Triple Click - Are Modern Games Too Hand-Holdey? [Mailbag]

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

The Triple Click gang opens up the mailbag to answer some of your best questions. What are our video game habits? What books would make for good video games? And does Wolverine's hand-holding go too far?One More Thing: Kirk: The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexendre Dumas)Maddy: Dolly Parton’s America (Radiolab limited series podcast)Jason: Echo WeaverLINKS:Game File interview with the director of Echo Weaver: https://www.gamefile.news/p/indie-developer-has-a-plan-to-keep  Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀 SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch 💬 Join the Triple Click Discord 🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy 📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

Every week on Triple Click, we say that we bring the games to you. But what games? And how are we bringing them? And who are you anyway? Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week, we're answering your burning questions on topics ranging from handholding and video games to habits, games have ingrained in us, why we haven't played Delta Rune, and what a dungeon crawler Carl video game might look like.

I'm Kirk Hamilton. I'm Maddie Myers. And I'm Jason Shrier. Hello. Hello. Hello, hello, my friends. How are you both doing? Pretty good.

Doing pretty well. It's fall in New England. It's beautiful. It's not quite fall in Portland. It was fall for a minute, and now it's the false fall. It's like 80 degrees in sunny. The leaves are doing their leaf thing. It's beautiful.

We want on a walk today. There's a bunch of wind. Leaves are blowing right in your face. Pow, fall. Love a good leaf in the face. Man, you know, fall is such a romantic time. And if you're feeling, If you've been feeling the romance of fall, you know, the kind of when Harry met Sally vibes and you're maybe undergoing a new, undertaking a new romantic endeavor.

You might want some advice on that. And if you did want advice, you can maybe ask, I don't know, your three favorite video game podcasters, which is just what listeners did on a recent bonus episode that we just published called Triple Kiss in the members-only bonus feed. And that is because, of course, TripleClick is a member-supported podcast. We do not sell ads. We do not have sponsors. We only make money from our wonderful listeners who support our show and support our network, Maximum Fun. And if you would like to support our show, you can become a member at Maximumfund.org slash join TripleClick.

And if you become a member, you will get bonus episodes like that one. I just mentioned, Triple Kiss. So many more. We publish one every month. And it's our way of saying thank you to the members who support our show. So anyways, maximum fund.org slash join triple click, become a member, support our show, and listen to bonus material. So those were questions about dating, marriage, love, but we get a lot of other questions as well. Jason, what kind of questions are we answering on this week's episode?

This week is burning questions, of course. I would love to hear, by the way, actually, I'm curious from YouTube. Do you think we should do another triple kiss? I think that was pretty fun. Maybe we could do another one at some point. I think so. I did say we got a couple messages. from people so far saying they really loved it. It's been only a few days since we put that out as we record this now, but it seems like people liked it. And I liked it. Yeah, I thought it was cool. Yeah, let us know out there, email us and let us know if you want more episodes like that. As for today, yes, we were opening up the mailbag and taking some listener questions, mostly about video games and not so much about dating advice for the dating advice. You got to go behind the paywall. As always, you can reach us at triple click at maximum fun.org.

These are real emails from real listeners. There. Maddie, why do you read the first one? Sure. This is from Ellie, who writes, Hey, there, Triple Click. Hope all as well. What are some gaming habits or intuitions that you feel may be lost on new or inexperienced players?

For instance, whenever I reach a crossroad or even at the start of a level, I always go the wrong way. Years of gaming have taught me that the best secrets are always found off the beaten path. But these can also be game specific. And from soft games, you'll often find me hitting on random walls like a crazy person. What are some of your video game habits or intuitions? That's a good question. Just like Silk Song, just smashing, smashing random walls.

Yeah, I mean, so I do the same thing where I try to go the wrong way to get the chest before you go forward, especially on JRPs where that's like a very common part of game design level design. But the problem is you don't always know which is the wrong way. So what I do is like an insane person if I start walking in a direction and it seems like it's going to be the main path. I have to backtrack and go get the chest and the other path. So then I can go turn around and going through that main path, which really has probably wasted many hours of my life.

It's a little depressing and think about the amount of time that's been wasted just doing that. probably about as much time as Kirk has spent running forward in Assassin's Creed loading screens I think we can measure all of that out if only those will those will stop any like those take the same amount of time no matter how much running you do that's true you're never really actually getting anywhere it's like a metaphor um let me think I have a few of one is that I don't level up for a while I think that's something I've learned from a lot of games like I don't know I was just playing a soul's like where I'm kind of getting a lot of experience

points and also getting the consumable experience points, like, you know, that you can choose to spend at any time. And these days, I really wait to spend those for a long time. And that's because I don't really know what I want to spend them on at first. And I think if I were, like, I have enough experience with these games to just know, okay, at some point it's going to be clear to me what kind of build I want to do and where I want to start to invest that stuff. But I don't just start spending them right away because you can wind up spending them in a way

that you regret. And then I'll say another one that's kind of the opposite of that, which is a habit I've actually tried to develop is spending more things in video games, like using more items, because I think my older impulse used to be to save everything. So like, you know, health potions and whatever, like especially things you would use in a boss fight. And then never wind up using them. A very common thing, right, where you wind up at the final boss and you have six billion

of every single potion. But also in a game where, like, you have a game where, like, you have a common impulse. a standard health potion for the first act, and then by the second act you're using the enhanced health potion, and then the concoction that heals more health because your character has more health, so the potions don't do as much. And like the game actually, a lot of games are designed for you to just use stuff, but then I didn't use to do that. So now I've actually tried to develop the habit of just like use things. It's fine. Just use them up. So those may seem kind of like they're in tension with one another, but I don't think that they exactly are. But I guess it's like,

I think about items and progression much more kind of. consciously than I used to because I played a lot of games. Well, maybe you have to be using your items because you're super weak because you haven't leveled up. They do kind of go together in that way. Yeah, you're making the game way harder for yourself if you never level up. I guess I have a video game bad habit that I think I've talked about on this show before, perhaps. This really upsets people. So I just need to warn the-

Throwing your controller at the screen. Your rage is your uncontrollable. Yeah, that I'm regularly destroying stuff from my home. No, I sell a lot of stuff in video games. Oh, that's right. Yes. I regret that I have sold something that was very important. I've been trying to break this habit, which I would say is the opposite of an intuition.

It is an active choice I make. I'm also, like, in real life, I'm a real big remove clutter person. And in life have also gotten rid of things that then... Marie Kondo Ackle. But, like, too much so. We're like years later, I'll be like, oh, I wish I hadn't gotten rid of that. Like, that's a flaw, a character flaw I have that I've had to kind of look at over the years and hold on to things for longer and be like, am I sure I want to get rid of this? Or am I just in an

excessively cleaning things up phase? And I do that in games and it's a problem. But I've gotten better at it. For what it's worth, Maddie, I think better to be a seller than a hoarder, I would say. I think so, but I, hmm, you say that up until like you find out in my case that I like sold the special set of armor that made me uniquely powerful against some really specific mid boss that then I'm just slogging my way through because I sold some key items. I was thinking about real life more so than yeah, no, totally. If you're going to overcorrect in one direction or the other, yeah, I can see that. Yeah, it's tricky. It's tricky. I'm definitely using it my potions though. That's always been something that I feel like I'm really good at is conserving healthily and using all my my video game power-ups at precisely the

