Triple Click - The Fall of Fallout

Episode Date: May 7, 2020

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You should play Fallout, a video game about what it's like to live in a post-apocalyptic world. Or you could just go outside. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. Today we're talking about the Fallout series, a beloved set of role-playing games that has had many ups and many downs over the years. Plus, as always, don't miss our one more thing. I'm Jason Dreyer. I'm Maddie Myers. And I'm Kirk Hamilton, and here we are.

We're here making Triple Click. the triple the third episode of triple the clicks triple the episodes we'd think three episodes just for today that's nine clicks wow that's a lot of clicks it's true that is a lot I think we should keep doing the show though I don't think we should stop in three episodes we could yeah I know we should have named it like 150 click to make 150 episodes I wouldn't have had quite quite the same ring to it no not really welcome we might make more than 150 episodes can I tell you both something yeah please Kirk um It is beautiful in Portland today.

Oh, it's just gorgeous. Lovely, lovely. Went on a very nice walk this morning. Oh, glad to hear. Or my mask in my headphones and I enjoyed it. Of course, got to wear the mask. Very glad to hear. Today I spend a total of three hours trying to get my baby to sleep,

and that means just standing in place and rocking her. Or pushing a stroller back and forth in my apartment to... Is the heavy rain baby rocking simulator accurate? I guess I've rocked a baby. I should know this. I don't think I played that far. Versus the death stranding, baby. rocking simulator. There are a lot of baby rocking simulators that Jason could rank. Oh man. Yeah. That should be a

ranking. That should be a ranked post at Bloomberg. I don't think any, I don't think any video game has quite got it because babies are all different, like some to end, different ages. They change. It used to be that my baby could really rock her to sleep, but, but now it's a little more complicated. She gets a little more squirmie and a little squirmier, a little louder, a little angrier. man yeah it would need to be a game that iterated on the baby's growth cycle and changed the rocking I don't think that would just be like a so not fun game just have a kid if you really want to do that games don't have to be fun right yeah games can be challenging that's true that's true I just don't know what the appeal would be this is something

like Bennett Fottie could maybe make this game oh that would be perfect getting the baby down get Ben and Fottie on that get him on it get the baby asleep, yeah, that really would be like a quop type thing, like get the end. It's just a futile endeavor. All right, so some vital stuff up front. First of all, thanks everyone who's been spreading the word about Triple Click. I see people telling their friends. I see people on social media sharing it, and that is very cool.

We're a new show, despite being veterans of podcasting together. Triple Click is new. So, yeah, keep spreading the word. Tell your friends and your forum members and your board game group. and anybody who might be looking for a fun podcast about triple click. Oh, and before I forget, I should also mention there's a triple click subreddit, which is really cool. We don't run on or moderate it or anything, but it is a really neat place where people get together to talk about the show. So you should go check that out too.

Just wanted to shout them out, R slash triple click. They're pretty easy to find. And there's some really cool conversations going on there every week about the show. Yeah, please do that. And also, if you're able to afford to support the show, you have the option to do so now, which is a totally, new thing for the three of us as podcasters, you can go to maximum fun.org slash join. And you can join at a lot of different levels, but even if you join at the lowest level, you will still have access to our monthly members-only episodes, which we're going to start putting out soon. And also, just an

additional note about joining maximum fun, you can join and you can just click on triple-click when you join and you don't have to back any of the other shows if you don't want to. Like if you hate them. There are a lot of really cool shows that you can back. But if you really just like us and you only want to support us, that's also something that you can do. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So bear that in mind. Yeah, we're super stoked for all the bonus stuff we're going to put together. And yeah, we appreciate everyone's support since as of right now. Yeah. There are people who signed up. It's so great. It is really nice. Yeah.

