The Morning Stream - CORE 497: Claire Obscured

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

Main Topic: Game Awards Nominees. Megabonk dev withdraws "Best Debut Indie" nomination (made previous games). Claire Obscur: Expedition 33 breaks record with 12 nominations. Notable snubs: ARC Raiders, Dispatch, Sonic the Hedgehog 3.Other NewsXbox Partners Showcase (Tides of Annihilation, Vampire Crawlers, Total Chaos)Epic/Unity partnership for Fortnite integrationKrafton AI controversy re: Subnautica 2 bonusesDispatch skill requirements discussionFirst live-action Zelda movie set photosOur Week in GamingShared: Dispatch progress (Beau completed, Jon restarted, Scott finished Episode 1)Beau: Claire Obscur Act 3, Slay the Spire boardgame, No Man's Sky Normandy unlock, Vampire Survivors VRScott: Forestrike (standout), Shelldiver (incremental gem), Advance Wars binge, Moonlighter 2 purchased, Cleared Hot, Guild Wars 2 reinstalledJon: Cyberpunk 2077 continuesFallout 4 pricing clarification from NickLandry - Anniversary Edition upgrade options explained, Xbox Play Anywhere support added.Links: Patreon.com/coreshow | CORE.show | frogpants.com/coreNew article on CORE.show: Vegas conversation about AI threats + why GoldenEye is the GOAT.CORE.show vs Patreon (frogpants.com/core)Episode 500 commemorative mug dropping at frogpants.shop this weekend! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

All I care about is seeing chaos dead. I need to. It's not a hope or a dream. It's like a hunger, a thirst. Hello, everybody, and welcome to core. This is core where we talk about video games and all the stuff around them so that you may too talk back to us. in your car. I don't know where you're watching this or listening to this, but wherever it is, we hope our voices find you doing well. My name is Scott Johnson. That's Bo Schwarz and John

Jagger. Hello to Bo. I hope my voice finds everyone doing well as well. Hey, you changed your thing to green. Oh, no, I'm not supposed to talk about the eyebrows on the show. Am I? This is still like a Josh thing. Yeah, what do we even talk? I don't even know. I made it up. I said a thing that doesn't exist. Everyone look at Bo. It's normal. Look at his face. He's normal. just a normal face right there the face of normality yep nothing weird going on here a couple quick things before we dive into

this week's nonsense and that is this there's some cool stuff put up on core dot show as of today or as of this week so a few things went up during this week is what I'm trying to say in particular I did an article about a conversation I had while I was in Las Vegas for a funeral

with a stranger I'd never met this guy before but we were at this little after party get-together thing that my wife catered It was super nice, great food, lots of talking, music and stuff like that. And then this guy and I had the greatest conversation, at least I thought it was a good conversation about AI and how it may play out in video games, generative versus different kinds of AI and concepts that, you know, why we even call it AI, which is a little bit weird. And then we had this whole conversation about why the N64 hit Golden Eye is still the greatest shooter of all time. at least he believed that. And we talked about that a whole bunch.

Anyway, I did a whole article about it because I think there's something to be gleamed there. So just a reminder to check out core.com where you'll find free stuff. Corp. I did it again. Core. Thank you. The new email is show. Dot core.

Dot show at core. Oh, God. No. Bo, why'd you do this? Yeah, it's your fault, Bo. You just watched a man stumbling down the street. You went, this will be great. And you pushed it.

Core. Not show. Sorry. It was so dumb. But it was, it's there. It's up. It's available. And this one was free. It was a behind the paywall for a couple of days, but now it's open to everybody. Go check it out along with the many, many other cool things that are happening over there. I would love to get your reactions and your thoughts. Lots happening over there.

If we get them. Oh, I almost forgot. There's another. You'll definitely get them. The other thing is, I wasn't going to say, oh, over at frogpants.com slash core. I put up a comparative, let me pull it up so I have it. There we go.

People are like, hey, what are the advantages of the Patreon versus the core. Dot show substack stuff? What's the difference? What do I get? So I put a comparison chart together,

a nice little HTML thing that I put together and it gives you basically all of it. And it'll tell you which has what and which one doesn't. And don't let those Xs scare you. There's probably plenty of you that may go over to the Patreon one and say that's more of my speech. Which is great because we're going to keep that one going. But if you want all this extra crap that we got going on over here, the things that aren't shared between the two, you can go check out core.

And there's a link there. It's very convenient. You can also send us a message right there on the site, as you can see. So anyway, just want to let you know about that for those who were asking for it because I did promise I would do that. And then finally, we are nearing 500 episodes of this show. All right. Oh, oh. Today is dangerously close.

497 right now, by the way. For a brief moment, I thought things were going to align really weird, and 500 was going to be like our first show of the new year, but not quite. Not quite. Not quite. But not quite. So that means, yeah, there's a lot of hours of us hanging out. I don't know what. I should go do the math and figure it out.

There's a way to do that. But to celebrate. Math, it turns out. Yeah, there turns out there's math. Well, average about three hours, 500 times three. Oh, no, I'm saying I could take the files themselves. analyze them and then give you in a to-the-minute length of everything we've ever done. I may not want to, that's like the real-life equivalent of slash played in World Warcraft.

Seems like we may be asking for trouble if I do that. But anyway, proud of these 500 episodes. And to commemorate it, this will go up sometime this weekend. I was hoping to have it today, but we're waiting on some manufacturing stuff. We're going to do a celebratory commemorative mug with our logo and just below. at 500 plus episodes of core if you're watching the visual version of the show you'll see this right now on my screen here's the back of it which says our brand new awesome slogan core play games always win dot dot dot or something uh that's what it says on the back and on the front that cool logo

anyway this too could be yours and you want to check the show this weekend uh if you are interested in such things. I'll have it up just as soon as I can and we're keeping them cheap and it will be a limited thing so not a thing we'll just have in perpetuity so you're going to want to get yours fast go to frogpants dot shop

for more all right so did it do it just to send Taz is in the chat room he makes like cool you know like art he made the core magazine like a full magazine

you know just like he's awesome yeah so he put the total number of hours of the show in one in that last like celebratory five year thing he did yeah how much was it um well i haven't looked it up yet i'm trying to figure out where it oh here it is it's on my i have a printed version one thousand one hundred and twenty seven hours of audio wow what does that translate to to years of content you know like time 60 dude 62 24 hour days shit but like that's 24 hour days so you know that's that's 24 hour days so you know that That's just your time in Hades, too, I think. You know? Kind of. Yeah, it sounds about right. That's true. Well, no, I only have 200 hours.

We know that that's not the case. This is actually my most played video game now. I think it even beats, well, it doesn't beat Planet Side 1, but close. Nothing will. When will something beat Planet Side 1, if you had to guess? Do you think that'll ever? I played so much of that. I just don't do that anymore.

I feel like that. Maybe heroes. I don't know what my slash played in Heroes of Storm is. I have played 12,000 games of it. yeah do you think your wow times my mind mine's so high i don't want to look my wow time's probably pretty pretty high but like not on the same character i don't know yeah wait what was the total number of hours 12 1,127 127 1,000 1207 okay so it would be number two on my most played on steam which is uh my number one is final fantasy 14 online oh course no doubt than a thousand hours of

I have played 2,985.1 hours. That's impressive. How much of that was... I will say, it got left online. That's what I was going to ask. There's a lot of just idle time in those numbers. It was a game I played a lot when my son was born. It was not be uncommon for me.

And the best part about it is it doesn't log you out if you idle. So he would be napping. I'd be playing the game. He'd wake up. I'd go. a dad for a real long time and then come back when you took another nap, go back to playing. It is not active time.

Active time would cut that number significantly, but. I think it even counts when your launcher is open from launching it within Steam and then just hanging out as a launcher. I think it counts that as well. But still, you know, even if you shaved, I don't know, 100 hours off that, that's still insane. Yeah. My wow time would be higher, although difficult to figure out because I've,

very cruel to my characters and I delete them unceremoniously. I think it's still like counting though. I put 85 days of my life into this character and playtime. Delete. Get rid of it. Who cares? I think but if you slash play in there, I think it does all that cumulative stuff on the account wide. Does it? Yeah, I think so. I don't think it's per character. I think my heroes is probably my most gameplay

ever. I've got 6,000 hours. Holy shit. That's a lot. Did you ever fall asleep though? Just some Nathcom. No, no, never. Game's awesome. All right. Game is awesome. Diablo 4. Yeah. Diablo 3 has a lot of my time. I don't know. There's some games. I would be hard pressed to know what got the most.

Probably wow, though, if I'm honest. I think that's it. It has to be. It has to be my most place. It has to be wow. And I kind of don't want to know. Like, I have friends who did a slash played recently and said, I've played this game for 368 straight days with no breaks. 24-hour days.

That's crazy to think you've got a, year and change of straight gameplay lock a year of your life like yeah don't think about it too hard man you'll feel bad i think i would and i do all right let's move on um oh yeah so that's coming out watch frogpants dot shop for more all right everybody that's all the business we have up front and now a button i have to push couldn't find it um we needed cool cool Was that the wrong one? No, that's the right one. I got a little lost for a minute.

I spent a decent amount of time last night capturing a bunch of Barry stuff from PlayStation 1's Resident Evil. A whole bunch of things I've never used before and forgotten he had said. I'll give you one example. I forget that. Oh, yeah, here's a great one.

John, I like this one. I have a rope here. I've got a rope here. I've got a rope. Yeah. Yeah. And you know what the dingus does with the he friggin drops it down to you and doesn't attach it to anything and the whole damn rope

falls in the hole yeah it's dumb it's really dumb he's bad at stuff he's also kind of a double agent but he's a reluctant double agent he's a dead man by the end here's what else he said how about going down to check by yourself yeah don't trust that anyway he's the best he's the best what if you did it all alone and in danger and peril what if we split up. Jill, hold this gun. Look down the barrel and see if it's clean. I always love it when he found something.

Just a moment. I found something. Just love it. Love it. What is Barry found? I must know. I sure hope it isn't Chris's blood. Yeah.

So now I have, if anyone needs it, I've got every Barry line ever made. Even in the remaster where you think, okay, well, they'll sort this out. He's still like my favorite thing to just think about the scenario, they get, chased by evil dogs into a mansion. They then immediately sort of split up. Barry and Jill go into the same room. Barry goes, Jill, come over here. Look at this. There's blood. I sure hope this isn't Chris's blood. And then what does he do? Does he say, clearly we're in danger here. Let's go look together. Let's figure this out. No, he goes, Jill, you go look in the other room. I'm going to stay here and examine this. What the fuck are you looking at, Barry? It's blood.

you can't run a blood test why are you sitting there just staring at blood he's a great big coward yeah he's a huge coward chill maybe you should go look in the other room I just want to look at this blood for a little bit yep and then now she's all in peril and then later when you see him again he says this

this hall is dangerous and why don't you go down it alone he's so bad I love him gosh dang it he's great anyway um hey them games awards game awards Jeff Keeley's joint they announced the nomination

Now, this isn't going to be news to most of you because you follow this stuff and you may notice this year, maybe out of all the years, has been what I would say the most chatter around it. Some of that could just be the popularity of it and it's more notable these days. I have a feeling it's because of the nominations this time. Like, it is like a lot of people either mad or disagreeing. That's normal for the Oscars, the Emmys and this show every year. There's always disagreement. But holy shit, John. I think there's evidence that's getting bigger.

It's going to be televised this year. Oh, I didn't know that. Who's doing it? Who's doing it? I'm with Bo. It's like, oh, that's the crossover. Hold on. I will look at up.

It's going to be like brought to you by like some bullshit. They already have a category that's brought to you by someone. Did you guys notice that for best soundtrack it's brought to you by Spotify? No, and I hate it now. I hate that. can i hate that okay it's okay for me to hate that right it's all right that soundtrack brought to you but yes it's yes like it's so annoying that okay it's not super televised it's prime video sorry to interrupt but i just i have found it but live on prime yelled it out loud oh yeah live on okay well that's

it's adjacent it is less of an issue it's just if it's tv then they have their commercial slots to fill so you know it's gonna be like a bunch of like well everybody's waiting for a commercial you're going to have someone out there. This is just a great year for gaming. Yeah. Oh, how excited is everybody? You guys ready for more categories? Yeah. And are you guys ready for more trailers? Hey, fellow gamers, do you want to

use tied laundry detergent, you know? Mm-hmm. Like all that shit. Like, that's why I'm like, gamers are like, no, I don't wash my clothes. Who are you talking to here? Here's the deal. I think that Sweary Pants McGee should feel safe to swear when he comes out to talk about his next do-it-together game. Yeah, they'll censor them on TV. It's fine.

Yeah. They have swearing on Prime anyways. I watch South Park, I think. Oh, hell yeah. Oh, they got all kinds of swears on Prime. They got the boys for hell sakes. I've seen a... All that'll be fine.

If it's just like a streaming service and like, whatever, what I was worried about was like, it's going to be on CBS. Yeah, I didn't like the sound of that at first. Yeah, the CBS version of it would be a big, it would be an awkward thing. So, these have been controversial for a whole bunch of reasons. I guess we could talk about what the. actual nominations are in conjunction with this. And this year we

are going to do, let's see, I want to give him proper credit, we're going to do another one of our is it Kipzinger, I believe it is. Kipzinger put together another sheet for us. We, because yeah, we watch it and then we have a thing. We've gamified the game award. We're doing a co-stream, right? You guys have booked off

that evening? I have. I believe it's Thursday. I believe it's on core. It's just the night instead of the day. one of those where we do we do a show and then we watch the awards proper well in the past we did show or sorry awards on Thursday and show on Friday but we can do whatever we want oh yeah that works too we get to choose we're the lords of our domain core dot show is where you want to go for that you are but over here you can see in the spreadsheet he's made this very convenient spreadsheet so that we know who we're who we're going to vote for and it's just a fun thing that kind of track the

way people do Oscar pools and stuff but I'll just rip through some of these that are in the controversial we got to do them all if we're going to gamify this because we need our definitive answers to all these things well correct that is correct oh are we doing that now like because i can i mean we can guys want to do it now you guys want to pick our pick our winners pick our horses now because i don't have a problem of that why not let's see let's do it so our first category is game of the year current nominees include i should warn everybody almost every category includes Claire, Obscure, Expedition 33. Okay, one thing before we go too deep in this,

are we picking what we personally want or what we think will win? What we think will win, I think. Okay, so this is, because we don't want to co-opt our own game of the year. What, yeah, core awards is like, we think will win. Yeah, exactly. Because we're going to do the core awards. Can we call it that? Core words.

The core awards. The co-words. The co-words. The co-words, and they're going to be our own thing, and we don't want to just repeat ourselves. Yeah, no, that's what we do. If Keeley wants to do that, then he has to pay us a royalties. I agree.

We learned from Twith. You have to be Kajima for him to give you those kind of favors. I'm sorry. It's just how it works. Hey, man, you never know. He might be listening to Cohen. Man, I wish those guys are my friends. He interviewed me once. All these friends just want to use me for my, like, connections. And these guys

don't give a shit. Look, he interviewed me on stage of Blisscon once, the radio stage. He should have some tendrils. into what we're what we're dealing with here you know what I mean like he should have a vibe out there even if he's not actively listening so Jeff G off keep it real buddy now that I know he's now that I know he's listening now that I know he's listening maybe we should you know go easy on him he gets a lot of flack he he does yeah I personally I'm of two

minds or I'm a I'm of a complex mind on the whole thing I love that somebody is championing this and making it happen. And I just don't love a lot of the periphery stuff around it. It's complicated and weird. It's mostly just cringy decisions and stuff. I'm sure, like, no doubt he has to make compromises because of corporate sponsorship and all that bullshit and to get it on the stage.

Yeah. That's a reality. You know, he's at the feet of those decisions, but who else is doing it? Nobody. But he's also cringy sometimes. Oh my gosh, guys.

I'm sorry. We have to give a shout out to this. Breaking news. I see you in the chat has suggested. the name of our awards at the end be the OSCORS. Oh! Yeah. I think that's really good. I think that's it.

We do the Oscars and we give him, you get full credit for that, I see you. Everybody will think we're thanking the hospital for it. The Oscars, brought to you by I see you. Only the best health care for the greater Phoenix area. All right. That's good. That's very good. Oscars. Aren't we that? You know

we're doing it this year at least and if it sticks we'll do it again it'll be the thing forever all right i like how kipsinger on this list too also called it a score card oh a score card it's not a pun if it's already in the word but it's good catch that's amazing actually i'm going to share that really we're almost we're like an evolution podcast from the final score car yeah they'll get it all the things that come together finally i heard uh the smack talk uh mix on oh did you hear that that was so much yeah well i i i was gonna like because i knew you're recording um play retro yeah i just pinged you and you're like oh i can't talk right now i'm on the show yeah and then i really wanted to write like the dirtiest thing i could think of just just to distract you massively but instead i watched

the show oh good i'm glad you were there for those who don't know i watched the smack talk mashup was pretty yeah for those who don't know it's based on this smack talk smack talk it's this thing that done away used to say to when we were arguing about something he didn't like or i liked or whatever and so made a whole thing out of it. We're like a Pokemon evolution because the first iteration is the final score and now we got core. Oh, weird.

Yeah. Boots in it weird? Yeah, boops in there which has an O in it. Well, anyway, we took the O from Boop and the We only took one though, right? We only needed one. We only needed one. So now it's just bop in that show. All right, let's do the I'm going to lay out your nominees for Game of the Year

and then we're going to vote. um clear obscure expedition 33 may have heard of it this year it's been pretty loud uh that game death stranding two on the beach uh donkey conanza bonanza oh no banana okay anyway haides two hollow night silk song and kingdom come deliverance you'll notice a distinct lack of dispatch on that list and a lot of people are upset about that yeah we'll talk about that we'll talk about that we'll talk about that after we vote right yeah we won't worry about any of this yet so let's vote on it um for some reason there's already votes in this i think this just i think you're just showing how to use it which i appreciate because i am too dumb to be given this document and go i know what to do yeah so you

probably would have put my name in there but i think you got to put your answer correct answers in there because there isn't a second cat it's not doubled down so we do have to put the right answer yeah and i think you just put an x right i just go x and then delete yeah okay yeah So that's what I think's going to win. Well, you've got to say it because people are theoretically listening to this show, Scott. So Wayne, this is also an audio format. Yeah, I don't mean to. I never do those.

Okay, let's go around. Scott, what do you think is going to win? I think Expedition 33 will win hands down. I don't think it's even a competition this year. I think the rest of these all are amazing games. If I was to give it personally, I would probably still do it. We're not doing the personal ones. We don't want to co-op the awesome.

John, I have a whole story to tell. listen uh also just kidding you're right uh also my server malganis needs raiders we run now he has a thing that says it's one i'm going to take that out because it's just a test one but that's off now all right so we've you have we all so i'm don't for that john what are you doing there uh clare obscure i think will win bow clear obscure okay you got to put your ex up here it says you like donkey cong more i'm going to change it there we go that's right i got it uh all right let's go now let's go now to best game direction. You got your Claire Obscure

Expedition 33. I'm just going to call it Expedition 33 from now on and leave the Claire obscure off. Death Stranding 2. Ghosts of Yotter, Yotter, Yotay. Get your yoder out of my. She grabbed them by the Yoder. Grab them right by the Yoder and wouldn't let go.

And then after that, you got Hades 2 and split fiction. I think this could go to Death Stranding. I don't know that it's the one that should win but i think it's that's who i'm there's a very cynical part of me that goes this is where jeff gives his friend an award yeah that's where i'm out but i'm going to say claire obscure is i still think it will win this category all right job beau 80s 2 80s 2 we'll give it to you all right look at that there's no going to be any ties this year nope there might still be ties

well there could be at least we're we're switching a little bit best narrative uh clear obscure Expedition. I did it again. Expedition 33. Deaths draining two. Ghosts. Oh, yeah, this is right. Ghosts of Yote. Kingdom Come, Deliverance, too, and Silent Hill. Mother F. I'm going to go, Claire Obscure. John is as well, it looks like. Bo. Yeah, same. All right. I'm going to do it up there. I think Kingdom Come probably has a shot at it, but I haven't played all of it. So I couldn't say. I think Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 definitely has a shot. Based on what I've heard people say, it feels like. Silent Hill has a shot, but not from what I've seen. No, from what we've played, it's fine. It's just not like standout. The F is for fine. I've heard on multiple playthroughs and with the scope of everything, it gets very impressive.

All right. And we still need to finish it. So there's that. All right. Best art direction. This is outstanding creative and or technical achievement and artistic design and animation. We have Expedition 33, Death Stranding 2, Ghost of Yoder. Hey, 80s 2.

Hollow Night. No offense to Yote, you guys. I'm just playing. I like, I like, you call it Yoder. Yeah. And then Hollow Night Silk Song. I have a feeling this is where Hades gets their love. So I'm saying Hades, too.

The art and that is insane. Art direction. Yeah. I think it's going to be Hollow Night Silk Song probably. Oh, wow. That's my prediction. Claire obscure. Okay.

next up best score of music clear obscure death stranding two ghost of yoder Hades two hollow night silk song this might be hate you know what I'm going to say Hades too on this one too I think score on music yeah I love the music I'm guessing clear obscure as well all right so John Bo everyone's voted just make sure I didn't miss bows yep I got you okay I might be nervous on that one but well well Yeah, keep in mind now. There's two people on the show who basically played Clare Obscure. We'll talk about it later, but it'll change you.