time when they most need to be used. I have one more before we get to the next question, and it is one that was actually imparted to me by Stephen Totillo, our former boss, now GameFile author. He loves the menus and video games, and I learned from him that when I'm playing a game and kind of approaching it like a reporter, that it was really helpful to start by just going through all of the menus and looking at everything in the menus. And you could look at the credits too and kind of go through all the information that's in the menu screens. And as a player, I don't really do that because I'm not trying to really approach games the same way. But I still find that I have that habit where when I start a game, I'm pretty likely to go into options and especially

into accessibility, because these days the accessibility menus are really interesting. And a lot of times there are things in there, not just that make the game easier or that you might want to turn on, but just some really interesting settings or things that convey interesting information about the game. So I tend to just like always go through the menus just to see what's there and what I can change and like what options are available since a lot of games do have really cool

and interesting and transformative options in the menus that you can get to right away. Like I'll go into the menus before I've even started the game sometimes and just read them. That's a good one. I think that's a really good habit. I've definitely trained myself to do that and it's super useful where sometimes I'll be like,

wow, this game hasn't explained anything. And then I'm like, wait, it has. And I simply skipped all of those screens. And now I'm just going to sit back. Actually, you know, that's a good related point, actually. Yeah, is like the lore recaps and character, like, codex that you get in a lot of role-playing games. I used to just completely ignore that stuff. And I do find that when I stop and, like, go read the, like, character summaries,

I'm, like, way more aware of what's going on in the story. And I do try to do that more than I used to. Yeah, if you do that in blueprints, you'll, like, find helpful hints and solutions. That's true. Very important. important part of the game. Stephen once wrote an article, at least I think it was Stephen,

for Katakio about like bad habits of video games or something like that. And he talked about how one of his things that he did was he would always ignore the part of the game where it's like, change the lightness until it's slightly, until the image is slightly not visible or something.

And he would always make it really not, really visible. He was like, I was funny. So he turned up. So every time I see that, I think of them. I definitely do that in horror games. It's just jack it up.

Yeah. I'm like, I got to make this light. Kirk, correct. Correct. Read the next one, please. Okay, this comes from Sophie. Sophie writes, Hi, I'm Sophie.

Great name. Sophie writes, so recently, and by recently, I mean the last two, three years, we have been bombarded with bad news. And during the recent Xbox layoffs, I started to wonder, as a gamer and someone who still dreams of making my own game studio, what do I do with all of this? There's a little bit more that.

like head out because I do, I think this is a good question in its own right. Yeah, sure. I think that like you just have to reframe your thinking if you're thinking about starting a game studio. And it also depends on like where you are in your life. If you're just out of college and you're like, I want to make a game on my own and start a studio and see what happens. Then friggin do it. Like go live with your parents for a year and try to make a video game or like get a day job and try to make a video game on the side if you can't if you don't have like a if you can't live with your parents or something like that like find a way to support yourself while you're doing it if you're later in life if you have kids if you have a family less possible unless you find funding and I think what's

a little less realistic these days is finding ample funding for a game studio to be able to like support big ambitions and a large group of people to to pay them salaries and pay yourself a salary and stuff if you just want to make a game the barriers for entry are lower than they've ever been. It's easier than ever to just download an engine and Unreal or Unity or Godot and just play around during your spare time and try to make a video game. So in that sense, I mean, it's like a renaissance for games. It's easier than ever to make games. You could go to Roblox and like make some frigging games and potentially even make money. So I think there is room for optimism there, even though the industry itself is less able to support.

people making games with a full-time salary, and those two things are very much related. So just from a sheer artistic point of view, there are definitely reasons for optimism. Yeah, I like that. I can only speak to it from our side of it, but I know that after I got laid off from the Boston Phoenix, which is my first job out of college, I really went through it emotionally like, oh, can I actually make a living doing this thing that is a really insecure industry? And when I was freelancing, I also found different day jobs and sometimes part-time jobs that I could do writing on top of. And that is how I subsisted for about two years until I got another full-time job at the Mary Sue. And that was, it was really difficult, but it also taught me a lot about what I actually wanted to do. I'm not pretending that the whole work a day job thing isn't really hard because I think part of what was hard about it. for me was finding something that wasn't a creative day job at all so that I didn't feel so

exhausted at the end of the day that I couldn't go home and make something else and use my brain in a different way. So I will say my day job tip is actually to try and find something that's completely different and really low impact and you can just kind of survive. That doesn't require a lot of brain power. Exactly. I don't know how easy that is now compared to when I was doing it. But it is generally what I tell people, especially people in our job where they're trying to make it as a writer and they don't have a job. I'm like, well, do something completely different and write at night. I'm not saying it's fun. It's just sometimes that's what you have to do for a while. Yeah, that's good advice. I'll just add, I guess, Sophie's question is, what do I do with all of this? I think if you're thinking

really big the way that Sophie probably is in thinking about this question, you know, what's going on with the games industry and why what do I do in the face of so much terrible news. It's really easy to just sort of feel a little immobilized or stuck because it's so big when you're kind of contemplating this, you know, Microsoft and what's happening there are these massive moves in the games industry or maybe the current games industry crash or that kind of stuff. And I've felt that way about other industries, you know, writing or podcasting or, you know, things that I've, feels that I've worked in. And you do just sort of, of start doing the work.

Like you start making stuff, you start doing things and finding collaborators. You begin a project. And then you just kind of find your own little shelf in it. And you start to figure out what it looks like to kind of make it work for you financially, whatever that looks like, how it dovetails with a day job or what kind of project you want to do. And it just, you kind of start to make a little space that you can actually see because it's something that you're standing in and is that you're a part of. And that sort of feels different than the at times paralyzing feeling of just looking at a whole industry, especially in industry that's kind of in shambles and thinking, oh, God, like, what do I do with this?

So, you know, it's like it's like act local. It's like the act, the video game, the creative work development, like the creative work version of act local is just do something, start doing it, find people to work with. And you may find that it feels a little less overwhelming because it's all a little more you scaled. Like the video game equivalent of running for public office and your town. Yeah, or like going to a local town council meeting and getting involved with something where you can actually like make a different. Make your own compost. Make your own mulch. I think what you're also getting at, Kirk, is that by actually doing that, even if you're only doing it part time outside of a day job or whatever it may be, Sophie can learn what jobs are actually any fun or interesting, which I think is also a really big existential question to answer.

or if Sophie's younger and just starting, which given the phrasing of the question, I think maybe is the case. So that, I think, is good. Just try it and see if you even like it before you get too existential about it. And I say that as someone who gets existential about her job all the time. So it's pretty hypocritical advice. But I also just really like what I do. And I only know that because I've tried doing it in a lot of different ways for many years. And there are certainly people who think they might like this job and then find out that they don't. And I think making a game is probably exactly the same as that, where you actually have to try it and see if you even like it.

All right. Next question. This is from Vishal. Hey, three clickers. Marvel's Wolverine is getting hammered for its, quote, handholding like a glowing scent trail, waypoints, unfailable QTEs. And it turns out some of that guidance can't even be turned off.

The backlash has been loud. Would love your take. Is this a symptom of AAA accessibility defaults going too far and stripping agency, or just this game being sloppy about it? Where is the line? I like that the question is, where is the line? Given that the thing people are objecting to is a blue line. The scent trail.

