Triple Click - GTA 6, Assassin's Creed, and More Summer News

Episode Date: August 11, 2022

It's time for a NEWS BREAK! Kirk, Jason, and Maddy go through this summer's big stories, from Grand Theft Auto maker Rockstar changing its ways to Ubisoft falling apart to the wave of unionization hitting the games industry. Plus: delays, delays, and more delays!One More Thing: Kirk: Prey (2022)Maddy: Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered (PC)Jason: The QuarryLinks:Axios story about Blizzard’s new legal strategy: https://www.axios.com/2022/08/01/bungie-destiny-lawsuits-cheaters-harassersNYT story about Amazon employees unionizing: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/02/business/amazon-union-christian-smalls.htmlMaddy’s review of Spider-Man Remastered on PC: https://www.polygon.com/reviews/2022/8/10/23298573/spider-man-remastered-pc-review-steam-deck-cops-police-nypd-portrayalKirk’s article about that lovely Spider-Man text message scene: https://kotaku.com/spider-man-s-text-message-scene-is-perfect-1829449521Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinBuy a Triple Click t-shirt: https://topatoco.com/collections/maximum-fun/products/maxf-tc-tclogo-shJoin the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/ Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join 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

Did you know that you have rights? The Constitution says you do, and so do we. Better call Triple Click. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. Today we are talking about this summer's big news from Rockstar changing its ways to unionization all across the industry. Let's get to it, shall we? I'm Jason Schreier. I'm Kirk Hamilton.

And I'm Maddie Myers. It's us. Hello. Hello. for another episode. We're going to start every show with a long pause. No weird pauses here. There are never weird pauses on triple click because I edit them all out.

No. We're supposed to all say hello at the same time. That's how we start the show. That's what we do. Every time. I think one day we should start the show by me like, I'm Jason Chiar. I'm Maddie Myers. I'm Kirk Hamilton.

And I'm Pucci, the Talking Dog. We need a surprise guest to just like shake things up a little bit. Right. a totally crazy voice just comes in. Yeah. And I'm Shigero Miyamoto. But honestly, Pucci should like be in the middle. Like we should put Pucci and or Shigero in the middle of it.

And it's like, and I'm Kirk Hamilton like at the end. And everyone's like, wait, what's happening right now? And we just don't mention it. It's like it didn't even happen. Yeah. I mean, Miamon is just sitting in Jason's office. He's just here for the pod. He's just here.

Jason always brings some guests. It's very thoughtful of him for this show. Well, don't you guys remember last week when I had that? Well, that's what I had. Yeah, of course. We were here for that. This was a callback for people. But it was not Tetsuya Takashi or Shigeromi Amoto.

It was just a guy who lives here. That's a separate thing. You wouldn't know him. He's not famous. Jason's roommate. You got to have some roommates in this housing market. Yeah, you do. You really do.

Speaking of housing markets, help us all buy houses by becoming a max fund member today. The three of us, we make this show entirely supported by listeners. You might notice. We don't have any ads. No companies. are sponsoring us, despite Kirk's love for Roomba, which, by the way, did you see that they're getting

bought by Amazon, the Roomba people? We did. We really got to kill the Roomba report for good. Wow. RIP. Yeah. Well, you know, we're using Anito. We use a Nito robot back now and not a Roomba. So even my personal Roomba

sponsorship is over. Anyway, if you want to help us support the show and make the show possible, you can become a MaxFund member. Join the MaxFund Network. Go to Maximof Fund.org. slash join and sign up today for as little as $5 a month. You get access to a whole bunch of bonus content, including monthly bonus episodes from us.

We just ran last week an episode about the MCU where we checked in on the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And this month we are recording a bonus episode that I am incredibly excited about. Yeah. We are going to talk about Better Call Saul, one of the best shows possibly ever made. Full spoilers. And we are going to spill the beans. Full spoilers. The show ends, I believe, next week.

And so we will be spoiling it a couple weeks later. Like at the end of August, our Beanscast is going to run. So it gives you all time to catch up, to rewatch the whole series, whatever you'd like. But I imagine this Beanscast is going to focus pretty, like, skew towards the end, but we'll be talking about the whole series. Can you imagine the lucky person who decides right now to just watch all of Better Call Saul before our Beanscast? I can't even imagine. I mean, I decided that only a couple months ago.

and it's been extremely fun. I feel like I started watching it at exactly the right time. So hopefully everybody else listening was also convinced by both of you talking about it on this very show. And they're finishing just in time right along with me. You're in for such a treat. Maddie just told us before we started recording that she is four episodes behind. Last night, I saw, Dina and I watched the season mid-season finale. So I meant the perfect stopping point.

And then we'll continue watching it. So it's really not a stopping point at all because such is the age of television in 2022. If you want to hear our unvarnished thoughts on Better Call Saul, go to maximum fun.org slash join and you will get that bonus episode later this month. All right. One more thing before we start with the show, we are doing, as we announced last week, we are doing a book club, a triple-click book club, a triple read, a book called Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin is kind of a video game theme book.

It's about game developers. We will all be reading it and discussing it on September 9th. And we would like you all to join us. Yeah. You should read along. I'm reading it right now. It's really, really good. So far, it's a great book.

So you're all in for a treat if you haven't read it yet. Sorry, September 8th. I said 9th. September 8th. It's 8th. Thursday, September 8th, we will be doing a book club coming in. All right. Today's episode is a summer news roundup.

We don't often talk about like the daily, the weekly video game news here on this podcast. of ours here on this old triple click. But we do every once in a while like to check in on the news of du jour. The news de jure. What's the news up to? I say to myself. Do month. What's the French version of, how do you say month in French? Du jour, do month. However you say it. I'm blanking. Don't you guys? Daddy. Nothing like the word month. I know. I know. So we figured we pick out a bunch of stories and just talk about them because there's some really interesting stories that have happened over the past few weeks since Faky 3 happened, which I think was last time we talked about news.

So let's get on with it, shall we? Let's talk about some news stories. Let's. Or Kirk is looking up the word month in French. Yeah, you can just tell Kirk is Googling some French right now. I can tell from his face. It's moire. Yeah, Muir.

Okay. The news du moi. News de moi. News de moi. It doesn't have quite the same ring to it is news de jour. No. All right. First up in the headlines,

Bungie is suing, quote, unquote, fans. So Bungy, this is really interesting. Bungee, the makers of destiny, recently purchased by Sony, so now the Sony owned makers of destiny, they are going out and like actively pursuing not only cheaters in destiny, people who are like cheating in the game, but also people who are sending them threats and impersonating employees and doing all sorts of shitty gamer the capital G behavior. And so... Got to watch out for that capital G. A couple of years ago, there's There's this great Axios article by our former colleague, Stephen Totillo, that will link in the show notes, where he talked to new Bungy General Counsel, Don McGowan, who has gone on this crusade to, like, take down these aggressive players. And so really, I mean, like, Bungy employees have apparently been harassed so badly and getting threats and stuff.

