Tomorrow - 219: Cyberpunk'd 2020

Episode Date: December 13, 2020

On this week's extra-long episode of Tomorrow, Josh and Ryan discuss the gloriously real game Cyberpunk 2077 with special guest and Input social media editor, Tom Caswell. There's also some talk of Apple's $549 headphones, a new Sony PSP, and slot car racing. Let's slide out of this horrible year together, shall we? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey and welcome to tomorrow, I'm your host, Joshua Tupulski. Today on the podcast, we discuss Cyberpunk, Cyberpunk, and Cyberpunk. I don't waste one minute. Let's get right into it. Alright, we're back. It's tomorrow. It's today for you, but for us, it's yesterday. And right now, we're talking about what's to come, which is just up ahead, which could be next week,

but for the purposes of a podcast called Tomorrow, we're calling it tomorrow. I'm of course joined by Ryan Hula-Han Ryan. Are you there still there? I'm living in the year 2077, baby. Let's hold on, just keep it and keep your accidentally glitching penis in your pants. And we are joined by Tom Caswell.

Tom, thank you for being here. Hi, everyone. Tom is input social media editor. He's a brilliant, brilliant man. Brilliant human. Let's just look at Jen. Well, we need to put gender into it. We're going to talk about gender when we talk about cyberpunk.

Absolutely. Also, Tom has a great podcast called Unranked. You should listen to where he and three other, I believe, men, or you know what, let's just say people. It is, man. People too. Yeah, we don't want to, we don't want to agenda any how to survive a punk. In the spirit, well, I mean, I don't know if it's in the spirit of cyberpunk, but anyhow,

he and three other human beings who live on planet earth discuss many things, including but not limited to their feelings and gaming. Definitely, obviously. Would you say that's a fair description? Yeah, 50, 50% feelings in video games, flushable. I mean, is there even a divide? So anyhow, so Tom is a gaming,

he's a gamer gator. He's a gaming member of his own A. Chan. No, he's a gamer gator. It's a gaming. He's a member of his own A.C.A.N. No, he's a gaming fan. You're a gaming fan, you're a gaming fan. You're a big cute hat, right? You love cute? Yeah, totally. This is exactly what I'm talking about.

Hillary Clinton is a part of a giant pedophile conspiracy and I won't believe anything else. Yeah, no, I'm a big, big fan of gaming. He's been a funnily enough not been a game of my entire life. Actually, no, I'm a big, big fan of gaming. I've been, funnily enough, not been a game of my entire life. I actually, my first console was a Dreamcast, which is pretty late. That's the way we're doing it. Why don't you come on, baby?

That's the, that's the, that's the, that's the, it was great. I never look back after that. That will really set you up to appreciate the art form. Yeah, I think if you're gonna get into games, that's the right place to start. You to start with C-Mam not Mario Well, I I mean I've talked about this many time. I don't know why you bought a dreamcast I bought it to play the new resident evil game. I'm not sure what your purpose your reason I had to be like five

How would I mean I was I was eight eight God I don't know I bought a Dreamcast specifically to play Power Stone. That's the kind of gamer I... That's cool. Power Stone should make a comeback eventually. That's actually a secretly incredible game. I played Sonic Adventure, was my big one, Crate Crazy Taxi, which is one of my favorite video games of all time.

And, uh, ready to rumble time. And ready to rumble. Yeah, ready to rumble. My father and I played that all the time. He kicked my ass and I did a rumble. What is ready to rumble? Is it a fighting game? It's a boxing game. Okay, I'll take a word.

I'll take a word. It's not like, it's not like Friday night where it's like realistic simulation boxing. It's like cartoon-ish boxing. Although maybe that was just the year 2000. It's closer to punch out. Yes, it's close to punch out. You mentioned accidentally had a little slip up there and said,

Friday night, which I should say is a great 80s horror comedy. Not only is the 80s version of Friday night fantastic, but the 2011 version called... I call it. I liked it. It's great. It's great. An Anson Yelchin, it's phenomenal. Yes, I actually, it's funny.

And you know, rest in peace, Anton Yelchin, what an amazing talent, like really sad that he died in such a weird and tragic way. But I will say that movie is enjoyable, entertain, is very entertaining. I think it's like very, you know, 2011. And if you like the original, like there's things that are not present.

Although there are some great, I have, I went, actually it's one of the rare films that I've gone to see in the theater over the past, you know, decade or so. And I do remember there's one thing because I believe it was a 3D film. I didn't see it in 3D, but I believe it was. It was shot because I believe it was a 3D film. I didn't see it in 3D, but I believe it was show. Yes, it was a 3D film.

And there's a scene, a really, really amazing scene, where they're inside a car. And the camera is like, I mean, it's obviously, it's obviously like a digital composition, I think, but like for like an extended period of time, the camera, if I remember this correctly, is in the car rotating around as if it's in the center console of the car, or sorry, the middle of the car,

and it's rotating around to like see these like scenes of things that are going on in the car as it rotates. And it's actually, I remember being in the theater going like, I totally, like this is a really thrilling execution of something that like in a movie that otherwise is like, I totally, like this is a really thrilling execution of something that like in a movie that otherwise is like, you know, kind of, not a B movie, but kind of like not, it's not an art film, you know, it's not like a high, it's not the Godfather. There's another shot that I remember kind of like laughing out loud because I was like, this is intentionally designed for 3D is when he's being chased by Collins Vampire, Antonielchin is.

Wow, spoiler alert. Wow, he throws a brick through the glass door of this kitchen of this house and the camera's in the kitchen and he throws the brick and it like smashes through the glass and heads directly to the camera. And it's all this CG glass around it. Totally, I totally just, like I have, I'm brought back to that moment. You know, maybe 3D, maybe 3D was cool actually, now that we're looking back on it, maybe. Spraying a back baby. Let's do it.

Well, they need to do something to get people in theaters. All right, but that's all we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about, we've all had an experience recently that moved us, that changed our, the way we look at the world, and that is going to change the way we go forward as human beings. And that experience is that we've all now played Cyberpunk 2077. It's a real game.

It's a real game. It was released. Somewhat. It's not one of a real game. It was released to... It did come out, yeah. It did come out. It just partially still living in our imagination.

Definitely, definitely. Certain elements, and depending on your rig, absolutely. But it was released. It actually is playable for some people. And now we've all had an experience with it. And I think it's, I really wanted to, with the freshness of the moment I wanted to. And we actually had a, we have an input,

has a 10 a.m. editor's call, and we spent, I'd say, 50 minutes of an hour editorial call this morning, talking about it, and it just made sense that we should continue that conversation. And, and we've all had very different experiences. Yeah, we have. And there's just a lot to unpack. And I just thought, let's just make this.

Let's not try to play around. Let's make this a dedicated cyberpunk podcast. Even though it has been unofficially a cyberpunk podcast since we started, since we started doing tomorrow, which was like 20, I wanna say 2015 maybe, 2014. I don't remember, but I do know that it was a, at least a year after I'd seen the first Cyberpunk trailer. So I want to, I want to, I want to let you know, I'm just going to say in 2012, baby. I want to know they, they might have announced in 2012 they did the first trailer in 2013.

Yes. By the way, who's arms or the lady Yeah, the lady, the sprang man. Spider, praying man, just lady. I wonder, is that song, is that fake radiohead song that's in that trailer going to be in the game itself? Has anybody gotten to the point where they, you know, you know, the one about, it's literally the hook of the song, this personal responsibility, which I believe means it's a song for conservatives. At least that's how I've always perceived it.

It's like libertarians. It's very bad. I'm talking about. Very bio-shack infinite. I really don't remember. You do not remember the song. It's like fake radio head. I don't remember this one.

Are you joking? Is this from the inaugural trailer? It's from the first trailer. It's like a radio head slash muse style. I honestly, can we get Orion? I want you, you're going to, when you produce and edit this, I would like for you to insert the music that I'm talking about so that all of the listeners can, so the Tony, Tony can hear what I'm talking about, which is this great song that I'm just dying to know it's in the game.

But I don't want to find out because I don't want any spoilers. And any personal, a responsible, any personal, a responsible. Oh. Anyhow, so let me tell you, I'm gonna start with talking about, we can each go through our individual cyberpunk experiences. I'd like to talk about mine a little bit, because I had quite a day yesterday. Now, as some of you may know,

as none of you probably know, I have been trying to buy a new graphics card from my computer. You may recall that about a year ago, I built a gaming PC, and I got a graphics card for it, which at the time was like pretty good. So the 2070 Super,

which honestly, I don't know the distinction between Super and non-Super. Like I'm not sure what it means, but the 2070 was like capable of doing like pretty decent ray tracing at like 1440. Like actually, it was pretty decent for everything. You could play some stuff at 4K. You could definitely do stuff at 1440 or 1080 and it looked great. But for Cyberpunk, it was clear to me, once I saw their system requirements that it was not going to pass monster. And the reality is I started to get

as the release of this game got closer and closer, I started to feel this panic that when I played Cyberpunk, partially because I was just like, I'm gonna be disappointed if it doesn't look like the trailers that they've shown, but also that I have waited so long and that if I play Cyberpunk in a less than ideal situation

in a situation where I have less than, you know, I wouldn't go all out, like I didn't build like a brand new rig with like the top of the line, everything. But my rig was already pretty good, sends like a very recent graphics card. So I came up, I started to to feel like if I didn't play it with basically a top of the line card,

I was going to be selling myself short after the wait. After a seven year wait, you know? And if I broke it down, how much would it cost for every year that I waited? It actually is pretty affordable. If I had just saved the money, you know, a little bit of money every year while waiting for cyberpunk, the card would only have only cost me like,

you know, less than 200 bucks a year, okay? Which is pretty affordable. I mean, I pay that much for my New York Times subscription. You know, which I regret all the time. All the time, I'm like, why am I paying for this? But then sometimes I'm like, it's worth it. So anyhow, so I had been scouring, I had gotten into the dark, deep dark underbelly

of people trying to get the new egg deal when it happens. There are like Twitch channels, and there are apps you can run they're like apps you can run in a terminal to like watch prices. I mean, it's very sad. I had that, I had that installed on my computer for a bit too. It's called market, market, grabber or something,

what's it called? Yeah, I think Nvidia Snatcha. That's a different one. See, there's multiple versions. There you go. At any rate, at any rate, I was like spending hours and hours a day. Like Zelda would be like, daddy, when can we play Minecraft?

And I'm like, I'm like, five, just five more minutes, honey. And she would be like, it's been an hour. And it's like, you know what, I'm ruining my relationship with my child over this. Anyhow, so I decided like, I'm not gonna overpay for this card. I'm not gonna buy a card on eBay. I'm not gonna give it to the scalpers. I'm just gonna wait and I'll just experience Cyberpunk 2077

with my mediocre, my okay graphics card and I'll just like be patient. And in a few months or weeks or whenever, I'll just buy the card at a normal price, you know? Any high woke up the morning of release day. And which actually was 7 p.m. GMT, sorry, was 7 p.m. East Coast because they did it midnight GMT. So it actually got based technically released on the 9th for a lot of people, at least for PC people.

Sorry, if this is a ramble, you can cut me off. But I'm going to tell you, I'm just going to tell my story. I'll just fast forward. So I woke up in a pan, I'm like, I have to get a card. What am I going to do? I was like, maybe I can find one story, I'll just fast forward. So I woke up in a pan, I'm like, I have to get a card, what am I gonna do? I was like, maybe I can find one from a reputable seller on eBay with for a not insane price that I can buy now

and then go and pick up, which sounds like an impossible thing to do, right? I'm stunned that this, yeah. It's so amazed. So I had looked at a card like the night before, but I kind of dismissed it. I was like, I don't know. Although the seller had a very good,

the seller had a very good, very high rating. It was like an electronic store of some type, which is always like a good sign. It's like, okay, they do this for a living, basically. Anyhow, I found a card, the basically the exact card I was looking for, it was not wildly expensive. The card retails for, I mean,

if you look at the EVGA site, it's like wildly expensive. The card retails for, I mean, if you look at the EVGA site, it's like a $780 card or so, that $770 card. People are selling it for 900. I paid $1,100 for, you know, which is not cheap, not cheap, okay? But I was like, I'm gonna do it. I'm just gonna pull the fucking trigger and I'm gonna see what happens And so like I messaged the seller before I bought it I was like if I I was because they were like in Queens basically I was like if I buy this Now can I come and pick it up and they're like yeah buy it now and we'll give you our address And I'm like okay, so and then I was like wow I could like die

Maybe this is a big scam like where I could show up with like and they're like oh this, this is like some like Ruchot shot, like pulled up in a Tesla, let's rob him. I was like, I had all these insane ideas that were running through my head of like, what, I risked my life to get a fucking video card or whatever, I was like, oh, what if I got killed buying a video card? What a legacy.