Where is the line? It's right in front of Wolverine. You can't miss it. It's right there. It leads to Jean Grey. So, okay, so I haven't played Wolverine. So I'm actually curious to hear from both of you about something, which is, so my understanding is that there's these big open-worldy areas that have been turned into more linear sections,

or you're doing more linear stuff in that. Is that where the scent lines are, is to, like, help you navigate through because they're bigger open-world areas to get to where your objective is, because otherwise you might get lost? Yeah, I mean, people can listen to us, talk with Lucy James more in-depth about this. And Maddie and I got into the whole thing on that game. But yeah, I mean, you know, the thing with Wolverine is that there are these multiple redundant systems of player assisting happening where, like, Wolverine's heightened senses are reflected by these blue clouds that even, you know, they lead you where you're going. And so they really just, it's like the Witcher senses thing or in Blood of Dawn Walker, like, it's a lot of games do this where you can kind of see something. But in Wolverine, you know, they're kind of always there.

And it's their reflection of one of his superpowers. So they can't be turned off. Then there are other things. There's like a waypoint bug that appears in your UI. I think that can be turned off. And then also Wolverine will say like I should find Gene. And there's a lot of those kind of AAA style like reminder lines of dialogue. And then also there's a lot of the world design stuff. Like there's paint all over everything where you're supposed to jump and lights shining on things. So it became kind of this, you know, a kind of flashpoint in critique. SkillUp, Ralph's video for SkillUp was very like he really went off on this because it really, really bothered him. I've heard some other people who like this super bothered them as well. I think Patrick Kleppick was like really, you know, really bugged him. I found it to just be messy. I mean, it felt to me like to and to kind of answer Vishal's question. It felt like a particular thing with this game. I mean, granted, this is like a trend across a lot of AAA games that bothers people. But I think this game, partly because it's so clearly was like kind of, they changed course

when they were making it and they had an open world game and then they turned it into a linear game and then they were kind of like throwing a bunch of stuff in that they'd maybe made to serve other functions in a different kind of game but then they still had them or some of the like art that they designed for some of the levels was like serving a different function when the game works differently so it just starts to feel kind of like a jumble that was my sense anyways mattie did it feel that way to you yeah i i really agree i also do think that they i think they added some ability to turn more things off later on but yeah the centrail I understand what you're saying.

Like, yes, those are Logan's powers, no matter what. They're there in the comics. He has heightened senses. He can smell people like a dog. And he can smell Jean wherever she is. So I get that you can't turn it off. But I will say that there's so many other things in this game that they have, quote, unquote, turned off about his powers. Like the fact that he can die in combat and you have to be respawning later is like, well, it's fine.

Just have a detective mode button where suddenly Logan is. is taking a big whiff and then the scent line shows up. But yeah, other than that, I totally agree. I think that this was just a case of this particular game suffering from having all of those different pieces thrown together and then maybe somebody somewhere along the line just got a little bit concerned that people would not be able to find their way around these open environments. And there's one too many helpful tips.

I think one mistake they did make that is, I'm sure, in other games, but it's pretty egregious in Wolverine is like some of the specifics, especially related to optional collectibles. Like the way there are these crates that you find, but they like create this massive blue pulse that like takes up the whole screen. They might have shrunk in those. I know like Insomniac has been adding, has been patching the game. So they may have changed that since I played it. Or even just the fact that there's like the whiskey collectibles like have a scent trail leading to them. And it's so that it's a little like you're like just guiding me straight to the optional collectible.

Like what is even like it just kind of undercuts it a little. And one thought I'll have, you know, I did see people saying this is a Sony first party thing. I think remembering God of War Ragnarok, which had some of that like, you know, Atreus tells you how to solve the puzzle kind of stuff. And like Aoi talking to herself and the Horizon games. I will say that there is also a notable exception, which is the sucker punch games. Ghostav Yote, I think, is a really notable example of a game doing a lot of creative stuff with player direction where if you remember, there's no mini map in that game. the wind sort of indicates where you're supposed to go. There's a lot of really cool, environmental, like, it's really beautiful and really artistic, actually.

Like, very artful, I guess, the way that you can see, like, a tree in the distance that's painted a certain color that tells you that some kind of story event will be there. And, like, I think there are games being made in this space at this level where they're coming up with more creative ways to kind of tell the player where to go. And I at least, yeah, I super prefer that. I think that that's really great. I'd be interested in what the actual player feedback that they're getting is, since I also get the sense that, like, there has been a lot of pushback on this stuff, but it's also been in, like, games critics and podcasts and, like, forums. Like, it's like people who are really keyed into this stuff. And I'd be curious what just, like, the average player, you know, who's only going to play one or two games a year thinks about, like, this level of handholding, like, whether it bothers them or even if they even really notice it. Yeah, the anecdotes that I hear from people who work on these games is that stuff.

like this is comes up because they test out the game with so many players you just don't know where to go next and the reason I asked that question about the open world design is because it seems it is to your point earlier kirk it is a game that was going in one direction and then pivoted at a director shift and i just wonder if like it was because it was a big open world exploration area and they needed to point you in the right direction which it seems like is part of that here yeah i think wolverine is just a messier example than usual, and as a result, like, this part of the game is, like, more muddled and jumbled than usual. And while it's, like, become a flashpoint, at least in, like, discussion spaces where people are, like, really worked up about it, it's also, it's kind of the

exception, or it's a pretty exceptional example, because the development of the game was messy, and you can just kind of see how, like, it's kind of a mess, like that part of it, where, like, most games, there are games where they are too handholdy, like, some of the, you know, Ragnarok, or there were, like, parts of those games. where like I wish you could just turn off the NPC telling you what to do in the puzzle. Like there are these smaller things that were just, you know, part of a less chaotic development that I think are like easier to critique or like maybe a stronger source for critique because they're actually, they were like decisions people really made.

Where with Wolverine, it seems like they were like really just trying to make it work. So the fact that it's really messy isn't a huge surprise. Sometimes all these things come online together so late in the process that it's like not everyone even gets a chance to like test everything out and see it working in that way. So yeah, I mean, is there a line though? Vichal asked about where's the line? Is there a line when it comes to this stuff? I don't know if.

Probably, right? There's like some percentage of players need to not feel confused about where to go next. That's probably where it is for developers, is they need to know that the majority of players know what to do. And then I suppose also that players who want to be a little more, lost in the world and finding their progress on their own, that those people have the option to do that and that you can kind of make that work. That seems like the ideal system is there's kind of a different level of it depending on how much of that you want. Yeah, I mean, the fact that you can't turn it off.

Yeah, like I think we've seen that trend with paint in games that you can change the color of the paint or make it completely go away. Like, I've increasingly seen that in larger games as like reflection. Is that a thing now you change the yellow paint to be another color? Yeah, yeah. You can make it like a different color. I can't remember what game. games, plural, I've seen this in, but it's definitely an option I've seen in the menu. However, the reason I don't remember is probably because I always leave it on because I actually get lost in games a lot. Wolverine was a little much even for me. So that's how I know that it was really going to bother people. I got to say like control resonant is a super interesting counterpoint

to Wolverine. Like the fact that it, that game has like no pain in it. Like it, there are so, and to a fall at times. And I'm getting lost a lot. There are definitely times where I go all the, I go to a door and then I'm like, wait, why can't I go to this thing on my map? Like, I have to go all the freaking way around. And it's annoying. But other times where it's really cool, and I just have to kind of figure out in these insane, you know, abstract environments where I'm supposed to go. And the developers have said, like, yeah, we straight up decided not to do yellow paint. Like, we didn't want to give too much of a handle because we wanted people to have to explore and get lost in this, like, non-Euclidean world. So it's really interesting that like both

games kind of came out at the same time. Control could actually maybe use a little bit of a like nudge at times. I wouldn't be mad if there's just a slight. Maybe you found the line. Maybe the line is somewhere between control. Yeah, but I really respect what Remedy is doing. I think it's really cool playing that game. And I think I, well, and everyone knows, or people who've listened to this show for a

long time know I love that kind of thing. Like, I love like an organic, like the way a game that organically tells you where to go and doesn't give you a whole bunch of on-screen stuff. It's just that is a lot harder to do. And there are times where Remedy kind of doesn't quite get it right. I'm fine with that overall because the overall experience is very cool. But I can see how that's like, it feels like a risk if you're a game developer, right, to go in that direction. Definitely.