I mean, but again, this is what the jury submitted as their vote, so it could go either way. But Clare Obscure Expedition 33 was on the Billboard charts for a period of time this year. Yeah, for a hot minute. Okay, next one's interesting. Best audio design. We got a little bit of a mix, not mix up, but some different stuff here. Battlefield 6 is on this list. Claire, obscure,

dust draining 2, ghosts of Yoder, and Silent Hill F. I think I'm going to say Battlefield 6. I watched a whole YouTube thing on their sound design.

And if you put headphones on and look at the way that, see how that game plays out with sound and environment, it's insane. I think that's where, I think that game gets that.

I said this in, I did a bonus episode talking about this. I have no idea what makes good and bad audio design. So I just am going to say clear obscure because there are things about that that I recognize

is good. And so that's what I'm giving it to. But I genuinely don't know what makes one of these better than the other. I once heard John has only one ear and he only hears mono sound and the one ear he has is in his belly button. That's the only way he hears anything. It's all muffled in there. And there's a small man in there that's

always whistling old Susanna. Yeah, and that's a problem. So it has to get through that filter too. I think your audio design is like, do the power-ups sound like power-ups? Do things sound positionally where they are? Like the overall vision for the game from a clearly audio perspective. Yeah. Like, if you

closed your eyes and can kind of immerse yourself, that's why I think Battlefield's going to do it. It's not going to be everybody's cup of tea. I haven't played a bunch of battlefield, it's very clear what's going on all around you and stuff like that and very immersive from an audio perspective. Agreed. I think they'll do it. Best performance.

We got Claire Obscure 33, Jennifer for English, Ben Starr and Charlie Cox are your first three options from that game. Ghosts of Yote, you have Erica Ishi. Is she? Is she? Is she? From what I've seen, she's very good. Indiana Jones on the Great Circle, Troy Baker.

Really good impression. I don't know, you know, how the acting is, but whatever. Silent Hill F. Consacato, Cato. So I've got, uh, Kanatsu, Kato. I got a grievance with this. All right, give it. I'm playing Claire Obscure in French and I can compare the two, but this is a very English-centric list.

Oh, yeah, for sure, right? Yeah. Because I would give it to the actor who played Esqui in the French version. It is the same, actually, I believe. Oh, who's that? I believe Esquier's voice actor is the same in English and French. Chat, let me know if I'm incorrect, but I believe Esquieu. But I believe he is the same voice actor.

That's how he talks. But is he on this list? Is it a person on this list or no? No. SGA unfortunately snubbed this year. Okay. Then. Actually,

it's bullshit that SQA is not on this list. Chad says that is correct. So SkiA is the same French and English voice. That's actually awesome. I love that for them. I'm going to give it to Jennifer English because by all accounts, she's really, she's really good and it's English. We're picking who they're picking, and I'm betting it's been.

Starr. Ben Starr, you say. Although they might give it to Charlie. So you played the English version. I assume Ben Starr is Verso? Ben Starr is Verso. Yeah, Charlie Cox is your other guy. Which one was better?

Between Charlie Cox and Ben Starr. Yeah, Gustav or? I think Ben Starr has more to do. That's true from what I know. Like the range, I think, of Verso is wider than the range. They can't give it to Charlie Cox. He's Daredevil. He's already won.

Yeah, but you know what? He also doesn't, he feels bad because he doesn't know anything about the game and people keep saying what a good job he did. I don't want to be cynical, but this is one of those things where I get, I am a little cynical about it. And I feel like a show like this would love to drag a popular television slash movie star Charlie Cox out as a winner. I know that's not how these are supposed to work. Hang on. Hang on. I'm trying to do the clear obscure math on this. Is Jennifer English play Mayo? Yes.

Oh, they give it to my... All right, we all did it then. We're all on the same page. I don't heard it, but she... F. Off, Ben Starr, and Charlie Cox, we went with Jennifer English. They both did an amazing job. But I do think this is probably Jennifer English's year. Innovation in Accessibility.

I like this category. Assassin's Creed Shadows, Adam Fall, Doom the Dark Ages, EA Sports, FC26, which is the old FIFA game. and south of midnight I've always said that they should tell you what they did to explain why they're there and it is there so if you want to know

it is there however this comes with a bit of a caveat it is very clear that the information provided was provided by the companies and it's just a write-up that they put about their game I know this because there is no way the Game Awards or anybody working for the Game Awards describe Doom the Dark Ages as this.

Doom the Dark Ages is designed to be approachable and accessible, allowing as many people as possible to become the Doom Slayer and wage a medieval war against hell. Yeah, that sounds like Marky. Does PR speak? Have I ever heard of? The other thing, too, is it's innovation. it's not just accessibility features

is who innovated I'm willing to bet none of these guys I'm guessing they're all the innovation for each of these happened years ago this is just good implementation if I had to guess so innovation is the wrong term

I have no idea what they did I have no idea what is good I'm going to put south of midnight I'm going to put Assassin's Creed Shadows because a well I don't get it I don't have to get into it but Ubisoft for all

their faults as a company these days with their stuff. They are very, very good about accessibility. So I'm going to give it to them. The rest I can't. Yeah, I think Assassin's Creed Shadows did talk to me. You know, when you boot up and it goes, hello. Yeah, they do that all the time. You've got to turn off. Yeah, that's innovation right there.

Letting you turn it off as quick as possible as innovation, that you're saying? I don't know. I'm just saying, that's all I got to go on. I'm not trying to be a dick. I think that one's good. I will say this. There's a six-year-old that my daughter gave birth to who absolutely loved Doom the Dark Ages

and played it with his dad and it's because it was so accessible to be able to kind of I don't want to say dumb down but get that game down to his level the game will let you do that and he could play it and he loved Doom

the Dark Ages. It doesn't surprise me. I bet my son would love it seen as he's still running around the house shooting people yelling cyberpunk cyberpunk cyberpunk. Yeah, something about that for those age. He probably would love Doom.

It's all fart jokes and doom for them right now. Well, plus he also loves K-pop demon hunter. So if you were like, son, these are demons. He'd be like, we got to shoot him. Yeah, we got to take care of this. Yeah, where's the cute Korean girls? All right, check this out. Games for Impact.

I assume, okay, for thought-provoking game with pro-social meaning or message. Sometimes I feel like they're getting a little too. What's the word? They're trying. I don't mind. I love categories like this and the accessibility category. If you really mean it. But sometimes I think these shows.

shows put it on because they feel like they're dodging bullets. I want to get a pat on the back. Yeah. They got themselves on the back. I don't want to assume because I don't know. It just feels like that sometimes, especially when you say innovation and accessibility. And then you don't really show how it's innovative. A, and B, you're having the companies tell you how it was accessible.

Like, that feels half-assed if you're going to be serious about that. Otherwise, you're just doing platitudes and I don't like that. Anyway, take your shit seriously. I gave it to Wanderstop. I've played two of these. and I liked Wanderstop. I know it's not supposed to be what we voted for, but there are two games on here that I could even talk about or guess on,

and Wanderstop is my favorite of the two I played. I'm going to give it to South and Midnight, what little I played anyway. I think that's the one they'll go with, because that game's going to need a nod, so I think they'll do it. What do you think, Bo? All right.

I'll just vote despalotte. I just have a good time. I like the word. That's cool. Isn't it despolate or something? Could be. I don't. The first time I've ever seen the word.

Despelote, despolote, despolote. I don't know. What's one of those things? Do you want beans and rice on the side or just by itself? No, just the despolode. Okay. I'd love a good despolode. Take some avocado and mango chagel.

Oh, shit. That sounds good. Gosh, dang it. I'm hungry. All right. Best ongoing game. Final Fantasy 14, Dawn Trail. Come boat or John, keep your seat.

okay i'll try not to stand up thank you for warning me you bet uh fortnight hell divers two marvel rivals and nomansky um i think no mansky yeah i think this is maybe a little too much of us bleeding into the vote but i still i'm still gonna give it to no man sky is it for is it fortnight this year well fortnight well i try to think about what anybody did this year that was big. Hell Divers, too, had the defense of Super Earth. That's a big deal. Marvel Rivals did hero shooter things, like, and kept up their cadence and popularity. Good for them. Rivals sucks. It's just people like it. So that's why it could win. Fortnite did more Fortnite things. I don't know if Fortnite did anything crazy this year.

They had a deaf punk concert, didn't they? Yeah. I mean, Fortnite, but that's like Fortnite every year. Yeah, they do that forever. To me, like, what stood out? What stood out? No. man sky hit record numbers this year yeah no man sky had like a moment man this year um i would say it's between hell divers and no man sky and i think no man sky has people have biased towards it even people voting on the panel so yeah the shipbuilding stuff this year was legitimately a massive hit for them and increased oh yeah i i Darth Vader was this year yeah but nobody likes a i so unless it's like a bunch of tech investors Revan Don, there is a chest over there.

Perhaps we should open it. I will kill your enemies for you. Would you like me to punch up what I've just said in a slightly more serious version? I think it could be Helldivers or Nomansky, but I think Nomanski's... Health divers has had lots of downswings as it's had upswings. So I think Nomanski is just pure upswing. I agree. Yeah, I think we're all on the same page for that.

Best community support. This is, you know, companies that... are great at like how is ballersgate three on well that's a good question did they do something it's over the game's done it out because it's not a game awards unless balder's gate three gets nominated for something what do you think that i mean they have to have it on there for no hate to the game it's just like i feel like uh was modding was modding added this year yes and they added uh pure linic support which meant your steam deck support got like a billion times better oh and they also added all the new classes this year.

Okay, you know what? It's on the list. Not new classes, but new, you know what I mean, specialties within the classes that they had. Final Fantasy 14s on here, they're not allowed to even do mods in that game. Why is that even here? Well, they're good at support, though. Except their web page. That's a piece of shit. Well, recognize the game for us.

Well, you've got to be good at support when your web page is back. A lot of people are going to ask you for help. Transparency and responsiveness, including of social media activity and game updates patches. Oh, so it's not the community. I thought it was like the mod and community. No, just support in general. Like how they take care of their audience.

They do a good job with it. Like, they definitely deserve to be recognized. They, their patch notes are real good. I think it's hell divers. But I'm giving my vote to Balders Gate 3. I think I am also doing that.

This is what I think. This is what we think is going to win. I think it's going to be Hell Divers. I think Balders Gate 3 is going to win. I do. I do too. Hell divers for bone. I can point at something that

Baldersgate 3 did from a community perspective this year, and I can't do that with any of these other games. Hell Divers 2 did, like, react to a bunch of complaints all the time. They're always up and down. Yeah, and I think they're paying the most attention. I feel like Balders Gate 3 is a little old to be. I will also say that every time Sean Murray did a tweet that was a cowboy man getting ready to shoot guns made out of various emojis, I got excited. So that's some real good community support right there.

balder's gate three included an image of withers with big naturals in their patch notes says jumps zero zero four well there you go so i feel like we have the answer right there another year another win yeah good job guys larian come out in your big suit of armor with some fake boobs i'm i'm here for it um all right let's go down the list to our next category the best independent game absalom i want to play that ball ex pit Blueprints, Clare Obscure, Expedition 33. We're not going to talk about the controversy yet, but we will momentarily. Actually, about most of this list, because anyway, we'll get to it. Hades 2 and Hollow Night Sox Song.

I'm giving this to Hades 2 for a reason that will be clear to everyone. We're not giving it. These are predictions, not our awards. I know that, but I'm just going to say, this is a principle for me. There are only two games on this list that are actually independent, meaning they don't have a publisher. They publish themselves. Hades 2 and Hollow Night. The rest of these, I'll have publishers.

They should not be on this list. So that's... Blueprints. I'm voting Blueprints. I'm voting Blueprints. It is a bit of a... It is a bit of a darling. And rightfully so.

It's a very good game. But I think this is its category to stand out. All right. We'll see how it does. Or maybe the next one. But I think blueprints. All right. Next step on our list.

best debut indie game okay oh damn my despolati's on it there's despolati again blueprints clear obscure despolate polote whatever dispatch and mega bonk

now megabonk has been pulled as you can see it's crossed out here yeah we'll get to that in the news but don't vote for it it's not going to win yeah it will not win it's literally out of the running so dispatch for me I think it's dispatch also

So, but I think it's just, it's the only place is going to win. We're predicting. We're not. We're predicting who's going to win. There's a little bit of me in this vote, but I do think that they're going to be people that somewhat understand. It's okay to put a little bit of you in there because we're all gamers. So if you have that reaction, it's okay to think a lot of people would and vote for it on the committee. So that's fine.

It's just we can't make any principled stands because we have, we can't assume. the principled stance of anyone participating in voting that's the issue yeah now we have most disappointing category i'm sorry best mobile game is what i meant to say um i like that the description that was shared with with us it was for the best game playable on john's mobile i'm guessing umammu su me oh that's great i didn't even notice that that's freaking funny dude look at that chat right here for the best play best game playable on john's mobile device fantastic um all right rising or sorry destiny rising persona five the phantom x sonic rumble uh unasumami umanusumami

umanishman oh no tsunami is that what you said yeah unasadami yeah that's why i get to read these things um pretty derby yeah persona people love their persona but i'm going with umamusumi that's race girls in a horse race. Yeah. I didn't play any of these. I know you're all shocked to hear that. But the one that was recommended to me the most this year was Umamusume.

So that's what I'm picking. I've played none of these. So I feel like I'm in the same boat. I'm taking your advice. Did anybody tell you to play any of these, Scott? No, Bo mentioned the ride the ladies. And then I think someone said to me that the Destiny Rising game.

I'm pretty sure. Sure, Bo told you not to ride the ladies, Scott. Somebody told, No, he was, that's right, but somebody. I stayed away because I felt there was, it gave me ick, because I'm like, I'm raising girl, like, that's what it was. Pre-pre-pre-pessing girls to race on a horse race. It just seemed like a harem, a weird harems, I don't know, it just didn't.

Didn't sit right with you, right? Amy,ick, that's all. Destiny Rising was recommended to me as being pretty good, but I don't have anything else to base that on. I'm sure they're all great, but we're picking, we're predicting. Yeah, we're predicting everybody. Here's the next list. Alien Rogue incursion for best VR AR game, Arch and

Age, Deadpool VR, Ghost Town or the Midnight Walk. So dispatch was, okay, we'll pick this. I don't see Batman on here. Deadpool came out like two hours ago, all right? Yeah, it's pretty where's Batman? No Batman. Well, see,

this is why it's shit that they do this in November because Batman came out just before the Christmas season as well you know what I mean yeah yeah and now it's forgotten qualified yeah well Expedition was April or something idiots doing their award show before the end of the year yeah you heard me Jeff we're not friends now

no you're not friends at all your word show in January blocks and unfriended do your award show in January I think it's Ark and age I heard a lot of good things about that I have too but nobody half the people on the list won't even have played any VR they're just going to vote what they know and that's Deadpool so go ahead

Oh, shit. Bo's saying Deadpool. That was where my first thought was. And I watched some video of it. It looks pretty good. I went with the Midnight Walk because I, that's, that's my guess. That's it. This is all the logic behind it.

Isn't that the, that's the Stephen King book, or movie I just saw the long walk? I think it's like a little nightmares guy. That one might actually win, yeah. Oh, is that there, deal? You can join me on the Midnight Walk. Do you want to join me on the midnight walk? Actually, yeah, I'm going to join you. Oh, man, when Deadpool VR wins, he'll be so mad.

That'd be really funny. Honestly, I haven't played any of these. Deadpool came out two hours ago. What the hell? It seems like a weird ad, especially because they're like, oh, freaking dispatch was so late in a year. We couldn't get it in there soon. And it's like, whatever.

You just put shit on that came out this week. Just put Deadpool in there. Yeah, a bunch of idiots. This VR hates really showing. all right best action game uh battlefield six doom the dark ages haydies two ninja gaden four and shinobi art of vengeance my heart

says shinobi but my brain says they don't have a shooter category so i got to put doom in the same category that is what do you think will win though i think hades too okay bow i'm really sad about doom but yeah Hades, too.

Yeah. I like that movie, that game a lot, but I think Hades 2 is like so damn good. The discategory is screwy. Yeah, it's not the best category. One of those games is solid and the other game is excellent. Yeah. That's a good way of putting it. That's how I feel.

We're predicting. Best action slash adventure game, Death Stranding 2, Ghosts of Yodel. Let's see, Hollow Night Silk Song, Indiana Jones Great Circle, and Split fiction. Split fiction. I think that's a smart pick. I'm going to say Hollow Night Silk Song, but I think Split Fiction, you can do a lot worse with your...

I've heard a lot of good things about split fiction. And Split Fiction's gotten a little bit of snub lately. Well, in these awards, they're usually in the best game category for their last couple of games. From what I've heard, I have this game. Carter and I are going to play it. I can't wait.

I haven't yet, though. But what I've heard is this just is like the best thing they've ever done. And maybe people are tired of that. I've heard phenomenal things about it. Yeah, so I think I'm giving it to that. Okay. Would you pick Silk Song?

People are going to be so mad. I picked, yeah, I picked Silk Song, but. All right, the next one's, oh my gosh, what a terrible category this is. For two of them, I mean. So I think a vowed is awesome. I love it. And I think that.

Wait, you say the category and say, sorry. Scott's like, I'm so mad. I'm just going to monologue about things that I have not shared. Sorry. This is so dumb the way I'm just getting all excited. All right. Avowed is on the list that I should tell you first. Best RPG. We have Avowed. We have Expedition 33, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Monster Hunter Wilds, and the outer worlds too. All solid games. But how do you choose between if deliverance is going to get its upcomings? Is it this category? It's not clear obscure is going to win. I think Claire Obscure is going to win. I think that voting for, kingdom come deliverance to in this category would be a good thing to do yeah you would be a good person for doing that decision but i think clear obscure will win this i want i just want what's his name jeff who's the guy in the game that we like henry henry i want henry to win shit well give him

an award scott okay in the core no we're predicting for the oscores you give him an award all right when the oscores come around all right when the oscores come around i'll re i'll revisit henry in his place gaming. Sometimes it hurts to make predictions because you're like, how could they pick this? I know. This is what I see in the future. It's like that painful look at VR we just made. All right, here we go. Best Fighting game, 2XCO. Fighting. That's sorry, Capcom Fighting Collection 2, Fatal Fury City of the Wolves, Mortal Kombat Legacy Collection, and Virtual Fighter 5 Revo. Only one of these games is a game that came out this year.

and is a widely available that isn't a remaster or remake of a game that came out before. So there's really only one game in this category, but I don't think the voters will see it that way. No. So if I'm guessing what will get picked, I think it's going to be 2XCO. But Fatal Fury City of the Wolves is technically the only one of these games that should really count. yeah and but also it's it's it's wait now that's not based on the one i'm thing there's a neo geo game called shit i thought maybe it was a remake of that maybe not i'm a big virtual fighter guy i'm going five revo that's what i'm doing so bo's got the vote all right we're predicting it's a riot game

that yeah it's gonna by all accounts it's actually very good but it's also not widely available right now which is makes it weird that it's on there yeah it shouldn't be limited release i don't like that. Maybe it is virtual fighter. I don't know. Dude, I love. This category I'm going to suck at, so I'll just accept my All right. Can't wait for that new one from your Yakuza people making the next

virtual fighter. I'm very excited about that. All right. Best Family Game, Donkey Kong Bonanza, Lego Party, Lego Voyagers. That's not fair having to Lego. Anyway, Mario Cartworld, Sonic Racing Cross Worlds, and Split Fiction.

I'm going to pick Donkey Kong, bonanza. Hey, that's what I'm going to pick too. Yeah. I think the rest of these are fine. It's good. You know what's better? Maybe Sonic Racing Cross. Yeah, I think Sonic Racing is better. It's more it's they're both voting on the best game that they're that they're that they're going to pick. I think the best game they're going to pick is Donkey Kong Bonanza. I do too. Bo set, Bo says, uh, cart. I think that's still a strong pick at the end of the day, Bo might be running away laughing with his money. of the highest cart it's a family game bonanza is a single player game wasn't it oh well whatever i could be wrong uh you can do a second player can do something with it uh but here's the funny

thing i have mario cart world i have sonic racing cross worlds and i have donkey conanza only one of those games have i played with my son and it was donkey con because he likes running around hitting things and going old and and your family it counts and we're family all right technically family. Yeah. You are of it. He is of your loins, is my understanding.

Yeah. Kitchen loins. He's a long wait for a pizza. Not too long, though. All right. So we all, we voted. All right.

Bo says, you know what, Marri? I really like World a lot. I just think that in some ways, crossworlds is stick, is, I don't know, why am I doing this?

