kind of campaign-based guy. I do play multiplayer. I'm not the world's most competitive multiplayer gamer.

So I prefer co-op and things like that. So for me, Quantum is a story. You know, we know Sam Lake and the team there, you know, just like they did with Alan Wake. They did with Max Payne and, you know, games I've always. loved playing really rich deep stories that draw you in, character-based stories. And so they're doing that again with Quantum Break. Now, what's interesting is they're also integrating the live-action elements. And so to have the, you know, top-tier talent like Sean Ashmore and and other folks that are working with us on that, that also play characters in the game is something that's really

never been done before in games. And so I haven't played through the game, but there are folks on my team that have played through the entire game. And I've read through their notes. And I've seen, you know, we have a lot of reviews on the title and stuff. And the team feels really, really positive about how the title's shaping up.

We think it will, uh, review well and do well. And I think it will, you know, draw a lot of interest. And I think it helps sell Xbox consoles, which is,

which is great. Um, titles I'm also super excited about. I'd say see if these is pretty high up there. I was out at Rare last week and we, uh, played the prototype. Um,

there's, uh, a prototype that we, is playable that we've been playing. And some of the core mechanics and the things that you do in that title are so much fun. And it is just a true rare game where I think like core game will love it. But also, you know, it's just open shared world experience and the setting of like pirates and ships and all these fun things you get to do together. And different people's personalities come out and what they do do.

And I found I'm actually a really evil pirate very violent when I get on a ship. Good. It's always fun. That's one should be. Exactly. Some people are much more cooperative and, you know, so, uh, and, uh, I was just thinking because our, our head of European studios and I were on a ship together. And he was like, you know, raising things and getting stuff organized and asked me to go do stuff. And I was literally like hitting

him with like a piece of chicken, you know, and he's like, what are you hitting me for? We got to go. We got to go. We got to go. I'm like, okay, oh, you're right. That's right. We should actually be a, and I was just like, cool, this thing I can hit him with it. You know, it's like, you know, sort of just felt like a child. So, uh, so that game, I think, you know, we're seeing how visually that game is looking and we'll show more of that title this year. I think people will be really excited to see that. I think you saw a little bit of what's happening with Crackdown and the innovation that Dave Jones and the team is doing there using the power of the cloud and the real-time destructible environments, which just kind of blows my mind. I think that is in reinventing

the way games are made using technology that we didn't have last gen. You know, you think about like what is a true next-gen game. Like I think we're starting to see those games come out now. And I think this year, and I think even more into next year, going to see titles that just literally could not be made without the technology that we have today. Even Halo 5 is using the cloud and Azure. We talked about the co-op and design there. So those are all great. We spent a whole day up at Coalition looking at Gears 4, title.

It's a world-class team under Rod Ferguson there. So another title that I think will surprise people. And, yeah, so, I mean, it's just no shortage of great games. if you're a gamer no matter what you're looking for what are some of the the smaller titles you're looking that people should keep their eye on because you know obviously people are excited about the gears and like rare's making see if these so it's like those are the kind of bigger marquee titles but what are some of the smaller ones you know we've shown some of them um you know cup had's a great example of one of the titles that we show that we're really excited to get behind i mean the id program is amazing because

we're launching multiple games a week and so i try to go in and play as many of them as i can it is hard to keep up. But off the top of my head, I don't know some of the big ones for next year, but I can just tell you from like this year, whether it was like Goat Simulator or playing The Escapist or some of these indie titles, it just really surprised me how fun they were. You know, I think the lineup of games will be even bigger next year.

And so, yeah, so I think, you know, we'll share more of those details, but a Cuphead would be the marquee game that I would say, if you could pick one indie game to play next year, it's unlike anything else you've ever seen. When do you think we're going to hear more about Cubhead? Because I want to know when I'm getting this game. It's such with Cubs with Cubshead since E3.

Yeah. It looks so good. The thing about it is everything that's been released about just gets me more excited. Yeah. It's a fun game. It's a hard game. Very challenging. And so the team, our team internally and the two brothers that are building the game,

you know, we've been working really closely together and making sure that they are, you know, they have enough time and enough resources to do everything they want to do with that title. And so I'm excited, you know, we've really gotten behind that title. That's a big bet for us. And we don't want to rush it. We want to make sure it's, it's ready and it's great. It's the first game they've ever made, which is also kind of mind-blowing.

Yeah. And so, yeah, like, the game will be fun. You know, my feedback to them was like, maybe not so hard. You know, like, I think, I mean, we all loved ORI and how hard that was to play and it was kind of rewarding. And we kind of how many times we died in ORI, but I think to make, you know, we want as many people to enjoy your title. And, you know, so I think being able to have some modes where people that don't want to just die 12 times to get through a level, you know, some of us feel the challenge of that, but I think you want to make it more approachable too. Yeah, I guess I guess I have a question. I'm not sure if you can answer, but I'm not because you wouldn't necessarily make these decisions, but you might have some insight into it. Sure. Because you guys are working with, you know, your second party partners as well, you know, remedy is a great example with with quantum.

