Shutdown Fullcast - TALKING IMPORTANT VIDEO GAME NEWS, with Matt Brown

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

Welcome to Buford Palms High School! You read that right: We imprisoned Matt Brown of Extra Points for nearly two goddang hours and talked about CERTAIN video game matters NEAR AND DEAR TO THE HEARTS OF OUR HOSTS AND AUDIENCE pretty much the entire time Learn why Matt's wife says he has "Nick Jr. energy" Holly shares her personal struggles with one particular aspect of the game Spencer and Jason discuss their experiences with roster building Taking the opportunity of having our favorite Brazilian blogger in the building to check in on our boy Bolsonaro's latest hospitalization What age is appropriate for introducing one's children to THE GAME? How to activate Alito Mode™ in College Station This week's theme song arranged and performed by Wes Hunt Follow Jason's work and upcoming book-related appearances on Vacation Bible School, Shutdown Fullbooks, and elsewhere at jasonkirk.fyi Find Holly and Spencer writing and chirping at channel-6.ghost.io, if you dare Listen to Ryan's other, less harrowing podcast, We're Not All Like This, wherever finer podcasts are placed Purchase only the finest Fullcast gear and keep up with our live show schedule at sunny preownedairboats.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lightning round. Will you be able to change helmet manufacturers, i.e., if I start with Riddle, can I change to anybody else? Can you name five helmet manufacturers? I'm just going to say yes. Sure. Wish? Am I allowed to name hockey helmets? Sure. We can. Bower, there. There we go. Okay. Can you tell me, and is Texas Southern in the game? No, no. I'm sorry here. Can we change, if you start as an Adidas school, can you change to a Nike school? I don't think that will be allowed. They should honestly, as a humanitarian reason, they should allow that.

No, but hokas. Hocas are on. Will the game have correct lighting based on respective time zones? The game will have no light. That is true. There was a press release about this later, this, ever. Everything is in total darkness. It's, um, yeah, nightlight mode. Yeah. It's a creeping big ten influence.

Is the snap count a clap, a set hut, or different sound effect? Reverb fart. Jesus. Reverb fart. It's actually the wild eep sound from your old Apple 2E. Uh, that's right. Or the, the, the modem dial-up sounds too, I think if you're playing with P. I want that sound, I want that, like, I want that YouTube, uh, YouTuber sound effect.

That's just the guy going, oh! That would be nice. Here's somebody that wants to know. Will you be able to buy this game as a physical release in Australia? Or will it be digital only? How did the phrase physical release in Australia make it through your spam filters? Yeah. I'll show you some physical release.

If I wanted a physical release in Australia, radio edit. All ecclesiastical authorities of mine, please stop listening to this podcast. podcast. Will there be high school all-star games like the Under Armour All-American game or Elite 11? Yes. Surprise. I don't know. Can you change? Can you add chrome helmets during your dynasty run? Only at Penn State. People forget this. Oh my God. When will they add Division 2 schools? Next month. don't forget that they promised don't forget to tell them that they promised this

that they promised and you're entitled to this that's a consumer um and what is the coolest thing you have noticed about Troy your username

proximity to great wolf lodge bitch they got a Publix Welcome, to the shutdown, full cast. You are listening to the internet's only college football podcast. I am Spencer Hall. I'm the voice you are hearing right now, the voices that you will hear with me in addition to the melodious tones of my own. Tenor. Tenor, am I an alto or tenor or is that? I don't know. I'm a voice.

And you're also going to hear Jason Kirk. Say hello. And Holly Anderson. Oh. And on the ones and twos, Michael Ray. Server. Serber, we have an interesting stretch goal, I believe, that you and I texted about for future fundraisers and or charitable contributions that we would like our listeners to make.

you are in possession of is that a rickenbocker it's a it's a it's a rickenbocker 330 um and i just i just started playing this charming man on it so much so so often then i remembered i was like yeah spencer probably that is the one song of all the songs he can sing word for word and sound exactly like the recording yeah and i and i think we should we should do at that at some point for stretch goal next this next time that absolutely and we'll also do uh more recent hits like B.B. L. Drizy. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. We'll do more. We've also been playing that one non-stop.

Yeah. It's hard not to. I'm going to get straight to the point here because I don't want to tease the people. It's not what we're here for. It's not who we're here for. What we're here to do is we're going to talk about the game. We're going to talk about the game. And if we need to talk about the game, then we need to talk to the person who has been, I think, more involved in the game than anyone else. That would be extra points on.

Matt Brown, Matt Brown, a former co-worker of ours, back from an unnamed sports site that we were all working with. But more importantly... Happy almost anniversary, guys, by the way. Yeah, thank you. But more importantly, is the mastermind behind extra points, which... Matt, I could try to summarize it, but I'm going to fuck it up. How would you summarize extra points like M.O. and focus?

Ooh, I got it. I got it. Can I introduce Matt? Yes. Matt is the proprietor of a newsletter that serves to make listeners ask Matt why they should pay him for his labor that they're so desperate to get their hands on. It's primary an emotional triggering device for men, if I understand this right? This means it's wildly successful. And also ask him any number of people talk to Matt like toddlers talk to strangers.

like Matt's you should tell me this yeah like I think Matt's Matt's mentions are the equivalent of of mine on a good day and on a bad day it's like did you ever have a toddler just walk up to you in the

in the store and be like I like your tummy this is this is Matt's mentions only imagine all the toddlers are on roids that is almost exactly right it's funny my wife Taylor describes me as having Nick Jr. energy, you know, to someone who is like, like unto an elementary

school game show host, which when I taught elementary school was a very useful, like, personality dynamic. But for, I've unfortunately, I think, cultivated that online where then people feel way too familiar with me or way too entitled to information and then we'll get angry if they are not immediately given extremely specific gaming information, even though, like, Fundamentally, that's not even what I do. What I tell people at conferences is I am trying to make sports business journal for people who listen to this podcast. But instead, you get the equivalent of grown men and running up to you in the mall and going, I'm a space man. Yes.

Yeah, there's some of that. I'm a space man. Why do you charge $8? So I don't have $8. I have one. I'm four. Yeah. There's only instead of four, it's like some human thumb who's in their mid 40s with the, you know, with the, with the, with the, with the, with the, with the,

Fast Pro Shops hat in the car selfie. And what are you going to do? This last year has been an emotional journey for me in communicating and reaching an entirely different kind of audience that I am used to. I think we can we can leave it at that. Yeah. And what it is that people want so desperately from Matt includes a variety of things. They want information on Division III college athletics budgets.

They want information on the future of NIL, but these days, the thing they want from Matt is they want information about the video game, because Matt has established himself as a premier journalist at the forefront of our corner of the Internet's video gaming concerns. And this has, Matt, as I gather, been a pro-and-con sort of situation where it's good for business, but also, like Holly says, you have people who won a lot of things from you. And we are going to talk about the game, but first, I just,

speaking of games, the one that, not to derail, sorry for being all full cast, but the one that I have been locked in on for, I spent all this past weekend playing it. Has anyone played Midnight Suns? No.

Tell me about that. It's like, so XCOM. Do we know XCOMs? Yes. Like turn-based, tactics where you're shooting aliens and stuff it's like that but it's Marvel

you're like leading a team of some X-Men, some Avengers and some of the angsty emo teen characters and they're all bickering and you got and do missions and you kill stuff and then you go back to the house and you try to like do couples therapy for Dr. Strange and Iron Man. You try to get

Spider-Man to talk to Venom about his feelings you try to get magic to talk to anyone like it's it's half of the game is managing these relationships and it is it is a bizarre pairing but the rhythm of it is like as soon as you're like oh that was awesome i you know blade just stabbed a guy and he pinballed off another guy and killed dracula i'm gonna i'm i'm done with this game oh oh are you sure because uh because iron man is scared of the dark so you need to talk to him about that and then it's like okay good i feel really competent and capable you know what i'd like to do i'd like to go pinball

some demons into each other and it's just like this completely addicting rhythm to things that should not go together but i really cannot stop playing it so that is these days when you say the game that's the one that comes to mind for me is this the one you can't get the switch version of uh i'm not sure like they didn't end up putting the switch version out that would not be surprising because it was like a huge commercial flop like it's marvel so it's expensive but the game is so hard to explain here how long it took me to explain it that it was a big it was like it's it's a cult classic even though it came out like two or three years ago um i'm just going to sit over here in my switch play pin and yell yeah but i got it in like all the dLCs for like 30 bucks so i'm gonna keep at

it for a while the only downside is deadpools in it but otherwise it's great you know you know what i like that you know speaking of older games with dLCs that maybe weren't so critically acclaimed and this i think feels like a very spiritually full cast kind of game the thing that i have been playing a lot in the evenings has been the long dark have any of you guys seen that or played that and it's a artsy game right it's kind of it's it is it's a survival horror game and you you you're playing crashes in the middle of the canadian wilderness and your job is to survive and there's no way to win eventually you die but you hunt bears and and and try to you know find discarded hockey sweater so you can survive the colds there's no Twitter

in this world all the electricity is out right so it's not all bad oh that's nice but you just you just explore like northern british columbia and try not to get mauled by wolves and it's just it's there's no winning it's just a matter of of losing a little bit less hard than you did before which feels you know as a son of the midwest a kind of spiritually big 10 kind of existence um i mean but is it like are you like repeating your way through is it like a rogue like where you know it's it's it's not procedural like it's it's the same map so you you you learn okay this is where this cabin is and this is where i can find mushrooms and and this is where maybe the hunting rifle spawns so i'm sure i'm sure if you're the kind of person that had a lifestyle that allowed you to game for 80 hours

over a two-week period and so you can master these things you can fly through it very quickly for somebody like me that has the attention span and like short-term memory of an unmedicated hamster Like, it's all new for me every time that I play, right? And, and, you know, it makes me wish that Canada was real. It's a very, it's a very pretty, pretty kind of game. It's my favorite fantasy world. Yeah, Canada. I quiet Canada without electronics, and I could just sit there and eat my, eat my deer meat, and nobody bothers me.