Anyhow, needless to say, none of that happened. So they were like, okay, yeah, I drove to Queens. I went into this crazy shop, which honestly, but it was like part nightmare, part fantasy for me. It was like a 50 foot long store, just floor to ceiling filled with crazy old computers and shit, just like a complete nightmare. If you're like Marie Kondo,

it's like the absolute polar opposite of a Marie condo situation. It's like they threw nothing out and never organized. Anyhow, I bought the card. I bought the card. I mean, I got the card. I opened it. It was in the box.

It was like totally factory sealed. I got a new power supply from Microcenter, which is a story I've literally never been in. Like, I didn't even know they existed. Isn't it the best? I mean, it's kind of depressing in a way.'ve literally never been in. Like, I didn't even know they existed. Isn't it the best? I mean, it's kind of depressing in a way. No! I found it to be, we'll listen.

I was the one in Yonkers. I don't know, maybe it's a different vibe than like one in Manhattan or whatever. But I kind of didn't even know they existed. Like I sort of was like, do we have stores like that around here? Cause I order everything. It's like everything.

Anyhow, it is kind of sick that it's like, oh, I'm like, oh my God, this is like a computer store. Right, I haven't, yeah. I've been trying to sell you a long time. I'm trying to sell you like fucking you who's at the checkout. Oh, no, but it was like a situation where like the guy behind me in the internet pick up line was like talking

to like another guy about like how he can get like the best price for something on eBay. And it was like exactly the kind of conversation you hear in a computer store. It was just like socially awkward people having very uncomfortable conversations about things. Trying desperately to bond about something.

Yeah, about things on the internet. And to another human being of that. About internet stuff. Like it was just a guy was like, you gotta put in the description, you can't put it if it has a knickered, it has scratch, you can't put that in there. You can't. I was like, I don't know, I feel like you should description, you can't put in, if it has a knickered, it has scratched, you can't put that in there. You can't.

I was like, I was like, I don't know, I feel like you should. Maybe it feels like a good idea. At any rate, got a power supply because this thing needs a 750 watt power supply. I took a part, I have a mini ITX build. I had to take apart the entire thing basically to fit this card and the card is fucking massive. Okay.

Is this boring? Is this story very boring? No, no, I mean not to me, not to me, I'm invested. I had to take it apart completely. I was like, I can't fit this card in here. It fit in in a way that I would say either the people who are responsible for designing like many ITX boxes and also the cards that go in them are very aware of each other and working in concert to make things just right.

Or I got insanely lucky and for whatever reason it's like literally within like millimeters within microns that this thing fits. And I thought I was going to crack the motherboard trying to put it in because you have no way to get leverage once your motherboard is in the box, which I did gonna crack the motherboard trying to put it in, because you have no way to get leverage. Once your motherboard is in the box, which I did not remove the motherboard, I basically took everything else out. Once it's in the box, you have no way to really get leverage if the box is that small. So I was like, I'm gonna fucking crack this motherboard in half trying to put this card in,

and I'm gonna start crying like a huge baby. At any rate, I didn't do that. I put the card in, I got the power supply in, I got everything hooked up, I think I actually cleaned up some of my cable management. Well that's a win right there. Yeah, I plugged it in and everything worked perfectly without a glitch, without a moment of problem.

Like, not anything went wrong. And like a few hours later, I was downloading Cyberpunk, and then after Zelda went to bed, almost an hour late, because I had been Dicking around with other stuff and not playing Minecraft It's all my fault a very cranky six-year-old went to bed late And then I played Cyberpunk like I just played it like it just was downloaded. It did need a patch And it played and loaded quickly and moments later. I was you know

Choosing the penis for my character. Right. Moments later. I'm the pubic cat. Yeah, the pubic cat. The coloring of the pee. OK, we got to talk. OK, anyhow, Tom, do you want to share your experience? Give us a little bit of a window of how it went

for other people. Sure. So actually, I first loaded up the game on Xbox Because I had a code for Xbox. I was like, okay, I'm curious to see how this runs on console and after you know the last month essentially of running you know games in 4k 60 some games You know 4k 120 like call of duty looks amazing on these new consoles I was very disappointed to find that this game runs at like 900 P, maybe a little less at points on the new consoles.

Now granted, it's running at 60 frames, so that it's pretty smooth. And the low times are great because they're just inherently great on these new consoles. But visually, I was like, you, Josh, I was like, you, Josh, I was like, I've been looking forward to, on and off,

I would say my excitement for this game has diminished at points over time, but in the few days leading off. I could not. Right, exactly. I eventually do want to get to the many, several vast issues that this game has. We have to.

We have to. But in the last few days leading up to it, like anything, I'm like, oh, I'm so excited, I'm so excited. And so I was like, okay, I'm going to do, I did the Street Kid Life Path on Series X, I'll do the Corpo Life Path on my PC when. Oh, yeah, so that's it. I get that to boot that up. That's exactly what I did Street Kid, but I was literally just saying to somebody on

Twitter, I kind of, the Corpo one is kind of interesting to me. Okay hold on we're gonna get into the game in a second I want to hear Tom's I want to hear more about Tom's experience because it's quite interesting. Long long story short I updated my Nvidia drivers I have a 2080 Super I have a pretty beefy i7 CPU like According to Cyberpunk's own website I should be able to run this thing at 1440 with ray tracing ultra graphics on no problem The only thing I would need the 3084 would to be good to full 4k But I actually decided to run it. I have two monitors. I have a 4k 60 monitor and a 1080 144 Hertz monitor and I actually just decided to run it in 1080

at that high frame rate and high refresh rate. And the game just kept crashing. And it would literally, at first, it was literally like I would create my character. I'd get my penis the way I wanted it. And then I, hey, that then- That's number one customization. You get the penis, right? And then I would boot into the game,

and within a few seconds of, you know, we played the Corpo Life Path, Ryan. I would get right to the point where my character throws up the pills on the counter. Oh, wait, spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. It's literally the first five seconds. Well, I haven't played that path,

and now you've ruined it for me. Now I can never experience it. Now you can have a lot. No, it's fine. We're going to put a lot of disclaimers on this. There could be spoilers. And yeah, and so it would get within five seconds and just kept shutting down, shutting down.

And I thought, okay, maybe the end video drivers need to restart my computer for them to take hold, right? Because it's always wishy-washy with this stuff. Do I need to restart my computer? Do I need to do this? Do I need to do that? And so I restarted my computer and then coming back, booting the computer back up,

it was stuck on the BIOS screen. So the image of the motherboard manufacturer, like that thing that flashes right before Windows loads, it was just stuck on that. And it has options at the bottom, right? Like press F11 to jump into the BIOS, press this to do that. And none of that was working. And so basically I actually had to,

I funnily enough had to dismantle my computer to Josh, but not to do the fun act of throwing in a brand new fresh graphics card, but to remove the motherboards like watch battery, the powers like the BIOS on the motherboard. So I had to pull out my 2080 Super. I actually did some cable management myself too, because I was like, well, well, I got a lot of...

Because when you build your PC, I think this has got to be a true, unless you're like a super like nerd. When you first build the PC, the goal is like, how quickly can I get it together so I can start using it? And on and like, just so it does it work. Okay good, let me close this fucker up and start doing something with it. But I think once you have a chance,

once you go back in there, you want it, you're like, I can actually improve this. I can make this look bad. I can make this look quite nice. Mine doesn't look nice, but, oh, I forgot, when you're done, I forgot one other important thing that I discovered while I was improve this. I can make this less bad. I can make this look quite nice. Mine doesn't look nice, but when you're done, I forgot one other important thing that I discovered while I was doing this. But go ahead, keep going. Well, long story short, it had to remove that watch battery.

It was stuck under the graphics card. And then fortunately, it left it a few minutes to let the BIOS reset, watch battery in, booted the computer back up and everything was okay, nothing, it was like nothing had ever happened. I was still having crashing issues after that. What I found online was if the game is crashing for whatever reason, just turn ray tracing off, which is a real disappointment, obviously, because this game is meant to be a showcase of ray tracing. Yes. But I'm currently until a patch comes through, I'm currently running this game without it,

but regardless, it does still look amazing, especially running at that high frame rate. And I'm about to, after we jump off recording this, I'm gonna go jump onto the stady version and give that a try. Mm, that's a third life path. That's very interesting. And Ryan, what did you do?

You played a console version. I have a version for PS4 that is arriving today, but yesterday I read online the little trick where if you set your Xbox to be as if you live in New Zealand, you could play the game whenever. And so I down, I bought the game and downloaded it. I reset my console. I'm told that I was a Kiwi. And then I launched it and I played it for like a good chunk of the day. And I have really

no huge complaints about that experience. It went fine. Well, that's a couple crashes, but other than that, it was the beauty of a console, maybe. Yeah, the beauty of a console, yeah. This is exactly like, honestly, in so many ways, it is what, it is the secret sauce of a console, which is like, there was a really good chance that everything that I did led to complete disaster. And like, I couldn't play the game.

Tom's experience, I would imagine, is not wild, they dissimilar for a lot of people. Now the game's buggy as his, no matter where you play it. It's a buggy fucking game. And what we should talk about, we'll get into the actual game in a second. But like the experience of just getting it working for it on a PC, there's so many variables

that it's like impossible to know what's gonna happen in some ways. For a console, I mean, this is one of the things I thought when I started up the PS5, that it just is, you forget, I've been playing on my PC so much, I forgot how seamless and satisfying console play is because it's just like, I mean, I hate to use the phrase, but it just works for the most part. You know, yes, there are fuck ups, yes, they have problems, but like, I mean, I hate to use the phrase, but it just works for the most part. You know, yes, there are fuck ups, yes, they have problems, but like, I plugged in the PS5.

That you live in your world and play in R's? I mean, I would say that I, I would say that, you know, I don't really think of myself as living or playing in any world, really. But, no, it's just like interesting that it just functions the way you expected to. And like when I got the PS5, I had a little bit of an issue transferring my PS4 stuff,

but then like it was, it actually was like kind of rough. But after that, everything worked, downloaded the new Spider-Man game and was like instantly like holy shit. Like this is next gen, wow, like I'm feeling it. Whereas like with a PC, there's so many more steps that have to happen usually. Yeah, I think with console,

it's the peace of mind that if there is an issue, it's not your fault. Like that's fundamental. When when, when, you know, oh my God, when I tweeted out that like my PC had been bricked and fucking people coming online well being like, well, did you do this? Did you do that?

And I'm like, how am I meant to know that maybe some random piece of shit software on my computer? Like I was having issues with, I have a Razer Chio, which is their webcam, that I don't use anymore because Razer Synapse is this piece of garbage software that will just ruin your computer for some reason or, and I have to keep it uninstalled. And it's just like, okay, was it Cyberpunk that brick,

you know, like caused my computer to have that crash? Was it the Nvidia drivers? Like what is the issue? Where is with console? Like the peace of mind of knowing, okay, if the game is crashing, there's literally nothing I can do about it. It's the game's fault and not mine. Like that peace of mind of knowing, okay, if the game is crashing, there's literally nothing I can do about it, it's the game's fault and not mine.