As of right now, that's the only way we are able to do the show is through listeners. support. And you can also contact us in a variety of ways. You can find us on Twitter, a triple click pod. And then you can reach us on email at triple click at maximum fun.org. We've been getting a lot of good questions, a lot of good feedback, emails. One thing I will say is I believe next week we are going to take one or maybe more, listener questions, as kind of the focus of our episode. So we haven't decided which ones yet. So you still got time to send in some good ones. It's like a sweepstakes. It's very exciting.

But they have to be interesting, right, Jason? Right. They have to be interesting questions. Let's not start this again. Don't screw around. Send boring questions. Before we get into the show, another quick couple of follow-outs on last week's episode. First of all, so last week we were talking about the last of us two leak.

Since then, we were, I remember we were talking and I was skeptical at the time. After having a hot take about the leaker, I was then skeptical that it was actually like a naughty dog employee once I gave it some thought and wasn't just like reacting to things I saw on Twitter in between baby feeds. And so, so I actually did some research of my own and reporting and digging and talked to some folks and learned that it was in fact a hacking situation where there was a security breach. Long story short, people were able to access. The builds, I'm not sure if it was a build of the game or just footage of developers playing the game. Someone told me they were theorizing it was like people playing a playtest or something like

that of a build from like March or April of this year. So the footage is certainly legit, but it was not a naughty dog employee. As far as I can tell, I've talked to a lot of people about this. There was no truth to the rumor that it was like that Noddy Dog wasn't paying people. And in fact, they actually, a lot of the contractors who were supposed to, whose contracts were supposed to end in March, they were extended because of COVID. And like, so Noddy dog actually gave them more time to get paid, to get paychecks and to get benefits. So good information to have out there. And then the other thing is Ring Fit Adventure, I was talking about last week, and I was complaining

about how you can't finish exercises if you kill someone. Turns out they recently added an option to make it so you can finish your exercise even if the enemy is about to die. So I have changed that set of it. Yeah, I mean, and again, this is also like the gym. You can finish your exercises after you kill someone, which is how it is for me. It's how it is a real life. Extremely realistic.

Man, this game is extremely silly. You guys should see how silly. I hope that one day you're both able to get copies if you want because it's very silly. In the far-flung future. Yeah, maybe they'll update the game so that it can be purchased again. When is back? I wouldn't that be nice. Yeah, that would be fun.

And I believe that's it. Maddie, why don't you take us away with this week's Hot Topic? Hot Topic. Sure. So this week's Hot Topic is Fallout, as in the video game, not the post-apocalyptic state of a world. because we're not going to talk about that. We're just going to talk about the post-apocalyptic video game series, Fallout,

because Fallout 76 recently got a little update that I believe the two of you checked out. Is that correct? Jason checked it out more than I did. I really tried to get myself to play it, and I just couldn't make it happen emotionally. But we'll get to that. I have a Fallout 76 story that I think is still worth telling. But yeah, we'll get there, since that's the... most recent. This series, the first Fallout game came out in 1997 and the second one came out in

1998. 98. Good year. Well, the times that you could get a sequel like one year after. I know. Well, it's because they were both fairly straightforward games, which I played about 10 years after that around when Fallout 3 came out in 2008. And Fallout 3 was not like the previous two Fallout games. the previous two were isometric role-playing games. You walked around a world. You clicked on stuff. You had a bird's-eye view of your guy who walked around. And I wasn't bad into those games, but I remember when Fallout Out 3 came out in 2008,

and it was like a completely different game. I really wanted to go back and play those original two games and see what they were like. What was you guys' experience with Fallout 3 coming out? Well, so Fallout 3, some important context here. This was Bethesda taking over from the previous games that have been made at an interesting. interplay. They were made by Brian Fargo and crew. And then Fallout 3 was essentially a revival of the license 10 years later by the people who made the Elder Scrolls. And the Elder Scrolls Oblivion had just come out in 2006. And that kind of blew people away with its

open world. There's also a lot of history that we won't get into about like how they wanted to do an MMO. But there was a lot of like legal dispute over whether there could be a fallout MMO, which is funny thinking about what just caught release. But anyway, so Fallout 3 gets announced. And comes out and it blows people away because here is this post-apocalyptic open world. It was unlike anything that people had seen before from an open-world RPG. Like usually you would just see these big open-world RPGs as fantasy games. So this was pretty cool and pretty, pretty, it blew a lot of people away. And then for a lot of Fallout fans, it was like, holy shit, they got the tone completely wrong. Yeah. So Kirk, you were, you were, were you a fallout fan or was