And we're supposed to pick what they were picking. All right, Scott, read the next thing. Best Sim strategy game. Siv 7 is on here. I don't know if I should be on here. Yeah. It's on there. Maybe not yet anyway, but Final Fantasy

Tactics, the Evil East Chronicles, Jurassic World Evolution 3, the altars. Heard really good things about that. Tempest Rising and Two Point Museum. Oh, Tempest Rising. Cool. I tend to... This is tricky when it's like, well, what are

other people going to pick? Yeah. Even with other people picking, I don't think it's Siv. The Evil East Chronicles, I just said, shouldn't technically count, but it's what I would give it to. But is that what other people would give it to? I'm doing two-point museum.

I think that thing was a banger. And it seemed to be widely regarded. It's going to be Final Fantasy tactics. People love that game. They're going to just vote Final Fantasy. Oh, shit. Probably right. You know what, Bo, you won me over.

And I'm going to feel really bad if it wins and Bo's the person who backed it. Everyone's going to be mad. Like, personally, I'm mad. about this. I'm like, this is the faith I have in people. All these people are like, I love Final Fantasy Tactics. And then they're just going to play a remake and make it win the award.

Yeah. You know what I forgot how this? To be fair, though, it's a really good remake. Yeah. Yep. You know what's good also? The GBA game. Do you ever play that one, John? It's a totally different game. But the fact It's very different. It's awesome.

I had fun with it. Yeah. I played a bit of that while I was on the road. Oh, a ton, but a little. All right. Moving on. It hurts me. It hurts me. I'm predicting the predictions hurt. I really want two point. I love that game. Still love it. All right. E.A. Sports, FC26 in the category of best sports slash racing games. So that's a soccer game for anyone who might be confused there for the FC. There's a Mario Kart World in this one. Can I change my boat?

You can change, you can do whatever you want before we're done today. People really liked rematch actually. Oh, yeah, rematch here. It was, yeah. That was all right. F-1-25. That's the F-1-25. F-125. F-125. You think you've got to be a quarter over a hundred? You jerks. That's what I say when we have a movie with F. Murray Abraham in it. I always go, F. Murray Abraham. I'm switching my family game vote to Donkey Kong Bonanza because now there's two Mario.

There's two Mario Worlds here in the sports racing game. It'll be Mario World. I think they're giving it to crossroads. I'm putting that in. Oh, man. That's a place for it to win. You guys both picked what I would think would be my vote. and now I either live in the bleak world of Beau

where I know deep down they're going to give it to Mario or the hopeful world of Scott where they give it to Sonic. I'm going to be positive. I'm having faith in humanity. I'm having faith in humanity. I'm giving it to Sonic racing cross worlds. You and I both. That game's a freaking expensive, though. It really is expensive, but so is, you know what else is expensive?

Mario Kart World. Okay, best multiplayer game, Arc Raiders, Battlefield 6, Eldon Ring Night Rain, Peak, and Split Fiction. I will bet you money they gave it to Arc, but I think Battlefield should get it. You know, without a doubt, everyone's like going to pick Arc Raiders, but this one, I'm predicting that people actually vote intelligently, and I'm going to say Alden Ring Night Rain. Okay. Let's get some variety here. I'm going to say split fiction wins here. Okay.

Look at that. I don't, I don't think this. is right. I think probably Arc Raiders is the right answer for other people and maybe even for overall, but I want to be different. I want us to have different scores. This is where I'm going to divert. That's perfect. This is our first diagonal tic-tac to toe right here on this. Yeah, this one, I will admit to a little bit of bias, but it's the only, it's only probably night rain mention that's going to be here. And it was a very good game. But I'm sure if I was predicting money, betting money, it'd be arc rate. I have a preview. I've jumped to the future.

and every time a Nintendo game wins, John will make this sound. So watch for that. That's coming. So glad you heard that at the ready. There's a case for Battlefield 6 to be picked and Peek is pretty popular to you. People like the peak.

This is a tough category. They're all great games. My daughter and her friends play Peak like it's going out of style. I freaking love that thing. But they ain't voting. So that's the important thing. All right.

Best Adaptation. A Minecraft movie, Devil May Cry. That's the anime. Splinter Cell Death Watch, also an anime on Netflix. I need to catch up and watch that. Or no, Prime. I don't know where it is. The Last of Us Season 2 and Until Dawn.

You'll notice the lack of fallout here because we haven't had a new season to be able to do that with. Yeah. Well, you want to know what I noticed, the lack of Sonic the Hedgehog 3, a movie that should count and be in this category and win this category because most of these adaptations are hot garbage. I would agree with everything except for, I haven't seen Last of a Season 2, us. I don't know how things went. It's fine. It's not better than season one. It is okay. It's what I'm going to pick because of these, it's the one that's not bad. It's successful at what it does. It doesn't give me a lot of hope on where they're going narratively because I think they shoot themselves in the foot with how they told this season of it. Because they apparently think people watching

TV shows are stupid. So I think, I don't know. Oh, and I've also heard people say Twisted Metal should have been on here because I've supposed to be actually good. Yeah, and this season was more like the game than ever I heard. So I don't know. I think they're going to give it to last of a season two. Of these, it's the one that actually feels transcendent beyond just a tie-in.

I agree. I can devil-make-cry. Oh, yeah, people do like it. They say it's really good. I also heard Spunner Sell Death Matches. is a death match. Death watch is really good. But I'm going to go with

the Minecraft movie because I have little faith in them getting this one right. I think that's how they vote. Man, I, here's guys. That thing's a piece of shit. Don't get me wrong. Here's what's going to happen. Someone is going to accept.

Minecraft movie is going to win. I'm going to be sad. Then someone's going to go up and either someone in the crowd or someone on stage is going to go, chicken jockey! And a part of my soul is going to die. It's going to just end right there and fall out onto the floor and I will just cry a little

bit. We're going to be together doing coverage and I think you're, I think you're not only I think they're going to do it when the name gets announced. It doesn't matter if they win. Someone's going to yell that. It may even be that scruffy little dude that screwed things up years ago. I don't know. Jack Black will probably run on stage and yell. Probably. Ah, and that he'll be wearing that tie-dye thing. He won't take off. He'll look. like he just woke up shit all right we'll have to just deal with it when we get there guys i don't want i don't either i'm dreading it i'm actually dreading it so thanks for the reminder that this is probably going to happen um okay where did we vote next a most anticipated

game double seven first light grand theft auto six marvel's wolverine resident evil requiem and which are four. Oh, they're going to say GTA. It's most anticipated. It's that thing's a billion dollar game, duh, duh. It's still not going to come out, but it can win next year too. Yeah, it'll win every year that it's on this list. Wasn't it on there last year?

I think it was, this category, I think. But anyway, GTA6 is my vote. Bo? John and I have spoken. We're all over GTA6, which are four? Well, I mean, yeah, we're saying what are they going to vote for? What do you think they're going to pick? Yeah, we're over it.

I would give it to three other games first, but. Everyone's over it. Oh, everyone's over. But weren't you? I was saying everyone has moved on. Okay, because I was saying you were just yelling at me for doing us. And it works out. You delay like three times.

Why won't they delay again? Plus, everyone's going to be mad at Rockstar because of their labor issues they're going through. So they're going to go with something more interesting. cyberpunk 277 people love and the cd project read why wouldn't they be excited for the witcher which or four seems like a perfectly reasonable answer all right which are four all right i'm kind of with you on if i was voting uh content creator of the year cadriel kisonat moist control tickle no moist critical moist critical i don't watch any of these people

moist control tickle i know who i know who i know who it's Tyson ad is the rest of these people, I don't know. Secura Miko. I've never, I think I've heard of them. By the way, here's some, I looked up who Securo Miko is, and this is what came up. So I'm just voting for that. Put it in the Discord. What is it? I put it in Discord.

Oh, shit. Really? Oh, it's a, it's a V-Tuber. Is it? Yeah, I guess there's nothing there. Hang on. There's a better video. One sec. There's like this live, first live flower Fantasia. Miko. It's like, it's like a V-tuber, but like they have a whole concert video. screen where they're showing hang on here you go

blu-ray digest movie it's like this not that not that not that click the new link I put okay I'm pulling it up hold on there we go what have we got here I don't think that was it it is the one you gave me I put flower fantasia

yeah that's the link it's in our chat well you gave me two which one do you want that first oh okay that is the one that is the one that is one it's a concert so she's on stage i think she's v tubing so it's live and there's a bunch of real people in the audience oh i don't know this is the evolution of v okay this is innovation scott search for the burnt peanut what are you asking me to do search for that's one of the that's one of the nominees the bottom one the burnt oh i know him he i see him in tech talk all the time

this guy yeah yeah i know who this is um boy i didn't know things had taken off for him clearly they have. 615,000. See, here he is doing our craters. Oh, do you like burnt peanut to play arc raters? Yeah. Burt peanut is getting a lot of traction. He's a little peanut guy.

They're basically doing the, the filters that if Boe wanted to like change his eyebrows or whatever. Yeah. He basically plays. It's V-Tubing on the Cheetah. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah, this is probably going to win then because it's.

I see him on TikTok all the time, but I don't, that he'll win. I think this is going to go to let's see. It should go to Moise Critical probably. I'm giving it to Moise Critical. But that's a bias. What happened to the

chubby little guy with the hat and the beard that everyone loves all the time? What was his name? He won last year. That's like 5,000 street. It's like Caso. Caso. Yeah, I almost called him Krubis. It's Koso. Well, he's not nominated this year. Yeah, what happened there? Was it that

fight? I think he won. Like, I don't know. There was a house fight or something. He had some kind of deal. For someone who doesn't know any of these people, you apparently know more about. Well, I know very little. I know the burnt peanut and I know Kays and that. That's all I know.

I'm going to go with, oh, you guys are probably right. The temptation. You don't even know who it is. You called him moist control tickle. Well, he's got a big dumb spelling and I hate those. I'm going to go. So does Bowen.

You're talking to. I know, but I know, I know, Gora G4-H. Yeah, I never write that one right. But anyway, I'll go with that because it is a name I've heard enough that that's probably, and I trust you guys, I have no idea, though. The burnt peanuts are going to win. I mean, we're just predicting. I'm pretty sure it's probably going to be the K-drill, the one nobody's thinking about

because he's a League of Legends streamer. And, you know, League of Legends is, like, still the biggest game. Yeah, a lot of people doing that. Yeah, you will actually, the more you play of this. dispatch, you will have literally heard Moist Critical because he's the voice of sonar. Oh, yeah. There's other people. Oh, is he the long-haired guy that has advice all the time?

Yeah. No, he's the bad guy. Advice, but. There's a long-haired guy with advice. Is that him? Advice. I don't know if I would call him advice, but. Well, he's this guy that is always like, so it is watching this thing.

Yeah. Yeah, that's the voice. Hey, guys, what's up? I'm changing my vote. video. Changing my vote. I'm going with... You don't like that guy? It's not that I don't like him.

It's just my feet is right with him and I don't think he's that good. So it's fine. He's fine. He's a Florida guy. Somebody threatened him with a gun on camera and he brought out an AK-47. You're not voting for me as cringe. Yeah. I just wanted to talk a bit about this thing.

There's this podcast called Core and they got this thing called the Oscars. Super cringe. Anyway, one of the hosts, Scott decided he didn't like me. And I just wanted to say, I think that's kind of bullshit and pretty cringy. The core situation is crazy right now. That's what will happen. And that's why I'm saying that's why I don't want it. Because I want gamer commentary.

What that guy does mostly? You don't know. He has a gaming channel that has been pumping out a new, like, full playthrough of a game daily. Oh, I believe you. He has made a hard pivot to gaming. No, I believe you. What I'm saying is all of his short form content, which is how I have access to the guys.

I don't go watch his streams or whatever. Hold on. There's always these long-haired guys, him and Asman Gold and everybody else, long-haired, one of my hundred. These people with hair telling people about things that are going on. He's a long-air streamer called G-0-R-4-T-H, who also does that shit.

Yeah, I don't mean that, though. I mean people who sit around. around going, oh, something happened in politics, therefore I need to talk about it. Like, I don't, that isn't a gaming category thing. Now, maybe if that's a little side thing they do, fine, but this is a category. It's like, no, no, I think the way you need to think about is they have more than one show. I think a streamers do most of the games. And then they do a 20 minute talk on some bullshit. That would be if like you got nominated and someone went, why is that guy nominated? He just does a daily show about random bullshit. Well, you also do core, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

core but you do um what's the thing like the diaries frog pants diaries or yeah yeah no i get i get that you can have diversity in your lineup that's not my my point my point is defending charlie god damn he's okay i don't know why we he's a good guy he's one of the few online internet good guy i don't understand why i why i need these guys to tell me how to solve the problems in the middle east he's not talking about that he does a lot a lot does that's as a no you're mixing him up with asmen

no he does it too he does it talk about it they all do it they all do it talks about people who cheat on people in weird ways he talks about police chases he talks about he's got a video look no hang out he's got a video are exoskeletons

a scam okay there you go that's great it's good and yeah he just you know he has his review No, no, he's okay. I don't think I've ever watched him talk about. Scott, what if I told you he was in the Hunger Games? Is he in the Hunger Games?

Yes. He is? Wait, the new one or the old one? No, it's fine. It's just. Ray, I'm sorry. Part of his lore is he was an extra in the Hunger Games because he was trying to do acting. Oh, okay.

He talks like this and he's not exactly an inspirational acting, you know, doesn't exactly have a talent for it. I want you just to witness just how impatient the wraith is in the chat. Pick one and move on, he says. All right. We'll go ahead. It is the streamer category. We are spending the most time on it. So, yeah, let's move on.

So wait, Scott, you've officially locked in then on Sakara Miko. I'm doing it. Because her doing a v-tuber dance in front of a concert hall. I'm going to switch my vote to soccer. She has more, listen, she has more viewers, more subs, more everything than any of these damn people. Just for that, I'm changing my vote to the burnt peanut. I'm changing it to Sukeramiko. I'm glad we did this.

I'm gone, burnt peanut now. All right, let's go. Next game. Next game. There's only three more categories left. We're almost done. Somebody give the wraith of some tea or something. He'll be fine.

He's angry. Yeah. Give him some tea. Whoops. I move something. There we go. All right. This is best e-sports game.

Counterstrike 2, Dota 2, League of Legends, Mobile, Legends, bang, and valerent. I move my back to the name Mobile Legends, bang, bang. I don't like it at all. I hate it. League of Legends and move on. Okay, thanks. I'm doing Valerent. Ballerent.

I watch a little bit of League of Legends this year. You did? Yeah, like 10 minutes of one match. That's great. That's 100% of my e-sports time this year. All right, this next category

is going to be hilarious because it's not streamers, it's best esports at week. And they didn't say what game they're from in the document, so I don't know. And the names are even worst we got brock chovie forsaken kakaru minard and zaywu like well i respect a name like minard but i can tell you because i haven't pulled up at least who played what games all right do rock is a valerate player chovie is a league of legends player forsaken is a valorant player

kakru is a street fighter player minard is a street fighter player and zaywu is counter strike two okay um i like how bernard his real name is saul leonardo and somehow he gave himself a worst name by calling himself minard i love minard it's great yeah i'm tempted to vote for minard some people love both of them minards of street i don't think the street fighter stuff's big enough on the radar i know it's big but it's not like league big uh or even c s2 big so i'm going to go with zay woo for c s2 i'm picking chuvie it's legal Legends. League of Legends never fails. All right. I'm picking

Brock. He was the Pewter City Gym Pokemon trainer and like the cut of his Onyx. Nice. Who just moved my vote? Okay, there we go. I didn't. Someone in the chat said that Chevy is a choker. Is that true? Or Chovey

is a choker? Sorry? They said Chobie. He chokes. I don't know. I don't know any. I can't, we're not going to we're even told them move on. Yeah, we've got to move on from this one. At least we actually had opinions with the streamer one. Yeah, fair point. I have no clue about any of them.

I can't evaluate. All right. Now, this next one I know some of these names, so maybe we can get somewhere. Best e-sports teams. Gen G, which is League of Legends, N-R-G for Valorant, Team Falcons, Dota 2, Team Liquid PH for Mobile Legends, Bang, Bang, and Team Vitality for Counter-Strike 2. I'm going with Bo's philosophy.

I'm giving it to the one that said League of Legends next to Gen G. I'm going to, because, like, sadly, there was a pretty big Starcraft tournament, even if it was in Saudi Arabia, but there was a pretty big StarCraft tournament, and it's just a shame they didn't mention, like, any of those guys. They never do. But holes. Yeah, man, anyways, I'm just going, Gingy. I don't, I wonder if Jeff Keely's gotten the memo that eSports is, like, kind of on the decline. He doesn't have to put this in his award show anymore can save us all some time. Yeah, I kind of agree.

Because there's barely any effort into this. It's not like, what will we do without the e-sports section providing recognition? And the VGA is like, there's, they have their own award shows. You don't need it in this thing. Yeah. I'm of the opinion. These last four categories could all take a big shit. But whatever, that's fine.

Let's have it in there. Have it in there. There's also the streamer awards now. So it's not even like they need to do content creator. It's a different vertical. So I don't get that shit out of here. Well, we've done it. We have voted.

Now let's talk about some stuff around it. Some weird things. the Megabonk dev pulled their nomination out of best debut indie game because they said, I've made games before under another names. This is not a debut. Yeah, what an idiot. I mean, he could have gotten away with it, but maybe somebody would have called him on it. It's something you get away with it.

It's that award show is a car the cartel marketing is aware. It's not some pinnacle of justice and truth or whatever. Sure. You're marketing your game, but I mean, he probably doesn't. doesn't need to I assume but I mean I'm saying that as a joke I think it's fine that he pulled out a very honorable thing but I don't think I don't think it's well what would have potentially happened to somebody said he shouldn't be in there he made other games before this it's not a debut but um it is a little bit of a bummer just as I think it's a huge hit this

year and should be recognized as what it is and there's there's no category two weeks straight yeah yeah it's really good still like it you know I respect it. I respect being like, yeah, I'm not a debut indie game. So thanks, but I got to not be here. Yeah. So I think that's the, it's the right call. But I think better to be ahead of it and go, yeah, then get attached to the stigma when people go, he's made games before and he gladly took an award or something. The record of him in the chat makes a good point. He's getting more coverage because he withdrew from the thing. It's probably true. That is also true. Yeah. So sometimes that's the strategy. Although like Mo said, I don't know if he needed it.

Yeah, but maybe pretty good. Yeah. If he stayed, he might have won, then he can go on stage and get an award from Stoop Dog. Maybe he really missed out. I think part of this is he keeps his identity hidden. Oh, yeah, that's true. I think people are not sure who he is. There's speculation.

Oh, are we, do we have like theories as to actual things? There's theories. You can go down the rabbit hole. I will. I'm going to go look. Yeah, I'm going to have moist critical video. Yeah, look, there's a video here who made Megabonk with 76,000, views, like, people are investigating

this issue. Getting moist critical is, he's probably like John said, no. I was just making a joke. He probably, Asma Gold got something to say, in between talking about solving the Middle East and all that, you know? No, no. Well, anyway,

good luck to everybody on that. But yeah, he pulled out, so goodbye. Nice. I thought I had something deep to say, but I don't. He did what he felt was right, and I can respect that. I can too. Claire Obscure, however, set records. Most nominations for a single game. 12. No one's done that before in the brief history of the awards. Although I think we're 10 years in now. Yeah. It's been around. It's been around longer than I thought. Yeah, same here. It seems like our coverage of it feels like that was all of it. But it's not. It was, there was plenty happening before. And it's just gotten bigger and bigger. But yeah, 12 is a big deal. Some people think it shouldn't have been in the indie.

I think I agree because it was published by had a big publisher and I think that's the defining feature of an indie game is you're independent. I think that they say right on the website what they consider to be the criteria for it. I think that everybody can and will based on what I've seen since the nominations occurred, argue about what constitutes an indie game in 2025. And I don't think that there is a clear answer, but the game awards gave their clear answer, which is a game made outside of the traditional publisher system. And I think that applies to clear obscure, and therefore it's fine. Whether or not you like that as a definition for indie games, that's up to you. You go decide that, but that's what they said. That's the criteria. It technically meets it. It's

fine. Yeah. Like Ball X-Pitt, someone just said it in the chat, that's a devolver-backed game. devolver is a big publisher of small games I don't want to see devolver games not included in lists like that so I'm not arguing that they have to be 100% independent but I just what isn't indie anymore I just think it's actually a good conversation

for everybody to be having I think is just what even is it probably most indies benefit from having a big publisher like that's a big win if you're a three-person team that you get somebody like devolver because they'll have funds and they can spend on marketing and you give them something but you sell more than you could ever sell with the partnership. Right. I think it's like where does developer end and publisher start?

I think if you're a one-man team and you get Ubisoft to distribute your game, I still, it's like, it's still an indie studio. So like do you disqualify yourself from this niche because you've got Big Papa to give you a hand, bringing your cow to market. You know, like, I don't know. You know, it's... You've made me just picture an old guy pulling a cow. Well, I mean, it's kind of what it is.