Like that piece of mind is bliss. And you can complain to like the developer or to Sony or whatever, and effectively like feel justified. Whereas this is, it truly is like, well sorry dude, you built a PC, you're kind of on your own. I mean, I remember talking to somebody about this like a decade ago and I was like, yeah, I can't get this,

you know, it was like, it's starting to something from and I was like, yeah, I can't get this, you know, I was like, it's starting to send me from end gadget and I was like, I can't get this, I can't remember what it was, it was like, some thing isn't working. And like, I was, they're like, oh, where'd you get, you know, where'd you get your system? And I was like, oh, I built it, they're like, well, what did you expect?

I was like, well, what I expected is that the people who make all this stuff are smarter than I am. And they're like, here's a card that goes into motherboard. The CPU goes into motherboard. The RAM goes in there. Some stuff gets plugged in. And actually, to the credit, I mean, I had the experience of, I have a pretty recent,

it's like an i7. It's not, the motherboard's not that new, but it's like fine. The RAM is fine. The cards are like, I went from a 2070 to a 3080 same driver's essentially, right? Like basically the same driver, software. And it was surprisingly not a nightmare. The other thing that I wanted to mention

is in taking apart my computer, which I have to be very boring for Tony to hear, but I'm gonna share it anyhow. I realize- I'm talking about the actual game at some point. We're gonna talk about the game. We're gonna talk about the game. I realize that I had the panels, there's three panels that are basically interchangeable on the case that I have, and I realize that I had the panels completely wrong, and that where my graphics card should have been venting through like vent holes, which are available

on the some of the panels, I had a huge piece of plastic window that was just sitting there. That was like not only not helping with any ventilation, but also was like exposing the LEDs of the graphics card, which I find completely obnoxious. And I was like, oh my God, I could solve so many, I had real world problems if I had just had to brain

and figured this out for the first time. Anyhow, let's talk about the game because we've spent a long time talking about our experiences setting up the game, which is, it's actually very boring, I think, to most people. So Ryan and I have talked about, Tom, I don't know how many times you listen to each episode

of the show, I would imagine it's got to be five to ten. Relatively. Yeah. But, Ryan and I have talked about Cyberpunk a lot, especially lately. And the last episode, I believe, we were talking about the level of either excitement or disappointment that we were feeling in anticipation of it. And like, I basically had gone from feeling like, okay, the game's gonna look bad and play bad

and it's gonna be a huge disappointment too. Well, you know what, I've seen some other stuff and maybe it's gonna be good. And here's what I'll say. Before we talk about the penis customization or the storyline or anything else, from a graphics perspective. And here's what I'll say. Before we talk about the penis customization or the storyline or anything else, from a graphics perspective.

Now again, I'm playing on a 3080 card with 32 gigs of RAM and SSD and all that shit. I mean, this game is graphically pretty fucking unbelievable. I mean, from a detail perspective, from a, like things that I expected to be disappointed about that I have not been disappointed about, like, the how many people you see in the city to the lighting, which is, I mean, and I hate to say this, but when

you get ray tracing working, and it's like unbelievable lighting effects that are just so, like, you're like, this looks so fucking crazy. Now, there are problems. The game is really glitchy, really buggy. But just on, let's just talk, not talk about anything else for a second, not mechanics, not storyline, not glitches. From a pure graphics perspective, with a pretty good graphics card, I mean, my PC was expensive to build,

but not the most expensive by a long shot. It was a very moderately priced gaming PC. This game looks like nothing I've ever played. It has a level of detail like nothing I've ever played. It is like fascinating and beautiful just to walk around and look at. And they have, they actually pulled off what you saw in early demos where it looked really,

really good and you're like, it can't sound gonna look that good. And even in the later stuff, or that's like, it got better. And you're like, it's definitely not gonna look that good. And even in the later stuff, or it's like, it got better and you're like, it's definitely not gonna look that good. They actually pulled it off. And I have to say credit to CD Projekt Red, despite all of the fucking problems.

This is one of the most beautiful, like, graphically detailed games. I've ever, maybe the most detailed and beautiful game I've ever played, console, PC, or otherwise. That's my... Yeah, being a heath. That there's this point, I think we've all gotten to it. It's very early on in the game. It's when you go, right before you go to the rip a dock, I assume both of you have gotten to that point in the game.

That's about, yeah, that's like almost about as far as I got by before I was like, I'm tired, I have to go to bed now. And Ryan is, I think, way past that, if I'm not mistaken. And there's this bit where you leave your apartment building for the first time in day. And you step out into essentially a plaza

and there's shops everywhere and there's high rises and there's like a monorail that worms its way through the buildings. And I kind of gasped when I saw that because I think on a macro level, the detail and texture of this world is really impressive. The only thing that I think would rival it would be something like the Last of Us Part II

that has just the detail of, like it looks lived in. It doesn't look like someone designed it. It just looks like there is a natural grime to the world. And that inherently is beautiful. The one thing I will say though, is when you go up to some of the textures and inspect them, the thing that it is missing compared to something

I'd last of us is that kind of micro detail. I noticed it for the first time when you sit down with your best bud, and he's eating ramen out of a Chinese delivery container box, you know, like those like trapezoidal upside down things. A Chinese food box. Yeah, and it just looked out I was like, oh my God. I'm sorry, I'm trying to explain

the most ubiquitous food I get in existence. You're like, you mean the white box with the red writing on the side that closes the round box? But yes, that's a little odd. But I was looking at this beautiful man, this beautiful robot man. He is beautiful. He's got a great, great hairstyle.

And now to Jack, what is his name? Jacky. Jacky? Yeah, Jacky. I like his first name. By the way, this is a no spoiler at all, but I got a bad feeling about Jacky. Yeah.

I ain't, I ain't, I ain't, I don't say anything, but I just the level of effort they've put into building up the relationship between me and Jackie. This early in the game suggests to me that Jackie, uh, something he might not be around for the whole game. I'm just thinking anyhow, go ahead. I was looking at him and I was like, he looks fantastic. I think the facial animations in this game are very impressive and that's something

that open-world games struggle with a lot. So I give kudos to the team for that. But then I looked at this box of Chinese food. I'm like, this box looks, I don't know if it's just not rendered fully or like what's going on. And then I looked down at the counter and this like sushi under the counter and I'm like, that just looks like a JPEG.

Like just someone just like slapped a stick of that. That's what happens when you can't turn ray tracing, you know, I'm just using sushi. Oh yeah, I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it.

I do think on that point about graphics. I do think they brute force a lot of this with like, you need a super powerful graphics card or you're going to get kind of a shitty experience. I mean, it is a running joke right now on Twitter that people who are playing on console or people who are playing with like last-gen graphics cards even are like, it looks like you know, GTA 3 or something.

And I do think there's a huge variance in the quality of the graphics based on your setup. And I think it's not like, there's some games like for instance i've been playing games with so amazing that something i realize on the with the ps5 is that i've been playing games by the way ryan you raise the point i think last week about does gta or do games old games look like either ps4 pro games or ps4 games when they play on the PS5. And I can tell you, beyond the shadow of a doubt that the, at least with games like GTA, it's playing the PS4 pro version if not a slightly better version than that.

So for certain games there, for certain games there, right? Yeah, but the difference is shocking. So I didn't realize this, I'm playing on PS4, I never went to PS4 pro. But like I played last of us two on my PS4 and I was like, holy shit, like this looks, I mean, I said to Ryan, I think the week I played, I was like, it's the first thing it's gotten me

really, really excited for the next gen because it's so good and the console's so old, I was like, what are they gonna do next? But I do think that unlike, certainly with the time people have had for the old consoles where you can really massage some of this stuff and kind of like cover it up in different ways and optimize for it. And unlike games that are really console focused

and have they have time to do all those optimizations, I feel like Cyberpunk is like, we are not going to optimize this to look good on lower powered systems. We're just going to brute force it on the higher powered system. So it looks awesome. And everybody else is either going to have to wait or just not gonna be part of the crew that gets like the great experience. And I do that is a problem with

the game but it also is a problem with how much hardware has progressed like consumer hardware has progressed that like I can have a system that you know it costs three times what you paid for your PS5 but like in terms of performance it's probably like ten times the performance. You know? I mean the big thing for me the big question when it comes to this and I would love to hear Ryan's thoughts because he's played the most out of all of us but has been playing on a console. But they started development of this game when last generation started. So how is this game in such a mess on the console that came out when they started development?

I just don't understand how. And I think this is a fan theory. I have no evidence to support this. I think that they are targeting a much better looking experience. Like you're saying, you know, you have a rip shit, fucking thousands of dollars worth of PC equipment. That's displaying the game for you when it looks phenomenal. I think that's probably the base that they targeted.

And then everything else they just, like you said, brute force to jam dip down because their plan is similar to the Witcher 3 and Skyrim, which I own five copies of each. Their plan is to resell this game to triple or quadruple dip for the next 10 years. And every time that there's a new hardware capability, if it's, you know, PSVR 2, if it's, you know, Xbox Series X Series X Pro whatever they can just very easily you know put their sliders up and say great now you have this additional you know now it runs at 4k 120 hertz and and it's like all ready to go in that regard but in doing with that planning and in wanting that they have compromised the current original experience for 90% of players, right?

Like, as an Xbox player, the game ran fine and I'm having a good experience, but I would pretty categorically say it does not look next, Jen. It looks pretty good for the older Jen, just from a performance perspective. The art style is beautiful, it's expansive, complicated world, obviously, it's a huge upgrade over something like the Witcher 3. That's not a question, but I think performance-wise, it doesn't look like Miles Morales. It doesn't look like, you know, it doesn't

look next-gen, I don't think it looks like it looks as good as the last of us part 2 looked, frankly. It doesn't even look close to that good. Wait, what do you mean, you mean on, on, on, constantly, on console, yeah. Yeah, well, so I, so I think it's interesting. I mean, it definitely, from what I've seen, it definitely doesn't. I think it looks like way beyond that

on what, like the kind of rig I'm playing on, but again, it's like this, like, it's a real divide. It's like, it just seems clear to me that they just couldn't get there or didn't have time to optimize for. Well, I think you knew that this would be 10 million copies and you want to resell you more copies later. I think, so first off, I think you're doing a 40-chest thing to CD Projekt Red and from what I've seen, I think I just think that if you think that they're like, hey, we can do a money grab where we

sell new versions of this. I don't think it was a money grab. I think they just want a future proof their development for the lifetime of this game. I don't think I think, no, I totally disagree. I think that CD Projekt Red would have loved to hit today, or yesterday. I guess it's today, isn't it? I mean, it's the 10th. With everybody going holy fucking shit,

this is set to new standard for gameplay and for graphics on every system. I think that's what CD Projekt Red would have preferred. But they didn't have the time. I think they're getting, no, they didn't have the time to do it, and I don't, but I don't think it was a question of like, can we, I get the idea of a decade's worth, I totally understand a decade's worth of gaming. I just don't think that was a question of like, can we, I get the idea of a decades worth, I totally understand a decades worth of gaming.

I just don't think that the way that they're thinking about it is like, you know, part of that is gonna be fixing things that people think look like shit. Because it only, I mean, if you read the reviews of this game, the reviews are extremely middling, right? Like, they're all, I mean, every review I've read is like, it's good if you've got like the right stuff, it's like a game itself is mediocre, the story is at whatever, it's like

bit off more than it can chew, but it's still pretty cool, and it's like, I don't think that's what they wanted, you know? But I do think, like we talked about this a few days ago in Slack, in input Slack, about like, in Input Slack, about like who's writing these, I mean, because I think to your point, just about the graphics, I just think that they have been trying to get this thing out. I mean, they've pushed it back at least twice

from a dedicated release date, and they've been promoing it for seven years. I think they were just like, we have to find a way to get this into market now, or we're gonna lose our chance. Like we're gonna only get, you know Like, we're going to only get, you know, it's like the new console hype. It's like this game's highly anticipated.

There's a moment. I mean, they literally worked up from the beginning of the PS4 to the very last, like, buying season for this console, and they barely got the game out. It was a very ambitious game that they, I don't even think they understood that like, they should have been beginning development for the PS5 back when they started to open for the PS4.

