Triple Click - How Are Games Made By One Person So Good?

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

How can video games made by a single person surpass $200 million AAA beasts? What are some weird things that have happened to the Triple Click gang because of games? And has the era of paid expansions come to an end? This week, Kirk, Jason, and Maddy answer listener questions!One More Thing:Kirk: Mistborn (Sanderson)Maddy: HacksJason: The Bright Sword (Lev Grossman)LINKS:Featuring an excerpt from the Balatro theme by LouisFBen Abraham’s “Permanent Death,” a 2009 permadeath run through Far Cry 2: https://drgamelove.blogspot.com/2009/12/permanent-death-complete-saga.htmlPreorder Jason’s Book! https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/jason-schreier/play-nice/9781538725429/Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinBuy Triple Click Merch: https://maxfunstore.com/search?q=triple+click&options%5Bprefix%5D=lastJoin 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

As the years go by, the messages you left in Dark Souls will fade, but not the letters you send to us at Triple Click. Those are forever. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week, we open up the mailbag to answer questions about preserving those Dark Souls messages, as well as why Baldersgate 3 doesn't have a DLC and so much more. I'm Maddie Myers. I'm Jason Schreier. And I'm Kirk Hamilton and hello. Hello. Hello. Hi, my friends. How are you guys? It's us again. Doing good. We're here. We're here again. And hey, this week it's on me.

I got to tell the listeners about Maximum Fun. Somebody has to. And it's me. I have to do it because I want to do it. And why? Lucky Maddie. It's a privilege. And why?

Because Maximum Fun is a really cool podcast network. Always loved it. Loved it before we were even a part of it. Now we get to be a part of it. It's just an exciting time in my life. But it's also an exciting time for you, the listener. because, hey, you probably like that we don't have any ads on this show. And the reason why that is is because many people and perhaps also you have gone to

maximum fun.org slash join and they've become a member and they've clicked that little tiki box next to triple click saying they support us. And all those lucky people, all those wonderful people getting warm fuzzies from supporting us, they get access to our monthly bonus episodes and also all the other shows bonus episodes. Like even the ones that you didn't put the tiki box next to, you get their bonus episodes if you want. Mainly they get ours. And ours include our most recent episode where we watched a couple of Christopher Nolan movies.

We watched Inception and we watched Tenet and talked about them and how they are both similar and different and fascinating and kind of gamery in their own ways. And we have a bunch of other episodes that we've recorded together. And this upcoming month we are going to record one of our occasional that we've done this before. We're going to do a Marvel check-in. We're checking in on Marvel. What Marvel adaptations are happening in all of our lives? I've seen Deadpool and Wolverine. I have thoughts about it.

I have plenty of thoughts on everything else that's happened. Robert Downey Jr. is coming back. We live in a strange world. Anyway, go to Maximfund. com.com slash join if you want to hear our thoughts on Marvel. And also just our thoughts on Chris Nolan movies and a whole bunch of other video games that we've played. We did an episode about the Psychonauts II documentary series. big backlog of ups there.

So yeah, don't miss out on it. All right. Jason, what are we doing today? This week, we are doing some burning questions. So we're going to answer some questions in our old mailbox, our old burning mailbox. Just a reminder, as always, you can reach us at triple click at maximum fun.org. If you have questions that you would like us to set on fire and then read, just send them on over. and our, of course, regular reminder that we really like questions that are unusual and weird and interesting and also that are short.

Keep them to a paragraph, folks. We don't need as much as I love reading about everybody's life stories. We're not going to read them all on the show. So let's get to it, shall we? Maddie, why don't you kick us off with this first question? Sure. So this one's from Nick, who writes, Longtime Caller First Time Listener. I was playing tales from the borderlands with my wife Amelia and a silly jump scare startled her and she hurt her neck, which took several days to recover.

Oh, no. What weird ways have video games impacted your real life? It's fine of all of these are injuries. But go ahead, Jason. I have a fun story, not injury-related story. Okay, I was in second grade or third grade and we were like talking. about American history and everybody had to like find some way to like talk about the presidents. I think we were doing a president thing. And I was responsible for like doing something about Thomas

Jefferson. And so I was really into this game called Sid Meyers colonization. And the way colonization worked is it's kind of like a sieve game if you think about those. Instead of like the wonders of the world, what you would do is you would get these founding fathers to join your American ongoing like American country, fledgling country, pre-country country. And the way that would work is every time you hit enough, got enough liberty bells to reach a new founding father,

you would see a screen pop up and it would be like, which of these five founding fathers do you want to recruit next? And it would be randomized. So you wouldn't see every single one. You would just get to select from five of like the 40 or something that existed in the game. And I was like, cool. Well, so this game has Thomas Jefferson in it. I'm going to show the teacher how it works.

And so she gathered the class in front of the computer, and I had to pull up a game and start playing colonization. And so I kept playing and playing. And then every time I would get to a new founding father, Thomas Jefferson would not appear. And I would be like, sorry, I mean, he's going to show up. He's going to show up. And I had to keep playing and playing. And eventually, we were like 40 minutes in and the class was over. And the teacher was like, Jason, like, what is going on here?

I was like, sorry, it's random. You didn't show up. And I successfully used a video game to waste our entire class and make people watch, watch me play it. And we never did get to Thomas Jefferson. So that was extremely funny. That rules actually. I feel like you really learned a lesson from that that you applied to the rest of your life.

I did. I did. Yeah. That's a good story. Do you have one, Kurt? Yeah, oh, I have a couple. One that comes to mind that I've probably told on the show before is that I really got into rock band 2 in 08, 2009 when I was still teaching high school jazz band in San Francisco.

And I never loved the guitar, but I got really into the drums because rock band was the first game that let you play the drums. And the drums and rock band are a pretty reasonable facsimile for playing drums. Like there's no high hat pedal, but there is a kick pedal. And the parts that you learn are like basically drum parts. And I then, after a couple of months of intensive rock band playing, I had to sub for one of my students in a jazz combo. And we were playing like red clay or some like beginning funk tune. And I was like, oh, I'll fill in on drums. And I used to be able to do that okay. Like I would just kind of keep time for the

kids that they played. But I started playing. And it was this feeling of like my right foot just knew exactly what to do. And I started playing like offset kick patterns. And I was like, oh my God, I can play drums. And then I was like rocking out in this rehearsal playing just way, way better than I'd ever played. And it was entirely because I had been drilling muscle memory playing rock band two for rock band one. It was very cool. Wow. I wish I had a story that good. I feel like all of mine are just physical injury related.

Yeah. I mean, I've definitely gotten like sore thumbs and stuff from playing games. Oh, sure. Definitely. I feel like, I mean, it's not, none of my stories are that good. It's more just like me realizing that I had to get an arcade stick in order to play fighting games. Because after playing on pad for long enough, I just was getting so much. hand pain, but I was like, this is not, this is not tenable and just like various points in my life.