You never brought your cow to market. Hey, all, it's me, Big Papa. I just wanted to let you know I found this cow, and we're bringing them to market. You know how much milks in these udders? Kick that thing. Not any, because I clearly said it was a male cow just a second ago, but you're welcome to... Oh, shit. You get this cow, you milk them.

you do whatever you do what you got to do i i will say that like the term indy is definitely being stretched to its thin to to to to you know stretch to bear because if you do have capable resources that's not indie like in the sense of like from indie music where it's like you recorded it in your house and then you you know paid somebody to make like a thousand copies of your cd or tape and you distribute it at your shows that's underground independent music making when you have an office and resources and producer contacts and a student you know at what point you're just like yeah you're not like a tier big business but you're not like indie anymore so it is a marketing buzzword and not necessarily indicative of reality well that's why i think that's

that's why i think that the industry around indie games let's call them that for a minute there it is evolving rapidly there are so many of them the tools have come down to democratization where people can make games. They grab Godot. They grab a shaker. Not shaker. That's the thing everybody uses. Blender. They grab this stuff and they go, bam, Lake Run's done on a weekend or whatever. Like those games happen all the time now to the volume and distribution that it's no longer just a thing you can just say, oh, those little weird things made off in the whatever. Just like music, indie labels rose from that. Well, is there even independent anymore when there's a

indie label. The chat keeps saying, well, this is a conglomerate. Kepler's a conglomerate of small indie game developers and that's publishing this. But what I'm saying is that's then that's not truly independent anymore. So I don't have a problem with it. I'm inclined to agree. I'm inclined to agree that they're stepping on actual indies to use the marketing buzzword to sell to people. Like I think I think this is like an investigative journalism piece like how bullshit is the indie term because I just went to itch.io to look at some real indie games like murp in murp world and bittersweet birthday and soccer spelled with two k's and gnomeball and dose phim sweetened placebo whatever the hell that is and sportile dyslexicardophobia i've never heard of these real independent games made

their bullshit put it on hio like oh is uh claire obscure an indie game is mega bonk even an indigate like i'm just like looks like they're kind of suffering from success uh to a point that it's stretching the actual uh credibility of the term so yeah it's a marketing thing and i think it's gotten harder because i think we all were okay with what was kind of a natural clear delineation in the past where it was like well your games of the year is going to be your big triple a studio games and then we want to recognize these other games that are not never going to quite reach the heights of these AAAs, but we'll call those indie games. And we didn't care at the time, but now three of our top six games of the year fall under

this indie games banner, right? So like now the indies, what we called the indies before, are becoming our best games of the year. And that is becoming a trend across the board. And so I think that right now we are in a position where it's not as important of a distinction. And so we're actually looking at it a lot more seriously, which maybe we should have done all along. But there's no answer to it. I found a real indie game just for you while I was doing it around. I have to show it to you. It's called Brother High's Foe Restaurant. Let's take a

look here. Discord. Yeah. It's like a sim game, so I feel like you'd be really into it. Oh, yeah. Oh. And they're saying, I'll click to a YouTube video. Maybe you can watch it easier. But you should turn the audio on. Okay, hold on. Oh, my gosh. I don't like that arm at all. That's a real indie game. That is definitely an indie game. Wow. Yeah, I'm, I think I'm, you know, we're not going to render your nose. Yeah, I love Fah, so. While John was talking about a cow, I found a horrible gif i'd like to share there you go look that cow yeah it's pretty foul this is from some cartoon or something i don't know what this is anyway sorry to ruin everyone's day uh anyways where where the heck were we we're talking about

claire obscure set a record got nominated for basically everything it technically qualified for and then some um congratulations this game is likely to sweep possibly unless everyone gets like cold feet about it. I think, yeah, you're going to hear a lot of irritation. Why didn't Ark Raiders win? You know, that kind of thing. Well, yeah, and why didn't it get nominated for more

things? I think it just had the one nomination Ark did. Dispatch deserved way more than it got, in my opinion. I only played one episode, and I think that. I think it's probably because everyone on the panel, for the most part, are like, not going to play it. So, I

shared with you guys, and I know Bo watched a little bit of it. Scott, I don't know if you did, but Alana Pierce did a really good video about the video game award. I like her. Put her on the creator list, by the way. She's right. And she, she is a fantastic creator, a very interesting person to follow because she has insider information. She has outsider information. And one of the things I do really respect is she's not afraid to take an unpopular take on things. So I always trust the creator that's willing to go, hey, this isn't the popular stance and I'm going to defend it because this is how I feel about it. Um, that video,

is really good and basically a couple of things that she clarifies in there is that first of all the way the jury works is there is no deliberation like a typical jury it's just these are the outlets that get requests they send a submission there's no in general there's no dialogue about it it's just we sent it in terms of dispatch being snubbed which is something we we kind of mention is why isn't there more dispatch? Dispatch is actually in a really unfortunate position because the first four episodes were out at the time of submitting your information. So it would make sense that people might be hesitant to say, you know, I don't know how this game's going to end, but game of the year. So people would be hesitant about that. The other crappy thing is

it is all out before the cutoff where it can be considered next year. So it was out too early to really apply for anything this year and too late to be on the list next year. So dispatch kind of is getting screwed, in my opinion. It was November 21st, right? November 21st is the date. Anything that comes out after November 21st, I believe, qualifies for next year. Which is tomorrow. Yes.

And all of dispatch. But all of the nominees are already up. so I don't exactly know how that works but yeah technically starting tomorrow anything that comes out can qualify next year so dispatch needed to get voted for before it was entirely out and is now cut off before after it's deadpool vr's release date

was two days ago yeah 18th after dispatch yeah so dispatch definitely got snubbed I love alana but I think she's probably wrong about this well I mean hold on if oh I see because all the episodes were out by then we yeah i played it before deadpool was released and deadpool made it on to the list i think they were desperate for vr stuff that's deadpool they're adding they're just adding

vr i don't think they can no that's a vr only game yeah the rules are different for vr because we don't care about yeah yes yes i think i think that is more accurate that's what we're going with rules are different for VR because who gives a fuck. I can't just do that. I mean, lives. Oh my gosh.

Hold on. It made me choke on my own face. That was amazing. All right. Yeah. See how I broke down the logic there? You know, if it's the first,

it's snubbed. I think the internet's right to be on fire. Yeah. They created the fire. They can't be like, you can't be like, oh, it's an impersonal selection process

that obeys rules dispassionately. Clearly, it's not the case. Clearly, that's wrong. Well, good news about your core host, as famously said by singer, song creator, and writer, Billy Joel, we did not start the fire. This is a whole internet thing

that we're just observing. All right? That's what we do. I will throw one more thing before we move away from awards topics because it's not in the notes because I literally saw it right before we went live. it. But the Golden Joystick Awards have concluded. This is one that is voted by the people.

And the big winner there will not surprise anybody. Claire Obscure Expedition 33 was nominated for seven different awards and it won all seven that it was nominated for. Wow. Claire Obscure is going to sweep. Feels like it's going to sweep. And listen, guys, I played it a lot. And we're going to talk about in the games we played, but I understand. You get it now, don't you? yeah i only played two hours and i kind of got it listen desk stranding two is really good it's much better than the first one i'm hearing it all the time because i'm like i think i'm out i played death stranding i got bored but like no you should play too and it's like i'm really not i'm really not i'm sorry yeah it might

be a great game i'm just really not but i think you run the risk when you don't do that maybe they're right maybe it's incredible in the way the first one i really like it i keep hearing they'll say oh it's so much better than the first one but then they'll follow that thought up with saying but if you didn't like the first one you're probably this 98% chance you're not going to like the second one and I'm like well wait which is it then is it that much better or is it just

there's there's this gameplay loop that you either like that or you don't and if you don't too is not going to do it for him I don't know yeah I just will say having played it like Claire obscures like back loaded it's not front loaded you know a lot of games are front loaded where it's like the first two hours are on immediate hook because

they're trying to get you like dispatch is a good example it's got a really awesome action scene that there isn't a lot of and the rest of the thing which is fine but it's just it's meant to draw you in by being really exciting and a lot of games do that and clear obscure arguably it's first 20 hours or it's worse 20 hours so if you start the game and then bail on it you are you know playing the worst 20 hours you're bailing on it when the game's at its worst yeah and it's a relative worst you don't mean that is like it sucks and then it gets good. You mean, like, it's not the best part of the game.

It's not when the game is, like, narratively interesting, mechanic, gameplay, interesting, like, all of it. It's just not as good. Like, if you were just to evaluate the game on its first 10 hours, I'd say the game is, like, not good. But the game becomes really good. It's just where balance and design and emphasis goes in. Part of its narrative reveals,

but I think mechanically, the game gets better later on, too. Like, I think there's a, it also has end game, which I don't, people, don't really talk about. I haven't heard people talk about it. I mean, they have and I just didn't hear it. But it's not just like a campaign. It's got a pretty robust end game system as well.

And a lot of single player games don't include that kind of thought like you're going to play this high fidelity, high effort game and then also have lots to do after you finish it. But finite, it's not a game as a service infinite style. Like the weapons in Final Fantasy

but like instead of just the weapons, we plan 30, 40 hours of like gameplay time for you you know that's pretty cool anyways we'll talk about it more later but like claire obscure is definitely going to sweep like yeah yeah now in our third hour programming we will now do each one of the joystick just kidding we're not doing that and then we'll do the dice awards and then we'll do you know all the others uh no actually what we will do is move on to some other news and i'll make most of these pretty quick uh so we can get to our break and then talk about those games we played let's start with this x-box did a partner showcase they showed off

tides of annihilation vampire crawlers it's like a survivors deal and total chaos it's a vampire survivor ex slay the spire it's a card game with vampire survivors oh i missed that part hold on where is that you need to find that yeah you need to find it that like there wasn't a ton of stuff in this but there was some really cool things in this I'm gonna play it I like my single player deck builders and yeah

you should pull up the trailer for vampire crawlers okay this is not this isn't YouTube so I can't really size it that is not the trailer isn't that it oh yeah that's it's it it's trolling you it's doing good graphics

and it's gonna go away it's doing good graphics to trick you to lull you into a false look at this little CG man all right and then they do that and then and now it's going to get all low res on me oh yeah there it is

look at the big the garlic there's the balls right there yeah that's the whole troll they're like this game's going to have great graphics not are these from just give it a second oh if this is from the survivors people yes it's Pankle it's the same two frame animation

from the studio of two frames of animation who brought you vampires of the same chest like so look it's a card game See? Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. Actually, I'm super into this. And you can have, like, 50 cards in your hand, and you just, like, it's, you're going to be spamming. I'm, I'm on board.

I am, too, dude. I'm stoked. This is great. It looks so great in a, in a dumb way. Oh, super dumb. Which is kind of like what vampire survivors is. So, yeah, it's vampire crawlers. They make a joke, too.

It's like, we didn't use deck building or cards in the entire trailer. So we definitely positioned ourselves in the market. They say it like, yeah. that's great i didn't know there's i missed most of these announcements from the microsoft thing i've been so mad at them i just didn't see it but they also uh released the game total chaos looks like a real scott game yeah that just came out um that's that's that's a game scott's gonna definitely need to play it's gonna like shit himself 50 times over it's not like i we call it a scott game but it's like it's a torture game is it not what

i thought of wait maybe it's something different are you thinking tides of annihilation i might be thinking of that hold on total chaos that's one that got a lot I'm saving that one for the end because I thought that game looked crazy let's see so total chaos actually came out oh okay

this is total chaos here this started as a as a doom two mod and has turned into this oh my lord is a shooter it's a it's a horror shooter oh it's uh

this reminds me of um this thing published by Apogee which is a blast from the past remember this deal and this controller what was the name of the game that was on

it was all gross splood splud splud splud splood splood splood

what was it it was like something like that it was with an ass and had like five or six letters spanking now why do you think I want to play this it looks scary as shit

yeah that's why oh well aren't you well known for playing horror game Scott that's just that was your wheelhap let's just hope shatterproof isn't

listening to today's podcast it's more of a shooter though so it might be at least like when you get freak out you'll be firing off a machine gun you could be shooting a gun yelling shit on me why uh doom two this doesn't look anything like doom two you mean doom i guess like when they were designing it that's what they started on they were like let's make a game oh doom too i like that kind of prototyped evolving into this yeah that's cool you know what this looks what i read it's kind decent other reviews so far we got eight reviews that's not a lot but the game's just out today. It's all positive. All right.

Well, we'll see. And the other big one that was talked about was Tides of Annihilation, showed off some gameplay. Looks insane. Again, who knows what the actual game's going to end up being. Seems like it's in the wheelhouse of your souls like type of games.

But the gameplay, the fight they showed off, this one you might have to actually look for. That's not what they showed. That's the trailer we've already seen. Yeah, I'm going to say this looks familiar that's that that was the fight they were showing but this is that whole thing where you're it's like split reality type shit where you're morphin into other realities or whatever oh that was a cool dragon it looks really cool I don't know that the quality is going to be in the gameplay but at least in what terms of what I saw it looked really cool

oh it's real nice looking look at that lady is she your lady is she our lady is she the lady we play she's our lady and oh actually i don't think that oh that was a boss lady the one that was dodging was our lady and scott you know jennifer english is the voice of the lady oh but only the english version with jennifer english right yeah she's she's contractually obligated to only ever do english i get it well scott's finally going to play a gooner game i found my gooner game guys we got him we got him it's exciting stuff. Well, that's cool. Well done,

I guess, Microsoft on that front, even though you did a bunch of bullshit in them behind the scenes. They closed. Well, they were the reason that Avalanche Studios closed a bunch of European offices because the big game they were working on got canned that they had a partnership with Microsoft on. So they canned

it like they did with Rare and others with their recent games. And now they have to shut down a bunch of stuff, lay off a bunch of people. I'm mad at those guys right now. Freaking Microsoft. I used to be so positive on this idea that you had all this money you could just afford to take the hits. It's just on their showcase.

Like, you can just buy it on Steam, so don't worry about that part. Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, I know that. I'm just saying, I'm not saying I'm like boycotting them. I'm just mad at them.

They piss me off. Yeah, no, and their windows is sucking and stuff like that. Yeah, no, I know. Jerks. Epic announces partnership to put Unity games in Fortnite. How will that actually work, John, with the fact that Fortnite's, you know,

full unreal and all that. What are they doing? We don't know the specifics. yet that's that's coming also all they've really announced so far is that they have a partnership the plan is to be able to put unity games directly into fortnight which is not surprising because that has been something that they have been doing which is turning fortnight into more than just a single game it's got a lot of games that you can launch from within the client and it sounds like that's a direction they're moving they basically said hey there's more to more to find out in 2026 but

this is a big partnership between epic and unity i'll bet say, here's my prediction. This is a push because at the Epic Game Store has not exactly caught on fire, right? It's there, but it's not like a, you know, it didn't do what everyone thought maybe it would do, which is really challenged Steam. So instead, what they do is they throw all their resources into making their launcher and their store is Fortnite. It's from within its bounds that everything will happen from now on. And that's probably... Games are coming from within

the house. And it's probably a better strategy. They're probably sell more shit there if I had to guess yeah and unity is a whole other engine so this is like some kind of wrapper within an engine like I don't know how they're doing that that's crazy but we'll see uh crafton not crofton although it sounds like shit he would do allegedly uh the company crafton put AI first by asking uh it how to get out of paying subnotica two bonuses um yeah boy that's a real fun twist on that story, is it? Big allegedly here, because we are dealing with a legal battle, but what came out in the pretrial brief is that the CEO of Crafton, I'll just read the quote

from the PC Gamer article, already concerned that Crafton had paid too much to acquire unknown worlds. Kim feared that making any earning payout to founders would earn him a reputation as a pushover and endanger his position as CEO. It states, desperate to avoid such a professional embarrassment, Kim obsessed over finding a way to avoid Crafton's obligation to pay the earnout. In pre-brief claims, Krafton, head of corporate development, Maria Park, told Kim that Crafton would likely have to pay the earnout if sales targets were achieved, even if the studio heads were dismissed with cause. At that point, the CEO turned to artificial intelligence to help in brainstorm ways to avoid paying the earn out the filing claims chat gpt likewise advised that it

would be difficult to cancel the earn out so just confirmed and so the best part is this is the same company that i think last week was like hey guys if you want to leave we're we're doing payouts because we're an a i first company and now allegedly they're turning to chat gpt how can we not pay somebody we really don't want to give them some money that we told them we would pay them Wild. Chat GPT, can you get us out of this? Crafton just slowly applying the clown makeup, maybe not even

slowly, just throwing the clown makeup right on. Yeah, I don't know how that all is going to pan out for them. They seem to be really gung-ho on this stuff though. They do deny that that happened, for the record. Oh, yeah, because the truth is, as I heard it or read it earlier,

I went, you could make this up. you know like this isn't this may not be real because you could be i could easily say oh i don't know yeah what was the source of this yeah yeah you could make this sort of stuff up pretty easy and that if it spreads it's just it's just bad PR but but they are AI first so yeah it fits right yeah go to the AI find out how i don't have to pay people i mean a lot of these guys are just like making the people use AI like we're paying for this AI please leverage it yeah and let's see some results so maybe the see, you know, it's believable.

That is still something Crofton would do. I'm sorry, crafting. Sorry. Friggin. Crafton. Crafton. Doing what they do. John, it turns out, you have to be good at dispatching and dispatch. And this is good to know because I'm starting my journey.

I've finished first episode. Why? Why do you have to be good at it? Yeah, just a quick little fun story about dispatch before I realized the show was going to be really long. Yeah, there were people that were reporting a bug and dispatch. saying, I picked all the right choices and I still got what they perceive as the bad ending. And they said that it is not a bug, but you can still get certain outcomes if you are not good enough at dispatching.

There is a score that is informed behind the scenes based on choices you made primarily, but part of that also requires you to do a good job in the dispatch minigames. So there were a lot of people, and I said it too, that said, you know, playing the dispatch part doesn't really matter. It's just its own little mini game. Turns out it does matter. There is an impact. Yeah. That's good to know.

It seems evident because, like, certain, like, if you don't complete certain missions, they join the enemy's team. And, like, they're in the game as having joined, like, the molemen. I'd failed to rescue the molemen. they joined the enemy team you know nice job well done well it's terrible why are you cheering for me

I did bad we needed those mole men I'll talk about it later I actually really like that mini game but we do we talk about dispatch we do have to address like some of the there's a bit of there's a bit of unjust shade I got told it's not a game oh that kind of thing

did you get told that yeah disagree yeah well we'll get we'll talk about that but i think that's a little bit i think there's a little bit of that like oh it's kind of on rails just choose whatever and the same things happen and it's there's probably some truth to that but it's not it's not there's there's variety and variation to yeah there's we're seeing that here i already saw in episode one at the point where i made a very distinct choice that would have either well it would have had very different outcomes but the overall would have still carried on maybe that's what they mean

Yeah, usually you're not like, there's not, you're not butterfly affecting the universe. We're like, if you choose one thing, it's a vampire game. If you choose another thing, you're in booking nights, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So it's just like it's a mild variation in the story's fairly set. Anybody making the claim it is not a game, uh, I want to be nice because obviously I know they exist. So I don't want to say you're dumb.

Yeah. I can feel like, I won't say that because I don't want to. No, they're just, I haven't thought it's true. But I just think it's disingenuous. Yeah. Tick Tecttoe is a game. There's more mechanics than this than there isn't Ticktactoe. Sure as hell is.

Yeah. Tick Ticktoe sucks. Can I just say that? Yeah, but it is a game. You can say I don't like the game, but you can't say it's not a game. Yeah, but I don't think we've said enough in our modern society how bad Tick Tacto is. You don't think it's caught enough shade? No.

People are too harsh on monopoly and not harsh enough on Tick Tick Tate. It's only good for like- needs a rules update. Yeah, it's only good for like six-year-olds because they don't understand that you can just in perpetuity have it draw every time. You'll end up with a draw match every time once you learn the trick. And then once you do, it's not even a game anymore. It's just dumb.

So like when they, in war games, they're playing Tick-Tac-toe in war games. That was the whole point. It kept repeating and never beating itself or whatever it did in Tic-Tac-toe. I understand or in war games. I understand the point of it in that, but what a dumb game. but still a game it's still a game. Yeah. Yeah. So you can say it's a bad game or a good game.

What I'm not accepting is any arguments that dispatch is not a game. Yeah. And I'm not saying I wouldn't play some little small game somebody makes kind of like these, you know, slot machine ones I've been enjoying lately or, you know, ball pit X. Slot machines apparently are a game and it's just pull a handle. Yeah, but what's fun about it is you go in and modify them and make these weird ass versions of those games. I'm talking vanilla slot machines like in the casino. Oh, those suck, yeah, F those things. I'm just saying the basic paradigm of slot machine,

if you're going to say dispatch it out a game and then accept that slot machine is a game, that's crazy. You're not thinking about it, but you're just not thinking clearly about it. I'm just saying some young upstart, some young upstart developer just needs to make Tick-Tac-toe relevant by adding a bunch of buffs to it

and, you know, Balo the hell out of Tic-Tac-toe, and I'm back in. We'll see how we can make it work. Well, I mean, the video games are prized themselves on interactivity, flashing lights, that kind of stuff. So taking any boring old game and giving it the juice up is probably, you know, if it's fun, you know, if it's well done, it's probably going to be fun. Tonda says Gooner games are still games too. Sure. Visual novels of games. Tonda, I want to see your

library. In some ways, Guna games are two games and one because you play the game. You play with yourself. That's right. That's right. Let's and the mechanics are, when do you play with yourself? How dexterous are you? All right. One last thing to mention before we go to our break, that is that the first photos from the Zelda set, not set, but shoot, live action Zelda movie have leaked.