And some of these details are out there, like actual transcripts and, like, quotes from the threats they've been getting. So Bunchy instead of just sitting back and taking it, they're like, screw this. We're like going after these people. We're going to take these people to court. And it's really interesting. McGowan, their new general counsel, has this strategy. And he's like, this is a great quote from Axios. He says, as their lawyer, my team and I have a set of skills that make it possible for us to defend them as well, the integrity of our place.

Extremely nisen-ish thing to say. Straight out of taken. So yeah, what do you guys think of this? I think this is interesting. I mean, it's a shift. It's a big shift in approach, at least from what we've gotten used to over the last 10 or 15 years of the sort of consumer first. We love our fans. They can be passionate sometimes.

But, you know, we love their passion and they're the lifeblood of this operation to suddenly, okay, too much passion, guys. We'll see you in court. Yeah. Which is a pretty significant change. That's something you'd see on an E3 stage. Yeah. To do what fashion. Dial down the passion about 50%.

It's running a little white hot over there with the passion. It is hurting us. Yeah. We do this all for you, the fans, but not really. Well, not those fans who are... Only some fans. And are... Right.

...withing us with bodily harm. I mean, some of these threats are really scary. Like, personal and intense and violent. So... Yeah, these are really just like... They're lawsuit-worthy. These are clearly, like, not well people. Yeah.

Right, and the lawsuits also center on, you know, cheating and showing people how to cheat and streaming, cheating in the game and that kind of thing too. Or like stealing items, selling items, making videos about how to do that. I mean, those are the kinds of things that make sense to crack down on. Right. It's taking a sort of firmer hand in general, I guess, with how people use the thing that you made and do own and not kind of, it's just like taking back a little bit of ownership, I guess, of the game from the fans, which is, you know, I mean, it's good. to see in this instance because it seems like a lot of this behavior was beyond the pale, but also it does feel a little bit weird to cheer like a large corporation going after people who use its products in court. I mean, like just as a broad thing, I certainly have mixed

feelings about that, especially if it becomes a general trend outside of this specific instance. Yeah, is there a slippery slope here where like suddenly they're going after fans for like more gray stuff? What if they start going after fans? What if Nintendo started going after fans for emulating their games. And Nintendo has gone after people who are like the architects of emulation software, but what if they just start going after fans? Like, is there a slippery soap here?

And I don't think anyone would justify the behavior, the death threats, and like the nasty behavior from some of these fans. But it does raise an interesting question of who you're really rooting for and what you're really rooting for there. Yeah. Yeah, I remember, you know, reading this,

Polygon has an article just sort of rounding up just the harassment story. and DMG 04, the community manager at Bungee, working on Destiny. I remember, this is a sort of old school Destiny thing, but DMG was a poster on DTG on the Destiny, the game subreddit, who was elevated to become a community manager. So I've been following, I mean, I've been aware of him for a very long time. It was kind of Deege was the community manager at Bungee for a long time,

and then DMG got kind of elevated, and it was interesting watching a guy. who had been a really active member of the community, suddenly be at Bungee and have his responsibilities change, his level of knowledge change. And then over time, I mean, that was a long time ago now, he's become a whole fixture at that studio and seeing him talk about the kinds of harassment they're getting,

how scary this has been, how intense it's been. It's just a sort of an interesting wrinkle for me as a long-time destiny player. And also, I was struck by the fact that he tried to really reiterate, like, this isn't a punishment. We're not trying to punish players. This is really about protecting our workers and our employees. And that seems to be how they're trying to emphasize this, you know, what they're doing here. It's not like, we want to punish the bad gamers, even though it's really easy to see it that way. They're really seeing this as a sort of labor, work, you know, work safety issue.

Yeah, and it should be noted that bungee, I think, is pretty well regarded. It is like a good place to work. A lot of people have really positive things to say, especially recently about working there. And it does, it feels, you feel really helpless when you're the victim of these kinds of attacks. And there are different organizations have tried different methods of like helping protect. We've seen this in journalism, helping protect people who are like under attack.

Some companies have gotten it better than others for sure. And this seems like a new level of that. But it's like, it's really you don't know what to do. And you have this just like with whether you're being barraged on. social media, like getting a barrage of threats on social media or nasty messages or whatever, or actually getting death threats like sent to your house. It can feel really helpless. And that's one of the worst parts. Yeah, I think looking at this in terms of a sort of broader context, you can see this alongside some of the other stories that we're about to talk about, all of which

represent a sort of stronger focus on workers because, you know, in so many industries, workers have more power now than they did even a few years ago. And you can start to see that. I mean, I'm not saying all of these things are necessarily just for that reason, but you do see there's a kind of a broader trend here toward these companies taking more steps to protect their workers, which seems like a good thing, to me at least, as a supporter of workers' rights in general. Yeah, well, let's move on, shall we? So the next story, this is a story on Bloomberg.com. Never heard of it. It's about... No, reported by some guy.

Reported by some guy about Rockstar Games. And so it turns out Rockstar Games has made a lot of changes over the past four years. As you guys will certainly remember around the time that Red Dead 2 launched, there was a kind of firestorm of controversy that was set off by Dan Houser, one of the co-founders and heads of the company, talking about working 100-hour work weeks. Basically, he said that as kind of a throwaway line, and everybody kind of leaped on it.

And then he made things much, much worse by saying, actually, it's just a few of us that are working those kinds of hours. Because when he walked that back, that's what really pissed off. His employees were like, no, actually, we're all working on. Anyway, long story short, it led to a widespread reckoning at the company, and the company kind of said, hey, we want to change our ways. And really, we've seen a lot of worker reckonings recently, and I think this one is the one that has, A, been the quietest,

and B had the most effect so far. So far, I say, because there's no unions here, and the union-led organization might have bigger effects in the long run. But so far. And so what happened was I spoke to about a little more than 20 people, 20-something people who either work there now or left very recently, so people who have seen these changes in action. And got the sense that this is like going to be a more,

this is to rock star trying to be a more progressive company in a lot of ways. They're like sending out donation like money to everybody and bonuses to everybody when the pandemic started. Black Lives Matter, they're saying like, well, match Black Lives Matter donations. They're sending out care packages. They're like adding more mental health benefits and breaks and stuff. They added this policy at a bunch of their studios called flex time.