And I've been like, I need to get more ergonomically sound in my life. That's really how video games have impacted my life in a boring way. It's just that I've been like, well, I should probably get a better chair and I should get better monitors. Maybe I should have like a real couch and like all these other things as opposed to just like balancing all my stuff on a series of bachelor-esque boxes in my life. just, I don't know. I mean, what weird ways did my old crappy gamer chair impact my life is the real question.

I mean, I don't have that anymore. How many dates did I miss out on that came to my house and saw that? Someone saw the chair and never came back again. We'll never know. We'll never know. Those are the extent of mine. All right. Next question.

Kirk. This question comes from Eric, who writes, I was recently listening to your Balders Gate 3 Beans cast after finally finishing the game and I found something interesting. At various points in the episode, you all discussed story-based DLC or a story-based expansion as if it was a sure thing, using when, not if statements to refer to the possibility. Damn, owned that we did that. We've been owned by Eric. As Eric writes, we now know that Larian has no intentions of expanding the game with narrative expansions. And I can't help but notice that two other major releases from last year, Tears of the

Kingdom and Spider-Man 2 also show no indication of expanding with downloadable content. It got me thinking, is the trend of near-ubiquitous paid post-launch downloadable content a thing of the past? Has the rising cost of game development made the prospect of selling more content for $20 or $30 prohibitive? Are there other reasons for this trend that you can identify? Yeah, I remember, so I started hearing like a decade ago around the time of like, I think I first started hearing it from BioWare people, like around Mass Effect 3 slash Dragon Age Inquisition,

that the drop-off in players going from the game to the DLC was so significant that it was becoming less and less worthwhile. And then I started hearing that I think Noddy Dog was maybe the first one to do this where they converted what was supposed to be uncharted for a DLC into a standalone product, and it did extremely well because it felt like a brand new kind of smaller scale. game. And then we started seeing more people like do that sort of thing. Take that approach of like, instead of doing a DLC, we're going to make Spider-Man Miles Morales. We're going to make this standalone product. Exactly. Which I think is kind of a win-win because you don't need to rely on having people pull out their old machines and their old game copies, their old discs, or re-download

their games if they already uninstalled them. And instead, you give them a brand new thing that kind of has the feel of a brand new game, but is maybe smaller scale and costs less. So that is always a win-win. The other thing I think we've seen a lot of is game companies realize that rather than selling a DLC, they can actually release it for free and get a lot more financial benefit because people, it'll attract, it'll develop word of mouth, it'll attract new players who will pick up the old game for.

this new stuff and or like it'll create a new buzz marketing cycle and it'll be a lot more worthwhile and we've seen that with like god of wars um god of war ragnorogs valhalla expansion was released for free which i think was a smart move as well so yeah i do think that we are moving away from the trend of dLC slash expansions that rely upon you to have bought the game and then to go in by the expansion and i think that drop-off is for good reason And like the three of us have talked before about how like when a DLC comes out, Eldon Ring, of course, being the exception, which we can get into in a sec. But a lot of times in a DLC comes out, it's like, do you really want to relearn all the controls from that game you played a year ago or two years ago is it really worth it to go back in? And it feels like there's more of a barrier for entry than there would be with a brand new game.

There definitely is. And I mean, Eldon Rang, we did have to relearn all the controls. And, like, I was spending weeks ahead of time being like, how do I even play Alden Ring? I restarted a new character because I was like, I literally don't remember how to play Eldon Ring. I don't know what any of this stuff is and I'm scared. And that is, that is a barrier to entry for me. It's why I don't always want to play a DLC because I'm just like, do I want to go back and

even remember what that is? Eldon Ring being an exception because the game is so humongous and so special that, like, people were willing to do. It was worth it. And the DLC was so massive and kind of. and kind of like shockingly huge and elaborate and like the size of a standalone game. You know, another exception that comes to mind

that is interesting on its own terms is cyberpunk 27 and Phantom Liberty because the Phantom Liberty DLC was like a classic old school expansion. I think I was reminded at one point by their PR to call it an expansion because I was emailing with them and I was like, do you have a code for the DLC? And they were like, expansion girls.

It's not a DLC. Stop calling at that. The expansion, which it was. an expansion and it coincided with the 2.0 release of that game so it was kind of the two approaches happening at the same time where we've seen a lot of like what you were describing jason is the free update that just sort of revitalizes a game or i mean even something that like balder's gate three got all kinds of free updates and it wouldn't actually surprise me if they still did some sort of overhaul update where it's like we've just added a bunch of stuff that you can just kind of find through the game to make it if you want to play it again like in a year or two

I could still kind of see that happening. Not a discreet downloadable, you know, expansion, but like just a sort of elaboration on the game. The Game of the Year edition, you think they might like to? Yeah, maybe. Or something like that. Or even just a free update that they give to everybody. And with cyberpunk, it was, they did do that, that 2.0 update,

which I've played a lot of and, like, love, you know. I really thought it made the game, the base game great. That was just free for everybody. And then Phantom Liberty was like the best thing in Cyberpunk. It was this really great story that was a totally new, you know, a new area. It was a very classic feeling like, you know, like old school Bethesda game style expansion where just there's a new area in the map that you can now access. And there's all these cool quests in there.

And they all feel kind of more advanced and elaborate and interesting because of all the lessons learned making the base game. It felt kind of old school, that part of it, in a way that I really appreciate it, even though I understand why it's less common now because that's like a big financial investment to make in something that, you know, only gets what some small percentage of people who played the game in the first place. It's a little different for a game like that where they really needed a makeover story too, right? They had an incentive for sure. They're almost like having a new entire marketing cycle is to their benefit in a way that it might not necessarily be for something like a Baldur's Gate 3 where it's like, okay, we did our thing. We won game of the year. Everybody loved it. We released a ton of great updates.