I mean, I will say in that vein as well, you know, I think that the game in terms of design, it feels, you know, to your crederine, it feels like an older kind of ethos or when it comes to just game design. And I feel like it would have, I mean, this game should have been delayed. It should not have come out now. It should have been put out in a more stable version. But I feel like with everything we've seen about NextGen, when we saw that on real engine demo that showing off, you don't have to

design corridors and elevators to mask loading because these things can just load things instantly. Game design is fundamentally going to change in the next two to three years. And if Cyberpunk could release next year or the year after, it would have felt extremely dated, I think, because it just literally feels like it was designed in 2013. Well, I was gonna say, this is probably the most phenomenal and incredible gaming experience I would have ever have had in 2014 or 2015.

Exactly. But now it is, I mean, we sat on the call earlier and I still do, this is my biggest takeaway, is that this is a wonderfully, ambitious, advanced, large experience, but it is also an experience I've already had on a smaller scale. And it is an experience that I feel like if you've played the Witcher, if you've played Fallout, if you've played the Outer Worlds, you're going to say to yourself,

I love this kind of game and I'm enjoying Cyberpunk as one of those games. But I did not walk away from this the way that I did with other landmark games like Breath of the Wild that had just as much hype. That I walked away from Breath of the Wild being like, how did they think of that, the care that went into every area, feeling these feelings of delight and discovery that like, oh, I discovered how to do that. Even if it was intentional for me to do that, the trap worked for me to feel that delight and discovery and for me to feel that amazement.

And with this game, I think it's impressive. I'm impressed, but I don't feel delighted or like I'm having an experience I've never had before or that it's changing the way that I think it's impressive, I'm impressed, but I don't feel delighted or like I'm having an experience I've never had before, or that it's changing the way that I think and granted, but don't you? I'm not completely through the game, and this is a complete and first impressions. But I will say, I feel like I have played this game

and this is just an evolution. I will say this, I mean, so Breath of the Wild is a game that I've tried to get into like 20 times and have never really managed to work up any interest in going for more than like an hour in it. Like, I find it to be directionless to a point of like me just going like whatever I don't care and I give up. Although I will say in a similar fashion and and and where a game like the last of us to despite what you will say want one might say about the quality of the story or some of the points that it hits and I have certainly have issues with

it's with its narrative and and and where it where it ends up. But it is really like, there is a story there, and you feel it from the first moment, you feel like there's a story, there's an actual narrative. It's more sit-in bad, it's very time style. Yeah, and it's super compelling, and then you're dropped into this world where you're like, wow, also this world is, I want to explore it, I'm really interested in it.

I mean, it's actually, I mean, the funny last of us too is like one of the most depressing games I've ever played in the sense that the entire time I played it, I was like, God, this is so beautiful and like I want to stop playing as soon as possible. Like, it would hit certain points where I was like, this is so oppressive in terms of it's mood

and it's message that I just don't want to play anymore. And I actually, there were many times I stopped and was like, and then it went on for so long. I was like, when is this game going to be over? So it was like almost too much story. It was like, okay, I get it. Like, can we wrap it up? But cyberpunk where I think there is a, I have yet to experience the moment and what's hindering my,

like all the stuff I said before about how it's beautiful and, you know, the lighting's incredible and the world's so huge and all that stuff. Like, I'm so impressed by it. Yet, I don't know what I'm doing or why I'm playing. I mean, like GTA, one thing you say about GTA for all of its political, not even political in correctness, just like weird retrograde bullshit and like how stupid the game actually is and how cynical it actually is and how the characters are these stereotypes. It drops you into a story like right away, you're like, okay, there's a story here.

Even if you want to run around and go to the trip club and do whatever, you're constantly reminded that the characters are fully developed, at least in the world of GTA, and have back stories and relationships, and that there's something going on, you know, that has a little bit of levity. Like, this game doesn't do that at all from the moment you start.

You kind of like, you're at a bar. Maybe it doesn't start this way for everybody. I play the street kid story liner, whatever. And it's like, you're at a bar, you're talking. Yeah. So, you know, you're at a bar, you wake up in the game at a bar. Okay. And then you're talking to the bartender and he's like, Oh, I owe some guy some

money. Like, can you help me out? And suddenly you're like doing a thing and it's like, Okay, cool. And it's like a little bit of a tutorial, I get it. Like it's a little bit like here's the world that you're in. But I understand that we're creating our own story as we go through it, but I think games need to do more. I think this type of game needs to be better at storytelling.

And like the one thing that I don't understand is like, who wrote this game, right? Like who's writing video games these days? Because I think a lot of the writing is really bad. Like, if you compare it to prestige television or great movies or, you know, great books, like, the storytelling in video games is decades behind it. Is just generations behind it in terms of sophistication, which is why

when you get a game like Gone Home, which has an amazing story that unfolds, just a wonderful little story that unfolds as you experience the game, people are like, holy fuck, you know, it's a good story. It's not, it's groundbreaking for video games, but in terms of storytelling, it's barely scratching the surface. And I think a lot of games feel that way now, you know, like, like, BioShock is a great story, but in terms of like storytelling, comparatively, to like film or TV or books, it's a very small idea, you know?

I've been playing Soma a lot, which I think is a great story and wonderful story notes and points. And I think that's a game that whoever wrote that put them into get them to CD project red ASAP and have them write a fucking story for this game. To be fair, and we should say that storytelling in video games is extremely complicated and it is complicated because it's similar to like how in a book Like the pros should sort of match and the tone should sort of match the overall themes and the characters and you need to create a compelling world right then you go to movies and you know the luck and the editing need to match the Reinforce the themes and the storytelling and where the characters go and what changes and in order for it to be cohesive.

With games, you have all of those things, including the writing, including the visuals, including the editing, including the pacing. On top of that, the gameplay loop itself has to match whatever, in order to be a cohesive message, it has to match whatever the overarching statement of the game is or the overarching themes or what's happening with the characters in order for it all to work together. And when it all works, it seems so effortless and easy to do because it seems obvious because it's working so great and it's so effective and so immersive. I think it is really difficult because I think games are not paying writers enough that they

believe this is their forever career. And if they are, if they are paying them to be like to really study and be an amazing games writer, they're not they're not being compensated phenomenally or they're in situations where they don't make the major calls on what the gameplay loop is or what the story is, or they're not developed beforehand. They have to kind of take whatever is being presented to them by executive producers and business people, as like, you know, we have a billion dollar project, we need it to be a shooter, we focus tested,

it has to have a female protagonist, adjacent to the male protagonist, and we're gonna take place on the specific planet, because it looks like a movie that is trending at the moment. You know what I mean? It is so workshopped and it is planned so far out and there is so much crunch and abuse happening that it doesn't leave room for these amazing projects

and that's why indie projects are generally so much better written is that you can start with a centralized passion and a centralized idea and like a concept you wanna to execute rather than having to please multiple people having eight different centralized ideas and yes the Marvel problem and so it's the Marvel movie of I don't know how we don't know how to tell CD project read like how to fix that problem other than to say to them this is a huge problem and writing in games has not progressed since like 2011.

And like I would say writing in games has not truly progressed since like BioShock. And I don't feel in mainstream AAA games. And that's why Breath of the Wild was shocking to me because it did give me this feeling of the gameplay loop going into the shrine, solving the puzzles, learning how to use the different physics and pieces together made me feel like a hero who was learning how to like actually rise to this challenge and like was actually like gaining information and then learning

how to synthesize it together and be clever and be exceptional. Like you have this feeling and that is also the story, right? In this game so far, at least, there are a lot of themes. There seems to be a lot of ideas. They've got a lot to say about capitalism, but I'm not seeing how it all ties together yet. And maybe by the end I'll say, wow. But at the moment, it just seems like another one of these games that the writer had one intention, the original source material had an intention.

The art style has an intention, the gameplay loop has to match like more of like what they think people wanna play, and then they just kind of bend and smooth all the edges out to the all the pieces fit together. And so then you have these problems, like for example, the Trans Representation, which a lot of people have been talking about, which you can tell the artists were like, let's fuck with gender, let's push this,

let's sexualize bodies that are never sexualized, so let's make it inclusive. But then the writers don like, let's fuck with gender, let's push this. Let's sexualize bodies that are never sexualized. So let's make it inclusive. But then the writers don't know what to do with that. So they're like, there's a Latino gang. And you know, one of them has a lady with a dick. And you're like, that, and you're like, we can see that hot dick. And you're like, all right, that's not like

a cohesive artistic statement. So the writing, I don't even know how to tell them to execute it better. All I can say is it's a glaring problem and it takes away from the work that shines in having capacities. But I mean, the last of us at least approaches like, you know, big budget, triple A blockbuster with like an actual story. I'm not saying the story is like. Sure, but it trades off that it has to be a little bit on rails.

And I will say with the, and that is true. It's a very, the last of us has the benefit of being a very like focused linear, very like, this is, you know, they dabble a little bit in part two with some open wall stuff, but that only happens in the very beginning. Like the first act is when you can explore parts of Seattle and then it like kicks into a very linear story. And, you know, it's Ryan's point, the indie games, they come from this place of love,

they come from this place of someone has a really great idea for a story. And then they write that and then they find developers to help them make it into a game, whereas that isn't obviously what happened with Cyberpunk. They were like, okay, let's make a game based off of this tabletop RPG, let's get people into right the story. They were like, you know what is that?

I will be trending soon. You know, like I can see that at the time they were like, but you know, Tumblr had like, you know, that what was it? Like cyberwave or whatever. This is such a Tumblr game. It's such a Tumblr game. No, this is, yeah, Tumblr. It's Tumblr, it's from Tumb tumble again. No, this is, yeah, it's Tumblr of 26. It's from Tumblr of, it's from Tumblr of 2011, 2012.

It emerged at the same time as the pitch for Blade Runner 2049 probably emerged and from the same instincts and the same cutting edge culture stuff. But it was quicker to make a movie so they got to get there a little faster. And now I just, I truly sometimes, I have felt with this game that this is in in itself a cyberpunk nightmare like a game that required People's slave labor to make this corporate product like it kind of it fucks itself over in that regard

Yeah, with with the writing totally you know when it comes to the you know the transphobia when it comes to the depiction of these These racial groups and these various gangs and stuff You know it feels like it initially made an attempt to maybe have some kind of interesting discourse about it, but it completely blows past all of that and just leans into these stereotypes. So you're totally right, Ryan. This is a game about the future that markets itself as written by a street kid or from the perspective of a street kid, but it is corpo all the way.

Like this is. But look at you talking in the terminology of the game. So maybe they've actually seen it. Oh, maybe they maybe they flipped it out. But again, it's super easy to criticize this game because in some ways it is remarkable and it leaves itself open to those criticisms because it it's

well awesome big ways. I want to say I do want to say I I haven't played the game enough to have experienced the whole story. I think it's very clear and I want to make that very clear. There may be a deeper, more powerful story that that evolves

here that propels me into the game further and and for longer. And the world is super interesting. Though I will say there's something about, I mean, to this exact discussion, it's funny because I've seen, I follow some people and they've been tweeting like I live in a Cyberpunk world,

which I think if you look around you right now, like we're much closer to the world depicting that game than we were in 2000. Oh, oh yes, we are. There are edges in there. I mean, if you, and I was like, holy shit in that game than we were in 2011. Oh, oh yes, we are. There are edges in there. I mean, if you and I was like, holy shit, that's actually already come to pass. It's like, yeah, and I think that,

and so I think that there's, I do think it did not, you know, again, it's also based on a tabletop RPG from the 80s, which is like when the, when the real birth of this of cyberpunk literature and cyberpunk culture sort of like that, whole things sort of came about. When it was very fresh and these ideas were so far away, you know, like, stuff like body modification was just like,

such a, oh my god, like what if, you know, and like the idea of the internet or virtual reality, these were things that were just like far away dreams, like oh my god, you could, you know, communicate with anybody over video from a thing that you slide into your pocket. It's like, that was stuff that was just like fantasy. And in this game, I think in some ways, it doesn't seem to acknowledge that those things are,

that there's a lot of things that were considered farfetched, that aren't really very farfetched now, and the game doesn't seem to be aware of it. I do, I found the world to be kind of like, it was like a version of the Cyberpunk world that I read when I was a kid in the late 80s or early 90s where I was like, yeah, wow, fuck, Cyberpunk. But now it's like, one, the world is caught up and And two, I'm not a kid, and those ideas aren't that wild anymore. And they've been well hashed through in every bit of popular culture

from Westworld to Blade Runner to fucking, you know, Halt and Catch Fire to devs. I mean, there's a million things. And so many books, you know, I can't even list them all. And also, so- I feel like it's really important to note here that it plays with ideas, that tie into that time period. There are sex workers in the game who are talking about, or who are presented in this

way of what will the future of sex look like, right? However, the game has nothing to say about, has nothing to say about sex workers as the industry exists now. It doesn't really, it just uses them as an object. And it also doesn't show us a vision of the future of sex work, where it's either super accepted or super restricted or whatever the artists intend or belief

about where our current trends will go. Like the game has a ton to say about capitalism, but nothing about the oldest profession. Yeah, I don't, I haven't gotten any sex work stuff yet, but I noticed like on, I mean, there's a lot of like, I don't know, they have the machines that are like drugs and like other things.