I don't even know if they leaked. I think this may be on purpose, but anyway, some are calling them leaks. These don't look like somebody took a picture of someone, like on set. Oops. Yeah,

these look like some glossy shots. Yeah, they're fairly nice. There's a couple of others floating around where they're kind of a little bit more like, you know, candid or whatever. but there's your Zelda, your Princess Zelda,

there's your link back there, chilling, looking all moody. And, uh, well, excuse me, princess, he says.

Yeah, that's the tone of it all. And then you got all this high rule back here and she got the point of ears. And, you know, that's, that looks fine.

This looks fine. Yeah. I don't, I mean, it doesn't look amazing, but it doesn't look bad. Yeah. It's just some pictures.

I'm like, okay. It's not enough. Whatever. Yeah, we need more. But, uh,

there it is. Yeah. I think some people, People have made plenty of hay out of wringing their hands on this thing, but it won't be me. No, most people are, it's usually sexist and or shitty. Just weird things. Teserat Dynamite in the chat says, I hope Link doesn't talk. No, we want him to make that.

That would be great, though. Can you imagine if he just didn't talk and nobody acknowledged it? He just has to make all those sounds he makes. Yeah. Ha! Ah! Why wouldn't Link talk? It's not like Mario talks, and they gave him a voice.

well he talks in the newer games yeah it's me mario yeah i'm a mario yeah and like later games stupid well yeah so later that's what we're talking does link not talk in any of the new links no the link the new ones he does he well no he doesn't talk but he barks out these yells and stuff i'm gonna find a couple right now so we can be the full multimedia experience not talking is not an iconic part of link like i think of gordon freeman you know he he never talks link link link has never spoken but is there is that like story or is it just because he just doesn't talk like no it's like chrono trigger chrono doesn't talk like people still talk around him they don't treat him like he's mute but right that's all true he just doesn't ever talk i now present uh 20 seconds of it

enjoy What's what is that from? I think that's 64. Yeah, 604 are they. Ocarina of time. That's the words I was looking for you. That sounds like a lot of talking to me.

There's no words, though. He sounds like a gestural, pretty much. What's a gestural? I don't know what that is. From Claire obscure. We'll get to it. We'll get to it. You're probably going to get spoiled on a few things.

I should play that game. And for those who haven't played Claire Obscure, if you don't want spoilers, skip the game section this week. Well, we're going to go deep into them, but we're probably going to mention something. Yeah.

Because I'm going to have to. I don't want to hear too many spoilers because I'm not far very far. I do want to play. So don't spoil me too hard. Yeah, he's got it on his steam deck any day. Any minute now. It won't be anything big, but it'll be,

I will try to be very careful, but you know what happens on the show. Yeah, sometimes stuff slips. I get it. Yeah. I've done a fair amount of slippage myself. All right, speaking of slip and we're going to slip out of here real quick and do a break.

When we come back, the games we played this week, your feedback and more. You also have a mash up a little bit later, something called reverse kidnapper. I'm a little nervous about whatever the hell that means. Oh, boy. Yeah, kind of scared. Paying good money for that. That'll all happen right after this. So, stay tuned.

And we're back, everybody. Thanks for letting us take a quick break because now. we have to breathlessly tell you the games we played this week and we're going to do that by playing this little sound right here first and then just for fun oh no just kidding i love that i love that sound though that's great oh it's one of my favorite things john ever did it's just classic and we'll live forever and myself with the the metro oh the music oh sorry yeah um all right let's get to the shared play this week we all played dispatch i finally got an episode in i was at a funeral

all week or for four or five days of travel plus the time there in las vegas i had no time for much um and i didn't take my steam deck so i there's really no way for me to play it at all and i knew i wasn't going to have time and i sure didn't have time so uh as a result i was like oh i can't wait you know get home i'll play that for sure then this week was crazy so i finally got to play an episode today prior to this show. Nice. It's fresh in mind. Hooked me right in, man. Let me tell you. Dispatch right off the bat. What a first impression a game can make. And I play a lot of telltale games. This one, and this isn't telltale, but it's ex-tale people. It's a lot of pedigree there. It's the style of game. It is completely the style. Yeah, the style of game is there. But what is

up here is there are a few things. I think the story so far, the cold open works really well. The voice acting, and I haven't even heard everybody yet, but episode one's worth of voice acting, freaking top shelf. The animation looks like I'm watching something brand new in a movie theater from some big animation studio, like production wise. This thing's insane. It's insane, just how good it is. And I know, you know, John in particular, have been singing its praises for weeks, but it was really great to finally get, dip my feet in there. I am now completely hooked. I want I can't wait to get to episode two tonight when we're done here and I'm all posted and everything. I'm going to play it. Yeah. Yeah. I really like it. So the that first episode is my first extent of it. I'll just say real quick. Mechanically, there are a couple of things. Um, for the first time in a while, I don't mind quick time events. I think they're handled pretty well here. Uh, they, in the fighting and stuff in that initial scene when you're when you're in the mech. That's this isn't a spoiler. You just see a

mec early on um that stuff i thought was really cool and what made it challenging wasn't that the the actual quick time events were challenging is they're really not they're just timing and write buttons and all like you're used to it's that there's what's happening on screen is so freaking fantastic that it's easy to get lulled into like oh wait there's a button oh shit oh right you're not just watching a movie for sure true and i don't i'm not saying that as an argument toward this is a movie not a game because that is not what I'm saying but that the fidelity is just off the charts and so I just I'm having a different experience than I did say with Batman or Wolf Among Us which are excellent games I just think this is kind of next level on a whole bunch of in a whole bunch of ways

and then I like the hacking mini game more than I thought I would I usually hate those actually quite liked it and I like the um the dispatch stuff more than I thought I would. The most game aspect of the game. Yeah. And you know what, Beau? It's an actual strategy game. I'll tell you what I would do if it was given to me.

This is a weird thing to say. If they broke that out as a separate thing where I could send heroes on missions and then put my phone on my pocket and then later I get in a notification that so-and-so's back from his mission, I would do that shit. I would play that game. Yeah, yeah. It's that. But you'll have plenty of it. There's dispatching to do in every episode. Yeah, I assume so.

You're going to get plenty of it. Yeah. It didn't feel like a pointless exercise. It felt like a fun. It was actually fun. It's part of the narrative too, because while you're dispatching, the heroes are incredibly talkative throughout the entire day. You never get to a point where you're like, I guess they're out of lines of dialogue.

Like they, throughout the entire game, they will be talking and reacting and giving each other shit which is the best part you know and um yeah no incredible it's really really cool so again i'm one episode in that's nothing bow beat the thing in one sitting right all six yeah i got started around two in the afternoon and finished around midnight played the whole thing in a sitting and um had just a great time like this kind of should be a game of the year like i know there's this weirdness about that but like this really is This is a really phenomenal experience. I really got into it, you know, when you're kind of in the shoes of the protagonist, you kind of feel like you're making decisions.

I was like, I was invested in wanting to find out how things are going to conclude, what was going to happen next. I felt like I had relationships with the different characters, even the ones that you have less of. You still thought and felt things about them, and you can react in ways when you have dialogue interaction with them, and it felt deeply personal. I felt a deeply personal connection to everything going on in the game. And, you know, there's even a little bit of like, you know, there's a romance storyline. There's definitely a game for the romantics. Because, you know, by the end of the game, I was like, oh, yeah, I don't have a girlfriend. And it was kind of sad a bit because I was like, you know, so into like what was going on.

It really sort of pulled at heartstrings and all that. It was very good. Baldish Gate. Very, very good. Baldish Gate, you were having sex with everybody. so I'm surprised you didn't have a girlfriend. Yeah, but that was like, you know, that was adventure.

It's an adventure. This is, this is its own kind of adventure, but it's more like, it's a mix between, you know, the office and, I don't know,

Marvel movie. Like, it's kind of a mix between the two. It takes the cynical tack of being, you know, leans in the boys direction where it's like you're playing,

you're playing with the Z team, the, you know, the worst of the heroes, the villains, who become heroes so nobody has a lot of faith that they can get anything right

and your character as well is kind of on a down having a rough go of it as well but it never gets so cynical that it's not cynical or like social commentary satirical on the way that the boys is but it's still realistic

that it isn't like Marvel where everyone's like oh we got to you know do this it still matters whether or not your hero so it has the wholesome side but you know there's a conversation about cum shots that happens at one point throughout the movie

the game not for the kids by the way you haven't even started episode two but you're going to get an eye full right at the start episode two and you're going to get a he already has yeah I got ass and weaners at the start right it's not a it's kind of a spoiler but like well I'm not going to say it but like punch up's ability is super

awesome when you finally connect the dots and figure out why you know what his power is this the short Irish guy oh I like him yeah yeah well just wait till you i've only had him in the bar he's really yeah what he's really good at you know just think of all the dogs in the game and think of how tall he is okay i mean this game has like the boys sense of humor where they do like messed up shit that's not like wholesome comic quality with the game it's like adult humor and the humor is like

definitely very funny i was laughing a lot throughout the entire run of the show like well well done humor talk like people realistically talk but it isn't so cynical that you're like the world sucks of superheroes were real like the boys is you're just like it's it's kind of finds a sweet little threads of the needle between both that's the impression was that they're going for like you said the boys vibe is very much there especially with some of the humor and just some of these heroes and anti heroes and everything but it also has heart pretty quickly. Like I'm already really into just, I want to see him do okay.

I want to see this work out. I want to see Jesse Pinkman's character, you know, go. It's not just Jesse Pinkman's character, but you get put in charge. I think that happens in episode one. You get put in, you get offered the job to work. Yeah, but you don't dispatcher. I haven't been to the office yet. They don't do that until season two.

Okay. You haven't had your team meeting. No. No. That's what I mean. It's kind of the office where you're in a conference room. and you've got to do the Michael Scott thing and try to raise them around.

But like everyone is super dysfunctional because you've got the villains turned heroes. But I like that because the boys is kind of exhausting sometimes. And I appreciate for what it is, but it's commentary, it's social commentary. It's meant to be,

there's no redeeming value in almost anybody. It's meant to be horrific. It's horrific and cynical. Like that's, that's shows. Yeah. And it succeeds in doing that. I'm not saying it's bad.

I think it's good. This I can tell. is more like yeah we'll dial that in a little though you know like he actually cares about stuff he's a little pooped out on it all obviously and things have not gone his way but i'm not getting the vibe like uh you're just a duchin you know being good matters nobody's good in the boys everyone's well beyond being good they're just it's just a slug fest at you know at a certain point and they lose that everybody on it on both sides just loses that completely but like this you know matters like you're you're part of a superhero company and you got to like do good

things and people you know they perform badly they can't really be heroes including yourself right you're just like they're even just like man they take they take bets it's my mild spoiler i'm not spoiled the whole this is not serious but they take bets on how long you're going to last before you quit because you know it's hard job and yeah you might die one's going to be a dick to you sure the action is amazing too that's the other thing is i thought i would start to see the seams of this is a video game when the when the when the fisticuffs happen and I thought it'd just be more stilted and and stiff the way that telltale game action often was and this is not that this is like Netflix special stuff like oh it's phenomenal I think um I hadn't

I played clear obscure after this and so that really affected things but like when I was done playing it I think it's the single best thing I played all year yeah like and I played the final fantasies this year and enjoyed them but you know it's short but a punch is like so high above its way and and like I said I got really invested you know you watch something you're hoping to be like swept away and you know lose yourself in the thing that you're you're watching or participating in and I just completely got you know transported to another world for 10 hours and that actually doesn't happen that often with video game experiences and this was just phenomenal playing it all front to back was great and it's just full of laugh surprises and

and because you haven't played far enough I don't want to we can talk about it next week I hope you'll finish it through to the end because there's like oh I'll finish this stuff I want to reference but all I got to say is like

man Matt Mercer is in this you'll know it when you see it and when it starts I think I already heard it I think it's my favorite thing I think I've ever heard him voice act well he's shroud

isn't he in this he's the character shroud in the first episode. You know that's, yeah. But like, you're not really going to do, you know, you're going to have an old story before you get to shroud. You're going to probably forget he exists. And then, you know, he's like your sandwiched bread on this.

They make it, they make a to-do about his character's like entrance when it's finally confrontation time. Because his shroud as a character is hidden in the shroud, so you don't really see him a lot. Right. And he doesn't have any lines, I don't think, when you face him in the first episode.

He does say something, very brief, but he says something, doesn't he, John? Does he say anything? I thought, I thought toxic just sort of translated for him.

Like, yeah, toxic, toxic and he just spoke for him through the whole thing. No, they really treat Matt Mercer like Jaws where you just don't, you know, you just don't see him till the end. And then it's like, oh shit, it's Matt Mercer. It becomes the Matt Mercer show. They do a really good job with him where in the beginning you don't know anything about him. So he's there and you're like, yeah, that guy looks cool. But when they use him and invoke his name and stuff like that, it's always very impactful. And it shows you very quickly.

I mean, even from the first episode, you know, your encounter with them, you don't walk away from in the best way. And so you kind of get an impression there. And every time Shroud is invoked from then on, you're like, oh, he's serious business. We have some questions, though, that we can ask about choices, just limited to episode one. But you got to promise to play it so we can talk more about choices. I'll play the whole damn thing. I'm in. But, yeah.

So how, you know, you met Blonde Blazer? Yeah, I met her, sat on the thing up there. I did kiss her, if that's what you're asking. You did kiss her? Okay, interesting. My daughter was sitting here with me and she watched me do a bunch. She'd already seen the game. And as she walked away, she goes, did you kiss her?

And I said, yeah. She goes, oh, good. And so I don't know what that means. Oh, good. Did you alcohol or ice flambay? So here's flambay, by the way. I was just getting his picture up when you said that. I love that name for a guy with fireball.

power because he's also a turd. I iced him because to me, my brain went well, no, he says he doesn't burn so adding, throwing raw alcohol on him is just going to make him flame on and not die. Through alcohol.

You burn his eyebrows off for like the rest of the game. I've seen, I've seen both outcomes, Scott. I do think that water is the funnier choice because we knock a tooth out. And he has a little whistly lisp for the rest of the thing. Yeah. And so. Oh, weird. So it is different because I think the missing tooth was funnier. Yeah. But the fact that he says he doesn't burn and then he does in fact

burn is very funny. Yeah. It is funny. And that's the one thing because Carter had played this with her friends or I guess her friends had played it and she watched. And they went a different way. And like you guys are saying, and a whole different scene played out. story carries on as is but this what happens to flambe is a totally different outcome scene and it sounds like the thing's full of those like your choices that's where your choices matter is like did I you I'm aware of like there's a pretty big choice in episode two that changes you know what happens in seven and eight so it's like the choices do matter I wanted to talk to you about it when I found out you beat it bo because you said it and I just immediately I wanted to ask you so many questions

but obviously Scott is in that same chat and I didn't want to fill it with spoilers or go through and spoiler tag everything. So I just went and looked at your achievements. And I got to say, one of your decisions, I'm like, he made that decision? Specifically around, I think, episode two. Oh, who to, okay, who. Yeah, who's no longer on the Z team. I was like, interesting.

I did it because the one character would perform better admissions and stuff was like leveled up and stuff and I thought out of everything in the game I thought that was a bullshit choice but it still makes sense because it's what corporations do anyways but I'm like it's my second day on the job I got to make this choice already I do agree it's a bullshit choice in fact I had to reload that's the first time I had to reload a save in that game or not reload but I alt-f Ford and relaunched it because I felt like it was such a choice I shouldn't have to make that I was like, I wonder if I just idle here if a third option

will present itself or what happens, but then the game just picks for you and I went, well, that's not what I would have picked if I knew I had to pick. I live streamed and a lot of people gave me shit for that choice, but it's because who it affected, it's like they're thinking of the voice actor and not the... Oh, the character. I was thinking of the character

because I was like, who else do I have that's intelligence and charisma? Yeah. And well, Invis a bitch, but... I'm sorry. There's a character called Invisibitch. Oh, that's a spoiler.

You'll find out an episode too. Okay. Yeah, we got to stop spoiling, but it's... I'm sure you can go to IMDB and see all these names, everybody, so... Yeah, I just... It's mainly for your benefits, Scott. Like, the listeners, too, to some extent, but we spoil shit all the time and get irresponsible. But you're actually playing it.

You're actually enjoying it. It's not a long game. There's high odds you'll have this done by next week. Yeah. Please have it done by next week. It's your sign. I do want to talk about choices, and... I want to hear like things and there's like eight episodes worth of choices.

I'm full, I'm full intention. The only thing that would derail me is something crazy. It'd have to be like mom dying or something. You haven't even met Phenoma Man yet, right? No, I have. Well, I haven't met him. I've done his tutorial thing.

He does. Well, he also is in the tutorial as your guy. Yeah, he miss spells. How to send heroes and oh, okay. He mispronounces words and stuff like that.

Including his own name, which is funny. But that's Travis Willingham, right? I'm pretty sure that's who that is. Yeah. He's perfect for that. It's perfect for that role. Oh, yeah,

I know. He's great. Yeah. But did you, you've been to the office, right? You met Waterboy. I haven't been to any of the office stuff that. He hasn't been to the office yet.

I basically get off. You really have to keep playing. I get off the billboard somehow. I get home and I talk to my dog and I turn on a video of the news and then the camera fades. I mean, the biggest crime is he hasn't met Jeffrey Wright's character yet. Yeah. that's the biggest crime oh you're gonna love okay you're gonna you you are going to if you love the first

episode i did episode after it gets better this is sometimes you're like oh they started really strong and it got boring it's like pretty much every episode tops the one before it so if you like this one you have seven better ones to look forward to yeah um the artistry on display is just i mean it's un it's impossible not to feel the craft here yes this is like like like i It's hard, like, if you're kind of reticent to play it because of price or because of what I mean, if you're finances or finances. This game is definitely worth it and it's definitely phenomenal, like one of the best things to come out this year. It is incredible. I want more of these.

More of these would be grid, but if all they end up getting out of this is, okay, we're going to have a companion series, that would be okay, too. Like, don't stop. I think this is these characters. These guys I think are working on the critical role game like this. They are. That's what's next. Yeah. So, I don't know when we'll see a dispatch too.

I'd be okay if they just ended at where it was. I'd obviously just take more, though. It was really good. I felt a lot of things in those 10 hours. I'd watch a 12-episode Netflix series. I mean, because you say, like, it's just a TV show. It's like, most TV shows I watch, I don't feel a lot. Like, Breaking Bads don't come around all that often.

And this is, like, on that level of being absolutely phenomenal. Like, it's not just like, yeah, it's a mid-level TV show. like it's like it's actually like better than 99% of TV shows that was the vibe I was getting the vibe I was like why isn't this just like a full blown series like it just because the interactivity makes it fun like I'm glad they did it this way it's incredible yeah it's kind of that's a carter Carter said that is what this is this is like a quality animated series it just has interactive bits and that makes it better because you're involved in it in the game the game does react to your choices. Like, I didn't know he gets a whistle the whole time if you pick the other

option, because my option, he just doesn't have eyebrows throughout most of the show. He's just got no eyebrow. They're all burnt off. And you have more interactions with flambay. And so, like, I just know there's actually variations to outcomes and stuff like that. And they're humorous and fun, and I look forward to talking. All right. Well, we'll talk about it more next week. John finished it well before us. We should actually go through. maybe I'll do it because there's they had to do a recap of the decisions you made we should like you know just totally yeah they let you do that the options have a like the codex will let you go look again everything you did that'd be yeah yeah so we should those key decision points we can we can talk I did so far episode one the ones I ran through I did a lot of 55% did like you did 48% did like you did it was like a lot of middle of the road stuff which stuff's middle of the road but there's a few there's a few that are not like the one that John was talking about with you, the achievement you found

or whatever? No, no, that one's going to be roughly Oh, I was on the low end for sure. That was like a 60-40 or 60-30 or 6535-35 thing. I definitely was in the minority on that one. I was going to say like that's another thing is a lot of this stuff

I was playing like as they release new episodes. Like I was hitting refresh to play at the second it went live. And so my stats probably don't reflect a huge number of people. So when I

went through almost everything was very 50-50 beyond some strange outliers and stuff like that. But now I feel like those numbers have probably shifted a lot because more people have played it or maybe even like I'm doing played it again.

Well, all I know is when we get to the end of this year and we're doing our Oscores. It's going to be hard for me. I know it's Cicency bias is a thing, right? You see something recently and you think more about it. And recency bias is not a new phenomenon. But this is really good so far.

And again, this kind of got snubbed hard. Like this should be on the nomination. I don't fault anybody for doing what Bo did. Obviously, it didn't impact him, you know, in a negative way. He's a big fan of the game. But like, this game held me for four weeks. was, I think, right? And I loved it. I loved consuming stuff between the weeks, watching the comments, filter in. Like, I don't want to get into too many spoilers, but like the first week

would go by and you'd have only episode one and two you could talk about. And so everybody was like, I think this character is secretly evil and bad and doing terrible things. And then the trailer would come out and they'd be like, yeah, look at them. They're definitely bad. And then the next two episodes would come out and they go, oh, man, I was wrong. Now I feel bad. Now I feel like a bad person. And it was kind of like we were all on the roller coaster of the experience together, which was super fun.