We're like flexi time where you. I was really surprised by that one in this article. Yeah, that's a cool one where like basically it's how overtime should work, which is like you work an extra hour. You get to take an extra hour the next week or whatever. You work an extra, you work a weekend, you get to take two days off that that following week. That's what they've implemented. Caviot here being with all these changes that like they're still not, there's still a couple years off from the end of Grand Theft Auto 6th, their next game. But, but things are, people there are pretty hopeful and optimistic. For the most part, some people are frustrated with the changes,

especially some old, old timer folks. Some people are frustrated with how slow progress has been on GTA6. This is a game. The article also has some more insight on that game, which has been in development in some form or another since 2014, which is right after GTA 5 launched. But it's worth noting that like a bunch of those, I think the entire company essentially was pulled off to work on Red Dead 2. So it's not like GTA 6 has been in constant production since then. But yeah, some insight on that is that it has a female protagonist, which I can finally share with the world. Now that the story is out there, I wanted to. Share it with you guys last time we were talking about G-T-A, but resisted the age. Has two heroes, two playable heroes. One is male, one is female. Heroes, you say, in a Grand Theft Auto game. Cap protagonist. Maybe anti-heroes, yeah.

I mean this in the sense of hero. It's like H-I-R-O, like in Snowcraft. Yeah, they're both the hero protagonist, if you will. They're the Jimmy and Cam. Exactly. I think they're trying to punch down less in this one. That's not to say it's not going to be like a big satire. that is like throwing bombs and a bunch of stuff.

But I think we'll see fewer jokes, if any, about trans people, about minority, like, punching down some minorities, that sort of thing. The way you might see, even, like, the throwaway jokes on, like, a truck. You might see, like, what was that truck in detail? It was, like, post-op or something, like, is a trans joke for the trucks. Like, that sort of thing. Which they took that stuff out, right? Yes, they did.

In the re-release of the game. Yes. Which almost shows how. how they've already been changing internally. Exactly. Exactly. And I think of course naturally there was all sorts of backlash from conservative media to my article being like GTA going woke they're going to go broke and if you think

GTA is going woke I think you're in for a rude awakening. Or going broke? Or going broke for that matter. I don't think either of those things is really happening. This game is going to be foul and it's going to be a GTA game. I just think like you'll see less. of the kind of punching down and more like questions about like what does it mean to be a GTA game and I think I think after playing Red did too I have a lot of faith in those writers because I thought Red to do just did a phenomenal job of telling a story so I think it'll be interesting anyway

what did you guys make of that story and all the changes at Rockstar yeah I'm really excited about this one because I remember even at the time people were talking in 2015 people were like well why doesn't GTA have a female protagonist yet? Because it was like right after GamerGate. That kind of conversation was happening a lot in 2015. People were really pushing back against a culture that had been a part of games since the 90s. And it just felt like that game came out at a weird time. And I remember the fact that it had multiple male protagonists was a really big part of the way that people talked about it.

I'm not saying that's unfair, but it was definitely a big part of the conversation. And this feels like both a correction. in the sense that would have disappointed me at the time where it's like, oh, are they just doing this because they're trying to be trendy? But it doesn't sound like that's the situation from your article, Jason. It sounds instead like over the past five years or seven years, however long since it's been, since they really were thinking about the last GTA. They've changed as a company and video games have changed a lot.

And it's just cool to see a company doing that in a normal way as opposed to what we might call the riot or the Blizzard Activision Blizzard way, where there's a hell of a lot of tragic reporting about something. It's not to say there wasn't on Rockstar as well, but there's not like as much. It's been different. I don't know. It's hard to compare these massive structures to one another in a coherent way,

but this feels more like internally people were making a lot of decisions that pushed the needle without being told by a government entity that they had to or else they were going to have to pay damages for it. Which is like a little different. I think the rock star stuff got less attention for whatever reason. The big outcry was about crunch, but later started coming out. There was a lot more. I ran a story on Kataku the following year about one of their top guys, Geronimo Barera,

who was accused to sexually assault an employee named Colin who spoke out by name in the article. Geronimo Barre denied the allegations. and I wrote a lot about like the kind of bro culture that surrounded Rockstar, the excursions to strip clubs and like heavy drinking and all that sort of thing. That is like essentially what Activision was then gone after last year. And again, I've said this before in this show, but like the only difference between Activision and other companies is that Activision was sued by California. Exactly.

Every company has the exact same problems. But yeah, I think Rockstar just for whatever reason, I don't know why maybe it was a failure of my reporting. Maybe it was just like for whatever reason. And sometimes these things don't gain traction. It did not get the same level of attention or level of reporting from other outlets. There were no other, no other outlet has like done that sort of reporting on Rockstar. So the way that a lot of outlets did on Activision, for example. So, yeah, so I don't know.

And Ubisoft and so on. Yeah, journalism has changed. There's a lot more, a lot more in-depth games reporting and people who are pursuing journalism than there was even a few years ago. So that's, that's been a big deal. difference. But yeah, I mean, Rockstar had those same issues and that's a big part. One thing I didn't mention earlier is that one of their big parts of their whole change has been getting rid of a lot of the bad apples, quote unquote. And that to a lot of people. Yeah, which your article describes, which is hard to do because some of that is culture too. Like even if you get rid of a few

people and even if they're at the top and they're really influencing culture, it's hard to actually make really big changes. Like the flex time you're described. would be such a huge cultural difference for people to get used to compared to 100-hour weeks. It's hard to even fathom how big of a difference that must be for people. And then you put on top of that just something like, and GTA isn't going to punch down. It's like, whoa, those are huge changes. Like it's just a couple sentences. But if you think about that in practice, how wildly different that would be in terms of the project you're working on,

how you feel when you're working on it, it would be totally different in every way. All right, moving on, another Bloomberg story. Knights of the Old Republic remake is in trouble. This is, so you guys might remember last year, Knights of the Old Republic remake was announced with just a logo, which itself is probably a bad sign. Anytime anything is announced with just a logo, it means we don't have anything.

And that is generally bad. Yeah. So you're saying God of War Ragnarok is going to be bad because it also announced with just a logo. Interesting, interesting, Jason. Go on. Interesting. Well, when they announced, they said 2021, and we all know how that turned out, right?

I know. I'm just teasing you. There are many games that announce was just a logo. It's common, tragically. Yeah, but it's always bad. It always means they're going to be delayed or that something is going awry behind the scenes. If a game is that's a just like that. It's certainly a very strong sign that the game is going to be delayed.