Fallout 3, your first entry. Yeah, I guess I can go next right with my sort of history with this series. I think that I played the first fallout, but I didn't finish it. I played some of it, like way back when it came out, only because I was like a PC gamer reader in 1997, and that game was winning awards, and I was very aware that this was supposed to be great. And I didn't play a lot of those style of games. I played Ultima. That was kind of my PC-R-G series, but, you know, I mostly played like, I don't know, first-person games and strategy games and X-com and stuff. So I remember playing it and liking it, but not really getting deep enough into it. So then, fast forward to Fallout 3 coming out, I played Fallout 3,

and I liked it, though, in a kind of a non-critical way, in 2008, I was yet to be working as a game's critic or thinking all that critically. It was like when I was first dipping my toe into that world. So I played it and just thought, well, this is cool because I liked Oblivion as well, which is kind of like I got back into gaming in 2007. I bought an Xbox 360 and I got Oblivion. That was the only game I bought for it. That's the only game you need. It was a 360 exclusive for a while. You couldn't actually play it on PC. I got that and San Andreas. That was the only gaming system I had because I, for 10 years or whatever, some chunk of time after college, I just didn't play video games. So I played a ton of Oblivion, which I liked, even though Oblivion is super repetitive.

and then I played Fallout 3, and I liked that as well, even though it's also super repetitive. And I wasn't totally clued in to sort of what Fallout used to be and what Fallout 3 was missing. I was much more caught up in what Fallout 3 was and what it let me do, which was a pretty cool game in some ways for what it was, even though now there is a much stronger narrative about how Fallout 3 was this total betrayal of Fallout 2 in particular and totally changed things. Yeah, well, but at the time it was really below. because most people... Yeah, so I want to hear it. You loved it? What was your...

What was your history with this series? Yeah, well, so I was... Yeah, I was in a big fan. So I was actually, I got into isometric RPGs, except for Fallout. I played all of the, like, Black Isle Games and Interplay games, the Baldurysgate, Planescape Tourment, et cetera, et cetera. But Fallout, for some reason, just never appealed to me. And then, so Fallout 3 was my first entry in the series, and I loved it. Like, I remember just going through the wreckage of D.C.

And, like, finding all these cool quests, and, like, Megaton always stuck with me that, like first city that you go to. And it didn't, it never really occurred to me that like this was kind of a simplified version of the moral questions and the, the ambiguity of the first two games where you could do a lot more and your story, your decisions could branch a lot more. This was a lot more like streamlined for mainstream audiences. But as a result of that streamlining, it wound up selling millions of copies. And it was essentially the first game like, like Bethesda had been doing well before Marowind and Oblivion. were both pretty big, but Fallout 3 took them to a whole new level.

There are a lot of people out there, and we discovered this when we were first reporting on Fallout 4 at Kataka. There are a lot of people out there who are like Fallout fans and like just play Fallout. It's very much a game series that like has surpassed the level of like hardcore gamer like Marrow and Nerd. And then Skyrim also took that to a new level. You know, why do you think that is? Do either of you have a theory for why that is? Because you can live in it. I feel like now that's what every game is trying to be. But I definitely have multiple friends who just lived in Fallout New Vegas for years and are still essentially living in it.