Yep. How do you as a studio or as, as really a team, because you're not, you know, you're not a studio, but as a publisher. do you identify these partners and be like we can work with these guys confidently or is there any interest in acquiring these studios to join the family like how do you kind of parse that out and figure those things out yeah so most of our big IP is done internally by internal teams like coalition with gears or three for three with halo or turn 10 with forza and then all those titles we call them published titles so there's a we have a publishing team actually have a publishing marketing team that works with that group and largely what it is is there some of the best development talent in the industry, but they want to stay independent. They actually

don't want to be owned by us, most of them. And so for us to be able to say, hey, we want to go hire these guys to go make a first party game, whether it's platinum, making skill bound, you know, or remedy making quantum break, for us to be able to take that type of talent, have them go make something really innovative, insomniac, what they did with Sunset Overdrive. It does to be a little more like new IP and things like that, which is also pretty exciting. And it is, it rounds our portfolio. So that's kind of the strategy is to work with those independent developers. Over time, you've seen other folks

that have done that where they were independent and they ended, you know, Dice was independent at one point and they made some games for us and then they made games for in the EA acquired them. So they do get acquired sometimes, but largely most of these studios stay independent. Fair enough. I'm excited. At 2016, it sounds like it's going to really, it sounds like it's going to be good

just for console gamers generally. It seems like everything's firing on all cylinders in 30 year. It's going to be good. I'm excited about it. I am, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm Quantum Break, though, is the one I think that I've identified next year as the one that I'm super excited about. And, I mean, it's going to take second place to Gears, which is the game I'm most excited about on Xbox One next year. But yeah, everything's sounding pretty good. Yeah, the Gears community is amazing.

You know, when we look at, like, our engagement with fans, like, the Gears fans, like, are so passionate and so engaged, you know, at levels we don't have with any of other franchises. And so it's been kind of fun to see, like, that Gears Nation kind of reawaken and the rest of the response to the ultimate edition and then you know I think as we start to reveal more about Gears 4 it's gonna be a fun a fun campaign cool well I'm still excited for cup hit so that that's great that topic brought you by draft kings your season long fantasy football team may be going strong but you don't have to wait until week 16 to get paid but your fantasy skills of the test every week this season at draft kings dot com america's favorite one week fantasy football site with one week fantasy there are no season long commitments if you got an injured player

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That's draftkings.com. It would be nice to be able to not play with injuries in my fantasy league since my team is... just atrocious right now. Well, you should go over to draft meet that Tom. Yeah, I'm in a whole network of, I've got three fantasy teams, and we have a donut pool at work,

and no matter what, like, it's, the scenarios are all bad. I'm rooting. Yeah, I'm in, I'm in really,

I'm in one very serious pay league with my uncle and his friends. I've been playing with them for a long time, and they're just, they're just really good, and they, and they,

you know, I draft well, but then my waiver moves are really questionable and, oh, it's a whole thing. It's bad. It sounds like a thing. It's not good.

So, topic three of the day, usually the final topic of the day is brought to you by the kind of funny forums where we get audience questions. We read them to you, kind of funny.com slash forums. But what we're going to do is a little something different. We got so many great questions from you guys that the final two topics are both going to be audience driven. I'm really excited about this. We talked a little bit about Halo in the first topic, Tomont, 2015 games. But I want to dive a little bit deeper for my boy, Joey V. Who wants to know, is Halo as big of a deal as it used to be? It's a good question, Joey. I think the, you know, what makes Halo special is it's not a, you know, you wait years to play it. It's not a title that comes every year. It's got a really rich, deep story. You know, for me, it is, you know, like what Star Wars is to movies, Halo is to video games. And I've grown up playing Halo and it's been such a big part of our Xbox heritage.

And I think what the team has done with this title, I believe, will remove any doubt, I think, about the power of Halo. Not that there's been a lot. I think most people are mostly really been excited about the game. And I think the innovations they're making with multiplayer will allow it to have a longer tail, if you will. But the story in the campaign, which is what is always been the core of Halo, is the best I've ever played.

And so I can give my full, and of course, I'm the marketing guy, so I guess you take that with a grain of salt. But I'm not saying that for everything. I really do truly believe this is a very special version of Halo. And I think people are going to be really excited. Second question, also Halo related from HoloDron. How do you approach Halo marketing? It's quite appropriate for you.

I feel it's been quite corporate and stiff the last few years, but things like the new 22nd advertisements for next week's Halo 5 live event are much more tongue-in-cheek. I think focusing on that sort of thing is key to keeping people engaged with it. I would like if you've spoken about the game as less of a product or an experience and more as a fun game and a fun universe to explore and play in. As the marketing guy, what do you think about that? Yeah, I mean, I think we have to reach, we have different segments of audience. So we have like, we can reach Xbox fans and we can reach Halo fans pretty easily, like through our dash through what we call our own channels.

We have our social channels. We have ways to, you know, reach people through our own channels. How do we reach mainstream gamers and mainstream consumers? They really then have to go to media. So we have to go to our TV campaigns. The launch event that we're doing is very much in the same thing as to like connect millions of fans around the world and allow them to experience this together, get excited. about the Halo launch the day before it comes out. And so it's great to hear it.

He's like some of the teaser spots. The team that is producing that show has produced some great teaser spots. They're kind of funny little kind of funny. You didn't miss that. Yeah. Appropriate. Yeah. And so there's one where it's like Barry White kind of slow jamming.

And then there's one where it's like this thug life meme thing. And so, but it's, you know, it's all. Thug life means? There's any, one of my favorites. Yeah. Yeah, so it's red versus blue. It looks like a gang war. And then it just pauses and it like does the,

I think kind of the midi version of Tupac. So we don't get. Awesome. Yeah, we don't get sued, I guess. And so, you know, but it's just been fun. And the idea is that they're fun and they're shareable. And we're just basically shamelessly trying to promote the show to get people to watch it.