Maddie, want to read this next question? Sure. So this one is from Kayla, who writes, sending on behalf of my eighth grader, who is a massive fan of the show. And Kayla's eighth grader, Owen writes, dear Maddie, Jason and Kirk, I'm a huge fan and your episodes have been something that I wait impatiently for every week to listen to. So I have one very important question. Have any of you played Delta Rune? I know that you don't talk about every game you play, but through all the episodes,

I feel like I've only heard Delta Rune mentioned like two or three times. This is probably one of the most formative gaming experiences I've played. I know Delta Rune isn't for everyone as it's episodic, with it being one to two years in between chapters, but you should definitely give in a try if you haven't. Love the podcast. Thanks, Owen. Did I tell you guys,

I think I might have said this on the show before, but I was looking through my daughter's middle school or elementary school yearbook, which ends in sixth grade. And the sixth graders, each of them has a page with like their picture and like their favorite activities. Yeah, this is familiar. There's a section at the bottom that is like favorite game slash app and a lot of people wrote like YouTube and Roblox and Fortnite. And then a couple of people wrote Delta Rune slash Undertale. Yeah, I remember this. So Delta Rune has reached the youth. The youth love Delta Rune. I remember that being true of Undertale for what it's worth. It makes sense. It makes sense. Middle school is like around that age in particular just really loved Undertale.

It makes sense because those are games that I think are universally appealing to the, I mean, especially appealing to people who are just going through puberty and growing up and learning how to become adults. And if you're like learning how to draw the art is like really lends itself to like the characters are very fun to draw. And it's like a coming of age story with like a kind of sci-fi fantasy twist. It like fits right in the realm of like young adult novels. It's like the young adult novel of video games. That said, I've played the first episode and then stopped.

Mostly because to Owen, like Owen brought up, I'm probably just going to wait for the whole thing. But also, I don't know, I'm not 100% into it. I'm not quite as into it as I was Undertale. But I will play it all or at least give it more of a chance when the whole thing is out. Right. Same. I love Undertale. I love the music.

Toby Fox is a great composer. I mean, he's a great at a lot of things. but honestly, as a musician, that's maybe my favorite skill of his. His music is great. And I haven't played it at all, and it's for that same reason. I mean, I like Undertale because of the complete experience. Like, I love the way that it ends. I love the way it all ties together. I think that's just such an important part of it. I'm sure Delta Rune is different in that it's just structured differently. And I know people will say, especially now, I think where it is right now, they'll say, you can play however many episodes are out right now and it feels super

complete and it is like that same feeling. But at the same time, I know there's more more. Yeah, but it's not complete. Right. And there's so long of a wait between chapters that I'll forget. And I really just, it's like Kentucky Route Zero was that way for me. I actually played Kentucky Route Zero episode to episode. And then it kind of ran out of steam on it really toward the end. And it required really like, okay, I'm going to go back and like do this whole thing and play it all the way through. And I was glad I did. But I think this time I'm just going to wait, even if that means waiting like three or four more years. Yeah. I remember I played Kentucky Route zero all at the same time. And I think it was one of my early one more things on this show at the time when

it all came out. And that was a really great way to play it. And I do have a code for Adalta Rune. It might even be installed. So I'm just going to wait and play it until it's all out. All right. Next. We'll get back to you, Owen. How is that sound? Yeah. It'll happen. Give us a few years. Next question, Kirk. This comes from Ed who writes, hi, Kirk, Maddie and Jason, first time, long time. Listening to your latest episode, I stopped and wondered. You start each show with the phrase, Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you.

Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. For our first glass, we have a nice... Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. Today, we're answering... Who came up with this intro? Were there any other contenders? And most importantly, what one game is each of you bearing?

Thanks for pulling out so many great. episodes. I think the games are bearing are just the triple-click picks. Like, that's what we're presenting to. You don't think it's like whatever games we're talking about in a given episode? Because that's how I think of it. I always thought that this was like ironic in some way or another, but I don't know. I don't know what my read on. I don't know who came up with Kirk. You came up on this? I think Kirk did. I did. And it was really spur of, it was like off the cuff. I was recording. So I had written the music and in writing the music like crafted this. music to work with the intro as it plays each episode where you get the little clicks and the

chord and then you talk over the buildup and then the melody comes in and you give the little spiel. Like I kind of designed that. So then when I was designing it, I'd to send it to the two of you and be like, this is what it's going to sound like, we'll take turns doing it. I just recorded one and was just like, I was like, welcome to triple click. Like I do the same thing for strong songs. I sell, welcome to strong songs, a podcast about music. I'm your host, Kirk. And it's always that, which is easy. But that I didn't want to be like, welcome to triple click, a podcast about video games because that's literally identical to my other show. So I straight up was, I think, I don't even know. I think I was just like, what about like where we bring the games to you?

Because it's a little, like it's a little corny, right? Or it's a little bit like it has that kind of, welcome to triple click, where we bring the games to you. Like it's a little bit of that vibe. But it sort of fits the music. That's why I thought it was ironic. I thought it was a tongue in cheek. It's a little tongue and cheek. But we do bring the games to you. Like I think that we do. You know, you're on your commute. You're at work. You're on a walk. You're listening to the show. we're kind of coming to you with video games and we're telling you about them. And so it seemed appropriate and it worked and we just kind of kept it and kept going. I feel like I imprinted on your sample intro and I was like, this is the intro. This is what we're doing. Even though I had the context that you were just recording it as a placeholder intro, I thought it was good. But yeah, I also think it's funny. I always think it's funny. Every time I record it, I'm like, I feel like I'm doing an infomercial. Like we're a late night. a super, super late night infomercial that's like four hours long and each of us is coming out and presenting a video game on a little platter and being like, you won't believe what control

resonant can do. Dylan can slice. He can dice. That is the vibe that we're bringing. It's that second person where you're like you, like when you're talking to the you, it has that kind of, you know, QVC. Exactly. But I think, yeah, to answer the question, I think we're just bringing the games. Like I'm not bringing a specific game. It's whatever game we're talking about this week. It's all the games. We're bringing them all. All of them. Every week. Well, six and a half years later, we're still bringing games to you. Next is Tom, who writes, hi, y'all. It feels inevitable that there will be a dungeon crawler Carl video game adaptation. What are your thoughts? Are there any books that you would like to see made into a game? Kirk, do you think there's going to be a dungeon

crawler Carl video game? Yeah, right there? Isn't it just the book already? Well, they're making a TV show right now, right? They're doing a show. Yeah, there's like an RPG, I think, like tabletop stuff happening with this game already. It kind of maybe lends itself more to a tabletop universe than a video game, is my thought. Having read all these books, I guess, listened to all of these books. So, yeah, they're making a TV show. I'm not sure how that'll go. They have a lot of talent and money behind it because it's very successful, but also, I don't know, man.

Having listened to all these, I mean, they cast the Jeff Hay, the voice actor, as Princess Donut, as the voice of Princess Donut, which is the correct decision. So, like, whoever's making calls is, like, making the right calls so far. But I don't know how you adapt this thing, man. Like, I really don't. The books are perfect. The audiobooks in particular are just exactly the thing. That's the, that's dungeon crawler Carl. So that adaptation, we'll see.