I'm like, okay, so you can just like dispense drugs or whatever like that. My impression of this world is that things like sex work and drugs are no longer illegal. It seems like murder isn't really illegal either. So, like, I keep, I mean, I've several times I ran into like random skirmishes where I ended up shooting people or getting shot at for no reason.

And I was like, okay, I guess like in this world, like people are just like killing people all the time in the reason. I got into one of those two and I felt so bad because I was like, oh, cool. Like a combat scenario happening in the world when I've just been for the most part, you know, because the opening of the game is a lot of walking and talking, which is fine because I think that like, you know, the dialogue options are interesting

and like where that can all go. And then there is a sequence right at the very early very early on where it's, you know, you're moving through an apartment, but it's designed to be stealth, right? Like it's designed for you to move from like person to person quickly, take them out stealthily. And it's pretty easy to do that and not have it come to shooting everyone. And so I was really looking forward to having this combat instance of like, okay, cool, we're in the streets. I'm picking out my gun, like we're firing.

And I thought that the, so I jumped in with both feet in this fucking conference room, and I'm shooting all these guys, and they all die. And I thought it was like gang on gang warfare, but no, it was them versus the cops, and I'd realized I'd just like help the cops murder a bunch of people, and they were like totally cool with it. They were like, yeah, cool, thanks for helping

to shoot these people, and I felt so bad, and then I get a call from like, I keep getting calls from people, telling me to do this job, do that job. And I get this call and they're like, yeah, so these cops, they're worried that one of that, someone in there, department's gonna be a whistleblower and rat them out for all the shady dealings.

We need you to convince them to skip town. And I'm like, fuck, no dude, it's 2020. Yeah. Fucking to fund the police man. It does have the issues that Miles Morales have, which is like it deals with some really big topics, but not with the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the kind of game that it is necessitates that they cannot be part of the current discourse and they cannot have any nuance to it.

So if I were to be spending a billion dollars on making a cyberpunk game, I would simply have something to say regardless of the context of the time and then stand by my statement rather than hedge my bets in a million ways and be like capitalism, vaguely bad, neon lights, vaguely good. Like you have to have, Dix, good. You have to have more to say.

And if you're gonna play with trans people in a way, like play with trans ideas in a way that no video game really has, I need you to at least, at the bare minimum, talk to some trans people about how they would like to be represented. Well, this is exactly my point. This is exactly my point.

If you have nothing to say about transness, then don't offend people. If you have nothing to say, then just do it right. Like, this is exactly my point. Even if you have nothing to say about transness, then don't offend people. If you have nothing to say, then just do it right. Like, this is exactly my point, which is like about the story writing, just the writing in general, like there are so many genius writers who could contribute.

I mean, like if you asked me, like who are the people who wrote for Cyberpunk? I couldn't name one of them. I don't know what their background is. I don't know what their experience in writing is. It's like they may be great video game writers, but that doesn't make a great storyteller necessarily, right? I don't like sitting and looking at the screen

and playing a game that I've waited 10 years to play and paid a bunch of money and bought already about multiple copies of and thinking, I could write, I could story produce this better. Right, right, so of course, you know, it's easy to say I could do it better, it's harder to actually do it, but I do think it's an interesting thing

like on the, on just this gender stuff, the gender and sexuality stuff that the game sort of goes into and a lot has been made of it. There's been a lot of conversation about it. Many of the reviews I read spent, I would describe like an inordinate amount, very unusual amount of time talking about it. But because the game puts it so front

and center in a lot of ways, and because the game, they've had some issues with doing some like pretty insensitive like promo stuff, and they've had like, you know, it's clear that you can, this goes back to who's, it's not all that, there are things that are really good that they did, that even some people that I've heard from don't like, that I'm like, but it's an artistic choice, you don't have to like it, but it is valid.

Right, right. And I think that, and I think, but in the fact that it's included at all, and that it's like an adult game where we can talk, we can deal with like adult things, like that genitals exist and that gender exist and stuff like that. But like, it is, it is, it does feel very one-dimensional.

And like, what would have been interesting It is, it does feel very one-dimensional. And what would have been interesting is for a great thinker of our moment, from the trans community to say, hey, let me really play this out. Let's think about what, if we jump ahead 50 years, or I guess it's supposed to be in 27, and so if we jump ahead ahead 30 years, which really isn't very far ahead when you think about it. I don't think it takes place of like a version of our world. There is some discussion of what was happening in 2020.

That doesn't match up with our world. Right. Okay. Well, at any rate, but the numbers in there, right? But we're jumping ahead 30 years, 37 years, whatever. Like it would have been, let's game it out from ahead 30 years, 37 years, whatever. Like it would have been, let's game it out from people who know this space the best. Let's talk about it and put it in the game. It doesn't have to be the like main feature of the game, but it wouldn't

be so much more rich and interesting to see the ways that that may have played out like with, with the like people who really have spent a lot of time thinking about and working on this, you know, like and living it. Because I mean maybe in listen, I don't want to discount there may be there may be CD project read staff members who are trans who contributed who wrote that part, who whatever, who were you know in that conversation. There may be outside writers who worked on it with them. I don't know, but the way it feels is, it's like a pretty heavy-handed,

pretty one-dimensional approach to something that could have been. And I think what's interesting about that particular point is you can apply that same feeling that we have talking about it, what I'm describing here, to a lot of parts of the game where you can go, you know what, like the cars, like they're cool.

But like, is this like, was this where we thought we'd be with vehicles? Is this like, does this feel right? You know, with like the relationships of characters with the body mod stuff, it all feels like it's ripped from a teenager's fever dream of a Cyberpunk world, which is cool in a way. But now that we know that these some of these things

are really, really closer even happening, it doesn't feel like we've given them the appropriate level of intellectual treatment and thoughtfulness that they deserve for this world. And maybe I'm asking too much from it, but I'm sorry, I've been waiting seven years, and it's a multi-billion dollar game, and tens of millions, hundreds of millions

of people are gonna play it. And I don't think it's too much to ask that you write the and tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people are gonna play it. And I don't think it's too much to ask that you write the fuck out of it, you know? I don't. Yeah, I think it's, I think, you know, ultimately, you know, the biggest thing that's, you know, the transphobia, the race issues that this game has, you know, all of it, you know,

I think that's the thing. This isn't some niche game that, you know, only a few thousand people are gonna see and it wins indie game of the year. This is the biggest video game to ever happen. And, you know, there have been some amazing articles out there. I think, you know, I'm gonna shout, you know, shout out to another website.

You know, probably gonna put out a video that was like, I know. I know. Probably gonna put out a great article that was like, it's a real fucking shame that this game leaned into its edge lord, you know, the community of edge lord that have been supporting this game and, you know, the Elon Musk fans of the world who just, you know, disliked bastardized idea of futurism that is like fuck everyone, like capitalism to the max, like, you know,

break, move fast, break things, right? And, you know, they have done so little to actually be like, well, hold on a sec, we actually have some interesting thoughts on this and want to subvert your expectations. No one's going to come out of this game, I think, or very few people are going to come out of this game thinking, think, or very few people are going to come out of this game thinking, oh wow, like, I learned that, like, when some of these things are bad, and actually maybe my viewpoint of the world is, is, is skewed, and, and maybe I should reevaluate some of my stances on things or, or viewpoints, it is, this game is only going to make people who have that kind of, you know, those kind of viewpoints, it is only going to make people who have that kind of, you know, those kind of reports,

it's only going to strengthen them. And there's millions of these people playing this game, and it's a little worrying, a little consulting. Well, I will say, and I think this is a really good example of where the game doesn't realize how wrong it got it, is there's a point at which you're getting cybernetic body modification done and You know you're replacing your eyeballs with digital eyeballs and like you're replacing your fingers with digital fingers digital finger

Look at that. Um, I didn't end it You're replacing parts of your body and then the doctor who's doing it the Ripper doc says to you You know, they're like one percent of people go completely like space crazy when they have of your body and then the doctor who's doing it, the Ripper doc says to you, there's like one percent of people go completely like space crazy when they have all this done and they go into full psychosis and they become murderous freaks. But is it worth it? Because we have, can expand our abilities

in these amazing ways. And then the game goes forward to make, it's so fun to be able to double jump with your enhanced legs. And so fun to have leather skin. And then the game goes forward to make it's so fun to be able to double jump with your enhanced legs and so fun to have leather skin and so cool. And and this is happening at a time when there is a disease that you have to we all have to opt out of fun to protect one to two percent of the population from. And rather than this game saying, you know, look, you replace your body parts and it ended so horribly. It says, look, it's worth it.

That 1% isn't gonna be you, because you're a player at home who's in control of yourself. So you have the most fun possible. And it's so tone deaf to this moment. And there's no way for them to anticipate that, right? But if they had thought, what are the implications of sacrificing 1% of the population's mental health to have superpowers, you would have a different game, but it just throws that out there and then moves on to something else.

Well, the game, the game is, I mean, you're hitting on something that I felt even in my first few hours of playing just that it was like just so steeped and seeped in a cynicism. Now, obviously, it's a very dark version of the future, so I get the cynical perspective, but I think that kind of feeds into that exactly what you're talking about, which is, which is, if you are less cynical about humanity generally, you won't just go like, okay, but it'll rock to get them, and we're going to just talk about this as a kind of like meaningless plot point. And who knows?

Maybe it reveals itself as less meaningless in the future, in the future in the game. But like, I think that it's like, it's like all of the things that could be serious, the game kind of is like, yeah, but we're not taking them too seriously, because it's the real game. So I want to have fun, because you paid $70 to deserve a good time.