So that's the idea. Quite familiar with that. Yeah. Yeah. Tim's our marketing. Yeah, exactly. I saw you did. I love your reading was good.

Oh, thank you. I think you should stick with us. Okay. Good. Yeah, I've been doing it a while. Brought to you by Drag I really like Halo because I think it's such a unique game in the sense that it is played so differently by so many different people. I'm like you're saying that there's different like kind of subsex of fans. Like some of my best friends are like the biggest Halo fans and like my friend Alfredo is super into the competitive multiplayer side of it. But then some of my other friends are super into the campaign. And I think that Halo's campaign

Kind of differs from things like Call of Duty and stuff where people enjoy it like Colin you're a big fan of Call of Duty's campaign Specifically over its multiplayer side and those Those games always do kind of push the The envelope when it comes to like what a first person shooter campaign can be Yeah, but I think Halo's different in its lore and the fact that every game kind of builds upon the last and people are excited to know what happens next So you're kind of saying like bringing up Star Wars like that's really relevant And it's great that there's people that will never play the Halo 5 campaign, but we'll still think Halo is a great game because they play online, you know, and play with their friends. And then co-op is a whole other thing, you know, and like the, the culture of just beating it on legendary and being able to say, I beat it on legendary.

That's a thing. It is. And like a lot of other first-person shooters don't really have that kind of legacy with it. And just then there's the ultimate Halo fans that like all of it, you know, they want the campaign experience, they want the co-op experience, they want the multi-person. a player experience. Yeah, and we see fans. They're fascinated by the story, the characters, trying to figure out what's going to happen. And I think that's what makes it so fun. You know, it's like we're all watching that we saw the trailer for the new Star Wars movie. And I think Halo has that same type of feel. And, uh, we know, New York Times bestseller books and, you know,

a lot of people read the Fall of Reach and we're actually making a Fall of Reach animated series. We're actually going to debut, uh, the first episode of that in our live show on the 26th. That is one of our things we have in our limited edition skew. And so another way to, to kind of, you know, it's not a lot of video games where there's actually like a whole movie that tells you the story behind a lot of what's happening. That was a book and a movie and it's like, and it leads up to like what's happening in the game. And so, you know, just that richness of the universe and the characters and whether, you know, ideally like whether you've played Halo 1, 2, 3, and 4 and reach and ODST or not, you can jump in and kind of, okay, I got it. Like there's two characters. Here's the basics of the story and you can instantly get in and feel like you're,

You're getting something immersive that I don't know. I think is unique. I think it's different than what a lot of other games do. Something I really liked about the marketing of Halo 5 was how it, the podcast, the Hunt the Truth podcast, like, you know, we do podcast. So we're looking at the charts all the time. So with PSI Love You, which is now, you know, number one, PlayStation podcast. Well done.

It's always cool to see Hunt the Truth has been just up there consistently. It's always in the top three spot. And it's like, that's really awesome. That's a pretty unique way to promote. the games and kind of promote the stories and people seem to be really into it. Yeah. And I think, you know, we had a great team that went off and put that together and we were able to get some really good talent, um, to be able to do that and worked really closely with three, four three and the team on the story. I mean, I got hooked on it. I was like every week when there's new episode.

I didn't know what was going to be in the episodes. And so I was listening. Uh, it seemed so popular that we decided to do a second season, which is up now, running now. And, uh, it's just a great way. I think again, back to like there's a story, there's a richness of the universe. And it makes, it's fascinating. I think again, for core fans that want to know and understand more as well as other people that are like, hey, I just want to get introduced to this universe. And, you know, like we played in the car, you know, the pockets in the car.

And, you know, my wife will listen to it, for example. And like, she's not a big Halo fan, but she's totally like, oh, wow. And she remembers the last one. And so kind of bring other people along into the story. Yeah. And so whether you're a core halo fan or not. And yeah, so we've had fun doing a lot of it. I think a lot of interesting innovative things with the campaign.

And now we are officially running the final campaign trailer. We are using licensed music. Yeah. That launch trailer got me so hyped. We did like a breakdown of it and stuff. Oh, man. Like to me, I love Halo and specifically. I'm a campaign guy.

And I've been like kind of like, eh, like five's coming. It's not that I'm not excited. It's like, whatever. It's Halo 5. At this point, we get it. Then I saw that trailer. I'm like, I want this game. Like, I need to play.

Doing our job. Yes. All right. As a like a marketing guy myself, a question I have for you is, so when Halo is a game that has such different fan bases where there's campaign or multiplayer and all that. Yeah. Do you kind of have, and I'm not even saying budget in terms of just financial, but also just in terms of how much time and thought you put into the planning?

Do you plan, do you have 100% of effort and you kind of divide that 100% up into, well, this much goes to multiplayer, this much goes to campaign? or whatever, or is it kind of like, there are two separate things that you guys are promoting multiplayer, you guys are promoting campaign. Yeah, good question. So we tend to think about the whole thing holistically and then we work with, you know, creative agencies that go off and produce the campaigns for us. We actually have a creative team internally that manages them.