It's a little more straightforward, though. For a video game, I don't know. It would be so hard. The thing about Dungeon Crawler Carl, you know, the setting of this book series is that there's this like inner galactic game show happening on Earth where like the overseers are this, you know, this incredibly technologically sophisticated, you know, aliens who have put together just a world that is, it's almost, it's so powerful like the simulation that you're within that even though it is real, like it's your real body and you're inside of it, it's basically the matrix. Like it's like all of reality is being rewritten by a computer at all times. So that is kind of what a video game is. But the thing is, like, the rules are a little wibbly wobbly in the books. Like, the whole idea is that there's, like, people are not playing fair or, like, some of the best things that Carl and his team pull off are when they work out an exploit.

And they, like, pull off some crazy trick that the people who programmed the game didn't anticipate. Because it's really a story about breaking the game. Like, it's an unjust and horrible thing that's been done to everybody. And it's the tale of, like, revolutionaries inside of a video. video game, figuring out how to break the game in order to kill all the people who made the game in revenge for what they did to us. And, like, that works for a story. But if you're building a game around it, suddenly you have to design, like, both the game

and the ability to break the game, which, like, can work. I mean, like, I don't know. I feel like Saints Row games feel, like, kind of spiritually connected on a design level to what Dungeon Crawler Carl is doing. But I also really struggle to imagine it working all that well, where a tabletop universe where you just have a bunch of rules and you can tell your own stories on like a different planet with a different game. Like that makes a lot more sense to me.

So those are the dungeon crawler Carl thoughts. Yeah, let's all answer this last question. Are there any books you like to see made into a game? My answer is the The Lies of Locke Lamora series, which is written by Scotland, who is a big video game fan. In fact, he named Lockelamora after a lock from Final Fantasy 6, but also would make a killer game to be doing heist with this group of the story. like dishonored. Yeah, it could be, yeah, it could be kind of dishonority. More teamwork, though, more of like a

heist game than a dishonored game. Dishonored you're mostly by yourself. It could also be like, I don't know, turn-based RPG, Claire Obscury. That's true. I mean, like Sixth of Crows, the Lee Bardugo Crow's duology, that would be a really fun team-based, kind of invisible ink style like stealth game. I could see that working really well because the Crows in those books, or fantasy heist novels. They're really great. The first one's called Six of Crows. You know, there's kind of like the sharpshooter, the stealth knife girl, the mastermind, like, you know, kind of, he can kind of be the mouth, you know, and the magic user.

Like they put together a crew that feels like a party and, you know, Fire Emblem or or Invisible Anchor in one of those kind of turn-based tactics games. I could see that being super cool and I would play the hell out of it. Yeah, this is total recency bias, but that's always how answering these questions. work, right? It's like whatever book is coming to mine that you're thinking about right now. But my sister is reading the Tamora Pierce Song of the Lioness Quartet books to my niece right now. And this is a series that she and I loved as kids. And so this is a real like we're forcing my niece to enjoy these. The premise is it's this young girl who lives in this medieval fantasy world where women can't be nights. And so she disguises herself as a boy and she goes to night school and has to,

trained to be a knight alongside all of these boys and trick them the entire time. She also has magic powers and like eventually learns how to use them as well. So I'm also like thinking of Syria and the Witcher and like how much potential there is for like sword fighting and magic using for Lady Knight characters. And I feel like that's setting. I mean, I'm a huge fan of the setting and like, make has been texting me about it. And I'm like remembering how great those books are and being like, oh, man, these were so wonderful. I don't know if Tamora Pierce has specifically, like, not wanted to adapt them, though,

because it's a series that for many years I've always been like, hell has no one made this into a TV show or a movie or anything, especially in like the post-game of Thrones world, where I feel like we were seeing so much stuff getting adapted. And I don't know. I don't know if she's out here just being like, no, it's only a book. And I will say they're really wonderful young adult novels. And I still recommend them. Yeah. I mean, a lot of the game, the shows that people tried to make after Game of Thrones just failed miserably. Totally, yeah. But, you know, then there's stuff like The Six of Crows, like Netflix kind of combination

series that Kirk seemed to really like. That show was a huge failure, though. Was it? So only Kirk liked it? See, I live in a bubble. No, no, no, Kirk didn't like it. You're forgetting my second one more thing where I said it was a disaster in the second season. It started okay and then it really fell apart and it's nowhere close to as good as the

Crow's books. I just read the books. Fair enough. You know, you're mentioning Siri is interesting. just because it is worth mentioning that The Witcher 3, which just got that update, I played a little bit of that, and it reminded me. Yeah, those are based on a book. This is a book adaptation. This is like a really, and a really, really good one.

There's no other, it's, I don't know. I mean, I can't say this for sure, but it is like the greatest video game adaptation of books ever. Like, it's really remarkable how good it is and how true it is to those novels. And that is a very cool thing about it. And, I mean, I think it's like the exception that proves the rule. It's a really hard thing to do. And they did it, but, like, that doesn't mean it should that everyone else can do it. But it is, like, a really great adaptation of a series of books.

And it's also making me think, actually, that there is a benefit to adapting a fantasy, almost RPG-esque story to a game as opposed to a TV show, because the Witcher TV show I thought was fine. It started all right. Kind of like a typical Netflix thing, just like the, just like the Grisha shows. Exactly. Based on Bar Dugo's books where it started pretty good. then it fell apart. Then they recast girls. I stopped watching that for a while ago.

Totally. Yeah. Whereas like I can totally picture the song of the lioness where I'm playing as Alana and I'm having to do like the school stuff and hide for my friends. But I'm also training as a night. Like you have the full RPG trajectory there because the books follow her all the way to adulthood. So it's pretty perfect. All right. Let's do one last question. Maddie. Can you read this last one? Sure. This one is from Matthew who writes as editor of the show, Kirk has the ability slash power to bing in with corrections, updates, extra thoughts, etc. I've noticed that as a music nerd, he often will also bing in with samples of game music as well. Maddie and Jason, if you were the editor, what noise would you use to announce yourself

and what one kind of additional non-correction slash update information do you think you'd introduce? So mine would be a clown horn. and I would be coming in to throw in the jokes that I thought of later and so didn't get to put in at the time or the one-liners, the comebacks. What you should have said. Like basically I would come in, I would clown noise in, and then I would be like, yeah, well, the jerks store called.

It wouldn't just be notes that you don't play jokes every single time. Yeah, that would be good too. Every single time, right? You make some variation of that joke. Every single time. In a way, the clown horn is the note that Jason doesn't play in every episode because it's not there. Right. Jason here.

And I just wanted to chime in to say, it's all about the updates you don't make. Mine would probably be me snapping my fingers because I like snapping my fingers. And I think it's a fun, fun noise. You wouldn't say bye? I thought that maybe it would be by. No, because that would be confusing. I wouldn't want people to think the podcast was ending. Buy is preserved for the end of the show.

I'm just like imagining it's like, bye. And you're like, hi, everyone. Maddie here. Anyway, bye. It's me. Bye. It goes to ask. Well, okay.

Hi. What if you said hi and bye? I could say hi. You could be like, hi. And then you say your update and then you say bye. Have you been saying goodbye? I thought you were just saying bisexual every time. Yeah, I was just coming out to you guys every time.

I was trying to remind because you know what as bisexual people have to come out again and again. and like because I'm married to a woman, people might not know. Bisexual visibility is important. I've been saying, who earns? What would my corrections be? I mean, I feel like a lot of times on this show, and you two can relate to this. So maybe you can add this into your corrections. I'll have like continued playing the game more after the episode comes out.