And now, at least according to Larian, they'd want to move on and make another project. I mean, they don't need a big makeover story. They don't need to completely redo the game and then also have a reason to come back in the form of a new story. I think with Baldersgate 3, it's more of a creative decision than a financial decision. Because if they released an expansion for that game, it would do gangbusters, sort of like how Shadow of the Yardtree did. I think there are a few exceptions to the rule of like DLC doesn't sell. And I think Balders Gate 3 would be one of them. Larian, Sven Vinkie, the CEO and creative director on this game, he has come out.

and said essentially, like, we were working on a new Baldur's Gate thing, D&D thing, and we were all just kind of creatively zapped of working on D&D, and we were like, we would just want to do our own thing now. So I think that was the logic behind them not doing DLC as opposed to them thinking, oh, it's not worth the investment because it's not going to sell. I think that totally would have sold. Yeah. Yeah, there's definitely just, there are these sort of different varieties of downloadable expansions. Like there was, and we're kind of at an inflection point, I think. I think that's kind of what Eric is getting at too, is that, like, if you look at

Dishonored, that's another game that had really amazing DLC in the first one. It was like Knife of Dunwall, Bring More Witches. It was like a two-part story. And it was really great. Like it was better, I would say better than the base game. Then Dishonored 2 came out. And then instead of doing DLC for that, they made Death of the Outsider. It was another expand alone situation.

where I think it was originally conceived as a similar kind of thing to the first game, and then they released it as its own game, and it's just a great dishonored game on its own. And that was kind of, that was still that era, like that was several years ago. And now it's a lot less common to see that. Like, there was also the period of season passes for single player games, like all the Arkham games had that. Or the first Spider-Man for PS4, where you would, there was like a whole black cat side quest, or they were kind of like bigger and smaller things you would get. And I think you could buy a season pass for it.

You could buy them a la carte. And then they were all just that, this was a game, Spider-Man was a game. There was a huge open-world game with a huge map with so much to do that I'm sure most people who played that game did not come close to 100%ing it. And then they're like, well, if you want, you can pay us another 20 or 30 bucks and you can get a bunch of like kind of okay side quest that would have just sort of been kind of okay side quest in the base game if they've been included. And I don't know what the numbers are on those, but it wouldn't surprise me if the sales

numbers are not that great and that it would maybe be. who've the developers to just move on and start making something new. So, yeah, okay, so DLC was a really popular thing back in the dishonored days because there was this period where it was like, oh, we just released a game. We have all these people with nothing to do. Rather than lay them off, as we might have in the mid-2000s, we're going to have them all start working on DLC, and then a small group over here can start figuring out what's next, and then people can gradually move on to the next big thing, and it'll be this nice kind of

pipeline sort of thing. that has changed for a couple of reasons. One is that more games are more servicey these days. A lot of games just are getting continual update cycles and content drops that people can drop out, like can move on to when they're done with the game rather than working on the big expansion or the expansion sets or whatever, the season passed. The other is that if you look at different studios, so like Insomniac is a good example, they have a bunch of different projects and development.

so when they're done with Spider-Man 2, those people don't need to work on DLC because they can go work on Wolverine or they can go work on Venom or whatever else they have. Like in development, another example might be sucker punch with Ghost of Tsushima. They are a one game studio, but so when everyone's done with Ghost of Tsushima,

instead of maybe some people go and work on the sequel, everyone else goes and works on this new, this like kind of unique, not-DLC expansion because it's free with Ghost of Tsushima Legends. multiplayer thing that they came out with. Well, Ghost of Sushima also had paid DLC. Remember, there's like that island. Right, it did. Yes, that expansion.

Yeah, you're right. You're right. So actually that kind of addresses the question of like they don't, they're a single project studio. So those people don't have another project to kind of peel off onto. So instead they're working on the DLC legends. And then yeah, you're right. That geeky expansion. And also PC version.

So there are other projects that people can be moving on to these days at a lot of these studios, Noddy Dog, another example. With Larian, I mean, I'm not actually sure what their 700 people are all doing. Presumably, they have things to work on. But, yeah, that problem has been solved to a greater extent of, like, the question of, what are all these people going to work on after this game ships? With Baldos Gate 3, the answer is probably they release so many patches and updates that they had a lot of people continually working on, like, the epilogue stuff and

all the other things without necessarily doing, having to do a big expansion. And so financially it makes sense these days to not be doing these big expansions. Yeah. Except in rare cases. All right, next question. This is from Luke. I've been having a blast with Manor Lords, a fantastic new city building sim that was made by one guy over a span of seven years.

It joins a long list of fantastic games in recent years that have been created by just one individual. Obriddin, Stardue Valley, and Bellatro, to name a few. In fact, it seems that these projects are often more innovative and interesting than their well-resourced brethren. How is it possible for someone working alone to outperform the work of well-resourced dev teams? I mean, this is an age-old question, right, of risk tolerance and creative vision, right? It's sort of those two things, and they're very different when it's one person versus a

large team. And the bigger the team gets, the more the creative vision can be diluted, and the more it can be compromised by a lowered risk tolerance because more and more money is involved and more people's careers are at stake, and so you kind of, those two things move in inverse proportion to one another. And also, I mean, we talked about this a lot on the Stardue Valley episode. These games are not all really made by just one person. I know Manor-Lor-Lor-Lor-It's kind of the illusion of that. Well, except for Stoutherty Valley, though.

But the question, I get the spirit of the question, the particulars aside, like, does whole lot. Is because you have one person whose vision is central to this thing, and then they just hire for, like, a musician to help them. or artists to help them or contractors to do specific work on their one thing. And so then it's just a matter of like, okay, this one united creative vision is present.

And then it seems possible for this sort of almost magical thing to be created because it's like it's the inception of one person. And that's what you're seeing. That feels that creative through line is the thing you're seeing that feels magical, not just the fact that it's one person doing it, if that makes sense.

I mean, there are a couple of cases. Stardu is the most kind of, we talked about last time. Like closest to just one. Yeah. Well, it is just one other than the funding. It's literally a guy. The funding being his girlfriend. But I mean, I don't think we're talking about funding in this context here.

It really is just the one guy. Animal Wall is another example where it was just Billy Basso making that game. He did all the graphics. He wrote all the music, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that like one of the reasons, yes, Kirk's point I think is very true. I think another reason is that it's a lot more efficient to work on your own because you don't have to communicate and you don't have to have meetings and you don't have to think about like what another person is doing. You don't have to be good at communicating. Right.

You don't have to, well, that's why some people do. You don't have to have check-ins. You don't have to have production conversations. I think that like if you have two people or 10 people working on something, you can get more done more quickly. but that production can be hampered by the fact that you're having to constantly communicate and check in and make sure that it's like everyone agrees on the vision and make sure that all of the stuff is up to the quality bar set by the creative director or whatever. So the trade-off there can be pretty vast.

And I think the main reason that a lot of people wind up going and working with other people for their smaller projects is because they are not capable. skill-wise of doing all of the different disciplines, art and programming and design and music and so on and so forth. Whereas when someone is capable of doing all those things, they can really make something special. It just takes a long time. I mean, that's the other part that Luke mentioned is created over seven years. And that's what you kind of sacrifices is if you are doing something by yourself. It's going to take a lot longer than if you're doing it with the team despite that efficiency tradeoff.

These days there are plenty of huge teams that take more than 70s to make a game. That's true. Absolutely true. And that is where the efficiency comes into play on the opposite. It's kind of this shifting bar, I suppose, that you can, that a lot of, depending on the project, you can go in. Also, it can be different levels. Yeah. Yeah.