We work very closely with. Traditionally, Halo has been much more campaign led. And so this time, we really wanted to dial up the focus on multiplayer as well. And so I'd say that's the biggest difference was, hey, how do we tell more of the multiplayer story, the innovation that's happening with Warzone? And some of that is through, you know, whether the campaign, you know, marketing assets will create, whether they're ads or digital pieces or whatever. But also like, what do we show at events, you know? And so we did some stuff at E3 where we showed the campaign, but then we let everyone play Warzone on the show floor. And we did the whole HoloLens experience with Halo as well to kind of brief you before you went and played Warzone. Then we focused. on more e-sports and the arena stuff at gamescom and so you kind of you know we we try to when it's the right story to the right audience at the right time um but it is a lot to tell and so you could overwhelm people i think if you try to tell them it all at once but if it's sort of like here's some campaign here's some war zone here's some competitive multiplayer and then at the end you know with

that hopefully you know like your reaction people see the the gameplay ad and and go wow this is a game that i got to have that's awesome man You're right? Yeah, I am. Are you choked up about Halo? I am a little sad. I was going to say, you're having a moment. That was weird.

I don't know. It felt like there was sand in my throat. Our boy, Maximum Cortez wants to know. What game did you think would be a huge hit that didn't do as well as you thought it would? And what game surprised you when it sold well? Ooh, good questions. You know, I think we learned a lot from Sunset Overdrive last holiday. Title reviewed really well.

It did okay, you know, but it didn't blow. blow out numbers. And I think largely, you know, it launched within a week of like Call Duty and Assassin's Creed and Master Chief Collection. And, you know, so within two, three weeks. And so I think it's hard sometimes for new IP like that. Because customers have only a certain amount of money to spend on games. And, you know, with new IP, I think it's much harder to break out during holiday. Now, we've definitely seen that. So I think that would be one example of one where I'd say, I played the game. I thought it was a great. It was actually my favorite game of last year for Xbox,

our first party titles. And, but it didn't, like, you know, didn't show up number one on the sales charts or anything like that. And then I think, you know, for this year, I would say so far the thing that has surprised me the most has been rare replay. It's selling really well. We'll probably sell twice as many as we planned. And so this is the reaction to that.

And I think just the love of the, you know, of rare and what they've created. And I think it's a great value. You get 30 games for 30 bucks. So it's like a dollar a game. And there's a lot of great games there. So that's probably been the one that surprised me the most. As a quick aside question, since you brought up Sunset Overdrive made by Insomniac Studio, I know very well. I'm friends with Marcus and Drew, who are the guys who were the guys that helped create that.

And I know them obviously from resistance, which was when I was doing the PlayStation beat at IG. So we're quite friendly. And I went and that was the first time I ever went to first party preview coverage was I went and did Sunset when we were still at I, and I was also really intrigued by the game. Is there any interest in doing a sequel or working with Insomniac again? Or you guys have kind of moved on from that? At this time, I don't think we've announced anything. We had a great experience working with Insomniac.

We were happy with the title. But again, it didn't blowout. It wasn't like a blowout breakout success. You know, I think the title was really innovative. It was a really fun game to play. But I think in some ways, you know, if there's like, you have to find that like consumer sort of alignment with like you know what is the one sentence description if you're in an elevator with me to describe what sunset overdrive is

and I think a lot of people took like it was over the top action and it was sort of but many ways it was like kind of a skateboarding game yeah with like guns you know and it was like super fun over the top action and so I think if people you know and of course it's not a skateboarding game but so it became it I think is probably our own fault it became it became became a hard game to describe what it is. And I think, you know, if you're struggling to even just simply describe what the game is, you know, we don't have that problem with Forza or Halo or other titles, I think that that might have been part of the challenge for us.

The awesome apocalypse. The awesome apocalypse. I liked that a lot. Yeah. Yeah. And we had fun. I mean, we made the weapons and we had like, you know, the T and Teddy gun. And, you know, we had people.

I like the vinyl, the vinyl record. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we did all, you know, we had the, um, the energy drink. forgetting now we have cases of that in our office. Oh yeah what was what was that called I don't remember I forget I can see it's blue and orange I can see I can see I can see the can I have my desk oh my team would overcharge thank

you scooter for the win. Joy for Tony says will we ever see any of the plans for Xbox one that they dropped come back I like the idea of physical and digital for everything also what's one feature you'd like to see on Xbox one the PlayStation 4 has so as far as as the first question I didn't quite understand most of our games we do launch physical and digital. Yeah. Okay. But we do hear a lot of the like, we wish you did a lot of that, you know, so I think people really liked some of the vision and things that, that we, you know, wanted to do with the platform.

And I think we're delivering on a lot of those. I mean, you know, now we're pre-order games and, you know, there's, you can share gold and, you know, you can, if you make it your home console, people can play. all the in anyone else can play all your games on your console so there is a lot of nice benefits to what a lot of that you know vision that people heard about um with that said uh we're still you know innovating we still have a long list of things we want to do and backward compatibility this holiday is one example of something that we're really excited to deliver on but there'll be more stuff the new xbox one experience of course and then um but there'll be more and more things we're bringing throughout the next year and then the second question was uh what's a feature from ps4 that you'd like. Oh, I'd like to sell as much as that maybe. Is that a great picture? Yeah. I mean, because frankly, it's like that's, you know, that's the fuel, right?

So, I mean, the more you sell, the more you can reinvest. And so we've been really fortunate that our console sales are up against 360. Our game sales are up. We feel like we're delivering the games. And so, you know, we're happy with where we are. I think Sony's done a lot of great innovation. I mean, I have a PS4 and, you know, I've been excited with what they've done. And their last round of updates I thought were fantastic.