And I'll, and sometimes we'll never return to it. It won't be quite enough for one more thing. So that would probably be what the most of my corrections would be. It would be that I'd just be snapping back in. See, that's why. has to be a snap is because it's it's a good way to verb that word. I'm verbing it. I'd be snapping in and I'd be like, so here are my additional thoughts. I played a little bit more of it and actually the story is terrible. Yeah, exactly. I mean, Kirk already does that. I do that sometimes. That's true. That's

true. Kirk has all the advantages that we don't have. That is that for this week's burning questions. Once again, you can reach us to triple click at maximum fun.org. Send us questions. keep them shorts. All right. Let's take a break and we'll be back with one more thing. Hey, guess what? Sue the subway train. No, not that gross. I'm just trying to tell you I realized what Dr. Game Show is about. You know that part of any game show where you meet the contestants and it's only a 30 second conversation? At our podcast it turns into two hours of small talk with listeners from around the world. Also the games we play are the ones that they submit We have to play them no matter what.

Oh, and Alex is here to help keep the pod running. Hey, I'm here too. Anyway, I like talking to silly billies and playing their weird games. Find it on maximum fun.org. Doctor Game Show. Wonderful is a podcast where we talk about things we like. That's hard to sell in a promo like this, so we've enlisted the help of piano rock superstar Billy Joel

to tell you about some of the topics we've covered. Take it away, real Billy Joel. Daddy Rock's been on Lake Sign, Rolls and Shire. Circle time Sega Dreamcast, he's a salad tower of annoy. Keep me up big time capsules, Wayne's World Cheese Bulls, Wallace Stevens, Stonkin gone, fun-size, almond toy. They didn't stop the podcast, except that's not true. They didn't 22.

They didn't start the podcast. No, they actually did. That was in fact of bib. Listen to Wonderful every Wednesday on Maximumfund.org or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks, Real Billy Joel. problem, Griffin. All right, Kirk, Maddie, we are back. It's time for one more thing. I'm going to go first. I am playing a video game that we got to talk about. It's called Echo Weaver. And I'm going to read a quote. This is a quote from Chris Sumsky, the director of Echo Weaver, to Stephen Totillo, a game file.

I love platformers. I love Metroidvania. I've always wanted to make one, but they are a dime a dozen. And I was like, man, no one's really taken the time loopy outer wildsie way of rolling on a game and merged it with movement speed running influences mastery of platforming which seems to be seems to me seems like a natural fit i know this character will be here blowing up half a station at the three minute mark how do i get there in time learn your rounding combine it with shortcuts and all kinds of crazy secrets this game you guys is best described as outer wilds as a platformer, as a 2D platformer, where part of the way to solve the time loop is not just knowledge. Knowledge is a big part of it, but also 2D platforming mechanics and like figuring out

how to get somewhere as quick as possible. So let me explain you how this game works. So it is a sci-fi game. It is set on a mysterious sci-fi environment and you play as a weaver, which is a sort of like robot clone thing that you learn more about as time goes on because this, some tragedy has befallen in this space. station. And so you're finding finding little logs of like certain people who were there before you. Not that it's abandoned because they're actual living people too, but you're learning more about your history and what happened there. So when you first start, you dropped into this room and you see that there's like, you can open a shoot and wind up in the like underbelly of it and you go in

the underbelly of it and there's fire everywhere and you just have to kind of jump over a bunch of platforms and get to this new sequence. Sorry, get back to where you were before in that sequence. once you're done with that sequence. And then maybe by that point, you'll be out of time because there is like a little time ticker on the top. You'll notice that you can replenish it by picking up resources, these little blue crystals things that give you more time. So time is kind of a resource and you learn that.

But let's say you're out of time. Then you find yourself back in the same exact place. So you're like, shit, I have to do that again. But then next time you find a code somewhere. And that code lets you unlock a shortcut. So then the next time you start your loop, you can unlock the shortcut and you can get there. much quicker. Get to the new place, much quicker. And on and on and on. Eventually, you'll learn that

these things around the world actually have, like, these objects that you can find actually have multiple uses. And hey, you can find shortcuts in other ways. Oh, hey, you can teleport around the map. Oh, hey, you got an ability, a special ability that lets you do things in a certain way. And as you're going, you're learning more about what's happening. You're learning what is happening at certain points in the time loop, and you're using that knowledge to your advantage, just like in Outer Wilds. It's super cool. It's just as cool as I just described it right there. Eventually, you get to this, like, village area, and you talk to all these people, and they explain to you what's going on. You also have this little notebook in your menu screen that works kind of like the ship's computer

in Outer Wilds, and that is keeping track of leads, and it'll automatically keep track of you what you should be keeping track, what you should be trying to answer, what kind of questions you have, how to learn more, it'll be like, we should be learning more about this, we should learn more about this. And then so you'll have all these different goals as you are going. So like one of the first things you have to do is you learn from your kind of weird, a bizarre companion who is in your head and helping you along the way, which is manifested as that cat eating pizza for some reason. you learn from this cat eating pizza that there's a door that you need to get past in order to get out of this first area. But that door is only open for 10 or 20 seconds, something like that at the beginning of every time loop.

And every time you get there and you try to get there, it's like this door has shut. Like, what are we going to do? And the cat is like, there's no way to do this. But then eventually you figure out that with the proper use of these things that you're learning and these, There's like one ability that you gain and you carry over from loop to loop, but everything else is just knowledge. So like you could theoretically do a lot of stuff at the very beginning. But yeah, with that knowledge, you can figure out how to get to that door before it actually opens. And then so you kind of speed run your way there and you use your platforming skills and precision platforming.

It's not that hard. Don't worry. But anyway, you speed run your way there and you get there just as it's closing and you kind of barrel under it. you roll under it just in the nick of time. And that on a grander scale is like how a lot of the things in this game play out. I haven't finished it yet. I made some pretty good progress. But I would say it is a killer video game that you too should play.

And then everyone out there should check out if you are into MetroidBranias. If you're into knowledge-based Metroidvania games. And also you like platforming because you do need to enjoy the platforming slash traditional Metroidvania aspect of this to like it, because there is some basic combat and a whole lot of jumping along the way. But yeah, it's, it fits, it scratches that outer wilds itch in a lot of ways. And it's really cool to kind of see the clockwork piecing to, like, to piece the clockwork together to figure out, to open up the clock and see how it is all working and see where different people are at different parts in the loop and see how you can

manipulate them and how you can veer the loop in different directions if you talk to someone at this point and then you do this and this and this and eventually learn how to escape from the time loop. But yeah, it's pretty damn cool. It sounds awesome. I have this install. I'm definitely going to play it. I guess the one question or one thing that you didn't talk that much about that I'm curious about is like how is the story in the world and kind of like is that, you know, one of the things that made Outer Wild so cool to me was the writing and the kind of feeling of it, the emotional part of it, the story and the way it all came together. How is that part of this? Like, is it as cool as all the mechanical, you know, tiki-talkie-click stuff? TVD. I don't know yet. I haven't

enough to know yet. These, as you're playing, as I mentioned before, you're getting these kind of like, not quite audio logs, but narrative logs where you'll see a scene unfold that happened in the past, and they'll be talking about, like, their science experiments and the tragedy that unfolded and we'll soon meet the villains and the kind of hero scientists. And it seems really interesting so far, but I don't. I haven't seen enough of it unfold to be able to tell you if it's, if it's like how good it is. Got it sounds really cool. I also installed it. But we're in the thick of it now. I have a lot of games installed. Yeah, my God. Playing eight games at the same side. What are we going to do, guys? Yeah, it's cool. All right, Kirk, what's your

one more thing? My one more thing I alluded to last week is a novel I just, just finished called The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas. This book rocks. Have either of you read The Count of Monte Cristo? Nope. Only seen the Wishbone episode. I watched that after finishing it. Really? Yeah, it's really, it is not bad. It is not bad. There are so many adaptations of the Count of Monte Cristo. Holy crap. I kind of want to go watch them all. There's an anime adaptation that my friend Tyson has been telling me. He says it's the best adaptation of all.