That sounds great. Tell me about the lore of Canada. They have socialized health care. Ah, yes, that's lore. this is why nobody likes Drake he's from a made-up country that that was the first reason to be clear there are others to be clear anyone else have have recent games on your heart before we get to the game I have been one board away from beating

Mario Wonder for like three months and I can't beat the one board in Mario Wonder it's like the the anti-penultimate board and I've beaten the board ahead of it because I managed to to get a shortcut around it. You've encircled it. I've beaten the penultimate board, but I can't get to the final boss fight in Mario world because in order, I'm in the bonus world.

Like, I'm already off in the bonus world. Like, I beat the regular game. But I am the world's worst platformer. Like, when we, Mario Kart came out and they had the steering wheel that you could just, like, play in mid-air, right? They had the Bluetooth steering wheel. We, I had to completely give up the game.

until they came out with wired Super Nintendo dupe controllers for the Wii. Because when I was trying to steer this wheel, I would just go off the road in both directions, like, all the way down the road. I can't, I don't have fine motor control to enable me to do motion control with any video game controller. And the second to last board in the bonus world in Super Mario or in Mario Wonder is just platforming. It's just jumping from one tiny brick to one tiny brick to one tiny brick. Y'all, when I say I have lost 700 lives, I'm not really exaggerating because that's how

many times I've had to go back down to the regular world and get another 100 lives and come back up. I'm not bad at this game. I'm bad at this one specific thing, and I can't master it. And you've exhausted all available power-ups and boosts of any kind? So this is, um, the, the way the, the way the bonus world is set up is to where, Mario wonder if you've never played it, like completely upended the, the power up system. Uh, and it's so if you could turn into like an elephant and stuff, right? Which is awesome.

Like, I, I really, like, I mostly love what they did with this game. It's, uh, roll tight. Yeah, I love, I love it. I love it. Every time they go back to a side scroller, I, I, I just love it. Like the new Super Mario Bros. They poured it over to the switch. I love it.

So you're saying elephants are bad at jumping from a single brick to a single break. Well, so the problem, the way it's, I won't go into this because I know there's another game that we specifically want to get to that's very near and dear to Jason and Matt's heart. And I know many of our listeners. Oh, take your time. I know many of our listeners as well, but they have set it up to where you can only take, you can only take, really take one power up into this thing because of the way the game is set up. And there are no power ups in the board. um so you only get one fuck up and it's also a vertical level uh with uh so it's like a jumpy bird or one of the yeah and there's and there's lava coming up below you

and so you can't like take you can't take your time and strategize and so like even with muscle memory y'all i played competitive piano for like eight years i can't beat this goddamn board yeah that's kind of was one of the frustrating things about some of the new mario games because they're all definitely made for children and then there'll be one or two things that are like yeah I love that they're hard I was raised on Mario 3 and Mario 2

Jesus I love that they're hard but kill me yeah I think this may be a theme of this particular conversation I don't I don't have that video game dog in me I do not want to persevere through through challenges I do not want to grow

as a person I I just want to win So it's hard for me to listen to this and think like, why haven't you just put the switch through like a television? That sounds deeply frustrated. And this is, I'm in, I'm in what's the equivalent of Star World in other, in other earlier Mario games. So like you can beat all the games in a circle. And but you, in order to to get to the final boss fight, you have to do this goddamn platforming. And it's called it has, it has a cute name.

It's called fluff, puff, puff, peaks special climbing. That's how you know it's murder. That is sinister. I hate it. Like if there's some Mario level and it's called something like, like, like, jickly puff, you know, mascara, God. No, it's going to absolutely fucking destroy you. I'm convinced they do that across multiple languages. They're like, come up with the cutest Spanish words to string together to describe this hellscape.

I'll put it in, I'll put it in chat so you all can see it. But like, so I've gotten to the point where like, every, every, every, like about like once a month or so I'll just get another hundred lives and go back in there and play until my hand cramps and then yell and scream and go on with my life but I have yet to see the end of Super Mario World

and I've had it since I've had it since like November of 2023 oh do you feel that you're making progress is like have you have you had subsequent runs that are getting closer and closer?

I've had, that's the other thing, too. There's no, there's no, and the board is the same every time. It's just that I can't do it. I can't, and this has been a struggle for me in every, in every Mario game there has ever. This is a, what's the one that came before this? 3D world. Odyssey? The one on the switch with the hat?

Yeah, yeah. I want some more of the fucking hat. That's Odyssey. Oh, no way. I see, oh, because it's there. I beat Odyssey, no problem. I've beaten Odyssey like three times, all of it, even the super hard in part, because it never has a thing where you have to jump from one tiny block to another, and you can't

like coast down and correct yourself. And so my jerky, like, completely non-adult fine motor control can play with this. But the stuff where it makes you get tiny and picky, I'm too much of a brute. too surgical of a game yeah yeah yeah I'm a I'm an orthopedic surgeon give me a hammer yes yeah anyway that's that's most I'm I'm you know I'm a game I'm a serious gamer like you guys and it sounds like it as a gamer let me go take a sip of my drink this is what is taken up most of my time and all of my patients this is hardcore dedication if I've ever heard it I've been playing, I've just started Rogue Trader, which is great, because you have to sort of assemble a team.

I like anyone where you have to assemble a team. A team of what? See, this happens in the Warhammer universe, so it's like this 40,000 years in the future kind of dark satire. And so like you get loading screens that say things like, Blessed are the intolerant. Which is also what you get if you play online and you have a mic. It's true. You get that. And I'm trying to assemble the most dysfunctional crew of assholes.

But really, I'm discovering that there's no way to assemble a crew that aren't assholes. So by the time, like Cass Marshall, greatest writer of our time for Polygon noted, you know, listen, I love this game because every character is a complete asshole, including, like, they're all such assholes that by the time you get to the character who is the one who basically, a job requirement for them is like I need a 401k and I need two weeks of vacation a year and I've got to murder somebody like every week or this is just not going to work by the time you get to them they don't seem unreasonable

they seem like somebody with clear needs somebody who will like clock out and leave you alone at times right right like somebody who you go hey listen you may not appreciate it but they get the job done you know that kind of person so

thus far very entertaining I'm not far enough in it where I have gotten properly obsessed with it yet but that's on the way This is another excom style game right Like turn by turn by turn There's a lot of that Like imagine if if Baldersgate had no sex

A lot more personality dysfunction Right And a lot more sort of like imperial satire There's a pent up Balders Gate Yeah yeah exactly Provo Balders Gate All right Provo Balders Gate would be amazing

You would roll And it would be like Would you like to exchange email addresses Would you like to attend a church meeting of sorts A powerful chocolate of red soda Would you say Spencer That your professional experience in digital media Has prepared you for a game

Where everybody is an asshole Or has it is it difficult Because some of these assholes appear to actually be like competent yeah they're confident like some of them can like definitely if you need somebody killed you can get someone killed that's where it's very different from online media because really the most you can do to somebody in online media has blocked them that's it you can't actually murder them

nor do they generally request to be murdered right they're like oh I'm going to kill you it's refreshing to play in a scenario where somebody says that and then they do it yeah so I mean we can think of some people that might be willing to kill others through disease, but not deliberate murder action. Via like casting uncleanliness on themselves and then sharing it with others. Cast uncleanliness. You've cast unclenliness.

Like going into the restroom, coming back out with poison. And then touching the Cheetos, for example. I was a hypothetical. I went to Harvard and what I learned is that you shouldn't wash your hands. It's a big, big soap conspiracy. Yeah.

Spencer, in this game, so you're like, assembling sort of a found anti-family, right? Like, it's like you're, you're, you're plucking members from different factions, right? But, and it's, there's no one, no nice people in this universe. So you're just assembling like a found. That's right. It's a family that works, a found family that works like a family. The transfer portal is open and threw it for the filth of the universe.

And if you say, I would really like somebody who is up to the standards of this program, congratulations, there are no standards. You just have to get shit done. with the people you have. It sounds like we're playing the same game, right? Like it's five rounds of tactics, but the one I'm playing is completely wholesome and the one you're playing is completely not, right?

We're playing the total opposite styles of the same game. Yes, we are, except mine is fun because, I'm sure yours is fun. The reason mine is fun is because every time I think I have made the most toxic workplace imaginable, I discover a new floor, a new tier of toxic workplace. But now we're talking about Yes, folks.

So Spencer, I just have to know, there is a sister of battle in this game. How is she? Is she one of the worst? Annoying. Holy God. All right, that's my girl. The literal, holy Christ, she is annoying. All right, let's go. Yeah, absolutely.

Is she trying to convert you to anything? Yes, I would so much rather, I would so much rather deal. Like I said, I would so much rather deal with the murder elf the murder space elf because the murder space elf only wants blood

and you know what I can get you blood does she like nag and tattle if you say anything it's just like don't ever it's a lot like life eventually you go you know what

I'd much rather deal with the criminal because go Gators yeah I'd much rather deal with the criminal because I can satisfy a criminal's needs you know an idealist i'm never ever going to be done with an idealist there's

something to that even on my serious professional beat if you just so matt it's it in a spaceship so further again there's more provo for you right again notice by the way we're all playing games where apparently the only victory is is not dying or there is no victory this is adult gaming you want to know real hooping real hooping is playing a video game this is adult gaming you're describing animal crossing yeah it's just dead there's no Just that. Capitalism. I thought the new Animal Crossing was very good at like sneakily making you despise the Amazon-like company that controls it all.

Oh, Nookko, yeah. Oh, man, you made up a lot of songs about how you were going to put Tom Nook in a wood chipper. You want to get radicalized. During early pandemic. Play Animal Crossing in the early weeks of the pandemic. Just emailing Nintendo. Like, are you sure you can't go anywhere? When you can't leave your house and all you can do in the game is pick up stuff.

sticks. That does sound realistic. All I can do is pick up sticks. I live in a hut and I owe. That was Matt learning woodworking. Yeah. Oh, God, I forgot about that. Yeah.

No, my God. That's literally it. You made beautiful stuff. No, I remember you mean beautiful stuff. We still, your cutting board came from Matt Brown woodworking industries. Yeah, that's a good reminder. I need to get back to it because I,

I see the table saw whenever I pull into the garage. I'm like, oh, I should go, I should do that more instead of tweet about games. Instead of my job. Instead of my job, right? Like, again, that's part of why the Canadian wilderness fantasy is, is attractive, right? There's so many trees.