And I have friends that work there too. So I think both systems are doing well. Both systems are selling a lot of games. And so we've innovated in different ways, perhaps. But yeah, I think for us, there's not a lot of things that we didn't do this year that we wanted to do. So I lied to everybody. We are running out of time. So we're only going to do one round of the things.

Let's go lightning around real quick through a couple more before we got to let you go. Foxygen wants to know Funnel Fantasy 7 remakes coming to PS4 and PC Do you think it might come to Xbox One? That would be a question to ask Squaring X. I mean, I love when people ask about individual third party games. We always want to have as many games as possible for our fans

And so That would be a question to ask square. Trevor Stark, you wants to know how much time and thought goes into bundles? Quite a bit. That's not my team works with the game sides, whether it's a first party game or a third party side, but we have. have a hardware platform team that does that. I mean, this year, I think we have 12 or 13 different

bundles. And the idea was, hey, we have all these great games. This is a year we think a lot of people are going to be migrating from Xbox 360 to Xbox one. So let's have, there's a Madden bundle and a FIFA bundle and a Gears bundle and a Tomb Raider bundle and a Fallout bundle. Like we've got, you know, and then we've got, you know, our value bundle with Ori and Rare Replay and Gears, right? So it's just no matter what kind of game you're looking for, if you're looking to buy a console, you're going to find a great value in one of those bundle offers. It's Pish Poss asked. Do you think we'll see any more exclusive benefits for day one Xbox one owners? Exclusive. Oh, like day one edition skew. You know, we've talked a lot about that. It really comes down to our retailers' interest and how important that is. And, you know, what we don't want to do is have like a day one skew that's like there two months later, you know. And so that's to be something special for day one. I think it depends on the title in the case.

Largely, most of those tend to be tied to pre-order campaigns. And so you'll continue to see us offer things as a benefit for pre-ordering games. I would say that will be more of the focus than a day one skew. But there will be titles that do special things on day one. I mean, Halo, we've got the Halo console, we've got the Limited Collectors Edition, the TriForce Statue of Lock and Chief that's out now. We release both those a week ahead of the game so that people can download. pre-download the game and have it ready when it launches.

You know, so, you know, depending on the title, there's reasons why we'll do bigger things for those I would consider both day ones. Those things will sell out, you know, within within a week or two. Final question. Yes. There's some random guy called Destin Legerri. He wants to know, what does the X in Xbox stand for? Ooh.

I don't think it stands for anything. We know that answer well from when we worked at IGN and everyone asked us. That same question. It doesn't stand for anything. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Aaron, thank you so much for joining us. We're going to have to let you go.

I'm sorry I lied to all of you. Yeah, we have an accelerated schedule. We appreciate you, though, and you are always welcome with us. So, you know, we hope to see you again soon. No, thank you for having me. I'm a fan of the show. I love what you guys are doing. And it's awesome to see you guys go off and do your own thing.

And I think you guys are more than kind of funny. I mean, I think you guys are legitimately funny. Thank you. Thank you, Aaron. We appreciate that. Yeah, we'll have to, we'll get you back on the show in the future when you're back and we'll hopefully see you to eat three and all that as well. That'd be great.

Yeah. Thank you so much, man. Thank you. We're back, ladies and gentlemen. For the final topic of the Kind of Funny Games cast, man, I fucked up. You did. I thought we were good. I thought that we had, had way more time than we did.

They got here a little late, and we got to respect their schedules as well. So, yeah, we got 50 good minutes in. I had a plan. I feel like the podcast wouldn't be long enough without a fourth topic. Yes. So we had to do that. We need the fourth. We owe them the fourth.

So we do. I went over to the Kind of Funny forums over at kind of funny forums, over at kind of funny.com slash forums. Looked at the Gamecast topic for topic suggestions. If you have them, Please go there, leave some. We'll get to them next week or the week after or some week in the following future. But gather a whole bunch of your questions together.

We're going to go through them. Not so Xbox related. Okay. So this Xbox topic is now... I wouldn't be able to speak to that too... Just a normal topic. Cool. Fantastic.

All right. Get it into this Daniel Adult Man. Daniel Adult Man. Let me tell you. I'm loving these names. Like, recently I've been seeing a lot of good username. So shout out to you, Daniel, adult, man. Hey, guys.

Halloween is near. And it got me thinking about what my favorite horror games are. So what are your favorite horror games? This is interesting because this topic, if you're watching on YouTube, will be going live the day before Halloween. So Hollow's Eve, which is some bullshit. You Long Island, motherfuckers. It wasn't a Long Island.

It wasn't a long island. It was when I lived in New England, and I told you, and my favorite thing about that, by the way, on Game Over Gregory's show, I think it was, was all the responses of everyone telling me that, you know, once again, I was right. Yeah. And I know that it's hard for everyone to imagine. It was actually a man be right so much.

It was a Twitter thing. A Twitter thing. We're me and you were talking. You tried telling me that Halloween Eve is a thing. And I'm like, you're, what? I'm telling you that. I lived in Maine. I tweeted about it.

I get all these people screaming at me. And I'm like, oh, man, like, they smell like Long Island people. I can just, I get this. And then someone post a picture of the United States, like, color heat breakdown of who the fuck gives a shit about this bullshit-ass day. And it's literally just like this small little section over in your East Coast glass. Real America. Yes.