Again, I don't fault anybody for wanting to binge them all. I'm certainly like that with a lot of my media as well. But like in both, in terms of the game by itself, I loved. But even just the experience of those four weeks, like it hit Wednesday this week. And I was actually sad that I didn't have dispatch to play. Not just because I didn't have, I wanted more, which I do. But just like, there was something that I was looking forward to every Wednesday. And then going from that to watching other people play it and seeing other people get jazzed about the game.

Like, it was fun for that entire all encompassing thing. Well, it's still one of the best sellers of the month on all major platforms. They're just kicking ass. And I think that's freaking great. They got up to 2 million sales now, which means effectively, once they all came out, they kind of, from what their previous announcement had been, kind of doubled what they were at. So that's good. It sounds like they got a lot of people in that early bit.

All the bingers. Yeah, and then all the bingers jumped on. As I'm a binger, I'm not going to watch your shit when it releases when it's a TV show. I'm going to binge it. If they made $60 million, that means good things for future projects, you know. hope so like i loved it i like it's phenomenal like i i'm just like man you tell tale like those style of games have really kind of just fallen into the background you know there's a real moment when the walking dead season one came out that that one game of the year i think

for whatever award show i remember it doing really well it was a big deal yeah and that was a that was a banger too and just just to finally have an experience like that that's this good again it's It feels good. It feels good. This is... Big thumbs up. I think, I think, and I think to thank Devastation, I don't know if she bought it for all of us, but she bought me, my copy. I might have held off.

I might have had the same holding back feeling, but thankfully, I was able to play it. That choice was robbed from me. And it was a good, that's a good thing. Devastia will remember this. It's, yeah, right. And it's just phenomenal. Like, it's, like, I think. I think I just felt the most things playing it.

That's what I'll say. Yeah. I know about all the games. Like I just felt, I felt things. Yeah. And I really enjoyed and appreciated that. Yeah.

In a way, I didn't get from most other games I played this year with the exception of like Final Fantasy. Yeah. It made me laugh out loud multiple times. It is not easy for a game to do that. Like, yeah, I find games funny,

but that doesn't mean I'm sitting here chuckling all by myself out loud. And this game made me laugh. bunch and then you know go and say oh you got to see a clip of this it's so funny it's so good um it did a really good job of marrying all the things you need to make john laugh as just do as an example but anybody really but it's the the production quality of it doesn't skip anything so you're not distracted by stiff animation or video game edges you know yeah you're just presented with just some raw story and the most fidelity you can think of in an animated thing So none of that gets in its way.

The writing's phenomenal. I'm only an episode in. And I already feel this way. Like it feels like a show, like a pilot of a show. I can't wait to watch the rest of the show. I'm just so stoked. The quality remains all throughout,

like no noticeable video game jank. Like just works well the whole way through. Yeah. Polished to shine. It doesn't, you never go, ugh, crap.

I think I hit back and now it's all screwed up or like even pausing to like, someone yelling at you gotta like pause it it literally just pauses things it doesn't skip anything it doesn't it's just a good game like the whole package that's just so good gosh dang all right we need to wrap the show early so you can go play tonight hell yeah i can't wait i'm so excited um all right let's get to what we played individually um you want to let bo go first yeah talked about it do we want let's do it let's do it let's get this clear business out of the way where are you at because so so interestingly enough i don't know why i decided to play this i played dispatch and with that was a good game and i kind of downloaded all the telltale games i didn't play

because i'm like i want to feel again i want to you know tails in the borderlands i want to feel again yeah i really can't underscore how much the game like really resonated and touched me you know yeah in inappropriate places right and um i was like man i want more you know And I kind of hummed around a little bit. Then I was like, you know, they say Claire obscure is pretty good. Maybe I need to, like, jump in here. And it's something I've been promising I finished before game in the year, so I'd have context on this one because it was going to irritate me.

So I decided to sit down and force myself to play. Now, the reason I stopped playing was I had misgivings about the Perry system. I didn't enjoy it. I thought it was okay, but it was pissing me off. But I'm like, you know what, I'm just going to sit down and accept it and play it and I'll be honest, you know, I wasn't super as I was playing it. I was like getting through the first act and I was having an okay time, but I didn't really pick up until act one ended. I kind of already had been spoiled on what was going to happen. So I don't think it had the same impact as if I had didn't know.

but it was very dramatic and then you know the new character happens and then you meet Esquy and Monaco and go to the gestural billet like all that shit happens I actually kind of do that before but like there was a lot of little things

there was a lot of little things that were just starting to win me over like oh that's kind of weird and this is kind of neat and I'm just now fully clear obscure approver this game is I understand why it's game of the year. It deserves it. So a few notes on the things that help me back.

One is the Perry system. You can do builds to trivialize it. So I've built Myel in such a way because she can, she has an ability call. I can't remember what it's called, actually. But she can guard for other people. So you do the Perry with her instead of the other ones. And she has a defense stance,

which reduces damage by minus 50. There's a Picto I got, which is basically just materia. that also reduces damage by 50% and you can't heal. And then I just buffed her health so she wouldn't need heels. All that to say is like I reduced damage to like 20 and I've got like 5,000 health. So like I'm like, oh, I don't need to dodge that much. Like if I dodge great, I get the parry.

But if I don't, you know, that's fine. Like yeah, I'm taking reasonable amounts of damage. I'm not spending my turn to healing. So the game started to get more fun because I was able to play in the way that I, you know, preferred. Can I just say real quick before you go on, like, this is part of what I like about this game because you and I couldn't have played this game more differently. Going into Act 2, when a new party member joins, I noticed that that party member had an ability called Berserk, which is basically does more damage based on how low their health is. So I built, instead of around insane defense, I built around, well, if I get hit, I die. So I better learn to Dodge and Perry really well

because I'm just going to keep my characters one hit away from death at all times and deal as much damage as humanly possible that way. And so I think that's part of what I find so cool is that your philosophy was, I like this Dodge and Perry, I'll just build defense around it and break the game in that direction.

And I went, you know what? The best defense is killing everything in one hit because I've only got one hit point. Let's do this. Let's go. And both worked. and both worked fine.

So my grievance with the Dodge at this point, because once you play it enough, you see how it becomes fun, but I have two major problems with it, but I also can give it some praise. The major problems with it is, I think some of the animations are tuned badly. For example,

the big gray rock monsters, the hexagon guys, the two-hit, the two-hit attack combo, I can parry that 100%, 100% parry rate. The three-hit combo, I'm like lucky,

like, maybe 5%. I get one of them. And I think there's something weird with the timing windows. Like, it's just not perfect. And I'm like, I swear I'm looking and concentrating and I can never parry the one animation, but I'm perfect at the other one.

Like, like, like, how am I bad at one and good at the other if the windows, if there isn't something wrong with some of the parry windows? So, and then as you get in the game too, the game trolls are even more with guys that do like seven hits.

And they're like, woo, whoa, whoa, am I going to hit you? I'm going to hate you? I don't know. Oh, here we go. You know, and it's just like, oh, my God. Like, they really got high in their own supply with it. But there are, like, in the, this is why Act One kind of sucks is you just have no tools and, like, no health. And all you're doing is healing and praying to God you parry. But once you have tools, you know, you can, like I said, my L is like my super sentinel tank.

And she'll just jump in front of everything and hit. And what I will praise, well, I'll start. with the thing when I there's this thing called gradient dodges which is like not only is there a perry or gradient Perry is there Perry there's a second type of Perry that comes up and act too and I almost almost quit the game at that point I was like what you want me to jump Dodge Perry now gradient Perry F this game but here's the thing the gradient Perry is easy it catches so one of the things the regular Perry doesn't do is like in Batman Arkham City you could you could

can do like a counter like when it when it's very generous when a punch comes in you press the counter button and the animation somehow works out that it'll catch or it'll go there even though if it's physics defying to make a comfortable fun experience and not too challenging on you which is kind of what i want and the parry is like there's five frames of animation which pressing the button's correct and that's it good luck and i was like they just really need to learn to do this stuff. Well, they did it with counter. I have had the sloppiest gradient parries, and it just

catches. And I got to say, the animation for the gradient parries is out of this world. Everything goes to monochrome. And the sound is like and one thing, this is why I was kind of pissed about them awarding English voice actors, because I'm playing in French.

I don't know if it's the same screaming. But when Maya L does a counter, she's like, like she's just like screaming like crazy and it like adds to the epicness because it's like an 18 foot monster that you're paring so I think anybody would scream like a maniac trying to counter like a 500 ton club coming at them

so it really really works the other thing too is I think the group parries are awesome when it's like you do a group parry as well like the actual like production effects of the battle animations is phenomenal and it makes me real I feel real energy

when I'm parrying so I will compliment that the parry system overall is a good thing but it took me a while to appreciate it because I really hate it in the first act

and now that I have had I'm in Act 3 right now and now that I've had the benefit of seeing most of the scope of the game I realize a lot of the design complements the later game

and they had to give you something to work from zero and it's just not the best that's my opinion story wise i think it starts strong but mechanically yeah yeah i'm just talking about the fun of the game doing the combat i just felt it was real shit and it it put me off the game honestly and once you get i would tell anyone now who's like hesitant or maybe not playing it and doesn't like parry or whatever it's like you i know it sucks it's not the best but like it is rewarding enough you need to play it to act two about midway through act two and at that point if you're really still not feeling it you're genuinely not feeling it but i think everyone who likes g rpgs will find the fun and the story as

well the fact that the story has this the story is kind of one of these uh even though it's not anime it's this classic anime like trope where things scale out bigger and bigger in like cool ways including once you get to Act 3 and you're like, oh, this is like, it gets banana pants, but it works. And it's interesting. And I haven't seen the full conclusion yet, but it's a winner.

And what I would say is like the game overall, even though you have 20 million to spend it, whether it's an indie game or not, it's still kind of like, you know, a beginner project and it really punches above its weight. And you really get a sense from all the creativity,

all the locations are beautiful the soundtrack really is like there is a there is an incredible amount of music like forget just even the quality of the music there is so much music in this game and the fact that this game is centered around this notion of art in creativity and that they live up to it by everything being like beautiful all the music being crazy there's poetry there are weird creatures and that's the other part that really won me over is humans there's a lot of humans in the trailer, but the best stuff is not the humans. The best stuff are the gesturals. You get a gestural that they're showing them even on the screen. That's Monaco. He's awesome. And his relationship with Verso is really good. And Esqui is like instead of getting an airship, you just have a giant wine bag,

sentient wine bag. And he's awesome. And he can never be mad, but there's a rock that's his neighbor. And the rock really hates him. Francois, the rock. and Francois is kind of awesome He is obviously a turtle Oh he's a turtle?

Is he not a rock? No, that's something he says They talk to him and he goes I'm clearly a turtle I don't know what he says in France Yeah, there's a dispute over Whether he's a rock or a turtle And I don't want to spoil things

Because explaining what makes it awesome Is the spoiler about what this world is And what you're participating in And so all that to say is like Things really come together. It makes sense. And it's as silly as it is cool, you know. And I loved it.

I've been hooked all week. Like, I played a ton. I just, you know, I'm, this is all I want to do is play Clear. It's very good. And, and I understand why people would say it's game of the year. And I think without having played, all of the ones that are nominated are up for contention, And this is pretty clearly the most effort and best result of that effort, probably out of any of them. So, yeah, I recommend playing it.

I mean, you know, I recommend getting through. If you enjoy JRPs and they're not like in the beginning, it's like Yakuza Zero. You know, it's like you got to stick around for a little while and it will win you over. Can you imagine what these guys are doing next? Like, that's what they said. they said they asked them they said what's next are you guys gonna are you going to expand and they said no we think we're about the right size for team making games and they said well you know what what are you thinking next and they said well you you liked what we did when we didn't know what we were doing imagine what we can do when we do know what we're doing that's a great way to put it that's great and i thought that was a real nice way of saying it i mean i don't know how it concludes but it doesn't feel like the kind of game that would be best serve as a franchise and if they're doing the jerry peachy thing. I imagine they go the final fantasy route and just make a whole new thing.

Yeah, I believe they're going to probably keep, uh, I think I read that this was confirmed, but maybe I'm just putting expectation as a fact, but I believe Claire Obscure is going to become kind of like your overall tagline and then whatever falls into it is going to be your different story, different, you know, what. Oh. Yeah. Like Final Fantasy. Same idea. Yeah. Like Final Fantasy four and five or nothing like but they have the name or whatever no but it really it really punches above its weight and like even the early levels like they're beautiful but the early levels are not interesting there's some crazy levels that are so cool later on and crazy boss fights where it's like oh here's where all the here's where all the juices like here's where the stuff where you're going

like oh like some woman's going oh you get into this huge fight and it just gets the crescendoes into like this crazy music and visual feast that's what you want though you want a game to start good and then gain right it is paced exceptionally well because i feel like the temptation is always there to put your biggest and craziest right up front and clear obscure like in terms of narrative it it has a strong hook like that prologue is something that a lot of people talk about. It's really good, yeah. A lot of people, it was quasi, you know, quasi spoiled for me, not specific as to what happened, but a lot of people talk about the end of chapter one. And you think, okay, well, it's a game that's got some interesting beats. But those big beats happen

throughout the entire game. It's actually paced very, very well. And just because a bunch of people talk about one doesn't mean that they aren't throughout. Same with bosses. You go like, okay, well, I've probably seen what the biggest, coolest thing they can do is. And then they do bigger and cooler. um it's it's crazy how well they paste that all out and you know even with the music you know this game had a boss fight uh near not quite the end of act two but near the end of act too that when the music kicked in i was just like i wanted to just jump out of my chair and be like this is the coolest moment i'm so stoked to be going into this fight because it just hits so hard for me um and then like even things

like the parry system like in the beginning I hate it but like I just did this side mission thing with these dancers and like where you have to parry 12 shots in a row and she shoots them really fast and I like I did it I'm like it took me like a couple effort took me a couple times and I'm like

oh shit so I then I respect my character to make her more survivable and then did it and I'm like I'm into the paris system like clearly I just did this thing I was like it's just the first 20 hours are like but to me they're the worst 20 hours. I'm not saying they're terrible, but they are the, like, worst of the game. The other thing, too, that I really appreciate about it is act three is most of the game is act one and act two. And act three is kind of like it feels like you can just go finish it because you're saying that, like basically the way the game's structured, you can just kind of go do the conclusion. But there is a ton of side content that you can do after you finish the game or before you finish and apparently it trivializes the last boss. But,

I've been doing the side content because I just really have been enjoying the game and want to prolong it. And I'm like, whatever. So we're doing side quests for relationship, you know, upgrades and stuff like that. There is so much to do. Yeah. Like, it's like the way Final Fantasy 7 had the weapon system where it's like, there's these crazy hard things to do. There's, I think I'm like level 66 right now. And I'm like, I'm pretty high level.

I probably can take anything on the map. And I went to this one zone and the first little dinky monsters just like turfed me in two seconds. And I'm like, oh, I'm going to need to be level 99 and like figure shit out to even do this level. But I'm supposed to finish the game before I do it. And it's like, oh, they have this whole end game map where if you're enjoying the game, you can just keep playing and there's lots for you to do. It's finite. Right. But I appreciate that it's not just here's your game and it's over.

Roll credits. There's some like optional end game stuff as well. How's the, what's the level cap in this game of Far Can? 99. I know that because there's an achievement to reach level. Did you do that, John? Do you hit 99? Yeah, I did. Nice. Of course you did. Yeah, it's not a slog. Like, I'm at level 66. And as long as you're doing like at level

content, like I get like five, you know, lots of XP per fight. I'm, you know, I don't know about later, but so far up to level 66, it's not a slog at all. So I did grind for the achievement, but I didn't have to grind much and it was not for very long. I think I spent maybe five minutes on it to get to 99 with where I was when I was like okay I need to get to 99 plus you enjoy it so probably not much of a grind because you're like what you're doing in there yeah yeah I think I would qualify grind is like I'm just going to fight these monsters for the sake of it yeah but every monster I'm fighting still at level 66 like oh this is a level and I'm got to get to the end of the level so I got to fight some stuff so it's part of like playing the adventure no that's it doesn't feel like grinding so yeah no it it's the game really is phenomenal it's like dispatch still made me feel more and it's like tempting to be like that's game of the year because i felt the most but like i still think the story is really good in this and the overall vibe and just how much you know like the RPG of it all and how fun it is i think it it definitely edges out you know over over dispatch but my favorite quote in the chat room today

is this one from tie in 83 says really surprised to elden ring is easy but Oh, struggled with the Perry system. What do you say to that, Bo? What? Say that again. I'll read it again. It says, really surprised Eldon Ring is easy, Bo struggled with the Perry system. I didn't use Perry.

Perry's hard in that game. I never used Perry at all. He might be talking about the counter thing or whatever you have to. Well, I think. There's no counter. It's just, oh, what were you complaining about before the timing thing with two different? I think all they're trying to say is that Bo. said Eldon Ring was easy

and then having a hard time with parrying in this. But I will say this also I believe they timed it or checked it and I think the Perry windows for the hardest difficulty in Clare Obscure is smaller than Eldon Ring.

I believe they're smaller than Sekiro. So it also depend, Eldon Ring it depends because Perry is an ash of war which means there are hundreds of ashes of war. You can use one, maybe two, if you're dual wielding. So most people are not parrying in that game.

There's guard counters where it's if you block and press the block button, you can follow up with an attack input. That's no problem. That's very easy because, yeah, it felt jet. I think there's a problem with the parry windows, and I still maintain that expedition. It's not, it could be better. But parrying, specifically the one-to-one that I would compare to

is an ash-of-war that you don't need to use. I never used. And some people post their videos of awesome. some parry fights where they 100% parry like a hard crusader in Elton Ring and you're just like, I'll never do that. I'll never be able to do that. The parrying is like, it's a little, it's a little too much. And I know they can turn it down because like I said, gradient parries are very forgiving.

I don't know, I don't know how or why, but it's just, there's been points where I'm like, I parried a full two seconds before that thing's going to hit me. And it gave me the, like, it gave it to me. so you can adjust it right but you're just doing default i assume you can't you so story mode apparently has more generous windows but normal and hard expert it's the same windows it's just health pool and oh i thought there's no actual window adjustments i thought that scaled every every level scaled your peri window i misunderstood that in fact i believe at launch i believe they were all the same i think the change the story mode uh where they made it larger was actually

a post-launch change, if I remember correctly. I don't think it's a size thing. I mean, making the size bigger would solve the problems, make it easier. But I swear it's just some animations are like bugged or not. There's a few that I just feel like I never really got good at dodging for sure. But I feel like whoever decided them went to the John School of deciding when you should press buttons because I actually was very good at it throughout my time. in the game. It was not a big struggle for me to learn. That's not me trying to brag. It's just it made sense to my brain.

And whenever it didn't, I felt like those were the fights where the audio cue was easier. So the one you were talking about with the dancers that shoot, you have to parry a bunch. I eventually got to where I was doing that from audio because I was having a harder time doing it visually. It's funny. I did a visual. I did a visual. So she has a little black hole. and the black hole shrinks and so as soon as the black hole

was at its smallest is when I'd press and then and then I got it. Okay, so yeah you got it off the visual. I was 100% audio. The time I beat it, I was trying not to look at her. I was looking down and I was just like just go off audio and that's how I got it. Oh, you're like a Zen master

when you're doing that. That's cool. They did put a lot of effort into trying to make them work. I just still think some of them are too small of windows. It's too crazy. Yeah. Some of them are bugged. I swear to God. Well, there you go. Another rave about this year's likely game of the year. Yeah, Claire Obscure. Amazing. Amazing game. I'm incredible. I'm looking forward to playing it. I'm so happy someone else on the show played it.

I know, right? You're never going to get me before. For some reason, even though it got, you know, record number of nominations and wins and all that stuff this year, being the only person who played it was like, I swear it's good, you guys still felt. Like, I'm the only person who thinks this. It's good this happened because now your award season experience will be much less a known. Yeah, the odd. Yes, I'm like, guys, I promise you, it's really good. Yeah. It's really good.

I remember the first day. John was, John is right, by the way. We need to give John his flowers here because he has been pushing for us to play it. Yeah, but I also don't think this was a bold stance. I look at the, you know, again, the 12 nominations that it got. It's like, okay. John took the. the brave stance that Claire Obscure Expedition 33 is a good video.

Oh, yeah, but I don't care about those guys. Yeah, I, you know what? The first week you played it, for one, for one episode of Cora, I was an hour ahead of you. Do you remember that? Yeah. Yeah. Not now. Now I'm 300 hours behind you.

No, once you're behind both, that's, you should play some Clare Obscure. It's very fun. Yes, do both. Yeah, both is good. Yeah, both is good. Yeah, you'll like the non-humans. The non-humans are. Yeah, I like all those.

I love the gesturals. That was actually, so I liked the game from the get-go. I didn't need to warm up to it. But the moment in the game where I was like, you know what, I think this game might be something like really special beyond just I really like this game so far, was the gestural village when I started to feel charmed by the game, not just like, oh, it's really good at touching on those emotional strings. And I like the combat and the world's pretty.