There's so much wood. There's so much hardwood here. I don't have to use this bullshit pine that's going to gum up my saw and everything. Like, I can, I, yeah, that's no one to bother me, but bears, then maybe I do want to get bald and die. Like, you know, that'll be, it'll be a good ending. Well, yeah, I mean, the wisdom of social media taught us you'd rather be around a bear than a man who would disagree with that that's true

pendulum castle that's what it was the eighth superstar road board in new super mario brothers u deluxe which is the dumbest name for any video game other that was another one where all the things you had not only were all the blocks you had to jump on like single blocks but they're donut blocks so they're gonna fall right out from under you oh man fuck donut blocks oh at least they i actually think they babied it a little bit because in this game unlike in games when I was a whippersnapper the donut blocks respawn which you did not

get in my day sound delicious oh the inside of Homer Simpson's brain I know that's what's kind of spinning around my head the hardest course in every Mario Kart it's sparkly sparkly rainbows oh yeah the fucking ice cream bridge well one of the things I was speaking of Mario Kart that I've grown to appreciate is the new expansion which deviates a little bit from like Don't Up Paradise and everything It's like, do you want to go drive through Manila? Do you want to drive through Tokyo or Paris? Yeah, yeah.

And they finally gave you a good Rainbow Road, which the original Mario Kart 8 left out. I think there's multiple rainbow roads. I got a few things about this. There's multiple Rainbow Road, but they all sucked in the original, in the original release of the game. They did not have the original

and they did not have the good one, which is the Mario Kart 64 one. That was the best one. You can drive through Berlin. just like the Red Army baby the Sydney the Sydney board is hard this brings us to my game

Hearts of Iron 4 yeah let's fucking go I found out at a bar two weeks ago Serbs is a hearts of iron guy so let's get ready to nerd the fuck out what is hearts of iron and it doesn't have Mario in it so I don't know what it is it's the World War II sandbox

it should have more okay with the Sonic game is this the one where you can like on super hard mode play as like Ireland or Brazil or some bullshit and sure. Oh yeah, sure. You can play as Ireland in World War II. You can play as Costa Rica. Oh, no. And you can

you can thrive. I think Jason and I both agree that Ethiopia is the most cursed and fucked way to try and start the game considering it literally kicks off everything. They're like, they're built to lose to start the gameplay.

Yeah, if you start as Ethiopia, you have Italy like bearing down on you. That is the first event of the entire thing and you have to like scrap together something to survive. But they'll lose eventually. So that part's if I were to describe this to a listener who was unfamiliar with hearts of iron, I would describe it as the World War II sandbox game where you might be able to dominate through a series of skillful moves with even the smallest or most underpowered country. Like it's it's possible to just alternate history yourself out of like your friendships and family relations

by spending years trying to get Slovenia to a position of dominance in the EU, right? This looks a bit. Yeah, yeah, essentially. I mean, the real appeal for me of this game is that it has like surprisingly a huge community, like mod community. And some of some of the mods are insanely fun. Like there's a fallout mod that I haven't played, but I have watched a stream. on before that looks really really fun so it's just like essentially turn-based fallout um on on on like

a global scale uh which is pretty cool um there's some that are really dumb like the millennium don mod is like essentially starts right before 9-11 and then it's just like how many satellite nukes can we all build um uh in which the game ultimately like eventually always falls into like all right well i'm just gonna i'm just gonna i'm just gonna i'm just gonna drop a lot of nukes because like eventually it gets to 1945 and you have 750 nuclear weapons again that's realistic yeah yeah it's fairly realistic so like the game is it's so the logistics of it are so hilarious you're just smashing spreadsheets together so like it does sound like any you know a a a fruitful framework that you could i've seen the tolkien mod um like someone did a world war

one mod like it could support any there there's one extremely nerdy uh mod called Darkest Hour which is just a it's literally just like a history mod like every 10 seconds in like speed three there's like five speeds you can run through um but like every like 10 seconds in speed three there's like a seven paragraph uh historical event that comes up that you just pause the game and read i think i played like i think i did like a three week thing with that one one time because I stopped for every single like pop-up that happened in the game. If I, server, I have a question.

How absolutely fucked up is like a Balkan Hearts of Iron server? Like if I like where Balkan players are playing like would it be the most violent threat laden thing you've ever seen? Oh yeah, it's pretty fucked like I there's a I think there's a

really like famous um hoi four streamer who's like a member of like the russian military like active member active duty member um and he like i mean yeah like those it's pretty fucked up like there's some places in there's probably some streams in europe that i haven't like that i haven't ventured upon because i'm not in those corners of the internet but yeah man that's probably not great it just seems It just seems like the kind of mod where you go, oh, this is weird. Serbia is the most powerful nation in Europe. Huh.

You've made this whole game. So Serbia is just huge and rich and dominant. That's crazy, man. There are very, very funny screenshots of like people play it all the way through the game. And it's, yeah, the whole world is Iceland now. Like, the in-game screenshots are. That would be fine. That would be totally fine.

Yeah, there's far worse options. I think the meta-joke is, my two favorite. I was going to say, I think the. I think the meta joke is that like every one of those where like you take over the entire world the option appears kind of at the end of like be the Holy Roman Empire

Holy Roman Empire of Iceland Question mark I'm I have my other monitor right now pulling up a bunch of these screenshots because I've never played this game but it definitely feels like something that I would vibe with and I just see I just have a big picture pulled

up here that just says Brazilian Russian Russia, question mark. Sure. Sure. And it's, but it's bordered by, yeah, it looks like, it looks like Iceland, and it looks like some Chinese province I hadn't heard of that in this world takes over Japan. Like, I'm into it. In six months, in six months, Matt's going to take a week off and he's just, he's going

to come back and be like, I created the Holy Samba Empire, Brazil overall. God, that sounds great. Right? It would, I mean, it would make, we'd all be a little bit more beautiful. It'll be a little bit more chilled out, I think. It wouldn't be so bad. We'd have a lot more fun. Yeah.

Yeah. So if you don't see extra points published for a little while, it's because I'm playing the game. And by that, it means I've gone down an alternate history rabbit hole to conquer Poland with Brazil. It's a alien. Oh, Germany. Who's got seven to one now? Yeah. It is really satisfying to fuck Germany up in this game.

Oh, wow. And it's not that hard. It's really not that hard. Well, Serber, you're really. good at the game because the game well we talked about this too the game is like the

they're the really annoying thing about this game it's all about supply like it is just like there there are it's it's tile based like you capture tiles at a time and like

there's a strategic way to kind of cheese the game out of like because Germany can be annoying so like ultimately it's like huh no

hot takes by server blosterous hot take they can be annoying I'm sorry I'm sorry Germany the New York financier

I would say a time or two in the past century or so Germany has been problematic Who among us? Yeah, but I mean They're pretty easy to be As long as you don't like get bogged down Trying to fuck with Italy

Because you can get stuck in the Alps But like the most fun part of the game It's like playing as Japan or any Asian nation whatsoever Like because they're like it there's what like if you have a good modded opened up version of the game not vanilla like you are you're looking at like 30 different options of who to play as um in as uh and there's a lot of like there's a lot of ways for that to go um and you're learning so much about like the half of that war that we in america you know yeah usually uh our education

systems overlook my my favorite my two favorite play through is where china surviving japan and then taking over Germany. And then I started as Panama and I took over most of Texas. Got to Mexico waited for, got to Mexico waited for Pearl Harbor and said, let's show! And then they're like, fuck you, go away. Sorry, sorry. That's beautiful.

I want an SEC with Panama in it. It's time. It's time. Davey Crockett approves. Yeah. What was it like Millard Fillmore or was a Franklin Pierce that? We have one of those, like, weird dipship presidents that tried to invade, I feel like. One of the ones from Tennessee.

It's usually one of the ones from Tennessee. Yeah. If there's a small invasion that failed that no one's heard of. There were like three or four attempted Scottish colonizations of Panama, and they just all... Really? You're trying to tell me a bunch of people in wool failed. Yeah, yeah. The world's palest people just doinked right off of Panama over and over.

All I see is natural success ahead of us. that's sweaty that's right yeah like everyone else has a colony why why why can't we and well there's yeah there's it turns out there's a reason stay put stay put i think the only successful scottish colony at all uh in that respect are the cayman islands which very scottish because they're like they manage to wheedle themselves into a place where they can play cricket there's no taxes country music is wildly popular and um and everyone gets skin cancer so you know It's mostly roses, a couple thorns. Actually, the most successful Scottish colony is the moon.

Neil Armstrong, look it up. That's true. That's true. The moon is Scottish. That's right. It's very white. Food sucks. It's very cold.

There's been golf has been played on it. I didn't see the signs of the secret colonization by the moon of Scotland. God. oh mona scott oh sorry it's summer major league baseball's in full swing and there's one app for you if you want last minute deals on major league baseball games and that's game time dot co that's right game time dot c oh i'm looking at the app right now and i'm picking out america's team really the kansas city royals uh and at kaufman stadium just in a couple days there's tickets available for sixteen dollars and then

Well, I don't want to up the stakes too much here, but let's go to next week. It looks like they're playing the Chicago White Sox. There are tickets available right now for $3. You could see a Major League Baseball game in Chicago for $3. What stadium you ask? Not important. It's in Chicago. But GameTime.co is not just for Major League Baseball games, even though you can get great deals for that.

You can also get great deals for concerts, football games. Those are going to be coming up pretty soon. You can find them on GameTime.co. I used GameTime.C.O. to purchase last minute tickets for an Olivia Rodrigo concert. Tyler Childers did not show up at mine. That would have been awesome, but it was awesome nonetheless, and GameTime.com.com made it super easy. I got my parking through GameTime.com.com.com made all of that so easy, and one of the greatest concert experiences I've ever had in my entire life. And I'll be using them again. In fact, I'm seeing a little bit called the beaches in late September. And where did I get my ticket? That's right. Even ahead of time. I didn't wait until the last minute because GameTime's not CEO has you covered then as well. That's what I love about it. Whenever I want to get a ticket for an event, whether I heard about it months before and procrastinated to no end and have left myself in a lurch, you can save up to 60% of buying last minute for sports, concerts, comedy, theater, anything else.