Favorite favorite horror game. My favorite horror game is Dead Space. Yes. Although, how do we define this word too? Because is Bioshock a horror game? Because to me, that's really,

that's one of my favorite games at all time. And then I'm a huge fan of the old Resident Evil games and Resident Evil 4. I think it's the epitome of that as well. More recent games, Outlast, I think, would probably be my favorite horror game of the last few years. Yeah, it was good.

This week, as you guys have probably seen, if you're listening to us on Patreon, a little hint at the future, is going to be a whole bunch of horror let's plays by yours truly, half of them with Colin, half of them with Nick. They're pretty good. We're doing a whole bunch of stuff,

until Dawn, PT, Slender, and Outlast. So they've been pretty cool. I'm excited to see the reaction to them. I have to give a shout-out to Fatal Frame, specifically Fatal Frame 2. On the PS2.

That game scared the shit out of it. me. And it was a very creepy game and something about the PlayStation 2's inability for realism. Like even when it's trying for it, made everything that much creepier. A little unsettling. Yeah. Yeah, I can respect that. The new fatal frame

just came out, I think on the Wii. I don't think anyone liked it, but yeah. I heard it was okay, but people upset about censorship stuff. Oh, they censored it. Is that what everyone was upset about? Because I saw there was a lot of, a lot of... People get mad about upsetness. Yeah. Which, that's a whole that topic. Yeah. It is. something. But yeah, there's a whole bunch of horror games that are definitely, I love slender.

The arrival, the first time I played it was for this let's play. Didn't enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the original slender like demo thing, the eight pages that they did. Because that game is fucking scary. And I enjoy it because a lot of these scary games you play and it's like you expect to get scared all the time. But it takes like Outlast takes a good 30 minutes of playing before like a scare happens. The original Slender scares happen within the first five minutes. And I do think I want to give a shout to Outlast specific. Specifically because of the mechanic.

I think mechanics can contribute a lot to what makes a game scary. So I think that like the lack of solid control in old Resident Evil games was almost one of the things that made them scary because you couldn't reliably get away from them. Although that's an excuse because that wasn't the intent of the bad controls. That's just a byproduct of them. But Outlasts camera, I think is a really super clever mechanic managing your batteries and so like that. I think it's just a really neat mechanic. Dead Space is mechanic that made it or Dead Space is really presentation is what made it stand out. and the Ishimora

going back and forth to rooms you've already been to and looking for slight discrepancies or things or new blood. I think Dead Space, the original Dead Space is really a masterpiece. I actually think that that game is even, I would even go as far as to say,

as underrated, as far as, uh, horror games as Chris is a fairly, fairly rated. In terms of horror, I guess that's true. They ruin, it's funny because EA and Visceral

jumped off a cliff way sooner than I thought they were going to with that series, as opposed to it took a little while for Capcom to remember Resident Evil, but they ruined it. Dead Space pretty quickly. Yeah.

No, they did. Which was unfortunate to watch. Yeah. Jake L.L. wants to know what we think about Guitar Hero Live. I've not played it, so this is all you. I've played, I've played a couple hours of it,

and so far, I'm in love with it. It reminds me of everything that I liked about Guitar Hero back in the day, rock band, and all that other stuff when it was fresh and new. And having not played these peripheral games in a couple years, going back to

rock band, it's like, as fun as it is and it definitely is fun I had a lot of fun with rock band when I played it all the bullshit and all the things that don't work and all the little little seconds of like why is this taking so long to load this thing why can't I find this song like all the questions that I have getting away of it

and then once I play it I'm like oh yeah that's cool and there's something about the fact that we've played these songs all before and it's like we're just doing it again it's cool it's like oh it's been a while but it's like, all right, there's a little too much available to me. It's not tailored to give me an experience anymore. It's just kind of like, it's like the difference between when you're talking about music, listening to an album and just turning on the radio and just having a bunch of shit there. Right.

You know, or not even the radio, like iTunes and just buying stuff willy-nilly and like downloading shit. Whereas Guitar Hero Live reminds me of what I loved so much about the early Guitar Hero game. games and the early rock band games, which was it's a music discovery platform. And it's also a new experience for me with the new guitar where when I'm playing it, I feel like fuck, I don't know how to do this. I keep fucking up. Then all of a sudden it's like, oh, I'm not fucking this up. I can do this.

And I remember when I first played the original guitar hero, the difference between, all right, my fingers are on the first four, adding that fifth button having to slide your finger, that was like a step that you had to overcome in your head. And with this guitar hero, with the new one, I've already experienced multiple steps in learning how to do it. And it's fun and it's awesome. The presentation is really cool. I love the tutorials. They just throw you into being in a concert, doing the live thing.

And you just have to, you don't even get to choose the songs. It's just three songs back to back. The sign is kind of like a just a predestined thing. And I liked it because unlike rock band where it's like, all right, I'm just, you have a bad set list. I'm just going to download the things that I like and you just play those things. this reminds me what I loved about the old ones where it's like I don't know these songs these are fun to play

they chose these they want me to play these songs there is a thought and an order to this set list I am growing and learning with this game and I'm learning about new music and it's like that to me is guitar that's what makes it good the biggest problem with guitar hero I'm not going to dedicate the time to learn it

and to have it be the party game that I think they want it to be yeah and it's almost like in that respect it reminds me of a sports game or a really popular shooter where it's a game that you you learn and you play and you play and you play. I don't, because it's even more than that because of the financial investment

of getting these games being not comparable to a normal $60 game because they're not. I mean, rock band especially is just really expensive. It's funny because I was really of the mind that it was time for these games to come back and now I'm of the mind that I might have been wrong

and that maybe not wrong for some people that are enjoying them. There's always people that enjoy these games, but I'm really interested to see how these games do, especially rock band, which a lot of people seem to be down about. And I don't know, I don't, I don't, I'm not even really interested in playing guitar here, even though I appreciate, um, appreciate kind of the differences of the game compared to rock band, which I think is very static and stagnant compared to the other ones. Although I will say that my patience for bullshit is also becoming lower as I get older too.