They're still there. Part of why Fallout 76 is such a tragedy that we'll get to because it clearly is aspiring to be a game that you live in since it's an MMO. But it also lacks the appeal of Fallout New Vegas, which came out in 2010 and which I would say became the game in the series that, that everyone still talks about all the time. But you two may disagree with me on that. I think it's great. I mean, it's a great game. It is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we'll get to that in a sec. But yeah, Fallout 3 was just like, the popularity of Fallout 3, I think, was because it was this confluence of factors of, like, that made it appealing to anyone who could pick up a controller and just, like, jump into it for a few minutes. It's like this beautiful, devastated world.

You can see immediately what's going on. You know it's like a simple story. You got to go out and find your, dad. The intro is really good in the way that it like ages you up through this sequence of events and Liam Neeson is is your dad for some reason. I think it's just Liam Neeson. Yeah, that's the main appeal. People were just impressed in 2008 by Liam Neeson being in a video game and he would blame them. And just the idea of being able, like, you're sent out of this vault and you can just go in any direction you want and just like find cool stuff to do. And that was always the appeal of Bethesda games.

And I think this really took it to a level for people who didn't necessarily want like the orcs and demons and fantasy shit and they wanted to shoot a gun but also they wanted that like immersive giant world of a Bethesian. So then what was really interesting was when New Vegas came out because New Vegas, Fall Out in Vegas came on 2010. It's actually one of the first games I ever reviewed as a video game critic October 2010. For Wired. Did you review? Yeah, for Wired and I remember I knocked it at a point or two because it had like all these game breaking glitches. Yeah. It had all these like I think it might have erased a safe file or something or came close to. I don't. I don't. definitely lost some progress. But anyway, so Fall Out in Vegas was made by Obsidian for Bethesda.

And this is really interesting because Obsidian, their history as an RPG developer, they were actually formed by Fergus Urquhart and Chris Avalon and a bunch of the other people who made the original Fallout games. So this was very much true to the originals, except they took Bethesda's technology and tools and style and gunplay and turned it into a spiritual successor to the old games as a first-person shooter set in Los Angeles. Las Vegas, and it was incredible. That's an incredible video game straight up. So let me tell a New Vegas story, but first I'm going to read the first paragraph of your review, Jason.

Here we go. Oh, man, you found it. Okay. Oh, yeah, I found it. Oh, yeah, I found it. My writing from 10 years ago. Great. Vivid fallout.

New Vegas is a captivating desert playground. I love Las Vegas. Ever since I first saw the movie Swingers, I've been obsessed with the glitz and glamour of Sin City. Wow. I've only made it to Vegas once. Ah, this is no longer accurate. That's true. I've only made it to Vegas once, but my time there cemented my image of the city as a hedonistic playground for adults.

Similarly, fall on New Vegas is a playground for gamers. So the beginning of a very positive looking review here from Jason. Except for the graph where he describes his save file getting deleted. Right, right. That'll be in there. Yeah, that'll take the one out of your sales a little bit. So I, here's what's funny. I was kind of a basic gamer from 2008, 2010 in this way of, like I said, tipping my toe into knowing

things, had been out of the loop for like seven years, was just getting back into this. And I didn't think that New Vegas was good. In my mind, I was like, well, this is the knockoff one. And Fallout 3 was like made by the Skyrim people, or I guess it wasn't Skyrim yet, by the oblivion people by Bethesda. I guess for me, it was like the people who made Arena back in the 90s when I played the first Elder Scrolls game. Was that the randomly generated one?

Yeah, it was, well, daggerfall is, I think that Deckerfall and Arena are both randomly generated. I played a bunch of arena, like when. it first came out and was very funny um that could that's a conversation for maybe a later episode so i was like new Vegas this is a knockoff and i remember starting it and being like who is this like weird like chubby checker dude and like who are these like you know or like frish's big boy and it just kind of the vibe i thought it was weird i didn't like that it got to the action so much faster like so many of the things about new Vegas that people now hold up as positives the fact that it just starts you right off boom in the action you get shot you wake up the guy talks to you and then you're

off to play where actually Fallout 3, like that intro where you're growing up, it goes on forever and it's actually kind of stupid. And like when you replay it, like, there's always mods to skip it. And you have to escape the sewers. Right. Yeah. So it's funny that at the time I was like, oh, this is totally just like this cheaply made whatever. And I don't even think I finished it the first time I played it. And then replaying it many years later, I was like, oh, like, holy shit, this is a really good game with a great story that's actually doing the like branching faction, and like many, many options, storytelling. The faction stuff was really appealing.