So take the guesswork out of buying MLB tickets with Game Time. You can download the GameTime app, create an account, and use code Fullcast for $20 off your first purchase. Terms apply. Again, create an account and redeem code F-U-L-L-C-A-S-T for $20 off. Download game time today. Last-minute tickets, lowest price, guaranteed. Those aren't the games we're here to talk about, folks. We're here to talk about the game. Discuss. Open it up. I mean, it sounds like they have. I think so. Yeah. I think so. you know because i mean tails is down for anything we know that this this comes from my my favorite sonic the hedgehog thread uh and read it from six months ago what are your sonic polycules

because everyone has a favorite the one you the ones you ship yeah are you are you allowed to read any of those um i feel like my understanding of sonic lore stopped somewhere in 1997 i understand the cast of characters. At which point you had what? Sonic knuckles and tails. There was Dr. Robotnik and I vaguely, there was like a crocodile I think in the Sega CD but you know I wasn't rich so I couldn't afford the Sega CD

so I don't know what any of those characters were and then I just There's also Sonic with a There's Sonic with a gun. Is that also Sonic? Oh, there's what? Texas Sonic. Yeah. Let me Google this. There's there's Attitude Aerosonic somewhere there.

Oh, you're not kidding. I just think everything Anything beyond, like, a Sonic Tales knuckles is just trying too hard. Okay. Those are all plus ones. Yeah. Amy Rose's fan service. I don't appreciate adding a pink hedgehog.

I didn't need a pink hedgehog. I don't even know who that is. They added a pink Sonic. I'm like, don't hand her to me. She's got eyelashes. I bought a game gear for this. Yeah. Or Joe Flacco.

I regret Googling Sonic with a gun. Oh, yeah. Google Sonic with images on. I don't know what I was expected. With one exception. What's that? Let me see if I can find this for you guys. This is one of my favorite.

Do you guys remember when we had blogs and there was just this special Fridays when we had blogs and Friday was always just kind of excuse to put up whatever? Yeah. In 2020, Polygon did one of my favorite

things that's ever been down on the internet, and I'm just going to drop in here if you look at, which is the Polygon staff all tried to draw Sonic from memory. Just because they were bored. How'd that go? If you're

Julia Lee, it went really well. Everybody else, why does this one have teeth? This one's got a wagon. I like Karen Hahn just drew a hedgehog, which I also appreciate. Stick to your strengths. But a number of them have teeth.

Yeah, it's like, what if the whoever drew the Louisville Cardinal also did Sonic the hedgehog, but made the teeth sharp? Yeah, I mean. Anyway, at our next live show, can we draw Sonic from memory? Yes. Oh, 100%. Either do that or in the dark, in the planetarium. Yeah.

I'm sorry. I keep interrupting and we're here to talk about the game. It's okay. I can confirm. It is too bad. I do get this question sometimes. Sonic is not in the game. Potentially, somebody that could be incorporated in at a later date, licensing was very expensive. So not included in this edition. That's disappointing, but it's good to know ahead of time

before I purchase this game. I'm here to help. Actually, I've just discovered there is a mod because go on the game that we are here to talk about of course the game all the listeners want to hear about yeah uh of course there is a sonic the hedgehog mod for civilization six yes um it looks like uh it's you can play as characters i never heard of these are all um characters for young people but but yeah someone someone took it on themselves to put in the game what what is the sonic the hedgehog unique building is it like a chili dog stand is it is it is it is it i

I'm scraping here for my sonic lore knowledge. Is it a geographical feature more than anything? Is it an Emerald Hill with a loop to move in it? Yeah, that's what I was going to say. I would make it a loop and it makes sure you like gain all your warriors gain moves or whatever. Yeah, I would make it like a natural feature. Is this the Eggman Empire mod or is there more than one Sonic mod? So, yeah, there's also, I know there has to be, there has to be at least a mod where from the Sonic Underground.

universe, a.k.a. the worst fucking cartoon ever made. If you want to see like the worst production cartoon to air on network television, it's the Sonic Underground universe, which is one where where Dr. Robotnik wins. And there's this like, there is this like alternate universe where everything is like very dark. And they made, and I'm pretty sure they contracted it out to like a Korean cartoon studio that had no idea what Sonic was. or what the story was supposed to be. So it's very, it's deeply confusing. It's French.

Like, is it French? Yeah. Yes. Yes. When Sonic started it was, it was like edgy Mario, right? And then Sonic got addicted to edgy and just kept getting more and more edgy until there was a gun involved.

And Mario just stayed not worrying about what the kids hanging outside the mall thought of him. And Mario remained cool, and Sonic became less cool. I wish Twitter had been around for that, though, because somebody would have just tweeted out with a question mark at the end. Sonic with the blicky? Mike screenshot. Sonic got that thing on him.

Sonic got frizzed up by baby gronk. So, Matt, when you play six, are we, is the Brazil taking over the, or five? I can't recall if you're a six or a five person. I have them both. I have them both. I don't play as Brazil very often because, again, like we've discussed, I'm stupid. I'm not terribly good at games.

And if you're going to play as Brazil, just like in real life, Brazil not really a country built for military conquest. It's there for tourism, and it's there to beat everybody culturally. And it means that you have to figure out how to build stuff in the jungle. I don't have time for that. Oh, folks, if I can split zone you for a second, because every comic book is somebody's first. Matt is of Brazilian descent. on I believe your mom's side. Which is why we keep bringing up Brazil.

We're not speaking on Brazil. No, this is true. I do have the world's most gringo-ass name in the universe. But I am a Brazilian citizen. Oh, lucky. Yeah. It's a good thing to have right about. Well, you think that, but Brazil is just speed running America.

No, but you get the entertaining one. We, you get the fun one. Can we just talk about our boy for a while? I was going to say, you've unlocked, you've unlocked the charismatic leader, Jair Bolsanaro. Is he in the hospital as of this recording? Like, what time is? Like, uh, is he, well, it's, well, he is he, on June 4th? Is he in the hospital right now?

He might be. God, that man loves. 20 years ago, the internet would have had a website that would just tell you yes or no. It's like a single splash page, like Bolsonaro Hospital. Yes, no. That man loves Jello. It's the only explanation. I does not want to prepare it himself.

The crazy thing about him, and I have learned about our countrymen here, is that the place that he loves going and the place where, like, a certain kind of rich Brazilian goes is always Orlando. It's always. It's always. If you go to Disney, the two biggest. Yeah, I think we're also always, they're Brazil and Japan, always. Two biggest expat populations in Orlando. Brits, Brits who are convinced that they have discovered a tropical paradise. And Brazilians who are like, I like going to Disney, hitting Epcot and getting bombed off beers.

And shopping. Yep. Yeah, you just unlocked a core memory for me because we would go visit my grandparents and go to Disney in like the off holidays, like not when it was super crowded. And it would all, no matter when we went, it would always be mobbed with school. groups from Brazil and Japan always because they carried flags this is why I mean know this sure sure it is it is the strangest thing to me right because I've never growing up anywhere or lived anywhere with much of a Brazilian community you know when we immigrated we ended up in Ohio where it's like all the I was gonna say

not much of a no every person of an Ohio diaspora no every Brazilian in Ohio is either somebody I'm blood relatives to or Andy Berrajao like and everybody else moved to Florida and they moved to Orlando and they moved to Orlando like Miami I can understand right that's kind of like the capital of like wealthy South American money but and there's a lot of Brazilians there but it's all Disney it's the it's the it's the it's the strangest thing so I think Bolsonaro has like a vacation home there in like one of the suburbs vacation hospital I wonder if it's a different thing with him I wonder if it's he's drawn to the swamp lands nearby in hopes of contracting something via mosquito or whatever he wants like crocodile boxed yeah he's trying to he's trying to he's He's, like, immune to everything at this point. He's got to be chasing diseases. He's got to collect them all, right? Yeah, like the Mr. Burns immune system.

Yeah, he does have every single germ is jam-packed into the door, into his body, and cannot enter, right? Because they're all there. That would have been a nice thing to build into sieve. Yeah, that's unfortunately... Like, like, make body worse, sieve? The sieve of the body. So, who do you're basically just porting this.

Speaking of Epcot, you're just porting cranium command into Siv. So, Matt, if you play this game on easy mode, does that mean playing as a Babylon, playing as a, who is it, it's, fuck, is it Gilgamesh? Where you get the, you get the technology bonus every time you do, I'm going to have a Eureka moment. Yeah, that's, that's the one. You end up with crossbows while everyone else has slingshots. That's exactly it, because I've figured out what the playthrough is. Like, okay, I got to go, I got to go kill these barbarians by turn four. I got a bee line to pottery.

And then if you do it, right, it's the late medieval ages and you've got fighter jets. I'm like, okay, this is now, now this is the game I could win because the sieves that are built around winning, not through diplomacy, but through like careful cultivation of managing your economy like Australia or Venice or Brazil. I ain't got time for that. That's too much math. I went to a public school. You know who is the easiest deity difficulty victory? of all is Canada. What?

Because they have a thing where no one can declare surprise war against them, because who would do that to Canada? It's like one of their very few powers. So to declare a war on Canada, you have to go through this whole process, and the computer just doesn't do that process. So they'll be declaring surprise wars on each other all game long, and you're just in your little utopia,

just building up, building up. You don't have to build a single military unit all game long if you're Canada against the computer, even on the hardest difficulty. And then you just lean in on diplomacy, buy up all the city-states, which in this game means make them all vote for you to elect you like the Canadian dictator of the world without firing a single shot. It's like a guaranteed victory. You know what I love about Canada too, for those that do not play Siv-6 very much. Can we all, can you all guess what Canada's unique building is, the one great cultural achievements that the Canadians can produce that no other civilization can?