I've heard that. He was like it captures the vibe. It like changes everything. But it's, you know, also actually somehow truer to Dumas story. So I had read the Three Musketeers or my dad actually read me those books when I was little. Like he read them to me. So I was familiar with that story. And then I remember the Three Musketeers movie, the one with like Oliver Platt.

I can't remember who's at it like the Disney movie from maybe the 90s. As a kid, I remember really liking that movie. And of course, that's the same author, Alexander Dumas. And Count of Monte Cristo, I believe, was written right before the Three Musketeers, but right around the same time. So he published this novel. It was published as a serial from 1844 to 1845. He is, of course, a French novelist author, very famous as, I think in particular for the Three Musketeers, the story of D'Artagnan, and also the Count of Monte Cristo, in addition to other things. Super interesting guy with a really wild story and a wild family story.

I've been learning a little more about Alexander Dumas. Wow, quite a figure, historical figure as well as the literary one. So I read this book because a surprising number of my friends out in Portland like love this book. And in particular, my friend Tyson, who's a drummer actually, he played drums on Strong Songs Live. He and his wife both like love the Count of Monte Cristo. And we would be like having dinner with them and they'd start talking about how much they loved this book and how funny and strange it is. and it made me just want to read it to talk with them about it. So I started reading it, and it really is such a trip.

Like, I can't do the language in this book justice. I don't have any excerpts prepped, but I might have to, like, bang in and read it. I read the Penguin translation because there's a bunch of different translations of this. It's in the public domain now. I'd say the penguin is, like, widely held up to be the best one. And just the way, because it's been translated from French and because the style of writing was just super different, you know, 200, almost 200 years ago. It's just wildly different than anything I've read in a really long time, because I haven't read anything from this time period or anything by Dumas. And that

alone, like, made it such a hilarious and generally just, like, very entertaining read. Everyone in this book talks like a W.W.E, like a pro wrestler, like, they all are, it's so dramatic. And, like, the narrator is, like, really catty and is always kind of, like, or just making these really grand statements, like, well, he was a Corsican. So we know that that meant he is prone to being an assassin. And you're like, okay? Like, is that true? And it's just like a lot of stuff like that.

Okay, as promise. I'm going to read some excerpts from this book just to give you a sense of just how unbelievably melodramatic the whole thing is. Here's an excerpt. Valentine lowered her head. She was overwhelmed. Listen, said Morel. This is not the first time that you have thought about the situation in which we now find ourselves. It is serious.

It is pressing. It is crucial. I do not think. this is the moment to give way to sterile misery. That may be enough for those who want to suffer at their ease and have time to drink their own tears. There are people like that, and God will no doubt reward them in heaven for their resignation on earth, but anyone who has the will to fight will not lose precious time, but immediately

strike back at that fate which has Delta Blow. Have you the will to fight against ill-fortune Valentine? Tell me, because that is what I have come to ask you. And just a couple other short examples. Here's a good example of the things the narrator will say. Sometimes the narrator will just say these incredibly specific opinions. Quote, I think I may aspire to that honor, said Danglar, with one of those fatuous smiles, which had the same effect on Monte Cristo as the pallid moons that inferior painters plant on the sky above their ruins.

And then last one short example, just because I don't want to imply that Dumas is not a good writer. He just writes in a very florist. and emotionally intense style. But occasionally he'll say things that are really profound and beautifully stated. For example, here is one. Moral wounds have the peculiarity

that they are invisible, but do not close. Always painful, always ready to bleed when touched. They remain tender and open in the heart. So anyways, some excerpts from the Count of Monte Cristo.

Back to the show. Bing! And I mean, this book is very much of its time. It's incredibly retrograde. in some ways. Certainly, it's views on gender and race differences. Like, there are so many things in this book where you're reading it, you're just like, oh, man, it's been almost 200 years. Though, I do have to say there is a side storyline with a queer character or, like, heavily queer-coded character that's remarkably cool, just given the time period and some of the other stuff

in the book. But for the most part, I found that it really just, it holds up, and it's such a, like, rollicking and entertaining read, and it's so kind of luxuriant. This is an incredibly long book. I think it recently went kind of viral on book talk because all these young people were like finding their physical copies of it. I should have brought down, I bought a paperback of this. And it is like monstrous. I wound up buying it on Kindle because I physically didn't like reading a book this large. Like it was so big that like holding it and reading it was uncomfortable just because it's like not really meant to be held as a collected volume because he wrote it as a like, you know, episodically. And he was definitely getting paid by the word. Like it's like so.

to like kind of a Charles Dickens situation. Yeah, it repeats itself so much. And like things just go on. Because it's like if you missed it on the previous episode. Yeah. Yeah. In the last two weeks, Kirk has finished Wolverine,

Blood of the Dawn Walker, played through most of the fire album, and also read a 1200 page. Jason, you have no like to stand on you. And you're playing Echo Weaver. I don't know how you had time to do that. We can't,

we can't even get into this. I will say that having, once I finished Strong Songs Live, I was like, I'm not doing, planning a live show. And I suddenly felt like I had so much more free time. We kind of planned that for the fall so I could focus on all these games and stuff.

But it's been nice to fit this in with all the video games I've been playing as well. But anyways, let me summarize the book really quickly for anyone. So this is the story of revenge. It's like maybe one of the – it's maybe the most famous story of revenge of all time. And I just summarize it. It's basically the story of a man who is wrongfully imprisoned for more than a decade, who then escapes from prison, becomes incredibly rich and infiltrates Paris High Society in order to troll the people who had him locked up until the people.

they die. And that's basically what it is. I would have thought, given that this is by Dumas, the author of The Three Musketeers, that it's like a swashbuckling tale of like adventure. And it kind of is, it's definitely like an epic. It kind of travels all over the place. There's a really amazing early sequence that's just several chapters set during carnival in Rome. That's just really vivid because clearly Dumas just like went to carnival in Rome in like 1837 or whenever it's set in the book, and it's just really cool, because it's this amazing account of what it was like to be at this totally wild event that goes on for a week and all this stuff happens. But it's not actually like an action book at all.

There's, I think, basically no violence in the entire book. Like many people meet violent ends and things happen, and there are guns and swords and etc. But it's not actually a swashbuckling tale of adventure. It's actually kind of a story. It's like a tale of like social foibles and of clever misdirection. and manipulation and a lot of like kind of parody and humor about Parisian high society and about the aristocracy in Paris in the 19th century, which is actually like really funny.

It winds up dovetailing actually well with the Gilded Age, the TV show, which Emily and I have come to really enjoy. Great show. That's set, you know, several years after this in America, but it's a similar vibe, like a similar kind of time period in the 19th century and a similar energy. So this guy named Edmund Dantes is like a young sailor. He's got his whole life ahead of him. And he gets framed by three men who just like really it's one guy, this guy, Daglars, who just like doesn't like him.