But the gestural village when I was interacting with those lovable idiots was when I was like, oh, you know what? I think there might be some real sauce here because I'm finding this charming and lovable as I'm going through this. I like the way they talk. They're goofy. I know I told you guys on the show about the guy who asks if you like gambling and then makes you prove it by saying, I don't care about numbers. That's how you prove you love gambling. Oh, right. I did that. Yeah, yeah. That's the correct answer is, don't tell me the odds. I don't care. Yeah. Spoken like a true gambler, he says. So that stuff was all really good. I mean, even though it's a, it's meme humor, even the one gestural that's just sitting in a house that's on fire going, this is fine. Like, even that I thought was funny.

There's a gestural too. There's a merchant bazaar, and one of the just was like, go away. I'm not selling you shit. You're like, well, why are you a merchant? Then you talked to another gestural. It's like, did that guy just, like, mouth you off? It's like, how does it be a good merchant? Like, it's very childlike, and it's like the gesturals are very, like, have a childlike logic to them where they just don't make, like a child made them, you know, it's, it's so good. Scott, you should play. I'm going to have two of us now.

It's going to be like, Scott, play Claire. I'm scared. I got two hours in. I just got to keep going. Maybe I will right after this dispatch business. Maybe that's what will be next. Maybe Sashima will still burn. yeah it will burn

it'll burn yeah it'll be fine let's go defeat the Patriots what else you get up to this week we played some slay the sky board game this weekend with the boys some no iRL streaming video games slay the spire board game super fun love it yeah um heard nothing of good things about that

here it's awesome it's it's fun it's just mentioning it because i played the game uh i did no man sky the normandy expedition is back in where you can get the the normandy from mass effect except i thought it was a ship you get but it's a frigate for your fleet and I was a little disappointed. Yeah, that's a little bit of a bummer.

I need to get in and do that again. Public service announcement. It might be done. I don't know when the cutoff. If you delete the save where you earned these things, they remove the reward. And as somebody who is a chronic save deleter,

I used to have the Normandy and I don't. Oh, I didn't know that, John. You didn't brought that up, that bit of trauma. that's terrible it's painful that is a painful thing and it's over now to do do it again i think so i think they're going to cycle through them though they said something about like they're going through a whole cycle of them i think through the holidays like maybe is yeah they're doing a cycle of reduxes of old expeditions so yeah i was like oh shit i want the normandy because i'm like in this close to doing mass effect legendary edition you know kind of want to play mass

back again do it do it there's some new expanse footage out there and it got me anchoring for some good space. There is? Wait, wait, what? Well, for the game,

you mean that new upcoming game. I thought you meant the show. Yeah, the Expans game. Yeah, there's some new, there's some new footage.

They got some, apparently there's some NASA consultants who, or astronauts who went to space that consult for the game. Oh, no way. And I was like,

yeah, yeah, and they're talking about how to make like sounds realistic and that kind of stuff. Perfect setting for that. I have a feeling to expand,

the Expans video game is going to be so money. I hope so. I'm so excited about it. Anyway, so I did the No Man Sky Expedition 2 and then I played Vampires Survivors VR which we talked about but I caught some footage

because the trailer makes it look very sensational so I wanted to show some realistic vampire survivors gameplay so this is you in VR playing the tell me it might not be as sensational as it looks right and everyone's like your poor neck because look I have to

look down that too oh you are so looking down that's worse than Demio like you drop something on your lap right in the middle of a VR session but it's like there's a table in front of me and that's where it's happening and look there's not many buttons all I'm doing is moving

moving around what's the circle that doesn't seem like it's not as hype as the actual as the actual trailer made it seem it does get crazy though and you do get epileptic stuff business but oh yeah I assume it gets crazy but what's that circle that's going around is not doing anything that's an ability it's like a bird see the bird

you're me yeah that's one of the you haven't seen those abilities that got added after you decided you didn't like this game as much as you should. As much as I like games based on it, yeah. They're better. And then I look up and I got to use a pointer and pick my ability. But you see how it's literally the same game.

Like they didn't even do anything to the menu. It's the same PNGs. Well, that's two weekends. You can't expect that kind of thing. You see in the background, the toughest monster, if you look above the XP bar. Oh, yeah. It's letting me know that that guy's on the battlefield.

So you kind of get some information from up there. That's actually kind of cool, yeah. You see that new Demio, uh, D&D thing, came out today? Yeah, is that in VR or? Yeah, VR and VRN dustop. This time it's a combo, uh, binary. I did see it. Um, right now this is mixed, but I don't know.

The, the fact that it's a D&D IP kind of just has me a little nervous, but I don't know. I'm curious about it. I, I saw somebody say it's like 60%, uh, Demio, 40% D&D. So I don't know what that means. I don't know. It might be worth trying. It's just, it's so much to do. It's just not.

high up on my list. So, you know, I'll book market, but I'm not running, rushing out to play this. It was fun when we played that time, me and you. That was a good time. It was good. I wish we had more multiplayer VR experiences. There's this Dungeons of Eternity that me and Crofton played that it'd be fun to get you to play, but I don't think you're in your headset that much these days. No, it's been a while. I could probably be convinced, especially if Crofton's just running around breaking shit. That could be fun. It's fun. You know, it's, there's some, there's a pretty good multiplayer experiences these days. But anyways, vampire survivors, just in case, I just wanted people to see the non-sensational version. This trailer made it look so hype. And I'm like,

it is hype, but also, you know, just remember, it's vampire survivors. But it's fun. I still had a great time. Looking down is cracking me up. Yeah. All right. Excellent. I will now tell you about a game called For Strike. This is when they, this is the actual medical term when they cut your tip of your penis off when you're a kid and you become, oh, I'm sorry, that's a very different thing. Circumcised. Circumcised, not Forstrike. Four strike is a very different thing than that. It turns out, it's a video game.

And this came to me out of nowhere from our pal, Shatterproof. And I had a little bit of time the other night and said, oh, let's fire this up. I'd heard a little bit about it. Shatterproof also gifted it to me. I haven't played it yet, but I will share a gratitude for that. Yeah, I think he made a joke about the three host thing in the,

in the post. Thank you, Shadowproof. So here's what this game is, and I'll try to just kind of summarize it. It really grabbed me. I'll say that ahead of it all, but I'll tell you kind of what it is. So the core mechanic of this game is that you're in some sort of ancient, I haven't really paid attention to too much about the backdrop, but it's like ancient Asian-cultory stuff.

You're one of the last members of a surviving group of master of martial artists who know these certain moves that nobody else knows. And you've got to bring peace to this kingdom. It's a lot of boilerplate stuff like that. But it's done really well. It's a typical devolver digital kind of production. Things are nicely made and look good and all that. We're seeing just some tutorial here right now.

But this thing, the main thing about it is the foresight system, which is the four in four strike, F.R.E. The foresight system lets you practice every single fight you ever encounter in the game as many times as you want in your head, basically in your mind. and so you can keep repeating it if you were not happy with the run you just did we had to fight these guys you can just do it again and do it again and do it again

until you do the real fight and that's where a progression will happen because if you win then you'll go somewhere else but it basically lets you try this stuff out try before you buy basically on the fight and you'll find the perfect way

to sort of beat everybody before you even have the fight so then when you do have the fight then you got to execute because once you've committed and if you screw up and you die you've only got three hit points as you can see here above his head if you screw up and do it wrong you'll you're dead and you go back to the beginning and you got to do a new run because it is a rogue like after all like you're going as far as you can go and uh the the ones in there in your mind you can die a hundred times it doesn't care because you're just in your mind uh doing the foresight stuff like you're doing a what do

they call it uh creative visualization yes exactly that's the idea of it and you're supposed to be learning how to be a master of this. This little old man up on that statue's teaching you how to do better. And it's kind of a puzzle game, uh, I would say, uh, it's hard to explain because the roguelike part of it is, yeah, you get a, a card, uh, basically the representabilities in between encounters. And so this one, I've got one extra block. If I take that card or once every fight, I cause bleeding or, you know, whatever it is, they're like upgrades and slay the spire or anything else you're playing like a run. But the actual fighting

is this really fun methodic martial arts kind of thing. It's not turn-based, but it almost feels turn-based because of the foreseeing thing because I get to go try all this shit. It reminds me a little bit of the,

what's the MEC game that the FTL people made? I always forget the name. Into the breach. Into the breach. There's a little bit of that, even though that's not really what I'm explaining,

but there's something about it reminds me of that. And it's not just the pixel graphics, but you have these customizable movesets and combos, different techniques from different masters that you learn. It's basically a puzzle game in that you've got up to sometimes, I've had six dudes on screen with just me to fight them. And I've got to figure out how to get them all with limited Dodge, limited health pool, limited abilities against some of their abilities.

Some of their stuff is unblockable. So I have to think about those things. so it's a lot of like well all right i'll have this guy run past me and he'll hurt the guy behind me and then the guy behind him will get knocked over that'll delay him from running at me you try these things in the foresight mode and then once you're comfortable you go do the real thing and it just feels there's something about that planning that really hits a certain kind of itch that i'm not sure i've had before like it's a bit's weird i don't know how to explain it it's weird no that seems really cool i i think you did a good job i mean it's basically like you know i think

the thing that was interesting is i looked at it and i also thought of into the breach and i thought oh okay turn based but it's it's as if the turn is a trial of a real-time combat there you go and and you get to you get to practice a bunch but then you still have to execute it so you can have a perfect plan go to execute it muck it up yeah And then you have to live with the consequences of not doing what you planned to do. Yeah. And I even had a case where I did a run before I did Forsyke because it looked easy. And sure enough, I killed everybody. And I went, look at me. And then the next one comes up and it looked actually easier. And I'm like, I'll just do that again. No, no, no, no. I shouldn't have done that because I died. And I had to start over. So there's real value in the foresight thing. And it's not tedious. It doesn't feel like it takes a long time. It doesn't load screw. green or anything. You just very quickly try these things out. And then once you're good,

you execute. And you kind of have to be perfect if you don't want to lose any health at all. You can lose like your block and maybe a weapon you were holding that you can throw or something like that. That's okay because those things replenish in the next zone. But your life, you lose, you know, you lose a life. Now, it's possible you can gain like one of these cards will come up and it's like, oh, I'm going to take the extra health one. So I have an extra tick of health, which is a smart one to do because you can do more moves and get away with more if you get that. You can share combat encounters with other players, which is kind of a weird feature, but you can save these things out, send them to your friends, and they'll do them in

slow-mo and everything. I don't know how often I would use that, but that's kind of cool. Some dialogue, heavy story in between stuff. That's pretty good. Lots of great pixel work. I like the art. I think this is a rad little deal. not super super far but i ended up getting sucked in pretty hard runs perfectly on a steam deck best i can tell that's where i played it and uh should be fine on your PCs as well i don't know if this is in other places i assume since this devolver this will end up on playstation and xbox and everything else uh no switch two has a version um so anyway it's very very cool game again it's called four strike f o r e s t r i k e and is it

available now and reviewing well is the other nice thing uh then i played uh you guys sometimes i'll find a thing for like two bucks and i'll think why not i think goon gooning time yeah time to goon um no i didn't i never think of gooning but i do think of some of my favorite weird little games have come from like a strange sale for a thing i never heard of and this had overwhelmingly positive reviews and seem to be just kind of a rad little thing. I thought, well, I'll give this a try. Basically, it's, well, I'll tell you the name. It's called shell diver. And you're a turtle. Speaking of a turtle. Look at this little guy walking here. Run now. You, here's your concept. I mean, the concept is basically, it's a cozy kind of incremental game. You play as a senior turtle.

So you're one of the smart older turtles. You run a jellyfish selling business. All right. And you do it from a submarine. And then what you do, this is all presented in 2D kind of sweet pixel art kind of stuff. And your first job is to go down 100 meters in depth. And with your bubble gun, bubble gun, you shoot a bunch of squids,

or not squids, they're jellyfish. And those jellyfish go back with you. You have a limited inventory of how many you can hold. And then you go back up top and you sell those jellyfish. So it's Dave the Diver. So now here's the fun of that. I'm glad you said that because that's where I was headed next.

Okay. They basically took what Dave the Diver is in long form and just said, hey, what if it was just the fun bits where you collect the shit, sell it, and watch numbers go up? Oh, it's Dave the Diver for me. Yeah. Yeah, it's Dave the Diver for you. So you sell your squids. They slowly sell. When you get the shells, you spend shells.

you spend shells on upgrades this gigantic freaking path of exile looking upgrade shart you got to fill out it's fun to fill out though it's all very animated and goofy um and as you go deeper and deeper and deeper you get more and more biomes more and more kinds of currencies that you then bring to the surface and sell upgrade your your abilities your chances of breathing longer your regeneration of oxygen like this little chart right here is nothing eventually this thing is a giant spider web of choices. And it sounds like maybe a bit much. It really isn't. I'll skip ahead here where he's really selling stuff. I'm at the point now where I'm pulling in 900 million shells on one return to the surface. And you spend those on upgrades. You go, see, here you go. This

thing's getting wild already. Then you go deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, more tools, more stuff, more things to see and do. You can max out some of the trees. Some of them you can't. Some stuff's really expensive. You'll see a thing. It'd be like, that's 7 million shells. I'm never going to have those. But then you do. Um, it's a game about your dopamine and about numbers going up and it does that, that little swap real well. Um, I got totally hooked on this. Very nice. Well, reviewed. People really like this game. Yeah, people like it a lot. Guess how much money it is. $2.99. No, my gosh. It's stupid. It's almost stupid. How cheap this is. Um, but that's part of its charm, I think, is it's not, you know, it's not really trying to be, I say the word depth.

I mean it unironically with a game where you're trying to go underwater, but it really is just about how low can I go, how long can I last, how much money can I make, how low can I go next time, what upgrades can I get? It's the loop we do with almost every video game without all the filler in the middle. So like you said, John, this is basically Dave the diver, but stripped of its extras. Without the parts I didn't like. she didn't enjoy exactly yeah and i really like it so i'm going to tell you right now so the easiest three bucks you'll spend five sounds like in canada um available now it's called shell diver like hell diver but shell diver and it's great and i freaking love it's mark me as a fan um and that was about it

i haven't had time to do much since i got home i can tell you while i was on the road i took an amber nick with me this guy right here took that with me the whole trip and i played advanced wars for about three hours on a car ride and then I played a bunch of stuff for play retro and then what was the other one I played I forgot now oh I played a bit of that final fantasy tactics advanced which is totally different than the other one anyway played a bunch of that but advance wars mostly dude let me just tell you something advance wars holds the hell up all right game is awesome I played two mostly because I beat one like five times um anyway so I did a bunch of that. And when I got home, I bought

Moonlighter 2 as soon as it was available. I haven't played it yet. Haven't had time. But I can't wait. For all those who celebrate, me and Kyle, get Moonlighter 2, because apparently it's pretty good, although incomplete because it's early access. Anyway, there's that. I also got today, I got a game called

Cleared Hot. I will talk about that next week. I've had about 10 minutes in it. It's a gift. If you used to like those strike games, like Desert Strike, Jungle Strike, Urban Strike. Do you remember these? Old Genesis S&S games? No.

Love those games so much. I was a huge fan. If this game is that. Cleared hot. You're flying this helicopter around doing missions. Oh, okay. Beautiful, nice modern engine. Having a ball for the 10 minutes I had.

More next week. I don't want to get into it too much today. And then I reinstalled Guild Wars 2. You can sue me later. All right, John, let's talk about what you play. Oh, wow. Did you see the... announcement for Guild Wars remaster? I did. Yeah. I'm interesting.

What made you install Guild Wars too? I think it did. Yeah. I think it did. Because I saw that. So I see this trailer. For those that didn't see it, they're going to make Guild Wars one, a kind of a remaster up-res thing with some changes to make it more, whatever, more modern. Steam deck verified, you can just play it. Just go play. And it's free, I think. Or no, maybe you buy it once and you just play it. I can't remember what the deal is. Anyway, probably no sub. They usually don't charge sub fee. Yeah, no sub fee for sure. But neither is Guild Wars, too. So I'm not sure how they're differentiating it.

But anyway, Guild Wars won for all those who have nostalgia for that game. That thing's coming on the third, I think, of December. And all it took was just all of that, which has nothing to do it, too, really. Yeah. And I was like, oh, I kind of missed two. So I installed, too. I haven't done anything yet, but I installed it. But it's installed.

you've you've theoretically played as much guild wars too since you installed clear obscure expedition yeah i'm having i'm having like the mmo second screen solo burn a couple hours for no good reason on a weekend kind of feeling right now and i don't i don't want to be in wow until the new expansion and so what else am i going to do i can play so but they're kind of at a middle point i don't know i don't know i think i think guild wars two is really rad and i don't i've never i've never felt like i've spent another time there. So I'm going to play a little bit of that. I don't know if it'll be this week or not, but we'll see. John still slumming, it says, here in Knight City. What are you doing over there? I played cyberpunk 2070. Like, yeah, that's it. Has V had... Guys, I told you all, I'm on a bit of a gaming break. I'm just playing cyberpunk 277 when I game. I did play a little dispatch this week as well. But yeah, that's it. I don't really have anything more to say. I'm having a good with it. I'm doing things I've done before. I'm doing a couple things I haven't done

before, and I like that game. Judy is your love interest? Because that's the only right answer is Judy? She is, because I'm a girl and it's between Judy or friggin' brobo cop. Oh, yeah. River? River's all right.

He is all right. He gets, he actually gets way more hate than he deserves. I think he's fine, but... He's fine, but Judy is Judy. So go... Yeah, it's hard. It's hard to not choose Judy. Always choose Judy. I will say,

Chad, apparently I tried to glaze over this because I was like, I've talked about cyberpunk so much, but chat did say same build. No, this is my first time ever doing a net runner build. And I'm playing it on the highest difficulty because everybody said net runner is super easy.

And you know what? Even on the highest difficulty, net runner is super easy. Oh my gosh. You just hack people. You just hack people and they die. And they don't even get alerted sometimes. unless they find you like yeah

I played it very early before like the balance rework and stuff like that and literally you would just show up to a spot hide around the corner upload something that lets you ping all or something like access to the whole network and then just you know upload your your hacks and watch them all their brains

get fried out and they never get alerted or anything it's just kind of scary actually wow I'm scared just hearing it yeah but there's new stuff there was new hacks that they added so maybe it's a lot different now I don't know well plus the whole fight with what's his name supposed to be radically different right

um who's the big bad smasher smasher yeah adam smasher yeah I mean that's the only tough thing is that like until you're like op some of the boss fights are pretty tough yeah with the oh he wrecked me for a while but then you know

it's one of those games I beat that place doesn't still burn well well that's not true the dlc is still burning i forgot about that i got yeah you gotta go um finish uh rescuing or no i got to make a choice i got to do monster scary or the other choice i still haven't done you didn't make the choice yet no still i haven't done it no because we were supposed to do it i think at this point just make the choice scott i think you just play it what if i played the non scary choice what if i did that yeah it's i think it's the better choice it's that is a way

to go. You like to make me choices, but there's a really epic moment if you take songbird's side. Yeah, but imagine how epic the moment would be for other people to watch Scott get scared by a robot.

So one choice is the game turns into Resident Evil. Yeah, alien isolation. The other choice is not that. Okay. And I like the Not That version, but I also not a survival horror fan, but people might not want to watch you do the other

side, although I think they would because it's still pretty damn cool. Lucky or nut says it's not that scary. Well, lucky or nut, have you ever seen Scott? Yeah. We're not talking about you. We're talking about Scott. Scott and his relationship to scary game. Yeah, I really, I have a problem

so. And we need to find we need to finish F, we will. People keep asking when's that going to happen. We're going to figure it out. Just busy, man. It's been busy. Stuff going on. This trip wrecked me. I got to get all my, I'm still not caught up, but guess what I am going to do? I'm a place dispatch to

And I, that's what I'm going to do. Hell yeah. And let me play Clarebscare. F the police coming straight from the underground. All right. Let's get to, let's get to some feedback today. We have an email, do we?

We do. It's not really an email. That's a good question. This is a comment on YouTube that I thought was worth reading here on the show. And I'm going to read it to you now. Hold on a second. There it is. Nick Landry on YouTube says,

Hey guys, love the show and all that you do. But I'm disappointed about the way you talked about Fallout 4. Because it's full of unaformed. Sorry. It was full of unenformed. informed opinions, says he. I would argue partially informed opinions, but go on.

Yeah, I feel like we were okay. But anyway, first, you do not need to re-buy Fallout 4. There is an anniversary edition, which acts like a bundle for 60 USD. If you already own Fallout 4, you can just buy the anniversary edition upgrade for 40. I still don't think you'd have to pay for it. Anyway, so my thing stands. In my opinion, well, this is mostly aimed at me. But go, I mean, go ahead.

Yeah, but I agreed with you. Well, anyway, which includes the six official DLCs and 150 Creation Club content packs. And if you already own all the DLC, you can just buy the Creation Club for 20, which seems really fair. I'd agree with that. Although, didn't that break everything? This is where I disagree. I think $20 for Creation Club stuff is still too much. Too much money?