Yes, I agree. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, got to worry. That announced it was 2021. And they're barely making 2022. I'm not trying to distract you. Back to Knights of the Old Republic. Anyway, so this game is in development at Aspire, which is a studio that probably not a lot of

people have heard of. It's in Austin, Texas. And it was previously known for porting games, for bringing games from one platform to another, mostly to like iOS and MacOS. And so they never really had a big budget production quite like this, which is likely one of the biggest factors behind the reason that it's in trouble. So the original idea for this, I remember when I was first hearing about this a couple of years ago, like late 2019, like 2020 around there. First of all, I was like, whoa, like someone outside of EA is making a Star Wars game, that's crazy.

Second, I was like, so what is this? Is it supposed to be like a remaster or a remake? And the answer I kept hearing from people was like, we're not sure. And I was like, rut, row. And so it turns out this game might have suffered from scope creep. It might have suffered from the kind of classic game development problems. Anyway, so what happened in July was they had a vertical slice plan, a demo planned. And after they delivered it, the company kind of abruptly fired their art director and design director.

And then they told the host studio, hey, this project is on pause while we figure out what's next. And we said, we're going to look for other contracts and stuff. And it's kind of a disaster over there. People are very, very clamped down and hesitant to talk because they're terrified of Disney. fact. But yeah, I was able to get enough of the story to be able to report it. And yeah, that came, if it ever happens, it will likely be finished by somebody else. There are rumors that Sabre, which is part of the same parent company as Aspire. Aspire is owned by like the Embracer Group, which also owns Sabre Interactive. Sabre Interactive is this huge company that has like all these

different branches all across the world, including in Russia, although they might have renamed or pulled out of Russia or something. I don't know. But, um, so, rumor is that they might take over, but not clear. I would say, don't get your hopes up for seeing this game is my advice. Yeah, unfortunate situation. Pause sounds like a breakup. It's like, let's put our relationship on hold. We're pausing this.

It doesn't bode well, especially for a video game that has an entire demo made for it. There's definitely like different levels of trouble that games can be in in development. and you kind of have to read the tea leaves to tell, and this one seems pretty serious, mostly because they just announced it. I mean, I didn't even have long enough to really think about or internalize the fact that there was going to be a Knights of the Old Republic remake,

and then here, oh, nope, nope, never mind. It's on POS, it's in Troubles. So it's, you know, it's a little bit of an easy come, easy go situation. But, yeah, I mean, it's a bummer. It's a bummer for everyone working on it, who I'm sure it put in a lot of work, and now doesn't, you know, faces an uncertain future. And I would play a Knights of the Old Republic remake.

I like Knights of the Old Republic. So hopefully someone makes one someday. Yeah, that would have been cool. Really, it's so depressing. It's like, I saw a tweet circulating the other day when the whole back girl thing happened, when W. W.B. announced that even though back girl is completely finished, they're not going to release it. And someone was like, yeah, this is what happens every day in the video. Yeah.

And it's like, yeah, it's like, I can't even imagine how painful it must be. And I'm so lucky to have never gone through this to spend years of your life on something, potentially, or months at the very least. And then it just fizzles into nothing. And it's like, we'll never be seen by anyone. You can't put it on your, on your reel. You can't put the concept art on your website or else it'll get taken by Reddit and, like, plastered everywhere and you'll get in trouble.

It's just kind of so sad. And, God, yet another reason. I have a giant, a notepad full of reasons. I would never go into game development. one of many. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, fair. So speaking of things that are a mess, Uvasoft, you guys might have heard, Uvassauft is a mess. Man, Uvassoft has been really struggling recently. I don't know how much you guys have been

paying attention, but their year this year is really, really bleak. I've just been waking up every day going, I can't wait to play school and bones, and you're telling me that that's the wrong mindset to have? Because I've been saying that for literally years every single day. I think that's the only time those words have been uttered in comedy. Honestly, like jokes aside, if they had somehow made it happen this year, I feel like it would have been their time because pirates are so back in. Like our flag means death is so popular right now. It is happening this year.

Etcetera. Skull and bones is happening. I'll believe it when I see it. No, it definitely is because they have all sorts of like, that game is complicated. It should have been canceled years ago, but it can't be because U.S.S. has this contract with the same. Singapore government with the Malaysian government. And so they cannot actually, like, they can't actually cancel. Right. They have to put something out.

It's just, who knows what it'll be. They got all sorts of money from the government to do it. Yeah, that game is a disaster. But also, there was supposed to be an Avatar game this year. That was delayed. Supposed to be an Assassin's Creed game. This fiscal year was supposed to come out in February. That was delayed to, like, May or June or something like that. So, yeah, just like one, what?

One miss after another for Ubisoft, a company that was once just like on top of the world with like its new Far Crys and Assassin's Creed every year. Yeah, they've sort of lost a step somehow or other. Because in addition to the things you mentioned, I mean, Far Cry 6 is widely seen as a big disappointment by fans of Far Cry. I played some of it and it was pretty boring. Like it was pretty repetitive. It kind of just felt like another Far Cry game, Giancarlo Ispizito was not enough to save that game. And so people aren't happy about that. If you play it as him, maybe.

Yeah, that'd be pretty good. I don't know, though. Not if you were playing that same boring Far Cry stuff. And there's also Ghost Recon, which has, like, been a total mess. I haven't played one of those games in a long time, but I keep seeing articles and headlines about various things that are announced and then canceled. NFTs, they put in NFTs in that. They've got, like, whatever, Battle Royale.

They had the NFT thing. That is huge. So it's like, it just seems like they're constantly. stepping in it, constantly feeling, oh, there's, not to mention, Beyond Good and Evil, too, which, like, has a lot of turnover. That just seems to be in development. Yeah. Was announced forever ago with a CGI trailer that, like, they've never really showed the game.

It just seems like that's never coming out, even though people were excited. So I do wind up thinking, what does Ubisoft have? And this is as someone who is a longtime fan of a lot of Uvysoft games. And, like, I like, you know, Watchdogs, too. And I like Far Cry too. and I like a lot of Assassin's Creed games and I like Prince of Persia. I like so many things that they have

that they can draw from. I like the first Bion of Good and Evil. And yet, they keep not coming up with new stuff and it feels like it's been years at this point. I mean, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, notwithstanding, everything else has kind of been a disaster. So, yeah, I don't know. I don't know what's going on over there.