Right. Which is like understandable to some that you've been also like. But you know, while that's trending, literally put out there, this game will make you miserable and will teach you a lesson about the world And guess what it did and it still succeeded and it had something to say Yeah, I think there's there's like a 10% more they could have added of stuff like that It's like a little bit more thoughtful on things like that. I think

It's it the whole yeah, I mean the whole if they kind of on, I feel like where the game decided to go with the implant stuff is they decided to make it, which is very watch dogs, which is a game that I've played, the new one, I've played a little bit of, and I just feel completely bored with where they've decided to make it like a surveillance state. It's a combination. It's a surveillance state conversation

and a plastic surgery discourse, which is so reductive. But there's the future of humanity. Like, but on more the future of humanity. Like, but on more than, like, I've like, you know, it's been in like cars where there's like a radio station, there's a guy who's supposed to be a conspiracy theorist talking about, you know, how they're watching you. If you get, you know, synthetic eyes,

there's like street creatures who are like, do you, there, like, there's a whole storyline. And I'm guessing it's probably not an accident today. I've heard it so much that it's gonna turn into a larger part of the storyline, which is like the surveillance state, which honestly, I think is a four, we live in the surveillance state. It is a foregone conclusion. And honestly, what the game could have done smartly, which it didn't, is like take things

like ring and take things like next door and all this weird, like self surveillance that we do and made it much more of like a dystopian, like everybody snitching on everybody else. That could have been a really interesting angle to play up, but it's more like, oh, the core. Or maybe you have to perform and act in one way when you're being perceived and then you are free to do what you really want when you're escape that perception. That would be so interesting. I'd be like, wow, you have to act one way around your Amazon Alexa because you know that Amazon is listening,

but you can't uninstall it for some reason. But when you're away from Alexa's, if you're in a field, you can desperately say to another character some plot updates and like what you need to be doing when you're back. And like that would be such an interesting statement about like the duality of self in a digital world, right? And instead it's just like,

you've been mission assigned to murder some kids and take their stuff and you're like, okay. Yeah. Oh, that's actually, you actually raised something that I just remember it made me very uncomfortable playing the game, is that there are kids in the game, there are NPC kids in the game. And like, I don't, like, I know I'm a dad

and I'm old or whatever, but it immediately filled me with this weird sense of dread when I was walking around and seeing kids on the streets and I was like, oh, what is this game gonna do with kids? Because the game doesn't inspire that it has well thought out or good faith kind of almost anything. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, then when parents have replaced their kids with a robot or like replace the parenting experience with like a kid robot, I, that upsets me to such a degree because there's so many kids that like,

need love and caring and attention and the idea that we would replace like a human who needs those things with something that's like convenient for us. I see that in sci-fi a lot and I don't like it. You mean like gay? Yeah, I mean like gay. Yeah, yeah.

But you know what, but I know, maybe it will. Maybe the game will go there and disappoint me. Let's see next week Yeah, I mean again, I mean we haven't you know played all through the game. I'm sure many things will be revealed Our tune has changed but I do every single week and I don't see that stopping for the foreseeable future Well, and it might and it might be a testament to just how impressive the game is but Yeah, I mean look there's a lot to unpack. And frankly, we have to wrap up because we've been talking about it for like well over an hour.

And people are waiting for me to do a meeting. But we might have to remeat that because we have to go through two input output stories. Okay, can we just do that later or something? Okay, can we just do that later or something? Okay, cool. But okay, so okay, final thoughts. Okay, it's day one. Let's talk about this before we wrap up. Tom, give me your final thoughts on, like, if you had to do like a speed review right now,

give me your speed review of Cyberpunk after one day with it. I think that it is a game that is worth experiencing for yourself, at least initially. And I think that, you know, this last hour of discussion, you know, I think if anything, the best thing that this game can do is show what future games that revolve around this kind of topic should not do. And so there's a lesson to be learned one way or the other, but I'm very excited to continue to play and like Ryan says maybe have this game surprised me ultimately and have my opinions change about it. So I think that you know I don't think anyone unless you know obviously I don't judge anyone, unless, you know, obviously, I don't judge

anyone, so there's meant to be a speed review. You know, I completely understand that the people that want to step away from this game and kind of ignore it and not engage with it because of the way that represents transgender people, the way it represents race, that I totally understand that and more power to you. And yeah, I think that to engage or not engage with this game is kind of the way that it's going to shape for your game discourse for like the next year.

Yeah, I agree. Ryan, do you have any speed review? Yeah, typically I will say this is the culmination in the finale and the ultimate apotheosis of the game style that started with Grand Theft Auto 3. I think it is a fascinating and interesting look at gaming trends for the last couple decades. But I do think that this should be this should be seen as a demarcation of the end of

this kind of game. I think that we should all play it and enjoy it and see with this style. Yes. That's what appreciate and it will be the ultimate version of it. But I think we need to move forward at this point. I am playing this game and I'm like, I get it. But our game's going to be like this for the rest of my life. It's just going to be the exact same game, but within a bigger city. Because I'm not interested in playing that again. I will be interested in playing this through. Maybe there will be a version in the future. Someone will come up with like a fantasy version

that I'm like, oh, maybe I'll play that. But I cannot in my life, I would like to see AAA games be more than the confines with which this was imagined in. And I hope that going forward, that this is no longer a refinement of this concept, but in fact, we need to start pressing forward in the way that I think Breath of the Wild did successfully.

And not to harp on, because I understand I'm gonna get a million death threats for saying this. Not to harp on like Nintendo's innovation in this area. There are other studios that do innovative stuff that push storytelling and stuff forward. For example, loved the Astros playroom situation with the DualSense controller. I thought that was so innovative

in a different way of storytelling and experiencing immersion. And I hope that in the future, games of this caliber and of this scope are able to take more chances. But all of that said, it's massive and it's fun. And I'm gonna stick single hundred hours into it. So, you know, but you have to have perspective on it. You cannot just openly praise it because it's the end, avengers end game or whatever. Yeah, so I think my takeaway on this is, I, to me, more than anything with a game,

and I knew that there was always going to be a situation with this where I couldn't be possibly fulfilled. I said, like, there's no way this can be a good game, even if it's the greatest game I've ever made. In some way, like, the hype can never, you can never reach in reality what maybe your mind has created. I do think this game succeeds in ways that I didn't expect it to. I mean, I think just purely on mechanics and graphics, like it pulls it off in a way that's better than I expected to be honest. I think that to me, my early review, and I haven't, again, I wanna stress it,

like I haven't really played this nearly all the way through and certainly not even, I think I'm still in the gambit. I think I'm still in the opening essentially, you know, here's where we're going to present the story part of this game, which speaks to the, just the massiveness of it. But I think that games, even games that are beautiful and vast and present tons of options for the user

and show you a world that you, you, you couldn't possibly dream of. I think what this signals to me is that, at least for me and I think for a lot of other players. And I believe like it may be the majority of players at some point, maybe now already. I think you've got to go further with storytelling. I think you have to be... I think that we have come to expect a kind of second-rate storytelling from video games,

because for a long time, that's really all we got. And if you compare, and I've had some unbelievable storytelling experiences in games. Both in open world games like Fallout and in more linear games like both the last of us games which are certainly have open world components but are really more like a game that's on a certain kind of track. But I still think that we're experiencing second rate components that are really more like a game that's on a certain kind of track, but But like I think that but I still think that we're experiencing second rate writing and second rate ideation on like what a game and a game world and game Careers should do and be a singularity of vision that is present because of directors in movies and showrunners and TV shows

Yeah, I think well, it's writers and directors. I think it's like, if you the singular person who's vision this is, if this is your, like you're the Ryan Murphy, you go out and you pick writers to execute your idea to the best it can be. That's not a hodgepodge of other people's ideas. I mean, if you watch the sopranos or you watch all the seasons of six feet under or you watch madmen or you watch. You can read it as a specific person.

I mean, that's not the writing of one single person on one day. It's a massive writing effort, but it is unified by there's a showrunner. There is a vision. There is a template. There is a way that it's sorry. I was going to say if we look at the games in the past that we've been praising, right? The last of us part to God of War comes to mind as well. You know, I just bought on a deal that we had on the website.

And then you go in the link. And put Mac dot com. Yeah. And you know, those we know, you know, Corey Barlog, like people, he's a synonymous person. You know, Hideo Kojima, right? Like, even David Keeve. Right. For better or worse, you can think David Cage is the most hack right or ever, but each of

his games are David Cage game. Well, but that's the point. But that's the point is like, hack work in video games is it elevates a game beyond our expectations. And so people are often like, this was, I had a religious experience playing uncharted or whatever. You know, because like, it actually has a story with characters and it goes somewhere and you're like, wow, okay, that like told me something. I think, and I'm not saying that games

need to necessarily have like super, they need to be heavily narrative driven, but I do think that that singular vision, that message, that kind of like underlying vibe, that you want to tell a story and you're telling it in a certain way, I think video games are an unbelievable medium for storytelling and I have experienced some truly epic in the truest sense, like experiences playing video games

with great stories. I think that more, we need to, it needs to be taken more seriously that a game can't just be a big world and lots of stuff to do in great graphics and cool guns. That is like from another era, I think, to your point, Ryan. It's from another era of gameplay and another era of game story. And that this feel, you're right, it feels like the end result of all of the most extreme of all of that. But like it is missing that element that makes it feel like this has something to say. it's gonna start saying it from from from

Moment one and you're gonna feel pulled into it and you're gonna think about it and you're gonna think about it after it's over That to me I haven't felt that yet and I worry that it isn't there Even in a shitty in a game where you could say there's such shitty Characters and so much crass stuff in GTA. In GTA V, it still kind of pulls you into like a singular vision of a story. There it feels like there's something there. There's a there there. And like I think that Rockstar has gotten that right,

no matter whether you agree or disagree with their decisions, this doesn't feel like it does it yet. It hasn't connected for me yet. And I worry that like as long as we think of video game writing as a kind of second class citizen, that it's like less important than some of the other things you might do in a game, and that that singular vision or that a shared vision

that's really strong is really important. It's not enough to say we have great source material. To me, this is like, this is like a fit, in many ways, like you can look at it as a comic book movie that lands with a thud, which is like, there are lots of great characters in comic book.

It's watched from comic book culture and history, watchmen. Because it's so stylish and stunning and gorgeous and the effects are so expensive and you're just blown away by the actors they got, but it does not feel like the director understands what the story is about. Right. Right. It's why the watchmen show in many ways succeeds the way the comic book does in a way that the movie could never have hoped to.

And it is, I don't agree with every decision they made for the show, but there's no question that it tells a compelling, singular, thoughtful, dynamic, creative story that does make you want to watch the next episode. You don't care about the characters that believe that they can change. Yeah, and this so far it has not set out that that's even a part of that's even an important part

of the conversation. And so I worry that that's the missing piece here and that I don't know if the game is do I pick it up every day for many, many hours a day to see where it goes? I don't they haven't told me why yet. Maybe they will tell me why, but that to me is like my lightning review of this is, is where's the story? And it better not be, you know, better not be like some hackneyed B-movie revenge

because, I mean, it probably will be, but I mean, that's not enough in my business. That's totally where the story's going. It's totally where the story is going. I agree. I agree. I think the story, if's going. It's totally where the story is going. I agree. I agree. I think the story, if I had to predict right now where the story is going, I'm just going to do this.

This is no spoilers. I haven't read anything. I haven't played the game for more than three hours. I think you're going to have to avenge the death of your buddy. Plus, we're going to find out that the corporations are using our eyes to steal our secrets or whatever. And that's going to be the two storylines of this game that they really care about.

That's what has been emoted to me heavily from the start of the game, and that's frankly not enough for me. It just isn't. It's that's some hackneyed shit. That is like, I've seen that every movie and every game I've ever played. I'll say this, my character, so hot.

Her tits are huge, she's got long nails. Oh my god, both of them. Yeah, but what about, but what about, I'm gonna say but what about what about Exissay. What about the penis? All right anyhow, we got to wrap up. Uh, Tom. Thank you for joining. This is great. It's great. It's great addition and we will have you back. Well, um, before we go, there's a couple things in the news. Um, that are very funny. One of which is things in the news that are very funny. One of which is in similar gaming vein, Sony has been rumored to be working on a next-gen PSP, which is not a good idea. I mean, it's only a good idea if they can out switch the switch, in my opinion, which would be like doing my dream scenario. I mean,

if they wanted to do what they should have done, let me try this many different ways. What Sony should have done was been like the PS5 is the most powerful game system ever created and it's portable. And then there are like you people will be like, what are you talking about Sony? That doesn't make any sense.

But yeah, like the technologically important thing. That actually is not physically powerful. And they be like, no, here's the impossible. That actually is not physically possible. And they'd be like, no, here's the deal. It's a handheld. When you play the handheld, the graphics are reduced and whatever. And then when you plug it in, it's like hooks up to this base station, it becomes the most powerful graphics

system ever created. And that's not the way they would say it. Can you tell it's Friday and I'm very tired? That's not the way they would say it. But you know what I'm saying. But they're not talking about doing that. They're talking about doing a standalone, like another version. I mean, the only way this could work

is if every game that you buy for your PS4 or 5 is basically like compatible with the handheld. So because that's impossible, there is something about them doing 5G streaming from the console or from the cloud. No one wants that. Nobody wants that. And frankly, guess what does that already? Your phone and you can just stick a controller on your phone. Why would you make it? Sony should make a phone.