I can't think of a real-life Canadian building. it's it's not one that there is a single example of it's one that there's a there's a lot of is it a velodrome close close it is the hockey rink yo that is unique yeah you plop it down on tundra and you're like boom tundra culture yeah amenity it gives you extra food somehow I don't really know how that works but beer I just swallowed the most god-awful geographic joke so proud of myself. Thank you. That is a good one. So who do you normally mess around with that? Because I, I, I, I, I, you strike me as somebody that's, that's capable of winning in every way, but, but, but maybe enjoys the, the, the conquest a little bit more. In five, I like, I loved

England, um, which, um, it takes a lot for me to love England, but in five, England was just awesome. Like, you had archers that had extra range. So you could take over your continent pretty quickly. Um, and then you build, they had the best frigates. And so you send, those out to go conquer other continents and meanwhile you had spies to catch up in technology that you fell behind on while building all these military units which is exactly how real england worked just conquering everything and stealing all their knowledge um in six i did six i like korea the most um like they're the actually working for it version of um of sumeria where it's like you have to like they're really good at defense and turtling and like building on hills and

building up these like just super powerful campuses um yeah so even on the highest difficulty you can catch up in um in science pretty quickly and you're going to have like really good defenses so then you just get to a point where you're like oh look i have stealth bombers first now out of nowhere i'm taking over the world who who's the worst like right now is it is it like is it scotland is it georgia's really bad yeah scotland's really bad georgia is also really bad. Georgia of the country. Georgia of the country, their thing is like their walls add faith. They're like, who gives

the fuck? No. Who cares? Who cares about either of those things? My faith is about tearing down walls. Read the Bible. Dork. Yeah, that's right. That's right, brother. Norway is really bad unless there's a lot of water. And if there's a lot of water, which I mean, again, this is realistic. There's a lot of water, Norway's

in hell, but they're Vikings, basically. Congo can be really, really, really hard. I think I've ever played with Congo. They can be super powerful, or they can be really hard. They can't found their own religion, but they can benefit from everyone else's. Yeah, I think Norway without water is the hardest. They literally have nothing special to go on.

Russia is probably overall the best. They get tons of extra culture, and they can do some, like, gamey, hacky things to have, like, super invincible horse invaders. Yeah, they have, it's like a cavalry, cavalry unit, right? like the rifles and horses and this is the problem I've had to do so much serious professional journalism that I haven't had time to do the things that I want to be doing which is now I think now playing multiple games

where we can have a global samba domination um we're gonna get it done one game one game I know all this all this filing open records requests and talking about division two budgets when when really Argentina is still there taunting me To be raised Like it should be

This is what my mother would want me to be doing with my time I think is definitely Argentina is just sitting there taunting you You're just looking over your shoulder And gritting your teeth As soon as I get this email out Soon as soon as I get Kirby Smart's contract It's over for you guys

No that's It's not what it is Because that does take a long time No I recognize that look We've been talking about this for a while I know this probably isn't the actual game That people really wanted to be talking about here since you're going to bring me on so um you want to talk metal gear solid

yeah always i wondered when we'd finally get to it one of the things that i've really appreciated about being a father is that my kids are too young to play metal gear solid right now but they are not too young to be to have to be aware of some of these things like i've taught estella when she sees the snake at the zoo or in class or in a book to then immediately do the snake without really understanding what it is which I'm sure it's going to make me a lot of friends I think with the other dads

they've learned to hide under cardboard boxes and kind of like you know sneak around I don't I don't know when you begin to talk to your family about Metal Gear like I think if you ask me right now to like explain Revolver Oscelot I'm not sure I could do it oh I so with my kid her favorite things in fiction are women

killing men or animals killing men so in the most recent metal gear um well congratulations on your bobby yoga yeah in the final country star jane league completed metal gear uh you you had one of your friends was a dog with a knife so anytime i took the dog with a knife on a mission i'd be like hey hey come watch come watch this dog fuck some guys up she loved that so my sons are both i think they both got it I think it's testament to Hideo Kojima's massive idiot genius that both of my sons have separately having played some Metal Gear games multiple both came up to me and said

Dad, is Hideo Kojima a genius? And I was like, yeah, he's probably a genius. And I've had them both come up to me and go, I think the person who made this game is very stupid. And I'm like, I think he has all. also that. Yeah. So they firmly understand the whole dynamic. I think Kojima has been teaching us about brainworms since like 1997. Inadvertently and intended like like yeah. Like there's entire plot lines about brain worms of which he was afflicted. You're you're you're not wrong. It really is

kind of perfect right? Because if you don't want to engage with anything on a beyond a surface level and think this is a game where I can move. an entire military, attached balloons to an entire military base while listening

to like 1980s rock in my, in my cassette here and murk people with with dog meet the dog

and not do anything else, you can do that. If you want to try to engage with some like quadruple crossing you know,

global thriller, I guess you can, but none of it makes a lick sense. I never thought before about frat bro metal gear fan.

Like, bro, me and my girlfriend doesn't wear clothes, we just went on to the desert and shot people. It was fucking

awesome. What'd you do? Yeah. I'm gonna fucking know why. You can, that game has more ways to be stupid than any game. It's great because it's like international military conspiracy, you know,

ghost soldiers and, you know, the war never ends. But also you can be like, hey, go hide in that bathroom and the cop and nobody will find you as long as you play an audio tape of a man shitting that you just have for some reason. Like you can play this tape of a guy that'll be like,

hey, are you okay in there? you play the tape, you know, this Russian guy comes up to, if you play the tape, and it's this guy just, and the soldiers are like, have fun with that, and then they leave you alone. It's a game about how smoking cigarettes is the best thing you can possibly

do. That's true. You just skip past boring shit, recover health. Nothing, nothing, it looks cooler than eating an MRE and smoking a cigar and then punching your subordinates. And they're I'm like, thank you, boss. And it's perfect.

Do you want to hang out in a dumpster and smoke weed? Because you're invincible if you're in a dumpster. Yeah, you could put, you can knock someone out, put in them in a dumpster, and then hide in the dumpster with them so their friends can't find either of you. Yeah. Perfect fiction. It's ideal. I watched a clip.

I still watch people because the Phantom Pain has multiple ways to solve the various missions that you do. And Phantom Pain, you can do this. You can get into a Jeep. that you have just dropped on somebody from a great height with a parachute and killed them, then you can get in that Jeep, set off a smoke grenade next to you.

Like you could put a smoke grenade in your Jeep, set it off and drive around and enemy soldiers are like, who's in there? I've spotted a Jeep. No one seems to be in it. It's a documentary, really. I have to imagine this is how war actually happens.

Like how did you lose this? base well you know somebody dropped a playboy and everybody lost their minds and then like one guy came in and blew the whole thing up like this sounds my right so much in metal gear is about people being on the clock like a dead body falls into the middle of the enemy camp and they're like well i don't see who dropped this here i'm gonna go mind my business elsewhere right like you're not paid to find who dropped the body you're paid to be there that's it i'm gonna go be there somewhere else hey listen it's above my pay grade there's a lot of that in metal Gary, a lot of like, poop, not my problem.

No enemy sighted. Just a dead body right here. Seems fine. It's a good way to stay alive. Like, the people that decide that they want to go the extra mile, that they want to go and press the supervisor, they're the ones that are going to... Yeah, they're going to get murked by the dog. Or worse, like, fully extracted.

Yeah, they're going to have to do paperwork or take a balloon ride, like either of those things. They're abducted into your floating cult. Yeah. Also, I think it has one of the most realistic, labor markets in any game, because you can take anyone into your organization. You can just go kidnap them, bring them back to the base, and they're like, oh, whatever, it's a hench's job. Like, it's very in keeping with Ironman's understanding of villain henchmen.

Like, these guys are crazy. I'm just going to go work for this other guy, right? I got kidnapped, but let's see the bright side. Maybe their HR package is a little bit better. You can do that, but it also is like, yeah, this guy you got, he's fucking worthless. He can't do anything. He's like, absolutely. Yeah, like, yeah, I don't even know if we can trust him with like, like, the most rudimentary task because he's going to set something on fire.

Yeah. So speaking of games with labor market stuff going on. Okay, folks. All right. We're there. When we said Matt Brown is here to talk about the video game, obviously we meant the college football video game. So Matt, you have, you have information to, to share with, to share. share with the public about a video game that you know about that you know much more about than

the average person does let's put it that way yes um i i i appreciate this opportunity here to be able to tell everybody about a college a college football game that allows you to run a real program the way that that you want to and i'm talking of course about all american college football that was produced by microsports back in 1991 i believe this is the first licensed collegiate football game a lot of people point to the bill walsh college football games on the sega genesis as the first game those were bootleg as hell those were bootleg as hell that was literally helped create the c lc infuriated people like there were there were no licenses i have a copy of that in my office somewhere um that that's the one where florida state is called tallahasse

yes and because the game didn't have enough disk space for all of the data it came with a bunch of note cards that had everybody's rating on them um and along with like suggested plays for like oh your quarterback has a two in throw power. Have you considered halfback dive? Because they couldn't fit all of that on the cartridge. But this was before then, because it was on, it was on the PC. And this was actually licensed. So you, I've dropped the link here in the chat. If you want to play as Georgia Tech or Maryland or Colorado, you can. It doesn't have all of the, of the institutions. And looking at the game itself, there's no graphics. It looks kind of like an old DOS computer looked like if you, if you were holding down the wrong button when it was

booting up and it had all like the really terrifying DOS like GYs or anything like do you want to overclock your computer but instead it's like do you want to recruit quarterback to Clemson and now it's abandonware so everybody can play it for free if they'd like to waste a little bit of time at work well I like the idea paid for playing this this is so realistic until like recently I like the idea of asking a supercomputer to recruit a Clemson recruit right like it's like let's ask the Kray XMP 4,000, with its vast and unlimited power to compute and solve problems to get a quarterback to Clemson.

I guess Clemson was still kind of good then. This is when Ken Hatfield was like just starting his tenure. I don't know who was. Yeah, before he fucked it up. Before Florida State joined the ACC, I think, right? Like when this was, there was still a little bit more parody. Yes. Yeah.

So there you go. I don't know what happens to that company. I'm sure only good things. But that is probably the most realistic and comprehensive college football simulation available in the market, at least in the near future. 80 teams. That's pretty good for those days. Yeah, for a couple. I could consider this thing came out on five and a half inch floppy.

Yeah. That's not bad. It's got Hawaii. And it has like the little rainbow helmet logo in like 8-bit color. So it's like cyan and like golden rod. It looks pretty cool. That's a beautiful helmet. Sega had college football national championship. I do not know if you remember there was an announcer.