It's not good. Yeah. I think Assassin's Creed Rift is kind of a good microcosm of Ubisoft as a whole and their problem. So here's what happened with that game. So Eve's Gives' game. Amont on a recent Ubisoft Ernest's call essentially blamed

working from home for all their problems and their delays was like, we're still getting used to working from home, blah, blah, production judges for a work. I mean, it could be some truth to that you should say, like it could be a hard thing to adjust it. Okay, so here's what happened with the Assassin's Creed Rift. So this is supposed to be,

so there's supposed to be this thing, this Basim thing, Vasim from Assassin's Creed Valhalla is supposed to get a DLC, right? UBesost looks ahead at their calendar, they say, hey, we have a gap in this fiscal year. Let's delay this BASIMD-LC and turn it into a full game. But also, instead of making it Valhalla style, let's turn it back into like an old school Assassin's Creed game

where you're like sneaking around and like doing whatever. I don't know the specifics, but sneaking around. I assume like... Honestly, this all sounds pretty good. Yeah. That general description sounds pretty cool. I'm into that. Except you only get like X number of months to do it

and you have to do it in the same engine like with all this RPG That's less cool. Sounds less cool. That's cool. And you have to hit this fiscal year, like essentially make a new game and like half a time it would take to make a new game. And then when it turns out that you need a delay because you can't actually make it all that in time, we're going to blame working from home on those problems. We're going to say it's because you're working for home. Right.

A convenient scapegoat. It's good they delayed it at least. And that actually does sound promising. I mean, like that the idea of taking Assassin's Creed back to just being in a city and sneaking around and doing Assessons. nations is cool with me because I don't need it to become even more of an open world thing. So that sounds fine. All of those specifics notwithstanding. Yeah.

And it's made by Ubisoft Bordeaux, one of their French offices. At least they're leading. And I'm sure, as with all Ubisoft things, it's being made scattershot all across the world. But yeah, no, it's interesting times. I'm looking forward to that game too. And I think that they're going to announce it in September. It's still not announced. Believe it or not.

They're going to nuts in September and maybe even hint at like Assassin's Creed infinity and the whole future of Assassin's Creed. So that'll be fun to hear about and talk about when that actually happens. I'd much rather the small scale Assassin's Creed game that is purposefully scoped as opposed to Assassin's Creed Infinity, whatever the heck that's going to be. Yeah. Well, infinity, I don't think, infinity is just like the platform. Like it's the skeleton for these other. So the idea is that instead of just like releasing a new game, every year you have this one thing that it gets modules or biomes attached to it and you log in

through the platform and I'm not sure what that's going to look like. But like, so the first year they're like, hey, now you get to go to Japan through Assassin's Queen Infinity. And then the next year they're like, oh, now you get to go to this other place, etc., etc. Yeah, also it'd just be nice to hear something not Assassin's Creed that is exciting for because it's been a long time. There is a new Mario and Rabbids game coming out this fall. I'm excited for that.

Yeah, but that's also Nintendo. so that almost doesn't count. No, it's made by Ubisoft. I mean, Nintendo supervises. No, I know, but it's like a Nintendo property. Like, I mean, like... It's not a new IP. Sure.

Kirk wants a new IP. Or, you know, a new watchdogs game that sounds really cool. Or just something, like something that Ubisoft has that is a Ubisofty thing that's exciting. What's tragic about Ubisoft is that they always have like all these new incubation projects in the works and so many of them get canceled.

Someone was just telling me the other day about like this promising new projects in Toronto that was like this original game and bam it was canceled. So like this sort of thing happens all the time unfortunately. I think Yubesov's problem and this is actually a really widespread problem that not enough people are talking about is a severe lack of senior staff because they're having so much trouble hiring. Pretty much every game company is having so much trouble hiring. And in fact, we can get to this a little bit later, but I just saw for Axis just delayed their game, their Marvel Xcom game, been 90sons. And the first thing I did when I saw that was like,

Like I looked at their website. And of course, their website under careers is like, lead role, lead role, lead role, lead role, senior role, senior role, senior role. Like all they're hiring is lead in senior roles. And so many, it seems like all these companies just have so many vacancies because all that burnout that people did to video game developers is finally coming to bite these companies in the ass. That combined with like the big great resignation that is leading everyone to switch jobs. And you just have like every single company is just like severely lacking staff. So I think that's a huge problem for Ubisoft. It does.

That makes sense. I skipped over this one, actually. A wave of unionization. Lots of, lots of uniting happening. Raven unionized. They were the first big North American company to do it. They're QA testers. And then another group of Activision QA testers,

this time at the company formerly known as Vicarious Visions in Albany, now known as like Blizzard, New York or whatever. They are also unionizing. So it's happening, guys. we're seeing unionizing. I was talking to someone about this who was struggling to get people organizing in their game studio.

And I was like, what really needs to happen, like we're seeing this starting point. The first domino is really going to be the first time a union gets a contract and it is like, here is what we won. Like we won a 10% pay increase for everybody across the board. And just like all the, like once the fruits of that

really are shown, then I think the dominoes will start falling and you'll start seeing this everywhere. But I think we need to reach that point first. Yeah. This feels like just the other side of the same pressure that you're describing when you talk about all these personnel issues and everybody burning out and leaving. I mean, this is just the flip side of that is workers have more power now and are exercising it. And it all just feels of a piece of all these broader trends. It's pretty exciting, though.

I mean, there's also just the fact that unionization has been taking over other industry. too, which is really rad. Like, it's pretty cool to see Starbucks workers unionizing, for example. Like, people who even a few years ago, I would have been like, well, I can't even imagine a union existing for these workers. And then now we have unions for some of them. And then other people that are in those same positions are like, well, such and such studio has a union for their QA people.

And QA people have been mistreated for so long that it's really gratifying to see QA people in particular pushing for unionization because it's just been horrifying to cover games for so long and know that the people who are fixing last minute problems with games that are so visible and that can complain about so much are also some of the lowest paid and unprotected people at the company. It's wild. So I'm excited for this. Yeah, it makes a sort of sense that the people who are treated the worst would be the ones to have the biggest incentive to unionize. Though, given that we unionized at our workplace when we were actually in a pretty good place, there is also something to be said for unionizing when things are good. So hopefully we'll see

some of that as well in game development. Although that's a tougher. It's a tougher cell. I think the Vodio Games Union is a good example of that. It was like the first North American video game union and Vodio Games is like a really small company. I think it's like a dozen people. And they just, they were the first North American one. And then that was around the time that the Activision Blizzard QA folks were also getting things together to unionize as well. But like some of the early examples that we've seen have been more the like the Gawker Media style of we just like working here and we want it to stay that way. And I would say that the QA workers at the bigger studios are probably more inspired by

stuff like the Starbucks union where it's like, okay, this small group of people at one store were able to get together and do this, who's to say that one group of QA workers at one town, maybe not every town, but one town can do this. And that's inspiring. It's like the kind of thing I think about when I'm feeling very doom and gloom about the world. I'm like, well, there's a lot of unions, though.