What have Sony made what have Sony made phones with with controllers, although I mean, they did this. They made a PlayStation phone. Remember? Yes, they did. I was, I believe that we were, I had a good one. I believe that N Gadget, we had a leak of it. We were the first people ever to publish a leak of the phone. And I think, I think I had, like, we had the thing where it was like, we had to do a rendering

because we were, we were told what it was. And I think people were like, this is bullshit. Like, this doesn't, this is not a real thing. And then it actually is exactly, it was exactly the way it was described, which sounds completely insane. But the thing is, why get into the messy business of hardware at all?

Just sell a controller or a controller case. You bet you're not telling me, they're in the messy business of hardware. No, but I'm saying they could just get, they could just start printing money from a cloud streaming app now. So Microsoft is doing, why would people spend extra money

for a 5G compatible handheld? Well, I mean, that is a failure idea in my opinion, what you're describing. What may not be a failure idea is something like, if it really were super synced with the experience of the PS4, PS5, if it were like a $200 or $300 device that like does the streaming stuff, but also can play like diminished, like graphically diminished versions of the games.

You know, there's a, there are a lot of games for like the Vita, which are cross compatible, right? I mean, like, they do that, right? Yeah, but they were, they were developed separately. But they're like, most of their like indie games for the most part, right? I don't know if there's any. Yeah, and they're, they're specifically developed for each console. I don't think they can do so differently. I mean, the reality is all my PS4 games play on my PS5, that's a huge deal. That's a never before done in the history of video games Situation like the consoles. I mean in the past yes, no, I'm saying this is the first generation ever where we can Except for 10 titles or something that we can play the previous generation games on the next generation hardware

Yeah, I mean not counting the PS for a pro and the Wii What do you And the Wii. What do you mean? The Wii played all game cube games. Oh, did it? And the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, and PlayStation 1, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 2, and game.

Did it? All of the no didn't. Yes, it did. Did it for I am. Okay, I have no recollection of this. I was like, this is such an incredible innovation. It's not fairly. I don't have any recollection of that. I guess like, this is such an incredible innovation. It's not apparently. I don't have any recollection of that.

I guess I was just so busy moving on to the next thing. I didn't even think about the backwards compatibility. But at any rate, so they could hypothetically, they could do it, right? It could be like, you know, I mean, they could do what the switch is doing, but better, right? They would inevitably be much more powerful than the switch.

Because that's like three or four, how old is the Switch now, three, four years old? Five years old? And the Switch is made so that Nintendo profits on the hardware, but Nintendo never does hardware that they'd break even on. Sony could walk right up to the break even line if they wanted to and have a far more powerful device.

Right, so I'm saying, I can't. But I don't think it's powerful enough to run those games. Maybe. I was thinking of all the people, all the cyberpunk, I was thinking of all the cyberpunk memes of people showing like the GTA stuff. It's just every time I think of this idea, I think like, oh yeah, you put cyberpunk on it, but it's going to look like a game from 2002. That's why I think like, yes, you're right. The only strategy that would work for them,

but it's an impossible strategy, so they should just stay out of it. Yeah, I mean, I think, I like the, I mean, I love hardware. I'm a hardware guy. I have a lot of collection of video game hardware. I love hardware. I love getting a weird little gadget.

You know, I love weird little gadgets, but I don't know. I guess, You know, I love weird little gadgets, but I don't know. I guess, I mean, I barely touched the switch. I mean, especially now that nobody's going anywhere. I mean, right now is it would be a very bad, I mean, they would do it obviously next year sometime, if they're gonna do it, or like at a later date. I mean, I just think for it to succeed,

a lot of things would have to happen. I think I do think there's an argument we made that for I don't want to hook something up to my phone to play a game. And I think that whole thing is kind of a messy and complicated. It's a messy and complicated experience to be like, okay, I'm going to like Bluetooth this controller or I'm going to plug it in and and then I'm gonna boot up the streaming app, and if it doesn't stream, then I'm basically screwed. I think if it were like, much more powerful than a phone,

but not like, so crazy that it's like a thousand dollar piece of hardware. And it had the streaming capability, but it also could like, you could take your games with you. I do think there's something attractive about it, like throwing it in a bag and having like a better than switch gaming option. Like, most of the switch games,

like I think it would be really awesome. Like I've been playing, I mentioned I've been playing Soma, which, I mean, I don't even know if they have for the switch or not, but like, that's a game I bought for my PS, on, well, it's on PS now, but I got it for my PS5 and I'm playing it. I'd love to be able to play that like city and bed or if I was traveling in the future when I am traveling to be awesome to play that on a plane.

And like, I don't think the experience of using it on my phone would be as good as a dedicated gaming handheld. I understand you wrote this thing and I totally agree with a lot of it that like there are reasons why it would not be a good idea. On the other hand, I kind of, like the more we talk about it, I'm kind of like, I sort of want this. I want it. It just doesn't mean that it makes sense for them or that it's going to happen. Yeah. I mean, I don't know this render that we have, what, I don't know where this came from, this

video render definitely makes me want whatever that is, you know, although it looks like it be really hard to hold. Yeah, it's not, it has not looking good enough. It needs to be like true, you need some like thickness there. You need a little bit of fat. I mean, even the switch light, I have like a chunky case on so I can give it a little booty. Yeah, you need to, you got to have something to hold on to.

Like a great lover, you need something to grab on to. You know what I mean? Well, speaking of a bulky tech, we talk about Apple's segue, $549 AirPods Max, $549 for the AirPods Max. Yeah, I don't personally, I wouldn't have ears good enough for whatever that sounds. But the other thing is like there are, I don't know. I guess it looks an Apple bakes in a lot of like, you know, homegrown goodness. You're like, look, the Apple, like I will say I bought AirPods Pro. I hesitated for a long time. I waited so they were on sale

significantly on sale and I bought them and they're really good. Although they, I'm having trouble getting seals now for just like my ears have gotten larger or something. I don't know what's going on, but like they're not as good as they were the day I bought them, which is strange, but I'm like fit wise, but anyhow, but they're very good and they interact with my phone in a way that is extremely seamless. And I think that goes a long way. Now going from $250 to $550 is a big leap. And they are not amazing over the year. I had fun. It's like absolutely stunning. Yeah, a lot of really well-known companies have been making these types of products for a long time.

And honestly, we have some, I mean, it's funny because they own Beats, but Laura has a pair of Beats over your headphones and they're fantastic. And they definitely did not cost $500, you know? And I think it's, I don't know who this is for. I feel like this is some weird pet project in the company. Like I don't personally get it.

I feel like it's one of those things where they were like, well we could do it and somebody had like kind of like, you know, it got stuck in their cross somehow. They're like, I really wanna do these headphones. You know, somebody like senior at the company. And they're like, all really want to do these headphones. Somebody like senior at the company. And they're like, all right, let's just release them at the end of the year. It could be like a luxury item that some people buy.

Does this seem like a market for them, the over-year market? I mean, I don't think that there's a huge market there. I also think of that the market that is there already knows very amazing brands who make like unbelievable sounding headphones for far less money. And I think, you know, if the design had been so iconic and stunning that people like would, it became like a fetish item,

the way that AirPods did, where it just became like, you know, a status symbol, the way that like even the white earpods did originally. But I don't think the design is there. Like when they're not on, they look like a boob purse. They look like a bra that's a personal purse. Is that, is that, isn't that a carrying case for them? Yes, but when they're on,

I want to look at them on the website. I actually haven't really. When they're on, they look like the most nothing, like they look like stock headphones. They're not like in my opinion, they're not iconic, they're not interesting, they're not they don't have any really thing to save about design. And then when they're off, they look like a bra. I mean honestly, it's interesting. They have that they have the dial from like the Apple Watch is kind of like stuck on the side of one of them. Yeah. I don't think these are unattractive in a very like, you know, Deeter Roms, like Johnny I have homogenized, you know, type of,

I mean, move the future. They look, I don't know, I'm looking at the pink ones or the red ones or whatever. And I'm kind of like, hmm, I actually, I actually kind of like these. You're out of my mind. Oh god, I'm gonna buy them. No, but you're not. I think I am. I actually kind of like these. Oh God, oh God, I'm gonna buy them. No, you're not. I think I am.

I love it. I love it. $50. I love the colors. I have really, I honestly hadn't even thought for one second about it, but now that I'm looking at them, I kind of, I don't know. They are, they are pretty attractive in my opinion. I know they look like other stuff, but.

This is how we slide up to a $4,000 iPhone. This is how we do it. I know. Although it would be nice to have some really great over the ear. They look huge, I don't know. This is for me, I don't want to spend $550 on anything. I mean, that's like, I'm trying to not spend my,

that's like, I mean, think about it. It's the cost of a PlayStation five. They're more expensive than the PlayStation five. That's, to me, that is nuts. These headphones are more expensive than, like, you could buy multiple iPads. I mean, that's not, well, how much are they? You could buy two iPad minis. What do they start at?

Let me get to a real story. That's a zit. They have one price, $550. I would definitely get the pink though. I mean, I'm definitely feeling the pink in a real story. This is it, they have one price, $550. I would definitely get the pink though. I mean, I'm definitely feeling the pink in a big way. I'm sorry, this is nuts, that these are $50 more than a PlayStation 5 is nuts. If these were $300 or $350,

I think like I would be like, okay, I get it. At this price, it's outrageous. I think it's an outrageous asking price. I mean, free engraving, they. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, this isn't either or, but who's keeping these on and listening to Apple Music? I don't. I mean, I guess people who have want to buy like a small luxury but aren't super duper rich. I mean, you can buy just to put in respect

if I guess the interior point, an iPad Air is $600. So these are $50 cheaper than an iPad Air, but an iPad Air does so much stuff. It's an incredible device. You could, it's literally like you could do everything with it. An iPad, a regular iPad starts at $3.29. I've got money. Yeah, iPad Mini's $400.

So, regular iPad $3.29, iPad Mini's $400, iPad Air is $5.99. You could buy, I'm looking at just some other products here. What does the Mac Mini start at? Mac Mini starts at 699, so it's more expensive, but still it's $150 more. For $100 more you can get an entire computer. What's the cheapest laptop they offer? But I mean, just for a one-to-one product,

like there's so many headphones, I mean, Apple offers a lot of headphones that are really great and have tons of features and are like iconically designed and do not cost $550. Like that's just, that is it. And you know what bothers me the most about it is that it's just so tone deaf.

At this moment of such enormous wealth and equality during a holiday season where most children won't even get a gift, where families are going hungry. To introduce this, I get it. There's multiple price points and we're not supposed to shame Cardi B for spending $88,000 on a purse. Did she spend $88,000 on a purse? Yeah, and then all of Twitter yelled at anyone who had any problem with that. I think honestly, it's just gauche.

I think it shows really poor taste. And it shows that they're brand, like I don't think, listen, are they still doing what they've always done? Absolutely. But I just don't, I think it speaks to how not relevant Apple is outside of, like obviously they're super relevant

when it comes to phones and computers. Nobody's gonna argue that. They have the only tablet on the market. But I think when it comes to phones and computers. Nobody's going to argue that. They have the only tablet on the market. But I think when it comes to like that cool factor that got them there, that like got to have it like drooling iPod factor, I can't think of anything besides AirPods that have had that in the recent past. Yeah. I mean, I mean, they have a watch is like a mom accessory.