They decided to use a celebrity announcer. It was New York Yankees announcer Mel Allen. That's who they had for college football. And it was very, very, very, like, you know, 16 bit, right? So he'd come on. And in this very phased out voice, you would hear the world's oldest man going, college football's national championship I think I mean

I feel like I rented that from a store once because I don't think I bought it but I I think it was the same announcer they had for like MVP baseball or World Series baseball like the same cartridges only it was talking about Alabama it was like they just had them in the building and they're like hey Mel well you're here can you say like first and 10 for us

they also did that with the Bill Walsh game the announcer in that one was like a NHL announcer It was Don Cherry They couldn't get licenses Because all of the hard drive space Was for his like sports jacket

Let's see I wrote an article about this game a while ago It's wild when you go back And you look at these things And you look at the credits It's like programming done by one dude Like the entire game was made by four people And it was the same guy that programmed like NHL 94

And now you think that to make something for the PS5, you need a programming staff the size of like Honduras, when it used to be able just crank out a game. Ron Barr, who's done the NHL and Bill Walsh College football. That's his name. Ron, thank you for your service. Sadly not Ron Cherry, which is why

that's why in the game somebody accuses a spread formation of being socialist. He's goddamn socialist. Should we talk about? Folks, that was cute. Obviously, that was a misdirection. Of course, we're going to talk about the EA sports game. um so matt when you played nc a 06 the one with like the squiggly lines when the crowd was really loud um as like an ohio state fan did uh did that strike fear into you you know when when they're on the

road in michigan or did you feel like your boys were prepared for that moment i definitely remember already being afraid because if i remember correctly that one had desmond howard on the cover i think there was there was a lot of inescapable michigan iconography everywhere in that game and if i remember right you know i was in college when this came out Was this also the game where when you did Road to Glory, there was a picture of your girlfriend that changed as you became a more high-profile player? Or was that the next year? That was one of the...

This was in the... 2000s EA sports was on some shit. It was like this was... You had in Madden, you had like eugenics going on. It was like your dad... Your dad was a dentist, so you're better at this kind of football or whatever. And meanwhile, the college game was about... like you didn't you didn't go to class enough so you're really cool but you might not make

the team like there was it was a lot of life sim type stuff that was uh like you say with with the dating element there was a lot of that little uncomfortable you know you know what i did appreciate though one thing about 2006 that was that's different from so many other games is that it had an actual like soundtrack it wasn't just marching bands you had the pie tasters the mr t experience you had de la soul um and guided by voices yeah like and and It was phenomenal. A lot of them really, there's stuff that I still find myself less,

bad religion had a song in there. Like, I can appreciate, you know, good on Wisconsin as much as any other Big Ten Coded dad. But I did appreciate that, that brief deviation. The college baseball game as well, for whatever reason, just decided like pop punk bands, emo bands. I have no idea why they associated that with college baseball.

That's where EA slid all of that. Yeah. So I made it. I tweeted about that game a couple years ago, and one of the guys who was on staff for it told me that basically just a couple weeks for the game before they were to be finished, they were like, okay, here's a budget for music, and they let the guys who were on staff pick the music.

And it was in Florida, like it was, I think it was in Tampa, Orlando. So that's why there's a lot of, like, I mean, that's just what was popular then was. And I like the strategy, too, behind the NCAO6 soundtrack. They were like, we wanted it to sound like a college station, like a college radio station. And it very much does. Cohesive in genre, like even if it's not your favorite genre, it's still, you say MVP baseball soundtrack, people know what you mean. You know, it's not like Madden games. They're always just mishmashes of everything.

They paid for train and vain? They paid clash money? Sure. They sure did. Damn. That was a great game. When you don't have to pay for players, you can get a whole bunch of stuff in some of these games. I do remember debaser on this, though.

I do. Yes. And I remember this because, you know, this, yeah, this one had been my freshman year of college. And I grew up in a very, you know, in a home isolated from what would be considered popular culture in a lot of other ways. So this might have been the first time I ever heard Dale O'Sull was from the skin like, oh, this, this, this is, this is way better than the country music station. Yeah, I like this. This was the first time. I just, sometimes you just miss a band.

It's first time I heard lush. Like I had just completely missed lush entire. as somebody who you know kind of knows a little bit about music and totally miss them lady killers lady killers is on the soundtrack

yeah I mean there's there's really only like two yeah I'm gonna put this up into Spotify later I feel like I would enjoy listening to probably all of these but two right now it's yeah too bad they went away from that no effects doesn't hold up all that great

I'll be honest Jeff where it's Parkinstocks skip yeah But the squiggle thing, I didn't call audibles, right? Because, like, you know, in these old play has two games. That's very big ten. Yeah.

That's very big ten. Just run the play. Run the fucking play. I'm going to make you stop it. You know what's coming. I took the Mike Leach approach, right? I don't have time to learn a full playbook. I'm going to learn five plays, and I'm going to do them in my sleep because I'm doing

this instead of going to class. And then I'm just going to try to out-execute you. I'm going to run the slants, the hospital ball over the middle. I'm going to drop back out of the shotgun and do a designated quarterback sprint out the side. I'm going to try a read option. I want to call plays like Urban Meyer essentially and hope that I don't kill my

quarterback, which you could get away with back in 2006. Yeah, before awoke. Yeah, this is an issue that I have in every football game I've ever played and one I will continue to have, which is that I turn into Bud Kilmer the minute I start managing a roster, right? Like, hey,

you guys got a severe concussion. Would you like to, you know, I'll take him cut him. Yeah, no, sorry, sorry,

your scholarship's done, son. Or the thing where it's like, this guy's rated, I mean, I've taken over shitty, shitty football and university,

and this guy's rated a 62. We just got in a freshman rated 63. Bye, 62, you're out here. We got ambitions. Yeah. You can tell me that the 62,

I mean, he might have a higher speed and catch rating and maybe the other, overall is just in, like, academic awareness or leadership. Fuck that. I'm not checking.

Fuck that. You know how bad we were last year? We got to make a bowl. Yeah. Y'all aren't getting me fired. Y'all are not getting me fired. That's what it is. I'm getting fired in real life right now from Blockbuster.

I'm not going to get fired from my game shop too. That's right. Everyone who has ever played a college sports game has become Dion Sanders on the spot. Yeah. Man. Half of y'all. Bye. It was even easier because they took this out later with the NCAA license.

But there was definitely a run in the P. ES2 era where you also had to manage program discipline, right? It wouldn't exactly say like press A to commit white collar recruit crime, but it would be like your star quarterback has not gone to class in three months. Do you discipline him? Nope. Nope. Because I'm changing jobs before the NCAA cops come here.

I don't care if you take scholarships from me. You think I'm going to be a bowling green in six years? No. We're here to win the humanitarian ball. I had a newfound respect for the Vagabond coach. I had a dynasty in like 10 or 11 or whatever the game was and I thought as a challenge

I would just move every year sure like no matter what the record was I'd just pack it up and be like nah you know what I feel like enjoying some tacos we're going to you tip you know and I I really did have a new respect for it though because you start doing the same

bullshit that you see every other coach doing you're just like like yeah I actually I am completely full of shit Yeah, I am going to lie to recruits. Yeah, I am just going to run the stupidest, easiest offense I can. Like, are any of my guys being trained for the NFL? Buddy, my boys aren't being trained for a CDL.

I'm not teaching them shit. I'm not giving them a single job skill. Are they getting an education under me? Yeah, yeah, they're learning how to win and win cheap. They're learning how to get me a better job than this one. That's right. They learned how to make money for daddy is what they're learning how to get me the fuck out of this dump. Yeah, when they were like, because there was a recruiting, like there was a recruiting question too.

Like, you know, stability, I think was one thing where they're like, you know, hey, yeah, you're going to be here and you're like, no, fuck, no. We'll promise you I will though. Yeah. Son, we are born alone and we will die alone. And that's how you will go. Go through this program too. No man is an island except for my athletes. Just me and show.

me and Schopenhauer and Magic Johnson being like, I ain't going to be there. Deal with it. Listen, listen, kid. This is a community college that I created and moved into the Pac-12. You think I'm going to stay here in this fucking desert

with a stand seat 4,000 people and half of them are identical NPC models? Fuck no. This helmet is clip art. Yeah. I need you to know. This rolls always only takes premium

and the tires cost $18,000 a piece to replace. Kid, when you put that jersey on, you should know, I designed it. I'm not sticking around here. I do your laundry. I'm Jim Levitt. I built this program out of a trailer and I'll burn that bitch down if I want to. I will delete you.

Yeah. And also, I might need to. I'm not even changing schools. I am changing save files. This external PS2 memory card has room for two dynasties

and it might be corrupted. I had to mail this fucking memory card to someone in Kansas so they could put your ass in it. I will send you back. I will delete you

because I want to play Final Fantasy 7 later so we are going to just the threat of looking at your virtual fullback your virtual fullback who's like a 63

at middle Tennessee state that you've just taken over and being like son I won't export you to Madden. Damn. I won't even export you to the arena football game that we also got for PS2 for some reason this year.

I will not export you to the Philadelphia Soul. I'll send you to the fucking Mutant League if you keep this shit up. You'll be playing on the ice world. How'd you like that? Yeah, whatever bullshit like Mario Planet that Holly's struggling with right now. We'll send you to...

Yeah, we'll send you to fucking jump town. See how you're like fucking fluff, puff, puff, ass, call it? Yeah. I'll call you. coach ace bricca tell him to send you to the hell world folks okay we're fun for real there there is a college football game it's uh it's it's it's coming out in just a few weeks and matt brown here is the dean of the press core on this video game it is the a sports college football 25 the jokes the jokes are over you've made it you've unlocked the good you are you you you earned this one

what would you like to know what can now that i do not have um grabs microphone yes Texas A&M 9-11 game. It's not a joke. It's not. We told you. Matt, you got to play the game recently in addition to your reporting background. So have you seen the Texas A&M 9-11? I have seen a picture of the Texas A&M 9-11 game.

So what we're talking about with this is that the folks at EA told us during this presentation that I want to say somebody can correct me if I got the number wrong. I want to say it's like 136 different. fan color configurations so like if you play a night game at Penn State they're going to do a whiteout if you are playing a major game at Tennessee you'll see you'll see this the fan the stripes right if they're hosting bowling in a week two then you won't and they said we even have a couple in here that either haven't been done yet or only done once or twice and then it cuts to college

station with the crowd doing red white and blue configurations which I believe was the 9-11 game um oh we don't know oh i don't know if i don't know people are weird i don't know if they did it at nine 11 but it's like an american flag texas a and m fan configuration and nobody talked about what you have to do to activate that so i don't i didn't play as a and m when i was when i was careful i kind of think it's the point yeah i i know one guy who unlocked that one in yeah i i don't want to speak for our a andm friends and i am i am unfamiliar with many of the ways of dog church, but I feel very strong that it might be the point of the thing not to know.