And he's just like, man, fuck that guy. Like he's getting a promotion and I should get it. So he and this other guy who's in love with Dantès's fiancé, they like write this letter accusing Dantès of being a Bonapartist, of being sympathetic to Napoleon. because this is during the period after Napoleon's reign when he's been sent to the Isle of Elba and is like in exile. But the current rulers, I think it's Louis XIII, they're like really paranoid because like he's still kind of right there. And he could just come back and like kill them all. And they're kind of weak rulers. Is this before his army became zombies?

Yeah. So it's really funny that we're, yeah, we're playing Valer Mortis. And considering that game is like set also during the Napoleonic era. Yes, this is before the zombie period. It's before the like there's like a return called the 100 days. One part of reading this book is that I like learned some of the timeline here, which I didn't really have a handle on. There was a period where Napoleon returned from Elba and like rose to power in Paris called the 100 days where he like briefly was returned and then he was deposed again and he, you know, left again. And like it's kind of the book begins right before that happens.

And they basically, they falsely accused Dantes of being a Bonapartist and of like facilitating their. return from Elba. And as a result of a number of like just sort of bad coincidences, the crown prosecutor who's like in charge of Dantes's case also is like, realizes that he's compromised by Dantes's story. So he's like, uh, actually, I'm going to just bury you and let's send you to prison forever and no one's going to find out that you're innocent. So it's like this, it's a combination of like malicious intent and also just like bad coincidence that three guys wind up kind of conspiring unknowingly to screw over this one dude. Then he's in prison. While he's in prison, he meets a dude who's basically the ultimate guy who knows everything. They

become friends. The ultimate guy who knows everything teaches Dantes, everything. So over the course of 10 years, I mean, I'm summarizing very quickly. I'm seeing Jason's face here. But over the course of 10 years, Dantes essentially becomes like the ultimate Superman. Like he becomes, I don't even know, it's like Thomas Crown mixed with James Bond, mixed with like Wolverine. He can like see in the dark. Like he, I think in the anime version, he actually like merges with some supernatural entity that gives him superpowers. The anime version. You know, the anime version.

I mentioned earlier that there's an anime adaptation. I know, it's so funny. Yeah, well, it is very anime. Like, a lot of this is very anime. Like, there are showdowns that are, you know, just people talking to each other, but it feels like, you know, Goku and Vigita, like, facing off. So he becomes the ultimate dude. There's a buried treasure on the island of Monte Cristo that he goes and gets.

And then he, like, uses his impossibly vast fortune to orchestrate the ultimate revenge. And then the whole book is just, this luxurious, really fun trip through Paris as these jerks who have become really powerful, just gradually he, like, dismantles their lives and, like, toys with them as he sort of destroys them in front of everybody. And that's a lot of fun. What I really appreciated, I won't spoil the ending, even though this book is really well-known. I actually appreciated that the ending is much more complex, and it isn't just as tidy as

like, and then he owns all the dudes and he gets revenge and is happy and it ends. It has, I think, a really great ending, and it does reckon in the end. with retribution and punishment. And in particular, like, there's a very religious undertone to all of this. Like, everybody in the book just believes in God and talks about God's justice. And Dantes believes himself, you know, as the Count of Monte Cristo, to be acting literally as the embodiment of the will of God. Because he's saying, like, if Providence, like, capital P, carried me out of that prison

and gave me this fortune and has made all of this work for me, then I am an instrument of God. And thus, this is, like, God's divine vengeance. And the reason, like, it's all very contrived and everything goes his way for most of the story. And it's like, because literally God is like acting through him. But then at the end, he actually does have cause to question. Like, was this the right thing? Like, was I actually God's will? Like, is it right for a man to claim that and to do this to people, no matter how horrible the thing they did to him was?

And I appreciated that there are these scenes that where he, like, questions that. And some of the outcomes were not what I was expecting. So I really liked the ending, too. So anyways, this is a really fun book. I'm super glad to have read it. It's like such a piece of the like firmament of literature and of, you know, Western culture. Like it's been adapted a thousand times. And I was really glad to go read it.

It made me want to just read more classics, honestly. Like it was so entertaining and readable. You should read Moby Dick if you haven't. It's so weird. Yeah, that's on my list. And there's a few other ones that I've gotten. I've been getting recommendations from some of my friends of just like the classics to revisit. But I'm really, I was struck by just how readable it is, how funny and,

outsized it is. It's not a slog at all. Like it's so just goes when you read it, even though it was written so long ago. So I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it and wants something different and something really substantial, you know, to really to really dive into. Count of Monte Cristo is a hell of a book. Cool. Maybe closes off. All right. Mine is a podcast, which, you know, if you have time of issues, you can actually listen this while you do other things. That's my, that's my hot tip to anybody listening to this and thinking, I don't have any time. Maybe that person is me.

Anyway, the podcast is called Dolly Parton's America. It's a Radio Lab Limited series. It actually came out in 2019, and I had intended to listen to it way back then because it was pretty beloved at the time. And after Dolly Parton died, I was like, oh, right, I really wanted to listen to that deep dive Dolly Parton podcast. And I really recommend it. So it's nine episodes. Jod Abamrod and Shima Olié. are the hosts of it and they interview Dolly multiple times and do like really extensive interviews

with her. And she is just a fascinating person to begin with in terms of her life story and career and her really complicated and yet common sense leftist politics. She's also, because this was 2019, this podcast is like really kind of honed in on her audience. and how unusual it is that she has kind of people across a political spectrum and across like every diversity you could imagine that are just love her and love her music and also love what she's come to represent, especially by that point. And what I think she still represents after her death now, because it wasn't that long ago. And they interview a lot of people who kind of have really different life experiences

and how they came to Dolly Parton as fans. And so like they have kind of the cultural side of things. as well as the historical side of things. And I think that blend is really effective. And you also just get to hear a bunch of great Dolly Parton songs interwoven in the podcast as well. And just some history of like some of the lyrics and musical influences. It's got it all. It's one of those podcasts.

You're like, wow, I really just get to learn a lot about this person and also their music. So if you're like me and you were putting it off, now you have an excuse. It's called Dolly Parton's America. Really loved it. and I really recommend it. Cool. Yeah, it's been cool seeing people rediscover that. I don't know if you remember this.

I had Jad on Strong Songs last fall. That's great. Because he put out a recent series. It was my one more thing when it came out about Felakuti. Oh, right, right, right. Called Felakutti, Fear No Man. Of course. And Jad is the creator of Radio Lab.

He's like the master of this stuff. And the funny thing about Dali Partens America is that like his dad was her doctor. And that's why he wound up making it. Yeah, that's like in the opening episode. Just such a coincidence. that this like master podcaster who like created radio lab, master audio storyteller, like happens to just have this connection to Deli Part and then is able to tell that story. Yeah, he's like one connection away from her and that's so funny. That's how the pilot episode starts as him kind of describing the comedy of that.

He's an awesome dude. And man, he's an amazing pot. He's like a podcast visionary. Yeah, he's a wonderful host as well of this show. It's just really great to. Yeah. He kind of takes like an outsider tack to it as like a. what is this person's life story and situation?

And how did she become who she is today? Which is an effective reporting technique. And it really works. Yeah, it's a great series. Awesome. Well, that is it for this week's episode. Thank you to everyone who sent in questions that we answered. And thank you to Kirk and Maddie for being here.

You're welcome. I will see you both. It's my pleasure. I'm also, it's also my pleasure. I'll see you both the next time. Yeah, see you both next time. Bye. Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton.

I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at maximumfun.org Join. Email us at triple click at maximum fun.org and find links to our merch store and our Discord server in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artist-owned shows. Supported directly by you.