Man, you guys remember Balatra? How when that came out? Yeah, it was so good. I was just thinking about that game. I think I saw like a funk instrumental cover of the. music on YouTube. And I was just listening to this guy, like, play the music. And I was like, man, that was such a good game. I want to go play ball. I mean, he's going to release some new stuff. I hope. One imagine. I think, I feel like I saw the creator teasing something just this week

about. Oh, man. That's exciting. That's exciting. I'm sure there'll be reasons to revisit it. Okay, Maddie, read us this next question. Sure. So this one's from Dan who writes, your recent conversation about Shadow of the Erd Tree, and specifically about in-game messages, got me thinking about the ephemorality of solo games that have some non-required social aspects. My first full play-through of Dark Souls happened during the period when the servers were down,

meaning I played through the game with no social messages and no invasions outside of a few scripted ones. It really made the world feel empty, and I felt like I was missing out on getting the full game experience. Similarly, I recently played through Bravely Default on the Nintendo DS, a game that has a whole village building and mode and a whole village building mode and summoning mechanics based around the now defunct street pass. Wow. It again felt like there was something missing. I know there has been a lot of discussion about games as a service where there is this impending doom

of the day that the servers shut down and the game will disappear. But I was curious if you had thoughts about these games that are solo with a smidge of multiplayer. How do you feel about this sort of design? Do you feel the initial fun of social aspects in a solo game outweigh? weighs the inevitable server shutdown. Do you imagine a world where for game preservation purposes we could find a way to support these games? Well, and the last question, I think that having other players might be a bigger impediment than server shutdown. Like how many other people are playing Bradley default to the point where you could be collecting street passes. Playing journey on PS3 right now. That said, I do think the social aspects outweigh like that any potential

negatives. I don't think it's worth being like, no, we're not going to include this cool, innovative multiplayer idea because it might not work 10 years from now. Like, I think it's okay for some games to have that kind of ephemeral. You had to be there sort of thing. And that can be all sorts of, that can manifest in all sorts of ways. Pokemon Go might be another good example of, like, if you weren't playing it during the craze, then you missed out on something special. And like, that's fine. It's fine for like, something. to be ephemeral, I think. Although it does suck when, like, you can't play Destiny 1 with Peter Dinklage anymore.

So there are some aspects. Yeah. But that's why the game of service is opposed to the solo game with multiplayer that Dan was writing about. Yeah. I do feel sad about the Dark Souls thing. And it's probably why I never will go back because my version isn't the prepared-to-die edition.

It's the original original version that I'm halfway through. And therefore, I don't have the messages anymore because they turn them off. There's no way to transfer your save between the two versions or converted. That sucks. Yeah, no, I'm sure. I just wasn't sure. But I'm also, like, it probably wouldn't take me that long if I just started a new game. Because, like, what was hard about it was not knowing where everything was, and now I know

where everything is. But do I really want to play through Sun's Fortress again? Like, I just beat it. And it was such an ordeal. Anyway, it doesn't matter. That's not really what Dan is asking. The point is the messages in Dark Souls are really wonderful. and I don't know of a good way to preserve them.

And I almost wish that the game had something baked in that would save them in some way, even though they kind of don't belong to the game. Like, it's not like there's a cop... I don't know if there's like copyright issues with that or something. But I could sort of imagine a fix where they basically take the most upvoted, you know, messages of all time, you know,

in a game like Dark Souls writer, Bloodborn, that's been around for years, where there are definitely messages that have just gotten thousands upon thousands of likes. And then you actually just create an update that bakes them into the game for like an offline mode.

I don't know if they would do that or maybe that's one of those things that's harder than it sounds like. But I could see them doing that just to kind of preserve the spirit of that and you could maybe toggle it on and off in the menu because yeah, I can see wanting to have that feeling,

that feeling of connection to other players, even if it's just players from the past and there are no more servers because no one's online. So when, when the producers on a game team are like looking at the scope and the timeline and the schedule and being like, all right, how are we going to hit this deadline that we have to hit? What can we cut?

I think the things, the parts of the things on the schedule, the tasks on the schedule that are like, do this thing so the game can still be enjoyed 20 years from now, those will be the first to go. Yeah, I guess what I'm imagining is something that they would have, they would take the time or even, I don't know, like some other company could do now to a game like Dark Souls, rather than something they would have done well developed. Yeah, I mean, it's come in and do something like that. There's also, I mean, there's also a practical element of that. That said, I mean, I told you guys a few weeks ago that I've been replaying Final Fantasy

14 with the new character. And part of the Final Fantasy 14 main quest requires you to go through old dungeons and old boss fights that involve getting together with other people. And while you can, the game is active enough that you can still make a party with other people and find it pretty seamlessly, the game now also gives you an option of filling out your party with NPCs instead, which is a cool way of, I mean, that's useful for a couple of reasons, but first and foremost, because if the game ever gets to the point where there aren't enough players to support getting through those old dungeons, then that would be a serious problem because you need to play through them to get

through the story. Otherwise, you cannot progress. Yeah. So having NPCs in there is helpful, and yeah, I imagine they're, you're, clever solutions that had other games that single-player games could do as part of their multiplayer components. But then again, I mean, there are some games that you literally cannot play today. So, like, just filling, when it comes to preservation, I think filling in the supplemental aspects of games that are otherwise fine these days, I think is pretty low on the priority list as opposed to, like, making sure that people can still access games that have since lost all support. Right? That's the important distinction is between something ephemeral and kind of neat that

adds to the vibe of the game versus something that's required. And Souls games tend to, they only make the online stuff ephemeral. It's always just a cool thing. You can summon NPCs. You don't have to summon other players. Being invaded is not an essential part of the game, even though I guess some people would say it is. It's more just about the vibe. Man, this makes me think of the first time I played Journey when I reviewed Journey and I guess like 2014 for Kotaku. I played through it and I, I, I I think I was online, but there just wasn't anybody else playing. So I just ran through that game. Like, basically it was a walking simulator with some light puzzle solving.

Oh, that's so sad. Well, I thought it was really cool, actually. I had a really profound experience with it. I found it to be this, like, beautiful, metaphorical, audiovisual experience, and I really was moved by it. And then I played it again, and people were online because the game had come out. And I found, I rediscovered it and found this whole new way of playing it. So it was actually really neat.

Like I sort of accidentally played a version that, you know, is incomplete. Like it was definitely not the primary vision of that game, which was meant to be this seamless, wordless multiplayer thing, where you're like going through the journey of life and relying on other people and helping one another. But without that there, it actually wound up being a different and very cool experience. So that's just an interesting aspect of this as well, that missing out on those things can actually just transform the game into something that is maybe cool too. That is neat. I didn't even know you could do that in Journey that you can't experience it alone. Yeah, because you could play it offline.