It's just that you roll into A&M and you discover it's the 9-11. Forfeit, get your ass out of there. That it is, by the way, it's the three decks of the stadium of Kyle Field, red on top, white in the middle, and blue on the bottom. What I want to know is how to unlock the protest one, right, of that that says America's in trouble, where it's red on the bottom, white in the middle, and blue on top. The Alito game. Yeah, the Alito game. Oh.

Then they're, press A. Those colors run. Appeal to heaven. No, when you said protest. I thought like, are you thinking like the Cal Berkeley mode?

Turn the controller upside down and press A to appeal to heaven. That's not how you challenge a call. Like, that's not how this works. No, I was thinking you meant like, I think, have a fetching silver bob.

Martha Ann. I hate that. She's impossibly powerful. Active is judge. officials. No, there's a couple of these that I know they couldn't talk about because I think they're going to be done in real life for the first time. It's the same

thing with like in all seriousness. Wow. So they're so they have they have like celebration type games that they are breaking the news of. So as I understand it it's a similar situation with

some uniforms. So like EA might reach out hypothetically to someplace like Georgia and say like hey, are you going to debut any new uniforms this year? And Georgia says, like, oh, don't tell anybody we're going to do a different kind of blackout thing on, like, October 29th. Send us the assets, and we won't break the news. Matt Brown reports. Oh, my gosh.

Listen, you guys cannot joke about this because someone's going to show up up my house. Hey, Matt, hey Matt, grown toddler here. Can you tell me about Georgia's blackout on the 29th? Don't make me pay for it. I'm going to look. Hopefully Georgia is not playing on that game, which would mean Matt is. additionally reporting that they will be no I'm I'm they're playing Bama on the 28th so wait no one sorry uh it is a biweek before Florida Georgia so Matt is also

reporting that there will be a game immediately before before Florida yeah people people forget that so I like like the West Virginia Cole uniforms right like those haven't been worn yet could EA have the potential to put those in like immediately after they've been worn yes like I I've been told it to school once that you can you can you could put that in there so if you know I don't know if middle Tennessee wants to do like a stripe out or something and they've never done it before god knows they've that i was you said that and i'm like this is tennessee is up to some shit in here and it's gonna annoy me so this is this is the kind of thing

that now with modern technology they'll be able to update uniforms as the season goes along because they're they're also planning on updating like player ratings and stuff too right player player ratings and roster changes you know if some walk-on blows up in week four and suddenly cracks the two deep like okay well it's a good thing we we got his we got his paperwork right back in back in june we can we can uh we can put him in there if If the ACC falls apart in October, we can make the changes necessary to put Florida State in the Big Ten. Yeah, they're not static. We can have these live updates just like we have for other AAA sports video games.

Which means that we can have real life. Oh. So if you're not only going to get real live protests of these changes, you're going to get real life protests directed at EA for going along with these real life changes. Or me. One of those two. yeah yeah some emails so if you get it so if your defensive starting defensive tackle comes in 35 pounds overweight right you click his profile and they're like he's unlocked achievement winded winded so in this game it's for the first time they have like the disc space to have like multiple announced teams like there's the regular team and i forget exactly who's on that one and then the big game team is herb street and fowler which i assume so how many you played a variety of games including one was a national championship game obviously I have a follow-up on that game.

What was the difference in like presentation in like normal game and big games? So I only got to play and play now. And every crowd that I played in the Play Now game was pretty full, even if you have like the B crowd like announcing crew, which is like David Pollock and I forget who the second person is. Oh, that's how you know it's a game. Okay. That's how you know.

That's how we tell it apart from real life. I think that's been. David Pollock has a job. His job is, listen, his job is talking about the Lord. Hey, now that we're real deep in the show, can I talk about some Georgia gossip that I picked up on our live show tour? Please. Which is that David Pollock is not allowed to work out at EGA. Well, like, when Kirby, so when Kirby came in us when new coaches often do, they're like, they're, they're like open door program, any, you know, any former player who wants to

come in, you know, well, welcome, you know, we're all brothers here. This includes Herschel, by the way. Herschel is allowed to come back and just wander around unsupervised. David Pollock, and this is not because, as far as I know, this is not because he was a creep or anything. This is purely because he was so fucking annoying. David Pollock has like a, you have to call first list and he has a minder because from what I was told, he was like trying to work in sets during team workouts? Can you imagine if you're Kirby's strength coach and David Pollock is in there like,

hold up actual players. I need to get my reps in. And this happened to the point where David Pollock now has to call before he comes to campus and he's the only one. And again, Herschel didn't show up. I don't say this lightly.

No problem. I don't say, there's no quicker way to get a strength coach to actually try to murder you than doing that. Mm-hmm. like smack this is not David Pollock has not been arrested

has said a whole lot of real stupid shit but that's legal he annoyed his way out of being welcome in Athens which I mean for a player of his

accomplishments while yes legitimately like legitimately one of the best this is just this is like this is IRL poster's heart

oh god anyway sorry continue No, that's okay. I double checked. Reese Davis, Jesse Palmer. This is fresh. This is not like a new development, but I just heard this for the first time at our indie show.

So, Matt, when you played a national championship game, as I understand it, between FBS's oldest team, Rutgers, and its newest team, Kennesaw State. The Owls won, right? So I must make a confession. I didn't finish any of the games I played because I was trying.

I had three hours there. And I was being babysat by EA's PR team. So I was just trying to, like, get through, uh, and I play like the first half for as many as I could of the first quarter. So I could see as many different places, but, but I did have a, I was up by two scores with Kennesaw. That's right. Did you enjoy, did you enjoy running the flex bone option?

Uh, that was why I picked them. Um, and I am not good at it yet. The game, I think, for me, as a, as a, as a bad video game player, I think they made the option a little bit harder. Uh, it's not going to hold it. It doesn't hold, it doesn't hold your hand the same way. like here is the person you need to read please press a to not lose four yards in the backfield but they also yeah NCAA 14 made it like a quick time event every time it's it's it's baby

baby baby's first option right and this is a little bit more more complicated but then when you actually make the right read it feels very satisfying and then like oh i got you know i have a 59 overall player i just ran for eight and a half yards um i had a pick six which which which which felt realistic you know because ruggers was throwing the ball and i i use that to to build the lead Though, I think the actual gameplay itself is pretty fun, even though I know it's going to take me a while to get good at it because it feels very different, I think, from the last game, particularly how you throw the ball. But I think that this game has gone out of its way to make it so you can't cheese the same three plays anymore. And it wants to force you to learn different playbooks and play different ways and try to do things a little bit more realistic. Oh, people are going to hate that.

That seems unrealistic. It does sound like it's going to ask a lot of the player, hopefully for big rewards. word and not just plays but players right like if you're a small school that with excitement to be clear sure yeah yeah yeah like you're gonna hate it at first and then you're gonna realize it was the better way all along but like players like if you're if you're a if you're a low tier school you might only have one really good player and in the old games you just go to that guy on every play but this time around you can't do that right yeah so there's there's two big actual like video game differences that I noticed immediately and they kind of reiterated this through talking to us one is that

you are really going to see the talent difference when you're playing. Like in the NFL, like the way I kind of wrote about this. Yeah. The worst dude is, well, this is. That's exactly what I'm talking about. It's both bad and fun, right? Like in the, in the NFL, the worst dude on the Panthers is still a professional football player and was very good.

The worst dude on like New Mexico or the worst dude at Eastern Michigan is more athletic than any of us, but is a car rental man. manager going up against a potentially NFL draft pick, and you're going to notice that matchup. So, like, I did a game where I made Ohio State play at Ohio. And, like, yeah, I could throw into double coverage if I have a five-star wide receiver here. And I'm still going to come up with the ball a little bit. I can make bad reads and be okay. Whereas if I, and if you're trying to tackle Alabama's running back with the 145 pounds safety at

Toledo, you're going to bounce off of them. So you'll see that, which, you know, Alabama, New Mexico state mode is going to be a lot easier or more boring right and then they changed the what they're calling the wear and tear system so it kind of like an RPG like all of your body has hit points essentially and as you get tackled over the course of the game depending on where you got tackled and who tackled you you that may impact your rating so you can't run qb draw with the really skinny guy 19 times or else he's going to drop to a 45 rating because he's been he's been murdered you have to actually manage your roster a little bit oh so

So to Holly's point about hard being fun, one thing, the thing I'm most excited about, honestly, is something I think I've heard from you and Robbie Callan and Bud Elliott and Chris Finini is the old way of, like, Dynasty Mode, you take over a shitty team and within two years of winning a national title is, like, virtually impossible now. Like, it's going to take several years of improvement. It sounds so fun to be, like, excited about scraping out a bowl bid, right? Yeah. Like, that's, like, it sounds fun to actually have to build it and work at it. The emotional arc sounds more realistic. Yeah, yeah. Or more plausible. So, like, I know with, like, the dynasty stuff that you haven't gotten two hands on with that,

but I'm sure you know, you know a lot more about it than the rest of us combined. But what of, like, what of those features are you most looking forward to? Hopefully when the game comes out, you're able to just clock out for like a week. I am literally going on. Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt. Matt, when's the game coming out next year? Next year. This is, this is not an exaggeration.

duration. I have a family vacation planned to like Zion National Park that week. Good for you, buddy. Got Wi-Fi? No, I'm going to take the, I'm writing I think a review or two for some non-extra points publications. I'm going to bring the Xbox

to play it a day or two. There's like a family reunion. My wife's family you have to go to, but then like when they're things out, I will be out of cell phone range. I'm going to be in some hoodoes. I'm going to be somewhere in the Utah Badlands or whatever. away from anybody.