That's pretty cool, huh? Did you read that long New York Times feature about the Amazon workers that unionized? That was a real, a real feel-good story. Damn, that was a good one. We'll link that in show notes. I'm sure people know that story broadly, but if you haven't read that article, it's a good read. Sometimes you just need to pick me up and you're like, some people were very stubborn and they just kept fighting for what they deserved. And hopefully QA workers everywhere reading those stories too and being like, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I'm just excited for us. The three of us kind of, we all know the benefits of unionization firsthand as we were in a union and it saved our ass when we got sold to Univision. But like the, I'm excited for people to actually see the benefits for like. one of these unions to actually like deliver on a contract that it's just like wow this is like awesome and like makes our lives so much it is a good feeling I remember it was we're not changing your benefits this year you're going to have the same health insurance because it's in your union contract and I was like oh that's kind of nice I don't have to deal with that now thanks union and it was just sort of this first tangible thing where the union just kind of came through it's

pretty nice it was incredibly nice I'm going to combine these last two for one quick last item so video game sales are down I don't know how much you guys have been paying attention to this, but I've been paying just because Bloomberg pays attention of this sort of thing. And Bloomberg's paying you. Sales are really down across the board. They are paying. I believe this last quarter, it was like 13% down over the previous quarter, something

crazy like that. There are a lot of factors behind this and all the game companies are doing earnings calls and most of them are reporting losses. A lot of factors. One is that there's inflation, obviously economic downturn. Another is that the pandemic is kind of... Yeah, we're not allowed to call it a recess. session. Legally, we can't call it that.

Legally, we cannot say the art word. Absolutely not. The pandemic is, people are just guiding over the pandemic and so they're less time spending inside playing video games. Pandemic isn't over, but people are acting like it's over, so that's the net effect. And then most importantly,

there's a lack of big hits this year. After like a strong march or so, it feels like things have really died down. And that is in part because of the other big item here, which is that everything is delayed. a short and incomplete list of games that were supposed to be out this fall, but are not. Sarfield, Suicide Squad, Breath of the Wild 2, for spoken, Midnight Suns, and Redfall,

among many others, including ones that were delayed kind of internally and nobody knew about. So, yeah, man, it's all kind of, speaking of doom and gloom, the video game industry is in an interesting spot right now. Yeah. People just don't like games anymore. After Eldon Ring, it was like, this is it. This is the peak. We can't do any better than this.

It's not on the ring. And we're just going to pack it in. There's a kind of a temporal disorientation that happens here because we're now kind of really feeling the effects of the pandemic. When the pandemic first hit, there were kind of all these games that came out because a lot of stuff was almost finished. Because games just takes so long to make that you have to kind of adjust your clock for your expectations by years, which is really hard for people to do. Like you can't. It's just very hard to have something happen right now. that is because of something that happened three or four years ago and then understand that in context.

So this is just, it just feels like, oh, okay, now it feels like a pandemic is hitting the video game industry, even though the pandemic, you know, hit two years ago. Yeah. Although it felt like that last year because there were a bunch of delays last year too. And it's like, oh, pandemic's delaying everything. Right. But there was that sort of, I guess we were looking forward to February, but there was that sense of, well, but February is going to come and all these things are going to come out. And it did.

And they did. Yeah. Remember the headlines were like, 2020 is going to be. the best year ever for gaming and then like we got Eldon ring and that was it and now this fall it's like god of war ragnarok and not much else saints row yeah and even god of war it really feels like a miracle that that's coming out especially because that logo revealed that was they really they really stepped in it with that set us up for disappointment with that they really yeah they upgraded after the hooker-roar-all, but I think it's all, everything we've discussed, like you said before, is

Kirk is tied together. It's like everything is delayed because of, in large part, all these labor issues. I think, I really think that, like, if you're looking at a game and you're wondering why it's delayed, chances are very high that it's because that team does not have enough senior staff right now. And it's not like a sexy answer, and it's not even a tangible answer because, like, even if you're on a team, you might not realize that like, oh, man, if we had one other person here, this would be avoidable. But like the, the, A, inability to retain staff and B, an ability to recruit staff, I think you're really just adding up and causing problems all across the point.

Or maybe an ability to train staff up to become leaders. I mean, that's also something that I'm sure people are facing post-pandemic if they're used to in-person networking as the main way that people do things in the games industry. And now that isn't the case anymore. That is no longer available, really. I mean, we didn't have E3 this year. The list goes on. It's like there's so many things about this year that have been weird and different and a sign of change.

But mostly it's the unions thing. I'm just going to stay on that because I got to keep my head above water. It's a nice spray point in all this. I mean, if you're going to take the optimistic approach, you could say that like if unions were in place and if more people felt like they didn't, if unions were in place, then fewer people would burn out and leave. even so you'd have more senior staff floating around the video game and it's doing the first place. Possibly, yeah.

Yeah. Oh, for sure. I mean, that thing that you're talking about, Maddie, where senior staff leave and people don't get trained up to replace them. I mean, we've been talking about that since I don't even know when, the idea of brain drain in the games industry because people burn out and that burnout has this long-term cost.

Or they leave for a tech industry job that pays way more and has better treatment of its employees than the games industry does. They're just like, I'll take a software QA job because they're not going to tell me that they're exploiting my passion and that's, I should be so lucky to be here, you know? Right. And then as a result, you don't get the new people to take over. The flip side of remote work making it hard to train people is that remote work also makes it easier

to retain people because like that's true. And diversify. Yeah, I read about this in press. He said, if you're in Boston and you are at a rational games and you get laid off, you can either move across the country for a new job or like leave the video game industry going to banking. Or work at harmonics and get laid off immediately after that. Right. Right. And now the remote is an option. It just changes everything for people.

It does. It does. I think this is just growing pains. This is still me being optimistic. But it feels like growing pains of unionizing and remote work being more of a thing, which to me is a good thing. Like, companies getting used to remote work could really change everything in a great way for how games are made and how they work and how training work. and how people communicate. I mean, I've been working from home for ages and I love it. So clearly I'm biased. But it has some huge perks. Yeah, I think you're spot on.