Yeah, you could. Yeah. You could not be on the Internet, play on your handheld or something. All right. Just Kirk, read the next question, please. This next question comes from Bill, who writes, it is a universal truth that double jumps are twice as good as single jumps. It's just math.

I mean, I agree with Bill on this one. Bill continues, if you could pick between double jumps and a single jump that covered the same distance, what would you choose and why is it still the double jump? Of course, that's still the double jump. double jump. It is. It is better because you're covering the same distance, but it's also more versatile. So you can redirect in the middle. Look, I play as a hunter in destiny. I was always a hunter. And there's always the question of do you want the double jump that goes really high or the triple jump that doesn't go quite as high? And the answer is always, I want the triple jump because I want

more control over where I go. So I think that is a pretty straightforward answer to that pretty straightforward question. And also it adds a little bit of like safety to the jump. jump, you don't have to worry about just jumping. Once you have that kind of backup jump, you're like that. Oh, well, it's never really. Yeah, the double jump is awesome. It's why when you're jumping in Super Mario world, you always want Yoshi so you can jump off him just in case and get a double jump as a result. Yeah, of course, obviously.

I think it's also the fantasy because no one in our reality can do a double jump. It's like purely a video game thing. I think LeBron James can maybe do a double jump. I think I might have seen him two one once. Unless you go to the volcano Mount Edna and you get the boots that are buried in the middle that can under the double jump. That might be what LeBron did. That is what LeBron did. Yeah, that's a special secret.

But I think that's part of it is just the idea that it's this special video game thing that you unlock and you're like, yes, this is it. This is my feeling of being more powerful than ever. It's the best. That's why. And just one really long jump wouldn't be the same as that. It's just not. And even better than the double jump is the double jump plus the air dash. Yes, of course.

All right, let's do one last question. This is from Mike. Mike says, I was wondering if you ever find yourself enjoying a game in a way that was likely not intended by the developers. When I was younger, me and my brother and cousins had an unusual way of playing WWF Royal Rumble on the Sega Genesis. We would start a match then immediately get eliminated on purpose and then watch the computer wrestlers finish the match, which would take quite a while. As I remember, we would place bets on who would win and rough house with each other at the same time.

It was like making our own little 32-bit paper view. It was an absolute blast. Later in college, my friend group would play guitar hero on the hardest difficulty by laying the controller down in the middle of the dorm room floor and each controlling just one input on the guitar. These are the kinds of gaming memories that really stick with me. These are incredible.

They're perfect. That's the way that both games should be played. in my opinion. That's true. Yeah, do any of us have any of these? I'm not sure. All of mine are Super Smash Brothers related. So, first of all, all the different ways of playing Super Smash Brothers are now, I would say, enthrined by the developers,

and that they actually have modes in Super Smash Brothers ultimate that you can design yourself. So if you have a weird set of rules for Super Smash Brothers, the game allows you to do that. But in old versions of Super Smash Brothers, that wasn't necessarily enthrined in the game. And so my friends and I would have a variety of different rules that we would implement for the game. I mean, some of them you can do in the game itself. You can set all items to high. Every character is a Pokemon and it's only Pokemon. That's obviously the best way to play.

You never have any idea who's thrown which pokea ball. So you're just avoiding every single Pokemon's attacks, which is great. And like any sort of like friendly fire, I don't even know how to refer to this. Like your own, your own Pokemon wouldn't necessarily be attacking you, but you would assume that it would be friendly fire because every Pokemon is evil. in the scenario, you don't know any better. Also, there's like the all-bees version when they added bees to Super Smash Bros. That's like a really fun way to play.

Beads? Yeah, I will also say, yeah, bees. Job's not on board. And then also in high school, I remember one of my friends had like a couple older cousins who liked to get high, but we were all squares and none of us did any drugs at all. So we did this thing where we would just set our characters to be, NPCs that were up to 10, and we would pretend that it was us playing against these older cousins who would be too high to realize that they were actually just playing against level 10 computers.

So that's another really cool way to play Super Smash Brothers if you just want to take advantage of people because you're too cool to do drugs and you're me in high school. And that's not how it's intended to be played at all. You're supposed to know when you're playing against the computer for sure. Yeah, I think having like house rules is not super. common. When I play like Mario Party on, Mario Party 2 is a common one, but really any Mario Party game with some friends who we play together, we have a house rule that is like no looking at the map, which makes it a lot more challenging to try to find, figure out where the

stars is and stars are and you have to like pay attention to where Toad goes and that's a fun way that's good though. And then yeah, of course, Smash, we in college, we always used to play no items was just our kind of our go-to way because items are too chaotic and we want. Right. We want strategy here. Or we would actually know. Fox only final destination. No, we didn't actually put no items.

We turned off all the overpowered items like the hammers and some of the other annoying ones. But yeah, I mean, Kirk always goes on about wanting multiple difficulty settings. I think that is one good way that you can kind of like. But I don't know if this is ever like unintentional, like the house rules stuff, the stuff that But you and I are talking about any. I don't know if those are ever playing the game in unintended ways. If anything, I think that over time, Smash became a game that fully embraced all of those ways. Exactly.

Exactly. I think maybe speed running would be the closest, but I can't think of any times when I really jumped into like, I'm going to play this in an unintended way. Yeah, I think, I mean, I think this is a little similar to our conversation about cheating where some of these house role situations can then gradually morph into an accepted thing that the developer. start adding to the game. I mean, I always think about Ben Abraham's Permadeath journey through Far Cry 2. He's a game critic and academic who wrote this really amazing series way back in the day in like 2010 maybe where he played Far Cry 2, Permadeh, where he made his own rules, because there was no way to play Far Cry 2 where you don't respond, but he was like, okay, if I die, I die. And then took the game on those terms and then wrote these kind of diary-like blog post

entries as he played his way through it. And it was a really cool thing. I mean, I think I remember like Clint Hockey, the designer of the game, like read them and was really into it. And that's the kind of thing that has become much more commonplace now in games where there is just a hardcore mode or a perma death mode where you can play where your character dies if they die and then have that experience like built into the game. But at the time, that kind of thing, you know, it's a little similar to what I talked about last week in GTA 4, like turning off the map and the HUD to the point where it does feel like this is not what the developer is intended. Like it's just weirdly stripped down and zoomed in and kind of overwhelming. but then that made for a very fun, like, moment-to-moment experience, just having a one handgun and, like, shooting at a cop and running away and seeing what happened. And, like, it was it really, like, I mean, it is playing GT-84.

It's very true to what that game is about, mayhem in the streets of the city. But it doesn't quite feel intended because it's so kind of opaque and difficult to get your head around and kind of challenging and strange. But, I mean, those kinds of ways of playing games, I think, are really cool. Yeah, for sure. Anything that makes the game harder can potentially be really fun. Like I remember when I was a kid, I would play Tetris with a rule that I had to be pressing the down arrow every time.