You're going to be Santos looking over a grateful universe. Oh my gosh. That first apple beer is going to taste so good when nobody can like bug me. I could just sit there in the canyons. What was it like playing the first half of this game

with an audience? Like were the PR people just sitting there on a couch watching you react to the game? Did they like give you some privacy or were they like kind of staring over your shoulder being like, look at this chuckle fuck running the ball? Yes. And my second question is how much did they

D. Age Fowler and Herb Street. You know what? I actually I don't think I... Are there faces in the game? I don't remember. Did you guys realize this? I didn't until I met him. Fowler's ripped. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

He's jacked. He's, yeah. Absolute credit to him. Like, he's got like a wiry old man's strength. Yeah. He would be furious at me just for saying the world old in that sentence. I was going to say, I would not like that. No, listen, I didn't say it was kind of a fun experience he doesn't get enough credit as a diva he really does not i think i think

he's funny like when i talk to him he's like oh so you're you're the you're the guy that everyone's been screaming about my instagram mentions every time i go say anything here like it's um you're you're the you're the video game guy no i i don't remember seeing their faces i just remember peering them they may be in the game i i didn't see it what what i what i can say is like the way they had to set up it's basically like a big open planned like almost like a new like a cafeteria kind of thing and there's just a role of PS5s and some couches. And you had some developers, but they worked in the game kind of mingling

and everybody else has their headphones on and they're locked in. And I say this, not to impugn on the professionalism of EASPR staff in any way, but I can just say, I can understand why they might have felt a need to babysit the asshole that keeps drowning them in Foil was

and was trying to lose them so I could talk to developers. Like I feel like when I was, I would say I have a much better relationship. Yeah. Like, you know, I'm not mad at them, but I think they knew that if I was left unsupervised, I might put down the sticks and go talk to somebody that I wasn't supposed to talk to. But it was, it was weird in front of an audience.

And it was honestly more from the devs than it was the PR people. They're like, oh, miss that read, huh? Oh, wait, what do you? It's probably very much like, ah, we got him. Yeah, we watched it fall into the train. I told me that wouldn't fucking work. Yeah, exactly. Then occasionally you flag somebody and be like, hey, I, you know,

maybe there was a bug here or something or there is a bug here uh the other team scored uh yeah this this syracuse says all kyle mccords for some reason i don't this just says game that's not a joke right like syracuse was that one guy copy that wasn't that wasn't a joke i mean like the offensive lineman has the game still still being yeah like i i had to be i was debating even sharing that like i did except i thought it was funny but i'm like there's going to be some idiot that's going to think like the game's not done it's it's not going to come out it's like it's broken EA cash grab like no this is this this is they just haven't They haven't finished putting in all the faces.

Yeah, because they're going through all. There's like 16, there's 11,000 faces they have to put it. It takes a long time. There's kind of a build-a-bear creepiness to that. Like, I'm imagined, I know this is not how real life works. I know this is not Monsters Inc. I'm just picturing like a warehouse of hanging faceless sets of pads with blank heads. That's a little bit how they do the uniforms.

I didn't realize that they kind of scan a lot of these things like physically. Like, they just have a giant closet of like every NFL jersey. or like a lot of the actual shoes and they're like oh yeah this is a camera that we use for the like the aviation industry and also video games and now watch we can replicate this in perfect 3D in 10 minutes

and it was all it was all very cool I'm not used to I am overjoyed by the way to hear that passing is more difficult because that means that EA is trying to force you to a more Christian true American version of football that's good some of you are going to be like oh I can't pass the ball 50 times a game

anymore. Seek Jesus. Run zone. Didn't you just see what Michigan did in real life? Go back to Sweden. It's true. Yeah. If you don't like it, you know, I'm sorry, we believe, we believe in God's football and you need to run the ball. You need to run it. Yeah. I guess you should have recruited a fullback. Yes. Yeah. That 62 fullback that you cut, guess what? Guess what? Guess what? He's over there whipping your ass for a totally different team. On, on that, note, I will say in all seriousness, one of the things about recruiting that I'm legitimately

excited about to play with is this is how recruiting memory plays into the transfer portal. So if you're recruiting some guy and you finish second or third in his recruitment and he ends up, you know, cashing a check and going to another school and then leaves and hits the portal the next year, you're going to get a big advantage because he's going to remember all of those positive things from the recruitment. And so if you're playing as all those lies, you told all those lies you told her and there's there's there's it leads to I think actually a really interesting kind of resource allocation play if you're like georgia southern or kennesaw you're

rebuilding somebody because you're basically impot it's almost impossible to recruit a four-star guy out of high school at those places but you might be able to get them on the bounce back and you think like okay should i go spend this recruiting energy getting a high school guy that i might actually be able to get now or do i get chased this guy who's going to commit to auburn but i might be able to beat georgia tech when he leaves after one year because things don't work out at Auburn which is a conference USA teams should invest in future flops yes yeah which I'm not telling you what to do but I would read 5,000 words about how they program the engine for that that that what I just described is legitimately how it often works in real life and I've heard player

personnel people tell us like yeah we we are sometimes like deliberately recruiting knowing we'll be back in two years I know I know who's recruiting you now we'll be ready this oh no this is the dating sim that's totally what this is like like yeah oh you who are you dating him okay that's cool that's cool well you know what do you just want to hang out we'll just hang out for a while it's fine that's that's it i think i think that will be will be really fun to play with uh in real life i think the road to glory seems kind of fun um and i'm i'm excited to give it a spin what i understand road to glory by the way you no longer have to actually play a high school ball which i'm really grateful for yeah there's been a lot of complaints about that and i'm like

Sounds good. Sounds good to me. Yeah, like, who is like, man, you know what? I can't wait to do in this video game. Play high school football. There was only one upside to the high school aspect of Road to Glory, which was that team builder allowed you to, you could build like your local high schools.

So I remember specifically like creating my high school as well as like several of our rivals to import as our opponents for Road to Glory. That ultimately didn't make or break the mode. that was a cool feature that since team builder is coming back, it's interesting, like, I don't, I don't think they've probably scrapped that idea for all future editions. That

would be a cool one if they added it back, if they also included the team builder option to be able to import, like, actual high schools. The team builder is very much a part of this year's game, so you can bring in your high schools and just stick them in the sunbelt, if you want. Right, right, right. Which could be fun in a

different sort of way. But, yeah. I was, I was also surprised to see the level of emotional anger that so many people had about not being able to play high school football. And I think when you put it like that. Maybe that does make more sense. I'm just trying to, like, I want to yuck it in with young.

We all engage with this product different ways, but that was a surprise to me on the team when I was 16. I really, I think there's a market, by the way, for, and I'm sure it's not a major console market but like this is a steam game waiting to happen the high school football game

where you just basically it's like Coffee Town like Coffee Town the video game where it's like do you want to run the wing RPG? Right do you want to run the Wing Tee? Do you want to schedule you know Buford Palms High School? One hundred and thirty miles away. Your bus

is broken down. That's our high school sponsor now. Buford Palms High School. It's so. Buford Palms High School. POMbs was busy. You ended up with Buford Poms, our lady of Buford Poms. Oh, we ended up with Buford Palms adult high school. That's a different team in time. The Rome, Georgia Dolphins. Correct.

Like, that's what I want. Like, are you a bad enough dude to play Val Dostas Central? Yeah. It's, you know, it's funny because how I've approached writing about all this, and I think how I even approached playing it as a consumer, changed after we made Athletic Director Simulator, which is like a real-ass computer game that you can play on extra points. And there's a little part of me now

that's like, a part of me kind of wants to ditch this reporting business and work on exactly that kind of thing because there's, I feel like there's so many other kinds of games you can make or tell in the extended college sports universe besides a football game, whether that's a point-and-click adventure, whether that's a tabletop RPG, whether that's a dating sim whether like

ADS 4,000 is kind of like a Carmen San Diego text adventure sort of thing. Matt, make college football missed. College football missed. Listen, and as we keep saying on this program, we are old enough to be pandered to now and we love it. I mean, Missed was just a giant

PowerPoint. You don't need, you don't need to be Bill Gates to create one of those things again. So listen, all you people in my mentions that are screaming about how it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's unjust to pay. Well, you know, that's, especially not an hour, 40 minutes into it. But yeah, if a few other people pay, I can go take a sabbatical and I can go make another computer game. I just, they are annoying in different ways. They are. Um, but I, I would play that. It doesn't, I just need, I just need, like, three weeks where I don't have to think about, like, the Patriot League's house settlement obligations for me to, like, sit down and, I'm telling you. We're going to have so much fun putting the playbooks together. We're going to have so much fun putting the playbooks together. that'll be like, do you want to run the wing tea? Or the wing tee?

Would you like to run the wing tea? It'll be like the Tecmo Bowl, like playbooks, right? It's you, there's, do you have your two running plays? You have your passing play that's really a running play, and you have punt. What do you need? I think it should be, I think everything over 10 plays. I think we could probably coach high school ball. Yeah, like everything over 10 plays should automatically appear, not as squiggly on the field,

like when you're away. It should appear as squiggly in your playbook because your guys don't understand. I've never seen it. It's just a question mark. Because they joined the team a week ago. It should show up as Sanskrit or like wing dings. Sorry, I didn't practice this week. I had to work.

Yeah, you didn't really play yelling. You didn't play the yelling simulator part of the game long enough. So the playbook is still very fuzzy to you, the coach. 70% of the game is really just about finding ways to get your kids to practice. It's ride coordinator 4,000 rather than any, like, any kind of like, Can somebody get peeway or ride? I know that this show has a rich tradition of launching other businesses. Hopefully, nobody else listening to this, you know, beats me to the code

before I get a little bit of a break and can take a step. We just recorded it so we can totally sue. It's copyrighted. Yeah. That's not what works. Well, our lawyer's not here, but, yeah. I like to think at this point, I haven't passed a bar, but I have had to do so much legal writing and so many FOIA.

was I got a couple of, I got some continuing legal education. You could probably, hey man, Captain Tusson did it. You could probably at least be a paralegal. Oh, I, I, I, I, I, I think I've learned how to do document. Which is no disrespect to paralegals in every, and every, every respect to the amount of work that you have put in. I mean, I think you're already like a Kentucky lawyer or something. Gentleman attorney. Yeah.

I mean, hell, we're colonels. That's true. That's true. I was incorporated in Kentucky for a couple of years. So maybe, maybe, uh, maybe, maybe, uh, maybe the, you know, that's true. that's my next summer's project finally passed the bar as my duty as a sports

what if you what if oh man what if you passed the bar before like Ryan did Ryan's a lot smarter than I am like that's he was smart enough to skip the forecast today and he won't listen to it

so we can get away with saying this no anything about Metal Gear Solid that's true he's never going to learn about Brazil taking over Russia he's never Thank you for taking over Russia, boss. Obrugado.