I mean, you can get the interesting thing is that you can get, I mean, they make a beat, the beat studio three are noise canceling over ear, you know, W1, W1 chip and W2. No, it's called, well, is that one W2? This one's a W1. I don't know if they, did they put a new chip and the new headphones? I don't know, I just threw that out there because I didn't know either, but yeah, this is these are W1s. But I mean, but yeah, these are W1s, but I mean, these are $315,

which is still a shitload of money for a pair of headphones. I mean, for a normal person, it's a shitload of money, but you know, I mean, it is not, it's not $550, and it's like, you know, it sounds more like a price that is, you know, you can expect. I mean, I have trouble imagining these being so much better sonically than, I mean, there are so many brands doing this in this space. If you really care about like the quality of sound,

I'm not sure exactly what you're paying for here. Maybe they sound truly amazing. But like both, sure. So these are brands that have like stunning studio quality, like musicians use them headphones, and they're still not asking that in same price. Like it's just, it's a big ask for a company that has not made over the ear headphones other than beats. Yeah, I'll be honest.

I'll be honest with you, I am very curious. They have, these have each one chips in them, which is apparently different in each ear. They're definitely, they're definitely are putting some weird technology in here. Spatial audio with dynamic head tracking. I will say I like spatial audio. I think spatial audio is cool and fun.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know what it does on an over the ear headphone, it'd be interesting to see. But like, I am the only who cares the question. If these perform from a sonic level, at a sonic level, it's considerably better than any other over the ear headphones in this price range, then they will have made their case, right? I just don't know that that's the case. And I mean, I'm not on a problem with it. I just think it's an, it's an, they're unusually expensive headphones, even for Apple,

even by Apple standards, you know, like, to go up from their most expensive earbud is 200 and what, 250? What is the, what are the iPod pros? They're AirPods, sorry, AirPods, AirPods, AirPods Pro 279. So they go for, I'm just looking at their website. You can't get to the price on their website.

You have to watch like a fancy animation. Airpods, progo for $200. No. No. $250 from Apple, they're on sale at $200. They're on sale for $220, $300. Oh really, that's a good deal. That's what I got them for.

They're also on sale at Apple for $224. But at any rate, let's call it $250, right? Retail. To go up at $300 to these headphones feels like a huge leap. It's like if you're best closest, you know, performing high performing audio product in from the, from your actual Apple line

is the AirPods Pro, I could see going up $100, $200 more and making sense. Going up $300 more is200 more and making sense. Going up $300 more is pretty insane. You know? And like, I don't know, maybe the sound, oh sorry, $2.24, I'm on the education site for some reason. The actual price is $250, is the MSR.

$250, yeah. I don't know where the, I guess $2.24 is if you're an educator. I don't know how I got on this page. They're like, here's $ bucks, that should do it. Um, but anyhow, yeah, exactly, that should fix our education system. Um, but anyhow, listen, I mean, I get it, I understand Apple, the Apple tax or whatever,

the only thing that could make these worth it in my opinion is if they truly sound just like, they need to be leaps and bounds better than anything else in this price. And they better last and they better not have batteries that a user can't replace because if I buy five hundred and fifty dollar headphones and they're not charging up in two years I'm going to lose my shit. Yeah, I mean that's a whole other thing. I mean, I think people who spend five hundred and fifty dollars on headphones probably aren't that worried about the battery. I mean, I don't know how many people that are like regular people.

This is an item that like, this is a luxury item. $550 headphones is not something that, and I say this is a person who buys plenty of stuff that's probably in the luxury category. I don't think that I'd spend this much money on over the year headphones. I could, I just don't think that I would. It doesn't feel like a good investment to me.

You know? So I don't know. There's a very, I feel like there's a very specific and small audience for this. It's like, you need to be a design obsessed, Apple loving, audio fanatic. Who happened to go to a gifting suite recently? Yeah. Yeah. Or like, I mean, I'm just trying to like to like what are like what are the like what are the

Instagram or like TikTok influencers who are trying to flex so mr. Beast. Yeah, exactly I'm on an audio file headphones. Let's see what the let's like what's what are the recommendations? I'm just doing a quick Google for this as one. Okay. Well, I mean, okay So here's their argument and I guarantee you the Zapples argument internally I mean, okay, so here's their argument. And I guarantee you the Zapples argument internally. They're like, listen, these types of reference level audio file headphones cost $3,000. I mean, I'm looking here and it's like

the high-end stuff is insane, right? Shit for people that are in software bulk. The headphones are for people who are completely in, I mean, here's the Sanhyzer HD820. They're $2,399, okay? They're three gaming headphones, noise canceling over a year, true wireless, we'll just go with over a year. Yeah, I mean, these guys are reviewing,

oh, here we go, best headphones under $1,000, big price, big sound. So I think, you know, potentially they would tell you, hey, listen, you know, these headphones are, you know, really good headphones that sound this good are cost a thousand dollars. And we're selling them for $550, so it's actually a discount. But like, who buys the thousand-dollar headphones?

What's the market for a thousand-dollar headphones? Nobody's doing that. I mean, honestly, it's like, it's, it's, If they are, they keep them in one room of their home and I've never seen them because I've never, I know some huge fucking nerds who like, absolutely have the most tricked out systems and I don't know anyone who's spent $3,000 on headphones.

Oh, $1,000 on headphones. Yeah, I mean, there's, maybe there's a, I mean, there's some audience, I'm trying to think of who it is. I think it's people, I do think it's like a gift. I do think it's like, there's maybe there's a, I mean, there's some audience, I'm trying to think of who it is. I think it's people, I do think it's like a gift. I do think it's like, here's a thing. Okay, here's a black piece. Oh, absolutely.

It's a black piece for an Oscar's gifting suite. Yeah, but no, no, I mean, but like, okay, it's Christmas time. You need to buy your loved one something really nice, okay? Now, by the way, a normal, and this is not a normal Christmas, so I don't know how many people are dropping big money on presents this year, but But you know, let's say it's a normal Christmas, which it isn't, which is why it's like why release them now, but okay

Let's say it's a normal Christmas, but they know the people who can afford these will always be able to afford them. Yeah I mean if anything the rich just got richer, so why not buy it? Absolutely like these are yeah, right like so anyhow You know you you wanna buy your significant other gift that's really that they would never buy it for themselves and that they love music and they're a niphon user. I can see this being like, wow, I wouldn't, if Laura got me these, Laura, if you're listening. You know, if Laura were to get me the pink versions, you know, I would

be like, wow, I mean, this is awesome. And I'm going to use these all the time. And I'm so excited about them. And I would never have bought these for myself. I mean, this is probably one where I would not fork over the money because like what the thing that it's going to bring me just isn't enough to make it worth my while. Like, a $500 PS5 is a no-brainer. A $500 pair of headphones is much harder from my brain, you know? Anyhow, but if she were to buy them for me, I'd be like, wow, this is an awesome gift.

And so, like, in that sense, they work, right? Like, they make sense. So, I mean, maybe that's the target audience is like people buying really nice gifts for people that they're really close to, you know, or people treating themselves to something. It's like a real luxury, but they can kind of afford. But still it's like $550 for headphones as nuts. I mean, you could leave these on a subway. You know, I could buy extremely wonderful, great headphones and still give $200 to someone in need.

I don't know. It's hard for me right now to be able to spend $550 on headphones that are like wireless Apple headphones. They're not even like, it's just, I don't like it. I don't like it. I don't think it's a good move for them. I don't think it like, this was the moment in history where Apple was like, oh, I know, we'll get our cool back. I don't think it like this was the moment in history where Apple like was like, oh, I know we'll get our cool back Like I don't know. I guess they don't they're not really I'm not gonna say like I guess they're not about that

I guess they don't have to concern themselves with what is accessible or what their image looks like anymore Like they're at such a size that they can just make whatever you're right This was a project that someone in the company was like I want to own these and I'm gonna do it and then everyone was like, okay I mean, you know, I want to own these. And I'm going to do it. And then everyone was like, okay. I mean, you know, I don't know, they're competition. No, I'm looking at like, you know, wire cutter, which does great breakdowns of stuff like this, you know, they're competition for Bluetooth wireless headphones.

I mean, maybe there's like a market for people who want like audio, you know, more audio file level sound with, you know, the ease and convenience of what Apple provides in its AirPods Pro or something. I just, I don't know if does that exist because I'll tell you this, an audio file would reject something like spatial audio. I'm sure of it. Like, I don't think an audio file is like, oh yeah, do some kind of weird effect within my headphones that creates like a more spacious sound because they're like, I want to hear what this sounds like like as it was recorded, I don't want to hear like this like weirdly influenced or attenuated version of it. So, so like yeah, I mean, I don't know, I feel like

we've already spent far too much time talking about these headphones. I think if you have $550 to burn and you have everything else that you could possibly want to cost that much money, enjoy, you know, enjoy. I just don't, I feel like it's the most non-essential, least interesting thing that Apple's done in a long time and that's saying something. I guess we should do some nice things, right? Yeah. Makes sense.

I'll do a quick one. I'll do a quick one. We're in the holiday gift corridor. I have been, I gotta tell you, I love shopping for other people. I love shopping online. I'm very good at it But I enjoy buying things for other people like I think I'm good at it I think I can be pretty creative with my gift given. This is a very egotistical nice thing And I just enjoy I think it's fun to I mean I like shopping for myself, but

It's fun to imagine what somebody else would like and try to like get that perfect thing for them. And so, my nice thing is holiday shopping. And I think, especially this holiday, we could all use a little, you know, it's nice to get a little extra little extra something if it can happen, if you can do it, you know, it's like, we all need a little help this year. So hopefully my gifts land, just really land. That's it, that's my nice thing. My whole extended family just did like a secret Santa where we would just pass around, well my dad's, I just did a secret Santa

where we would just like, everyone would get one person a gift. And I got, one of the people I got is like a small child. Oh wow. Oh, like you don't know the kid's interest. I don't want to insult them. I have to do something that's like powdering gendered. How old are they? Four or three or four.

But I ended up this like, so there's company Carrera has like, it's like slot cars, but you can get different kinds of, it's like a slot car sort of like, it's like an upgraded transit, right? Like slot cars are like individual ones and they have like, they had the cars themed ones from the Pixar movie cars.

I don't like the Pixar movie cars. I hate that movie. So I went with the Mario Kart themed one. Oh, that's very on brand for you. I think kids, all kids will like it. A peach and Mario and Luigi. I think it's like the right, it's very on brand for you. I think kids all kids will like it. It peach and Mario and Luigi I think it's like the right sounds very cute. Yeah, I thought it was cute So there's

I guess that's a nice thing was like I finally found the cure for that I also found I also bought two other things that I that I have to recommend one of which is a new TV I got the LG OLED GX gallery TV with sound with with the accompanying sound bar and it which is a new TV. I got the LG OLED GX gallery TV with the sound with the accompanying sound bar and it. Oh, you bought a new TV. Yeah, it is. I mean, I could not believe I was I can't believe I've been like not on the L OLED train my entire existence like this TV. And then John got.

entire existence, like this TV. And then John got wanted to get a new vacuum, heard about the RoboRot H6, which is like a digital looking vacuum and it has like a whole display. It's like if Apple or like tesla made a vacuum, like it's very designed and it's completely wireless and it comes out of these little attachments and he's like thrilled and it's coming wireless and it comes out of these little attachments and he's like thrilled

and it's coming so handy. And so I guess my nice thing is just like, it's just like, if you're an adult, you don't have to get another adult to gift. You can just like buy and gifts for kids is hard enough. Just say specifically what you want or go buy it for yourself and high five and call it a holiday. Like I think that that's my lesson coming out of COVID is I don't want to guess what John wants. I don't know. So yeah, that's can't be done. Yeah. Anyway, that's my nice things. All-walking consumer products. But you know, what do I love it? I love we live in America. Okay, we're Americans. We're in our in our national pastime is shopping. And so be it. You know, what else are you going to do?

What else are you going to do when you're sitting? Nothing. I'm about to go do a whole bunch of nothing. Oh my god, that sounds great. All right, let's wrap this thing up. Let's get out of here. All right, time to punk. Bye.

Bye. Well, that is our show for this week. We'll be back next week with more tomorrow. And as always, always you and your family the very best, though I've just been told by Dex that your family's gotten too many body mods and they're having cybernetics like nd BYE!