So like the sinking of the controllers, we had a lot of problems with that are the instruments. It reminds me, I've been, I was playing organ trail, organ trail yesterday on Vita. And the controls are just so atrocious when you're shooting in that game. Like, I don't have page. Like, I just, yeah. I have no time for excuses and all these kinds of things. Like I just, I'm moving on now.

I got to play something different. So, you know, it's, it's one of those things where, where these games are such a significant investment that I hope people are really going to get the bang for their buck ultimately because I don't feel like they're getting the bang for their buck out of the box,

especially with the set list of these games. Yeah. I mean, Guitar Hero set list, I love. And the fact that the set list on the box is not even representative at all of what the game really has because of the, I think that might be all I've seen. So,

yeah. So there's G. Guitar Live, which is like you play in whatever. Then there's Guitar Hero TV, which is kind of this music streaming service where at any time you go on, there's a different set of songs that you get to play for free. And it's like curated playlists and stuff. And like, it's just this set list is awesome. It's fucking awesome. So that it's going to be exciting to see how this all shakes out.

I don't think it's going to shake out well. I don't think that these games are going to, you know, be the huge hits that they used to be or that maybe people expect them or want them to be now. but this is the guitar hero I wanted. Like they made the perfect guitar hero for people that want just to get better at learning the game and being good at it. This isn't a party game. This isn't like all that stuff. Like rock band.

This is not bad. Yeah, at least it's certainly drawing a comparison to its competitor. So you don't get two of the same games. I'm not even wondering about critical reception, which has been, I would say lukewarm, but still good for both games. I'm even wondering if these games are going to be profitable.

Well, that's what I'm saying. Like it's going to be interesting to see how people like kind of recept it, especially guitar hero, I think, because rock band is at this point a thing people accept. Guitar Hero is definitely a step in a different direction. And a lot of people are upset about the microtransactions. Have you heard about how Guitar Hero is doing this? I saw people upset about it, but I don't know the... So people are really mad about it. It's a new style of micro transactions where you can't own the downloadable content for Guitar Hero.

You can't just pay a dollar and have the songs. you pay for like play tokens and your token can choose you can play the song then there's things where it's like you can buy like 24 hour party passes where it's like $6 or whatever it is I wonder why that is I think it's totally like a licensing game I was gonna say it sounds like a licensing

and like this is a very it's upsetting but you get the play tokens by playing the game so you don't have to buy it so you don't have to buy them and like I'm unlocking these things left and right where I'm like this is kind of cool and constantly because of Guitar Hero TV you don't get to choose the songs you play if you want to choose, you need to pay or use a token

that you can gain in game. But there's always playlist that are free. So there's always samples of different songs. Every time you turn it on, it's a different set of songs you get to try out for free. No, I like that. It sounds, my thing with microtransactions is as long as it's not too egregious,

and it doesn't sound it's egregious here since you can earn them organically in the game. And it's a single player game, so you're not breaking it for anyone else. It's like, what does it really matter at that point? I mean, it's kind of complaining about nothing almost. It's interesting, though, because I think people are going to be mad and upset.

People are mad and upset about everything. The song. Yeah, that I understand why people will be upset about, but that does sound like classic licensing issues where they could not negotiate in perpetuity these songs. Well, the other big thing is Guitar Hero TV has music videos playing in the background, like the actual music videos. That's cool.

Yeah, I heard that is. Another level of licensing. Legal ease and complications. It's complicated. We'll see it all shakes out. Onificate says, The Rise of the Tomb Raider is a timed exclusive for the Xbox One. It won't be released for PlayStation 4 until Fall

2016. My question is, what are your opinions on timed exclusive deals like that? Are they sound business deals, immoral, or somewhere in between? What was the second one? A moral? Yeah. Nothing moral or amoral about business. Is it a sound decision? Probably. It bolsters Microsoft's, in this case, Microsoft's exclusive portfolio. I'm sure that there was an exchange of money. There's no doubt about that. I don't see why Square NX, which is the publisher, would really want to limit the reach of the game, especially watching what happened with a game. like Titanfall, for instance, which would have done much better had it been multi-platform. But these deals are made a long time ago.

Again, as I've said in the past with Titanfall, if EA knew what was going to happen with Xbox 1 early on, I'm sure they wouldn't have made that deal. And who knows what Square would have done. But again, the infusion of capital from the public from the first party might make these games possible or make them break even without even having to sell a game. So there's all these business ramifications. How do I feel about them? I think it's fine.

The gaming is a competitive marketplace. And these things do matter. and they do work, people that are big plans of Tomb Raider will not want to wait a year. And if they don't own an Xbox, they're going to buy one. So it makes sense. I don't think, you know, is there morality and business and immorality and business? Sure, sure there is.