And I would just see how fast I could play Tetris and still win. Do you get what I'm saying? Like I would just always be pressing down. And then you'd like also try to press over. But I mean, that's just like, that could be the way that Tetris was intended. Just like kicking up the tempo on a YouTube or something. You just want to play it faster.

That's rad. That's hard for it. I mean, it was fun. I don't know. It was really just when you're a child, you only have so many games. So you're like, well, how many different ways can I play the five games that I have? And I don't have any mods.

So, like, all I can do is modify my own ways of playing. That's definitely what Mike's letter reminded me of. I mean, even the idea of, like, playing everyone is controlling the controller together. Like, I can picture it in my mind's eye. It's like, why would you play guitar hero that way? That rules, though. Right. Yeah, that does seem like a great way to play.

Well, and I mean, wrestling during the, like, background, AI fight in a wrestling game. is really good. It rules. It rules. All right. We have like an extra minutes. I'm going to throw in a bonus question. Yeah, go for it.

This is DLC. This is some free DLC added to the episode. A listener named Nick wrote in saying like he finally listened to Blood Sweat and Pixels and he loved it and can't wait for playing nice. So I have a third book coming out that I've talked about. We'll talk about more later. And he writes, Maddie and Kirk should write books too.

We'd love to read Maddie on a history of Metroid and Kirk and Kirk on Music theory of platformers. So I had a question. So I've written books. I have my new book coming out. If you two could each write a book, what would it be about? That's my bonus question. I don't know if it's going to happen. I've certainly considered it and I've even put together proposals, but I feel like I've realized how lonely of an experience writing a book is. And I'm just not sure I have the affect for it. But it probably would be a history of Metroid. Let's let's be honest. I'm a one trick pony. That's probably what I would do. I feel like I would I would have to do, like, a lot of interviews.

Like, I would need to have it be a more social experience because I've, I've sort of realized that's how I work. I really like being on a team and I like not just feeling like I'm all alone. I've recorded solo music enough times to kind of know, like, I like having other people be a part of a project with me. And a book isn't usually that way. So I would probably need either a co-writer or for it to be like very interview-based or something. So wait, so to answer the question, it's symmetric.

History Metra is your answer. I guess I answered the question in a more ephemeral and emotional way. But I couldn't help it because I feel like that is part of what they're asking. Kirk, what's your answer? Yeah, mine would be a music book. I actually have a concept for, I won't detail it too much because it's still kind of in the gestational phase. Oh, yeah, I think this actually will happen at some point. Oh, that's great.

But I'll say that I'm kind of following the Shreier model where... We both are. Well, it'll be, specifically, it'll be, I think, pretty broad. and I like the idea of starting with something broad because it would be my first nonfiction, like my first book. And then maybe, depending on how that goes and how I like it, writing something more specific.

And I think that's worked really well for you, Jason. And you also, when you talk about broad, are you talking about anthology style as well? Yeah, like talking about a lot of different aspects of music and sort of putting them into book form and like being really broad and wide, with a wide range that's sort of a pretty broad appeal. And then later, you know, just be,

like there's a million musical figures. gears or concepts or like stories that would be fun to maybe write a book about. I don't know if I'd want to, but I could see that being great. I mean, just take your pick. But I think I would start with something pretty broad. Or at least that's the idea I've been playing with. And who knows, maybe one day, one of these years, I'll actually announce something like that on the show. But it is something that I've thought about. You should do it. Video game related or no? No, I think it would just be, it would be music. There would maybe be some discussion of video game music, but no, I actually don't think that I would write a book about video game music specifically.

Cool. All right. Well, on that note, thank you to everybody who sent in questions, and we'll be taking a break right now, and then coming back with one more thing. Hey, do you have a favorite episode of Star Trek? If you do, you should also have a favorite Star Trek podcast. Greatest Trek is about all the new streaming Star Trek shows, and it's a great companion to The Greatest Generation, our hit show about Back Catalog Star Trek that you grew up with.

It's a comedy podcast by two folks who used to be video producers, so it's a serious mix of comedy and insight that fits right into the Maximum Fun Network of shows. And Greatest Trek is one of the most popular Star Trek podcasts in the world. So if you're following Lower Decks, Prodigy or Strange New Worlds, come hang out with us every Friday as we roast and review our favorite Star Trek shows. It's on maximum fun.org, YouTube or your podcatching app. from the twisted minds that brought you the adventure zone balance and amnesty and graduation in ethersea and steeplechase and uteruspace and all the other ones the mackroy brothers and dad are proud to reveal a bold vision for the future of actual play podcasting it's um it's called the adventure zone versus dracula yeah we're gonna kill dracula's ass we're gonna well we're gonna We haven't recorded all of it yet.

We will attempt to kill Dracula's ass. The Avengers Sub versus Dracula. Yes, a season I will be running using the D&D 5th edition rule set. And there's two episodes out for you to listen to right now. We hope you will join us. Same bat time, same bat channel. I see what you did there. Break over.

Kirk Maddie. It is time for one more thing. Maddie, start us off. Sure. So Dina and I have completed watching a telemarking. television show called Hacks that was recommended to me by a man named Kirk Hamilton. I'm so happy. We thought I was already watching it and said something to me like, aren't you excited for

season three of Hacks? And I was like, I don't know what that is. I don't know what that is. I guess I am now. And honestly, having watched it, I really don't know why I had never heard of it before. It is incredibly good. We really, we like watched it all in a whack. Like, we got obsessed with it.

And we were like, we have to watch this show every. single night until there are no more episodes to watch. That's how good hacks is. I really recommend it. So this is a show about a fictional comedian played by Gene Smart. And she is like an older woman. She's, what's the name of that famous female comedian who she's kind of used? Joan Rivers.

Joan Rivers, who I did a show with once, I will just say. And she made fun of us on stage. I performed with Joan Rivers. Of course she did. Yeah. A legend, a true real life legend. Joan Rivers, unbelievable lady. And the character, Deborah Vance, is sort of a similar, like, insult comic style of, like, she's an older woman.

She tells a lot of misogynistic against herself kinds of jokes. A long, salty history. But also insults everyone that you can imagine, but also, like, you know, was in a man's world and had all these things working against her. and, you know, has like a crappy ex-husband and list goes on. So her situation is she's, she's been doing this stage show at a casino in Vegas for just years and years and years and years. And it's getting extremely stale. And her team is basically like the show is on the brink of death.

And it's absurd that you're still trying to do live comedy shows. And you should probably just retire from that and just like do infomercials for the rest of your life. And she refuses to. she's like, no, I have to do a live comedy show every night for the rest of my life until I die. And they're like, okay, well, you should probably hire somebody to help you write better jokes then, which I don't even know if this is a real thing that happens or not, but it happens on the show. And she ends up working with this sort of like down on her luck, like kind of older Gen Z comic, who's played by Hannah Einbinder.