I think we're on a reflection point from the industry. Everything about the industry, everything we've talked about, just feels like an industry that's in the middle of flux. Yeah, yeah, yeah, which can be good and can be bad. And we'll have to wait and see what the net effects are. But, yeah, here's rooting for good outcomes, I suppose. Yeah. You're so open. All right. Why don't we take a break from all this news?

And we'll be back shortly for one more thing. Hey, it's John Moe, host of Depression Mode, a podcast about people's mental health journeys. Guess who we got it? Guess who? It's Jamie Lee Curtis. I look at life now as the game of guess who, which is simply the process of elimination. I know what I don't like. That's how I found out who I am. Jamie Lee Curtis on addiction, show business, and fooling people. all on Depress Mode from Maximum Fun, wherever you get your podcasts. Well, Manolo, we have a show to promote.

It's called Doctor Game Show. It's a family-friendly podcast where listeners submit games and we play them with callers from around the world. Oh, sounds good. New episodes happen every other Wednesday on MaximumFun.org. It's a fast and loose oasis of absurd, innocence and naivete. Are you writing a poem? No, and just saying things from my memory. And it's a nice break from reality.

Are we allowed to say that? I don't know. It sounds bad. It comes with a 100% happiness guarantee. It does not. Come for the games and stay for the chaos. And we are back. Kirk, Maddie.

It is time for one more thing. Is that the Resident Evil announcer voice that you're trying to do? Yeah, it's my new... It's my new, I don't know, game show where people like fight each other to the death. One more thing. Maddie, Maddie, you kick us off with a recent release. So I've been playing the PC remaster of the 2018 video game Marvel Spider-Man by Ensonniac Games. This game's really freaking weird to play in 2022.

I don't know if you do have revisited it recently. But boy. So even in 2018, people were like, is it a little weird that Peter Parker is unlocking surveillance towers that were built by a massive corporation and are all being used by the NYPD to listen in on every single cell phone conversation that every single person in New York City has? And they're using that to stop crime.

Oh, and also the towers are infallible. They never make a single mistake. People are either criminals or civilians. It's a total binary and all you have to do is find the criminals and stop them and save the civilians. Did people think that was weird in 2018? Yes, of course, they thought it was weird. But four years later, playing it is so disarming. Like, actively I have to turn my brain off in order to enjoy the game.

I have to be like, I need to ignore what I'm doing in the game because I can. can't get on board with anything that I'm doing. Interesting. Because even just like listening into people's conversations and being like, oh, these two guys are talking about a bank they're about to rob. Like, I don't know. I feel like the precogs and minority report or something. I'm like, they haven't even robbed the bank yet.

And I'm already swinging down there to murder these guys. Like, damn. It's weird as hell. It's kind of, it's a game that I'm sure was made many years before 2018. And this is kind of the problem we're talking about with GTA. where it's like by the time it came out in 2018, public perception of the police and how they operate in American society

had shifted a lot. I mean, the way police were operating hadn't really changed that much, but public perception of them and of that behavior had shifted. And people had different demands, different expectations, even then. And they have very different demands in 2022 as well.

Exponentially changed after 2020, I would say. And that's just an ongoing conversation. Yeah. But I would say that Ferguson situation in 2014. I mean, that's the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement, I believe. I mean, people knew even in 2018 that things were bad. So it's not like, oh, this came out of nowhere, but it is interesting to play it now. But it's also kind of bittersweet because I'm like, there are parts of this game that have a lot of heart. There are moments that I really love.

There's like this scene where Peter Parker and Mary Jane have a whole text conversation. And I loved it so much. Like the blocking of that scene is incredible. I think I wrote a whole Kataku article about just that scene. Just about that. I'm sure you did. It's like Kirk Hamilton catnip where it's like as Peter reads the text, he's like swinging through the streets of Manhattan. And he like gets one text from her and he looks at it.

And he's like, yes. And then he's swinging. And then he like hears the beep again and stops and is like, oh, now she's mad at me again. It's like his body language is so great in that scene. And it makes up for the fact that everybody's constantly calling me on the freaking phone in this game. And I want people just stop freaking calling me so that I can like navigate the city in peace. But I'm constantly getting phone calls. Credit to Yuri Lowenthal who plays Spider-Man and is awesome.

Yes, he's really good. So there are some things in the game that I'm really enjoying. But you just can't get around the fact that you are upholding a police state and that it's kind of creepy. Like remember at the end of the dark night when Batman was like, maybe it's a little weird to record everybody's cell phone conversations, even though it's going to help me find the Joker. Peter Parker never thinks that. I don't know why not.

Well, and yeah, Batman destroys it afterwards, to be fair. Yeah, wild stuff. Well, this is something we're going to talk about, I think, in an upcoming episode because I've been playing this game as well. I do think it's appropriate that you mention Batman because I think a lot of these are Batman mechanics from the Arkham games that are a little bit awkwardly carried over to Spider-Man because some of the disconnect here is just that Spider-Man, like, he's not really the police guy. Like, I know that he's helped the police. Yeah, he's just a guy. Like, that's kind of his back story, is that he's just a guy. Like, he's, he's poor.

He's, he's, nobody. Yeah. It feels a little more like the Batman thing where he is, like, Batman's a little bit more fash than Spider-Man in general. Yeah, and he's also got the ego to match it, you know? Like, he not only does the things, he believes he's in the right for doing them. Whereas with Peter, you're like, well, Peter probably wouldn't be on board for this, right? Like, personality-wise. Spider-Man is your neighborhood, Spider-Man.

He's supposed to just be, like, helping people out at a more ground level. and a more civilian level. But there's the whole question of like, do video games lend themselves more to one style of hero than another style of hero? And this is a teaser for a conversation that we will get more in-depth on in an upcoming episode. Yeah, I have plenty more to say, but that's my preview. Kirk, what's your one more thing? I watched a movie that's really good. It's called Prey.

It's on Hulu. It's the latest predator movie. It is really great. And I liked it a lot. I'm sure everyone listening to this. probably knows about this. How does it compare to prey from 2017? Yeah, that's what I thought this was going to be because I forgot about this movie.