But this is not an example of immorality and business. Immorality and businesses, you know, betting against mortgages that you own and hoping they fail or something like that. That's immoral. But economics, you know, the market will dictate whether these things work or not. And time and time again, these timed exclusives do work. Yeah. Flea Dog wants to know what our favorite gaming peripheral of all time is.

I don't know. I remember getting Super Scope 6 when I was a kid for Christmas. And I really just wanted it to play with it outside. And that's what I did. I just had like a cool little bazooka that I can like shoot fake enemies with. I don't know. I mean like the NES Zapper. It was very, uses very limited like two games.

But generally I don't. really care much for peripherals at all. So the answer is like none. I would I'm fine with the controller. I want a controller. I want to play games with the controller. I want gimmicks. Yeah, I mean for me the guitar hero controller definitely specifically the guitar hero three controller man I fucking love that thing. But besides that I gotta give a shout to the transfer pack that came with Pokemon Stadium so that you could you know hook your your your Pokemon game board game up and use your your Pokemon in the system which was like fucking mind-blowing. And also

had a mode where you could play Pokemon on the TV which was super fucking cool. Another shout out the Super Game Boy. Oh, yeah, Super Game Boy. I was going to say Game Boy player as well for GameCube was really cool. Those I wouldn't really consider peripherals. Yeah, the transfer pack I'd say is more

of a peripheral. But that was great. And I mean, the Rumble pack now is nothing. It was very novel back then. First playing with Star Fox was like, holy shit. The Rumble was novel. and and copied, much copied.

Yeah, there were some good ones that added and some ones like the expansion pack on N64. I was like, this is such bullshit. But it is a good idea. I'm surprised that it's a good idea and that you can do more with a game and let your developers figure out ways to extract more out of a system

that doesn't have the horsepower. It did it at the start. I'm surprised actually that PS4 and Xbox one are both so closed. I'm surprised that there's no way to expand them because it would make them live longer, but that's all so complicated. Final question in the day.

Craig the human asks, when do you think we'll see redesigns of the Xbox 1 and PlayStation 4? Yeah, this is a common question. I don't know that you're going to see them quickly, but you have to remember that the redesign of PS3, let's see, 6, 7, 8, 9. So it took like three years for the PS3 to redesign. We're probably going to be in the same place for PS4. They don't redesign them just to redesign them. They redesign the consoles typically to make them cheaper to manufacture, and then they can drop the price,

or they can keep them static if they want, but it's mostly to, like when you look at PS3, the way it started and then PS3 slim, and then the third PS3 slim, the third PS3, like the forming grill one is like a third or a fourth of the size of the original PS3.

It's all about like getting everything down and compiling it into as little as possible to save money. If PS4s are being already sold, you know, hand over fist and they're already making a profit off of them, then it might not be worth the R&D to make them. The imperative might not be on them to do that unless they can shave more money off,

but since they just dropped the price of the PS4 as it is now, I will not expect to see a new PS4 until they're ready to drop the price again. And I don't think that's going to happen until next year or the year after. I think another thing there, too, is the fact that they use the new versions to kind of promote, to get another spike in system sales, you know, with Uncharted 4 coming out, I don't think they need any other reasons to have a spike. Like, that is going to sell systems from that type of stuff. Yeah, absolutely.

I do think, though, that depending on what Nintendo does with the NX, announcing that at E3, I think that that could somehow influence. both sides Xbox and PlayStation to have redesigned things just to kind of steal the thunder a little bit from Nintendo. If they do announce the system, this is very, if they do announce a system that's more powerful than... Yeah, I mean, the rumor is that it'll be at least as powerful. I don't think it would be more powerful. That'll be really awesome if it was. That would be really extraordinary.

But, yeah, I think actually the... I find the Xbox One personally to be quite inelegant. It's fucking massive. It's heavy. the brick is not even inside of it I don't understand how these two somewhat comparable consoles in terms of power one is like got everything inside

including the power and is half the size of the other one that's heavier in it so I think that I want to see what the Microsoft engineers being very smart people what they can do to make that thing smaller and lighter and get that brick inside the system so you don't have this freaking massive thing seeing outside your TV I think that you'll see a redesigned Xbox One

before you see a redesign PS4 ladies and gentlemen That's the kind of funny games cast, that topic brought to you by LuteCrate. Would you classify yourself as a geek, gamer, a pop culture nerd, then this is the subscription box for you. For less than $20 a month, you get $6 to 8 items of gamer and pop culture licensed gear, apparel, collectibles, unique one of kind items, and more. Make sure to head to lukerate.com slash KF Games and enter code KF Games to save $3 on any new subscription. Every month, there's a different theme, and all items are curated around that theme. Basically, Luke Crate's like a friend who knows what you love and surprises you with an awesome present every month.

You have until the 19th at 9 a.m. Pacific to subscribe and receive that month's crate. And when the cutoff happens, that's it. It's over. So go to lukecrate.com slash KF Games and intercode KF games to save $3 on your new subscription today. Colin. Tim. Thank you very much for being here. Oh, thank you for having me. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being here.

And Cisco, I love you. We love you, Sisko. And I love everyone else out there. Did you see this? Well, I've seen him tweeting out. Recently, he tweeted at me. And he was just like, how come you didn't say I love you? I was like, what are you talking about?

He was like, your sign off. And games got something. I didn't even realize that that was like a thing. And a whole bunch of people responded like, yeah, I don't feel loved. No, know that we love you, especially you, Cisco. Yeah, especially. No that we especially love you.