And the charisma between these two actresses is just freaking unstoppable. Incredible chemistry. Parts of it that are like a little bit like what you dream would be a conversation between like a boomer and a Gen Z person. And like in the sort of fantasy way of like two female comedians like talking about how different their lives are and how different their perspectives on comedy are. And like the idea of like should you apologize for a joke. That's kind of like what season three is about. But like and some of it almost feels a little surreal. But some of it feels very real and very grounded in the reality of like just work a day comedy writing.

and being too personal with your jokes and like, what should you say? And like how hard it is to come up with this much material and who it's for and like how personal should you be in your act? So, I mean, it's a bidingly funny show. It's a really mean show. The two lead women are absolutely anti-heroens in the best possible way. They're both kind of unlikable but also therefore very likable at the same time. It's hilarious and dark and sad at times and just really, really. good and I can't recommend it enough if you like any kind of anti-heroen kind of a thing and comedy

hacks hacks is what it's called like you know the pejorative that you would say about a bad comedian you might call them a hack it's that but plural and yeah it's really really good I really recommend it's on max right it's on HBO match yeah yeah that sounds right there's a max there's the uh the modern female Walter White and Jesse Pinkman a little bit man I'm so glad that you like that. I love, love, love, love that show. Oh, it's so good. It's so good. It's amazing. Everyone should watch it. It's really, really, really good. Cool. Yeah, great show. Kirk, what is your one more thing? Well, my one more thing is another Brandon Sanderson. It's so funny. You're still reading these. Cool. Oh, yeah, man. He's great. He's so fun. And it was really remarkable how excited so many people got

when I talked about Brandon Sanderson. Like, I got more emails about that than I have about anything in a while. It was just a lot of people being like, oh, man, I'm so glad you read Atlantis. A lot of people actually saying, oh, Atlantis and Warbreaker are like his weakest books. Mistborn is so much better. Oh, it's going to get even better. So I already had, I actually just bought the three book box set, like the paperbacks of Mistbourne, because you can get them for cheap now. So I already had those because I was like, yeah, man, I'd read a big fantasy saga that's finished and by this writer that I've been really enjoying. It's finished.

Oh, I know, man. Very key point. So these books, there are three of them. I read the first one, which is titled Miss Born. They were written between 06 and 08. That dude can write, man. It's really wild when you go look at his output and just how long it took him to write a fantasy trilogy. Like he wrote it in two years.

I don't know if that's actually how long it took him, but something like that. He writes very, very quickly. He's extremely prolific. And Miss Born is one of his most famous books and most famous series. And I got to say, you know, the people who said that it is better than a Lantris and Warbreaker, I see what they're saying. It's a really, really enjoyable romp. I mean, it is just an action-packed thrill-ride, a super fun book.

I found things about Warbreaker and Atlantris that I really liked. You know, I also like those books on their own terms, and they're both stand-alones, where Miss Bourne definitely feels like it's ready to be continued in two more books, because it is. But it's also a really satisfying story on its own. So it is a, I definitely recommend it. I don't know. If anyone out there listening is thinking about getting into Brandon Sanderson, you could are with any of these three books. They're all just total crowd pleasers. They just, they go down

really easy. They have great characters. They're really fun. But I do think Miss Bourne is a really strong starting point. So just to give a quick sort of synopsis for anybody, it's a fantasy story. It's got a lot in common with the Matrix, actually, and it has that same thrill that the Matrix has, basically of uncovering latent powers within yourself. And then being really, really being the underdog, like being super overmatched by the enemy, and then working up and building for a long time toward a confrontation, whereas the audience, you're like just thrilled and not sure how it's going to go because the bad guys are so powerful and scary. In this world, it's like, basically there's like a lord ruler who's essentially, he has like godlike powers and he has a whole army

and these sort of grand, these steel inquisitors under him who are like unstoppable immortal beings. And he just rules the world. And all of this, this whole group. group of people have just been enslaved and are living in like just misery. And they're kind of like separated out from the nobility. They're called the ska. So they play trombone and they wear like Chuck Taylor's and they dance like. Skinny ties. Terrifying.

And a checkered jackets. And to fight them, you have to pick it up, pick it up, pick it up. Of course. Of course. That is the moral of the story. So the ska are kind of like an underclass that is oppressed and have been oppressed for centuries or even millennia for so long that like no one remembers what the world was like before this. And the world is like really like barren. There's volcanoes everywhere and like it rains.

There's ash fall from the sky all the time. And like it's just awful. Like they live this awful life. And it's the story of a group of ska who are kind of disguised as nobility who are all sort of different kinds of thieves who come together to and make a plan to overthrow the Lord ruler, like this godlike being, who is so unstopably. powerful that it just seems like an insane plan and the whole time they're talking about it, the guy organizing it, Kel, one of the two main characters. Like everyone's like, you're going to get us all killed. This is impossible.

But, I mean, what else are we going to do? What else are we doing? Let's just do it. So the two main characters are Kel, the guy who is like a very powerful, missed born. I'll describe that in a second. And then Vin, who's a young girl who's kind of the actual main character. She's the Neo, who is basically discovers that she is missed born and has all these powers that she didn't know about and winds up playing. integral role in their big year-long plan to overthrow the government. The cool thing about this book

is the magic system. And this has been true through all of these Sanderson books. Each one actually has a really interesting magic system. Like in Warbreaker, it was this chromatic aura thing where like colors, you like drain the power from color and use the frequencies of color for magic. So he always comes up with these neat, like hard magic systems where there are all these rules and you really understand how they work. Missedborn's magic is like a showstopper. It's the coolest thing in the book where you ingest small amounts of metals. And each metal, if you are, this is only if you're misborn.

Like if you have this like genetic trait, you ingest metals. And then you can burn the metal it's called inside of yourself. And it gives you a certain ability. There's a lot of dishonored in here actually. I feel like the dishonored writer's kind of read Mistborn. Because you can have like enhanced eyes where it's something you can see. Or you can get really strong. If you burn pewter, you get really strong.

And so on. Some of them are just kind of basic like that. But the coolest thing is, I think it's like steel and iron. And if you burn those two metals, it gives you the ability to pull metal toward you or to push metal away from you. But what that means is like, well, kind of. But then again, not like magneto because physics play a role in a way that they don't for magneto. And it's a really crucial part of how it works. And he's very strict to the physics of it.

And that leads to a much more interesting power set where, okay, so if you want to move around really quickly, everyone who can do this, especially if you're missed burn and you can like do all the metals at once, whatever, all the specifics aren't that important. You carry coins around with you and you throw a coin down onto the ground. And if you push the coin, it pushes away from you until it hits the ground and then you push away from the coin. So if you pull something toward you that's heavier than you, you go flying toward it. If you pull something toward you that has less mass, it comes toward you. So in a fight, that'll mean, like, pulling a guy in armor toward you, and then knocking him to the ground and then pushing off of him to go flying through the air.