I was like, oh, the video game, pray. Okay. It's funny that the movie has the same name as the game, which I also really like. It's, well, it's similar in some ways. I mean, you are, there's a lot of hunting and hiding, and there's an extraterrestrial threat that, you know, is sort of overpowering and requires ingenuity on the part of the Heroes of Prey the video game and Pray the Movie have some things in common, but this is a Predator movie, and it's just a great movie. I mean, it's just an ass-kicking action movie. It's back

to basics in a lot of ways for Predator in that it is just the story of an alien who shows up and starts killing people, and then the people have to get clever to defeat the alien. But the particulars make it really cool, and it's also just a beautiful looking, really well-shot, just pleasurable movie to watch. So the hook of this movie is that it's taking place in the 1700s. It focuses on the Comanche Nation. And so it's a story of a bunch of Native Americans who suddenly are faced with a predator who lands on Earth to hunt some people because that's what predators do. Everyone knows the premise of the predator movies, but yeah, that's the story. It's like the predator always shows up and it's this giant, totally unstoppable killing machine who is their whole culture, the predators have a whole

culture where it's all about finding apex predators so that you like, it's like a right of passage. You get sent to this planet and then you have to hunt. And so first they kill animals and then they discover humans and clearly humans at the top of the food chain and then the humans and the predators fight. And that's the premise for every movie. It's a very neat way to set up an action movie. And I've liked pretty much every predator movie, like different amounts. I won't do my whole predator ranking right now.

But I like this one as much as the original. I mean, this might be my favorite predator movie. I guess I just saw it, so I have recency bias. But it's just a really, really cool story. Obviously, it's really neat to see a story that centers indigenous people, has a whole cast of indigenous actors, really takes that very seriously. There's even a version you can watch with a Comanche dub.

So it's like the whole thing is, you know, all of the Native American characters are speaking Comanche. In the version that I watched, they're speaking English, and it's just there are characters who are French, like they're sort of French colonists who turn up at one point, and they're just speaking French with no subtitles. And you kind of understand that the Native American characters are speaking their own language, even though it's English and we understand them.

And so that's kind of, it's a cool device and it works. But you can watch this with Comanche, duh, which is really neat. But I don't know, it's just a great movie, Amber Mid Thunder, the star of this film. She's a sort of a young woman who wants to be a hunter and clearly has a lot of potential, but that potential keeps being frustrated in various ways. And she sets out to fight the predator. and it just winds up being this great underdog kind of cat and mouse story. It really focuses on hunting and survival.

There's a lot of logistics and the practicalities of trying to track something. You see a lot of animals hunting other animals. It's a very clear theme. It's directed by Dan Tractonberg, who made Ten Cloverfield Lane. Bing! Kirk here, and I just have to mention this because I somehow didn't mention it when I was talking about it. But this movie also has one of the greatest dog performances ever. I gather the dog was not actually trained.

to be in movies and was sort of a pain on the set. But oh man, this is like the best movie dog ever, and I just had to mention it because I love dogs so much. I know a lot of listeners do too. If you want to see an amazing dog in a movie, watch this movie. Okay, back to the show. Bing! Anyways, that's a bunch of facts about the movie.

I just thought it was awesome. It was way better, actually, than I was expecting it to be pretty good. So I highly recommend it. I really think people should check it out. If any of that sounds good, it's called Prey. It's on Hulu. It's a rad movie. I'm going to watch it.

it's good cool my one more thing my one more thing is a game called the quarry i've talked about this before when it first came out because i played it a little bit but i have spent the past few nights playing on my tv with my wife which is a much better way to play and i've also played a lot more of it and can now uh uh kind of wholeheartedly say this game rules so the quarry this is made by supermassive games it is a spiritual successor to until dawn which came out a few years ago and was kind of this schlocky horror, climate gore movie slash thing, interactive movie

slash thing, where you, as a player, like can leap between all these different characters who are these kind of like archetypes of teenagers in the woods being chased by some sort of possibly supernatural villain. So the quarry is very similar. You

play one of eight or nine camp counselors at this camp. It's the last night of summer camp. So all the kids are gone. And you wind up, there for an extra night for one reason or another. And it turns out there are monsters all over the camp, among other problems. There are also these two guys who are hunting you for some reason. And it's got a great cast. Even DuPlay is in it. David Arquette is in it as the head counselor or is the head of the owner of the camp. A few other recognizable faces, people you will recognize.

Brenda Song is in it. Sam Ramey's Bramie's brother. other Ted Ramey is in it as this like corrupt cop, speaking of cops, speaking of fucked up cops. But anyway, so it's got this great mode called couch co-op where you and whoever you're sitting with can each pick a character. And then the game will prompt you before it switches to a character and say, player one, your turn, player two, your turn. And that's how my wife and I have been playing, which is so much fun. So we've been switching off.

We each like, we divided all the characters in half. So I took four and she took four. And so we're just passing the controller back and forth. And so we each make the decisions as we go, which is just like incredibly fun. And it's so schlocky and stupid. And like the characters made such bad decisions constantly that you're just yelling at them the whole time being like, what the hell are you doing? Why are you doing this? But you're the one making the decision.

How can you yell at the characters? You should yell at yourself. Well, they also, they make decisions outside of what you're doing. And those are the stupid ones. There's some things you don't get to pick. Yes, 100%. And there's some things that like don't make sense or like, are clearly, we don't get to pick. clearly weirdly stitched together because there's so many different permutations, but still,

it's so much fun. I've been having such a blast, and it's so much fun to play with someone else because it's like watching this interactive movie where you both get to be in control and see how things unfold. And I'm very excited to see if we can make it all night without losing any of our counselors, so we shall see. But I did just get to this part. I think I'm probably halfway through the game, because we just got to this part where like a certain character is explaining to us a lot of what's been going on. It's been very interesting to hear that. And yeah, I won't spoil anymore.

But there's some cool stuff in this game. And yeah, I'm really enjoying it. Go check it out. This game has been really like under the radar this summer. Because it came out in June. I don't think I've seen many people talking about it. But yeah, the quarry. It rules.

People should play it. Nice. I want to check it out. I have it downloaded. But that's as far as I got. I think you will both enjoy plugging it to your, this is not a good steam decky. This is a good plug it to the big screen. Play it with your significant other.

play it with some friends. It's that kind of game. Have the horror movie experience as it deserves. Exactly. Exactly. I guess the only downside is you can't like binge it in a night. So it's kind of like it unfolds in different chapters. I think they're like 10 or 12 chapters. So if you think of them as each is an episode of Netflix and that's a good way of doing it. So like spend a weekend. Play through it all on a weekend or a week. The Quarry by Supermassive Games. All right. That is it for this week's episode. Kirk. It is.

Maddie. See you both next week. Yeah. next week. 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 D.J. 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 Maximumfund.org slash join. Find us on Twitter at Triple ClickPod. email the triple click at maximum fun.org and find a link to our discord in the showdowns. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

Maximumfund.org. Comedy and culture. Artist-owned. Audience-supported.