Now, granted, I am playing on console, console players, especially at Bethesda games. are going to live in the line of don't put up a walled garden around mods. I want to go to Nexus mods. I want to download stuff. If I feel like supporting a creator, I will. Don't try to package me a bunch of shit. I will decide what goes into my mods. Thank you very much.

Sure. So, like, yeah, so the idea of being charged for it is obscene to me. I also think, and I'll let you get to the rest of the email in a second, But just like, in general, we are talking about Bethesda, which people are waiting for another really good thing from Bethesda. And we're talking about Microsoft, which right now I think everybody fairly, in my opinion, is going to be a little overly sensitive about feeling nickel and dimed by Microsoft at the moment. I think that what was before a no-brainer best deal in gaming sign up for Game Pass, we're happy to recommend it and talk about it, has switched into a, hey, look, we acquired something, we spent a lot of money on it, and you're not getting what you feel like you should have been, and you're getting a lot of disappointment, and we're passing on that money we owe to you to foot the bill for. and we're not giving you much in the name of it, but we're going to tell you we are.

Like, to me, that's the part of the GamePass thing that I think sat with me. The worst is the fact that it's one thing if someone comes to you and says, hey, we're slim year, we need more money, and you can decide if you want to do that. I don't like when somebody says, you need to give us more money

because we're going to do more for you, and they very plainly are not doing more for you. And I think that sucks. And I think as a result, I think Microsoft and anybody under Microsoft is going to be under additional scrutiny when it comes to the money they ask for people. I think that extends to what we talked about last week or whenever it was with World of Warcraft and what they're doing with player housing. I think that gets additional scrutiny in part because we're seeing a lot of financial decisions that are not consumer facing but feel like, oh, you want a. to foot the bill for all the shit you acquired. And so

I am... You already got the money hose. Like the dream is getting a bunch of subs. I think would both companies do things where it feels like it's not enough it gets irritating? Sure. Like you won. Why are you trying to get more?

Yeah. I think that you know, yes, I think there is a logic and I think probably especially for console players who don't have as easy access to mods saying $20 for a creation club pack is maybe not crazy, but that's not what I'm looking at it from. I'm looking at it from what I'm seeing,

Steam charge me for a game that I've already had, that has already seen multiple re-releases. And I think the idea of charging that much for it, even if it's just $20 is too much. And that's just where I land on it. And if we disagree, we disagree. And that's fine. And I welcome the feedback and happy you can clarify the areas

where maybe we weren't clear enough. But I still think that it feels cash grabby to me on a franchise that there's plenty of other places I would give you money. I like Fallout 3 way more than Fallout 4. If you want to do a proper re-release of Fallout 3, I'd be happy to give you a little money for that without feeling like you should give that to me for free. But when this is like the third or fourth time that Fallout 4 has been brought back to the table um i don't care whether you're charging 60 or 20 it's a little silly to be charging me at all

yeah there's this other aspect of it that goes along with what you're saying but the reason we haven't seen a three remaster and maybe the rumors that that's being worked on are true i don't know so i could eat these words but what do you do if you're the company trying to maximize squeeze every penny out of everything you can you go well we've got this one that was released initially on x86 architecture consoles the Xbox 1 and the PlayStation 4

that's very easily scalable movable re-releasable we don't have to do a lot of work in fact we already have high resolution textures they're just sitting over here on this drive plug them in let's go there's been new content since add that in there but the heavy lifting

of having to convert stuff or do a lot of under the hood stuff doesn't exist it's already ready so to re-release four this many times makes perfect sense to me. Now you could say, well, wait, didn't they kind of do that with Skyrim? They did.

They remade Skyrim for the more modern consoles, PS4 and Xbox 1, but now that version gets re-released. It feels like it gets re-released all the time. I think that's what you do. You go for the low-hanging fruit, and then maybe just maybe, if you think the market is there,

you go for the extra effort to do three or New Vegas, and they haven't done either of those yet. but if they end up doing those, those are going to cost more for them to convert them. It's easier money just to re-release four and say it's better. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And I'll tell you, like, this isn't even extra cynical take, but I think that it seems convenient to me,

dubiously so, that they have found a way to put a new product. In a way, yes, it's a bundle. I understand this is not its own separate game, but a new product for you to spend money on with the fallout name just in time for season two of the TV show. And it feels very light in terms of what you get for it. And I feel like that is a bit coincidental in a way that makes me go, I think this feels like a cash grab to me.

And if I'm wrong, if that's not what the talk was in the business rooms, then, you know, hey, I'm sorry, but sometimes you have to lay in the bed that you made or that other people made for you when you work for a company. And that's what I think this is. But I cut off the feedback in the middle. So let's get everything out there before I kind of jump the gun on arguing it. He goes on and says,

second, the Xbox version is now Xbox Play Anywhere and supports cross-say between Xbox console and PC and anyone who own the Xbox version now owns the XPA version or the Anywhere version. It was a separate product before. In my opinion, that's cool. I'm pause there and just say a lot of games, like the one we were just talking about,

cyberpunk 277, added cross-platform play. It didn't charge anybody anything for it. I'm just saying it's like if that's a selling point, and it is, I love crossplay. I love it when I can go from a console to a PC and carry on my progress. That's a favorite thing of mine.

And I love Steam saves and the Steam Cloud and all that. I love that stuff. But I don't, I don't think that's, if you're telling me that was worth the $40 upgrade, no, just give it to me. That's one of those things where, you know, you're comparing the other offerings and behaviors to the market. We got charging for updates is not, it's not really well appreciated by anybody. It also depends on what the update is, right? I understand that. And I think that the biggest selling point here is a ton of DLC and more content makes sense.

You know, like anything that is like a re-release of the game, but like an excuse to get a bit more money. I don't know. Just nobody's going to be happy about that, even if it sells well. Like, no one's going to be like, that's awesome that you did that. Yeah, even Nintendo doing 10 bucks, it's still kind of an insult. It's like you didn't need to do that. I don't know. I wonder because, like, there's upgrade, like, there's upgrade sales, but like these, you know, there's new sales as well.

Like, just because your game is 10 years old and you do an update, it doesn't mean you won't get any fresh sales, right? Like, why do you need to go after the customers who already bought it versus trying to acquire new customers with a free update? Like, like, there must be a business, to me, that's no man sky's business model. They're not like, oh, we're doing an update, please pay us. We have to put a battle pass in here, or we have to do something to pay us. Like, clearly they're generating revenue from putting out a free update from new customers. So that's why I think when you look at what when companies, like Nintendo, and in this case, this one are like, oh, here's a new addition with new features,

but you've got to pay because we did some work on it. And we're going, are you looking at what other companies are doing? Because they just kind of do it. and they earn revenue from new acquisition, like new sales, because not everyone in the world has bought the game. Right. So I just wonder if this is like boardroom logic where it's like, our install base is this much.

So we expect 5% of people to buy the upgrade and we'll make this bunch of money. They go, great, ship it. And you're like suffering reputational damage in doing so. And maybe you don't care. Maybe you aren't seeing, feeling that you're suffering it. And it's just us who are going to complain about it on the internet. but yeah yeah i think i think everybody's made some really good points i think he makes a good point for those who are just like maybe they're late to the game on fallout never been a

better time to get four i guess this is a cool package if you've never had fallout for but we've all i've never played it i i don't have follow for i have follow up for vr and the i was modding it though because that's another complaint i would have is you guys kind of they kind of charge a lot for the VR versions and they barely added anything to them and they got lampoon. They came in 2017, by the way, that's crazy. So the people who put out Fallout VR4

have had eight years. Wait, my math is off. Nine years. Five plus three years. Wait, eight years. Yeah, eight years since launch and a mostly negative game to look at and go like,

oh, maybe we should make this a better experience for VR and I've done Zit, Zilch. Because it takes a bunch of work and they don't want to, Am I supposed to give you an extra $20? Not you, but the company. Am I supposed to give Bethesden an extra $20 to make the game playable? Like, they launched it and dumped it.

And people feel away about when companies behave that way. And that reputation lingers. So, like, when you start charging for things that you don't need to, we perceive it as nickel and dimming. Yeah. The game is 10 years old, and you found a way to sell it again for $60. to people who haven't experienced it before. Right, right. Yeah, sorry, I'm not speaking specifically to the commenter, but I mean, like...

We like the comment. Yeah, we love the commenter. Nick's a great guy. Commenter is great. This is not aimed at you. But even though I said you, I understand the confusion. But like, they found a way to charge $60 for a game that came out 10 years ago. And that's granted, yes, that's for people who have never played it.

And look at all the content they're getting that wasn't their baseline. But at the same time, like, it's a 10-year-old game. Like, you could get most of this content during a steam sale for far less than this. And that's what it should have been. And I don't know. Again, you're riding a reputation of a company right now that a lot of gamers, myself included, look at as, like, a bunch of corporate cash grabs going on. And I don't see this as an exception. It feels like Bernville.

I think we're also past. Yeah. We're past the era of like thinking Bethesda Jenks cute. Yeah. I think there's kind of a meme. They got away with a lot of that. And I think after Starfield, in a post-Starfield world, nobody, that's been all pissed away, I think. Yeah.

It's like making excuses, accepting the Bethesda Jenk, I think is like, I think people are done with that. Yeah. I still, I'm more fond, obviously, than the three of us. for sure but I'm I'm I'm I'm kind of fond of what Starfield was aiming to do but even now I just feel like okay well did Howard know I just mean as a general vibe you don't see it you know yeah but they just give up go well I guess we're just not going to make that any better move on to the next thing and then they believe they like right now oblivion remastered is got some kind of tanky reviews and I was like why it was really well received at first and it's that there's a bunch of bugs Bethesda is just, it's like abandoned where they're just like, you got the game, we're not going to fix that until they repack. Yeah, that's what I mean about the way they handle the VR games is really eye-opening to like their company culture.

Yeah, it's actually really bad and because people have forgiven it for so long, they've never had a need to really fix it. But look at the cyberpunk. No one was like, oh, cute little CD project, Red Jank. Adorable. No. Yeah, we're raked over the cold six ways to Sunday and they fixed their game to now. overwhelmingly positive.

It's like, oh, you can behave that way. Complete reversal. Yeah. It does, like, come take a look at what's going on over here. It might be an important lesson here for your company. Yeah, do like that. They charged for an expansion. And you know who didn't complain about having to pay for an expansion of that game? Because they spent all the time up to it, writing on the goodwill of like, hey, we're

going to fix it. We're going to fix it. People were not up in arms about Phantom Liberty being an expansion to buy for the game because they proved one that they could make that game work and be good and then they went hey look at everything we're giving you for the cost of an expansion

and people looked at it and went yeah that's a good value people didn't complain about it and that's a busted ass game at launch building a reputation and then charging people additional money years later for it that people were happy to pay

myself included I bought it twice I wanted it on Steam and I also got it on Gog so yeah i i don't know i again i welcome the the comments um it's fine but i and it's good to clarify so that other people can make a more informed decision as to whether or not they agree uh or if it's for them or not but i still think to me um my sentiment behind oh my god what oblivion does have like a lot of recently bad yeah just talking about it They, I was just looking at myself.

Stability issues are real. Optimization is a joke. Four months, no updates. Like, it's like abandonware. It's sold like crazy. Like, I don't know what they're doing. That's a real shame because I think that's the thing you could point at as like, look, they are still with it. They're still doing good things.

And it's kind of a shame to see stuff like that because that is an area where things were still, you know, you look at it and you go, that, that's what people were happy to put their money. behind myself included i was happy to buy that yeah it was a genuine ass remake um but you don't take that money put it out and go well it's done i take that money and they head for the hills clearly it's how feels because we see that behavior in other games where they don't head for the hills and they pay people to make sure the game stays you know yeah to improve it to make sure that's a quality product that eight years from now people are like man there's people that don't play games right away. There's still sales to be made 10 years after the launch of your game.

But not if you're not if you don't do anything with it after it's out. Breaks my heart. Breaks my heart because I love Bethesda stuff. I like their kinds of games. It just bust me up. I hate it. I just think it's a, I think there was an era where it was like, well, it's a Bethesda game.

You know, it's how it goes. And now it's like, actually it's not how it goes. like we're seeing other companies behave very differently and now it just looks like laziness to be honest I think I think that's how people are feeling well but does this specifically please feel free to Nick if you want to do any kind of follow up and anybody else have thoughts on this or anything else you want to tell us

keep that stuff coming there are a couple ways to do it you can go to show dot core dot show when I did that wrong sorry the new email address is show at core dot show i think you said it right actually did i i think i said dot twice i think i said core dot show dot i don't know i did but it's core sorry it's show at core here again core dot show week has taught us nothing let's go to ten hams dot com it'll all make sense yeah 10 hams will work any places go well you can find the ways to contact it's

core at show no no thanks for clarifying bow he's it's core at show not it's core at show dot core hang on i let me get this out all right core at show dot core no no no no it's show show show show at core dot show yeah show at core dot show if you want to write into us and the complaint department is core at show dot core yeah there you go oh i see what you got yeah they use that address i'm trying to make a joke but i mean it took 10 hours to you know it was good it was good um anyway we want to hear your feedback and we love it so keep it coming to the ten hams.com line lets you do we'll hear some of it yeah we'll hear some of it the 10 hams line's great because it's voicemails text is super easy and fast so go get that in there and we'd love to hear from you uh we do have a mashup to play

this is a core classic it's called reverse kidnapper from 2020 that's the pandemic year what's a reverse kidnapper i don't know man we're about to find out though so here's jamie's latest work who do you think said it though uh i think it sounds like a sex thing so I think me. I'll take, you know what? How about this one? We all claim credit for it. Bose just said himself, I said myself, Scott, you're willing to own yourself as saying? I will own myself as saying it. Absolutely. So let's find out who's right. It's not going into it. No, you went hard. I like it when you go hard. That sounds terrible. You can see myself with this just in bed at night cranking off, you know. Uh-huh.

Ready, how's going? I got your kid. That'd be reversed. I didn't get this voice changer to work. We still got your kid. I got your kid. Bring the buddy. I'm going to France to have sex for a while.

I mean, it is France. All right. Are we getting it on? Hey, I'm Benjamin Franklin. And my fellow Americans, have you heard of Bukaki from Japan? If you're able to master and beat a game, are you master beating? Mm-hmm. Okay.

I didn't beat a lot of games as a kid, so I was not a great master-beater. You know, I feel like I got the concept stand. It looks like what the gentleman at Blizzard's name. Oh, my God, what's his name? Sean Bean. No, the new Mike Moorheim. What's his name? Terrence.

I know his name. Terence Malik. Strap on. No. Put your wiener in the socket and hold on tight. Ferrant de Luttonhov, the royal instigator of crack. Oh, Carrick. Oh, Carrick.

It reads like Crack. I'm the instigator of Crack. That guy can eat a giant penis. He can die. Or a vagina. Let's be inclusive. Oh, you could eat it. Yeah, I can totally eat a vagina.

A whole giant one. Yeah, big giant vagina one bite. But what I'm saying is like there's this one chow... The vagina is my movie. That's my favorite anime now. Oh, you want some of the grandmas whatever bread? And I'll go... Like that.

She just gets super nauseous and gags from her. Grandma's whatever bread. Is that a drug? Speaking of drugs, is as Beau's voice? We saw low to you, or is it just me? Yeah. Oh, do I have the reverse kidnapper? Oh, hi, guys.

That's weird, man. I want a million dollars in unmarked bills delivered to the locker at the airport. That's so weird. This is good. This is really weird, man. You should just keep it. You're like a whole different person. Yeah.

I'm one of your neighbors. Don't try to guess which one you'll never figure it out, but I'm the one that took a shit in your pool. Learn to pick up your garbage and learn to tell you. your kids to shut up once in a while. This is so weird. So this is how we sent when this was going on. If you don't fix it, I'll shit again in your school.

I forgot about your weird mic thing that went on for a while. That was a wild thing back in the day. It was because of bit rate and ASIO. Oh, because you were making music and it would change. Yeah, Hans Sontizer sent me

the mark of the unicorn and it's beautiful. It's much better and modern but that one kind of played funny with my computer. Man, I forgot all about vagina one bite. Yeah,

vagina one bite. It was like about to make the same joke and talk over the thing about how it's my favorite anime and then I literally said it's my favorite anime. One of your go-tos, I guess. Yeah, they're only,

I mean, I haven't heard it since we said it, but it's a good memory. They only did two seasons and they never translated the second season in English, so I never caught up on vagina one-by. over dubs with vagina one bite. Yeah.

Yeah. I know the new season's disappointing. They're not animating enough. Now they call it vagina one frame. Oh, shit. That's a terrible. Well, don't they do a colon with sometimes they have like a new season, but it's a whole new arc, like vagina one bite. Colin.

Colon. Peter. The last stab. The last stab. The last dab. Dab. Dab. Those are the hot ones reference.

It'd be like code. It's like code. Code goose. or something. There you go. Like code goose. That sounds about right. I'm going to watch that.

Vagina 1 bite. 157 over 30. He's going to show up in a future mashup and that'll be, that'll wreck the universe. We can't have two mashup. And it'll be like this, you know, it's a vagina one bite inside of a vagina one bite. Yeah. Meta sort of deal. Can't have that.

Two layers deep. That's how the enemy ends. Kawami. Yeah. The ultimate. version kawami vagina one bite quami yeah I forgot what that means I know what it means

the pinnacle the pinnacle okay the pentacle vagina one bite all right the penisicle the penisicle of all creation well done everybody involved including Jamie who sends us those we really appreciate it I want people to be reminded that there's a sister show that we only do

to talk about retro games and that show is called play retro me and Brian done away sit down once a week and we talk about some old-ass game. And this week, it was all those Harvest Moon games. In particular, the games on the S-N-E-S and then the Game Boy Color

and then the Game Boy Advance versions of those games. So we kind of focused on those three. Had a really good time. So check it out. Frogpants.com slash play retro or wherever you get your podcasts and shows. This show is supported by you folks at home.

There's two ways you can do it now. Patreon.com slash core show and core. dot show. One of them is not like the other, but I made a nice little chart to help you understand what the differences are. You can find all that on these sites as well. I want to thank some new supporters. Brand new people at Patreon include

June Lewis and Ginky Lobobobo. I think that's right. Would you say ginky lobobobo right there? Ginky lobo. Oh, there. I don't know. Yeah, I put them at the bottom there. Oh, yeah. Ginky Lobobo. Yeah, just paste them. So, yeah,

It's like Labubo. Labobo. I bet you're right. Ginky Lobobo. On Core. Dot show, and I'm just going to do a few of them so far because we had a bunch of folks over there lately. And so I'm just going to kind of piecemeal them in over time. So if you're in there and you're like, where's my name? I'm not going to read all of you tonight. But I'll read these four. And then we'll keep going down the line next week. Bruce Nottinghill, Brad Barber, Abdullah, and Adams, sorry, Adam Bindslev. Benzlev. Anyway. However you say that, they're new supporters over at Core. Dot Show. If you guys want no commercial, there's the thing that the two sites do the same. No commercials or ads of any kind. Pre-show content every week. Both sides get this stuff.

Host specials, John just put one up yesterday. And it was all about, what'd you do? Oh, it was about the Game Awards. If you listen to that hour-long discussion today and thought, man, I could use another hour-long discussion about it. Check it out. Yeah, go check it out. And I think you guys are really enjoyed.

it was really good and it's in both places loads more can be found at core dot show i just put up a video today complaining about yet another studio closure in the form of avalanche studios in liverpool and i'm pissed about that because they made the mad max game 10 years ago that i freaking love so much and they closed because microsoft pulled a plug on another partner game bastards anyway uh go check it out everything you can find or everything else you can find at frogpance dot com slash core including that chart i mentioned someone in the chat says all there is one of those yes grandstander or whatever your name is in the chat you can't quite read that the gher the ghoster the ghost of duder ghost rider ghost rider he's got ghost rider is the little avatar it's the ghost

right yeah i don't know how i got that wrong but yeah if you go over there you'll see this little chart core support method comparison and it will tell you everything that's different everything that's the same if you have any questions reach out to me let me know we also do the show live in three places now, YouTube. That's the number one where we keep the kind of an eye on the chat. It's kind of our main channel there. We also co-stream to Twitch at the exact

same time. And no, we do not use, for those who are worried, I'm about to say kick, we don't use kick. It's fine, if you like kick. I'm not having to... Also, get other worries. Don't worry about what other people... Don't worry about what other people do. But we also stream at core. show. So that's

happening as well right now. Hello to those folks. That is going to do it for today. I think we have to swing this microphone over to Grandma, though, and let her tell us what games who played today for those who weren't listening. Grandma, take it away. They played all sorts of games this week. They played Dispatch,

Claire, Obscure, Expedition 33, Slay the Spire of the board game, not the actual video game, the board game, with the physical pieces and other people and socialization. Yeah. No man sky, vampire survivors, VR, Forstrike, Shell Diver

and cyberpunk 277 It's a nice list Those are all games I would play And I think You all should too

So go home Yes go home Play your girthy games Come back next week For another episode Of core until then Stay out of trouble Damn it

This show This show is part of the Frog band network Yes Get more at Frogpants.com This is not a brutality This is a fatality This is a fatality