And there's a lot of, like, unbelievable aerial combat where people are, like, pulling and pushing metal and, like, flipping around. There's, like, a sequence where a guy is in steel bars and he gets thrown through the air, but he's, like, pushing against the bars to float in the middle of the bars. And Sanderson can write action. It's something that I actually didn't see in the first two books that I read of his. His action sequences are like watching The Matrix. It really, it's like an anime. It feels like you're watching anime where he'll describe these like incredible flourishes of like, you know, combat. And like it's so lucid and clear that you can picture it like very, very clearly.

Like the cool thing that Kel just did as he flipped through a room and like blocked two guys and pulled another one up and like stabbed a dude and like drop the sword and flipped underneath. And you really just get this very. visceral sense of each fight. It really feels like you're kind of watching a movie at times. And I found that really enjoyable. Like I don't look for that in every book that I read, but I really, I was really impressed by writing action, especially as it builds. And it just builds and builds. And then, of course, like I was saying, there are these steel inquisitors. There are these enemies they have to fight who are basically agents from the Matrix, who are so powerful and unstoppable that once it's time to really fight one, you're like, oh my God, like, what is going to

happen? And it's very exciting. So that's just a few stray thoughts on Missed Born. It's a very fun book. Again, the same thing I've said about Sanderson before, anyone looking for just like a very breezy read that's more sophisticated with better characters and more enjoyable writing than you might expect from this kind of book.

Like, it really is a very well-put-together story with good characters and great writing. I really enjoyed it. Missed Born, it's good. I can't wait to read the next one. I might not make it my one more thing, but who knows? I might. He's a very fun writer.

Cool. Cool. So my warmer thing is also a fantasy book. It's called The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman. Hell yeah. I'm psych to read this. You haven't read it yet, right, Kirk? No, but I'm psych to read it. Okay. So this is a new book by the writer of the Magicians trilogy, which people described way back in the day as adult Harry Potter. And this is, I think, could be aptly described as adult King Arthur. And so what Lev Grossman does is he has this, this is a story set in the King Arthur mythology, but it's got an interesting twist, which is that it is about a aspiring knight named Column who goes to Camelot and finds that, hey, actually, King Arthur

is dead, and so are most of the knights of the roundtable. And the people who are left, the people who are remaining, are kind of the dregs, the lowest of the low, and the misfits of this world of Camelot. And then, of course, he winds up on an adventure to figure out what happened, what went wrong, how can they make things? right again. And what's really interesting about this book is that it's got stories about these kind of either made up or unexplored characters in Arthurian mythology. And so it uses this story as a platform to explore a lot of these really interesting characters or Lev Wright, Lev Grossman writes them in a really interesting way. And there are trans characters, there are gay characters. There are

characters who are kind of dealing with repressed trauma and the book explores how they deal with that. And it's, it's really, really interesting. And it's got some really cool stuff in it. It's a very bloated book. It's like 600 plus pages. And there's a lot of stuff that like, I was like, this does not need to be in here. But that said, it's still a very fun read. And you can get through it pretty quickly. And I really enjoyed it. I actually enjoyed it a lot more than I enjoyed the magicians, which I bounced off of because I found the characters to be in stuff. back in the day when I started reading that. But this I really liked.

And it's a cool story. It's got some really interesting characters, some characters who I really found empathetic and relatable and interesting. And yeah, it explores King Arthur mythology in a way that I haven't seen before. For example, Merlin is not portrayed as this wizened wizard who sees the future and helps everybody. He is portrayed as this terrible, like, predator. which again just kind of a subversion on the mythology that I thought was pretty cool.

Morgan Lafay is also portrayed as someone you would not expect if you are familiar with King Arthur mythology. It's also, I think that like it's certainly helpful to read this knowing the names of certain characters are having some base familiarity with Arthurian myth, but still you can read it without that. And I still think that you'll get a lot out of it. And it does wind up getting into, there's a lot. lot of stuff. It's kind of lost-ish in that it goes into the past for a lot of stuff. So you do get a lot of Arthur and Lancelot and Galahad and Gawain and so on and so forth. You do get a lot of the familiar characters just in the past for the most part. So yeah, really cool book, The Bright Sword, Love Grossman. I really enjoyed it. Just be aware that it's pretty bloated and there

might be some parts where you're like, man, I want to skip a few pages here and there. But other than that, I really liked it. Did it feel like there would be more books in this series? or is it a standalone? Totally standalone story. Oh, that's awesome. Oh, that's great. That's cool. And it's very much about, like, it's, they're really interesting, broader themes.

I keep using the word interesting, but that's just what I think of it. There's some really thought-provoking broader themes about the past and letting go of it and moving on and rebuilding the future and what that looks like. It's, it's definitely left me thinking a lot about, about the story. That doesn't surprise me. Yeah, given the way, the, the, during, direction that the magicians goes where I definitely understand bouncing off the first book, because Quentin is such a turd in that book, and it's kind of exhausting. Those books, I think the

next two books become very strong and are very interesting in that they're, like, exploring all these ideas of storytelling and fantasy and escape and what it means to, like, what a fantasy escape gives us from our lives and what it means to, like, let go of something that you've created. And actually, referring to our last week, our topic last week, there's a lot of cartography. And I think it's in book two of the magicians. There's a very great, like, subplot where the cartographer joins his crew and they're like sailing a vessel around and drawing maps and it's very cool that is neat they draw the marauders map no it's an adult version of that it's very adults yeah it shows you where all the porn is

yeah it's funny because the fantasy hoggwards thing or that sorry the adult Hogwarts thing that's mostly true of the first book because books two and three they like leave the school behind it really becomes this like it actually is more narnia it's like the whole whole premise is that like the Narnia books, they're called something else in magicians, but they're like, they're real and like Narnia exists. There is a fantasy world and like magic flows through it and they wind up going there. And then a lot of the story winds up being about like finding the real version of this fantasy escape that you always dreamed about as a kid. And then what it means to go there and like meet the people there and the people who live there

and like how it interfaces with our world. And it like, it stops being like, we're at school, but we all have sex and do drugs because we're teenagers or whatever. It's college. and not grade school. Gotcha, gotcha. Anyways, whatever. That's a tangent. I really am excited to read The Bright Start. I've got a copy.

I'm just waiting to read it. Yeah, it's cool. I think you'll like it. All right, that is it for this week's episode. Kirk Maddie. I'll see you both next time. Yeah, see you 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 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. Send email the triple click at maximum fun.org

and find a link to our Discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artists-owned shows. Supported directly by you.