Oh, yeah, that was the cool stuff. It's funny that we all associate it with our formative years, which really just shows that we're all the same age. Because, like, I also started my games journalism career in 2008, and I remember part of why I played the original Fallout games was because at the time I was, like, very insecure about not having enough gaming canon knowledge.

So I was like, in order to even understand Fallout 3, I have to go back and play the original two Fallout games. I don't even know if that was necessary or like fully helped me understand the conversations that people were having about fallout games. I guess it kind of did, but not really, especially by the time 2008 was happening, people had totally different standards for what a game should be than they did in 1997. And so in 2008 and up to 2010, like people thought that the new fallouts were the cool ones. Like that's how I remember those conversations going.

And I was definitely influenced by that. And I was like, those old boring, isometric fallouts, those are clearly not good. Which if I played them now, I don't know what I would think. I might think they are really cool if I played them now. Well, there's a series called Wasteland that is essentially those games except for modern audiences. I haven't actually played it anymore. I think they're remastering those later this year. Well, Wastan 3 is coming out later this year.

I played some of Wasteland 2 and it was cool. I want to go back and play Fallout 2 all the way through one day. Just because I've spent a lot of time recently for whatever reason watching really long YouTube videos about Fallout. Interesting. Really? Yeah. H. Bomber Guy has a good one. Maybe we can link these in showdouts. I'll try to find them and give them to you to link and showdits. For other people who have a lot of time on their hands. I can't imagine who that is. But if anyone listening does. It's partly, so okay, H. Bomber guy has a good one. Noah Calderalder-Jervais has a good one.

And I'm trying to think there was another one too. And it's partly because people were talking about the outer worlds, which we can maybe talk about. talk about as a sort of way to tie this all together. But like it was that and then maybe the YouTube algorithm was like recommending me all videos. But watching these videos, especially Harris, H. Bomber guys, really long thing about Fallout 3, it's an extremely convincing and like really well-researched thing that made me be like, okay, I've got to go finally finish Fallout 2 because this game, that game seems just totally fascinating.

If you do, you have to let us know because I'm very curious about what that game is like today. So let me just zip through real quick the rest of Fallout history. So New Vegas comes out in 2010. Skyrim comes out in November of 2011. That's obviously a humongous landmark in Bethesian history and video industry. So Fallout 4 and Fallout Shelter both get announced at E3 of 2015, which is Bethes' first ever E3 press conference. And Fallout Shelter is this mobile game where you kind of build your own little Fallout shelter. And it's surprisingly fun for people, even though it has the whole microtransactions.

Right. stuff. I think it was timers. I actually don't remember what the microtransactions were, but it has micro-transactions. It's a mobile game. Very much a mobile game. Very much waiting and dragging people around and stuff and waiting for people to come to you. And then Fallout 4 comes out. And I believe when Fallout 4 came out, obviously set in Boston, it does some things that are very different than previous games, including the most controversial choice,

which is that instead of having dialogue options, you have like words that pop up and you have four for every, four max for every conversation. and you just pick the word and your character will say something based on the tone of that. It's like a little bit like Mass Effect style. Yeah, sort of Mass Effect-Effect-E. But anyway, so Fall 4 comes out November 2015. I think it's pretty much critically acclaimed, but it's one of those games that starts getting a backlash afterwards

as more and more people realize that like the criticism doesn't really seem to square with like what people think of the game in general, like what the widespread consensus is of the game. having so this is this was certainly true for me and I didn't review fallout for anything I think the main thing I wrote about it was a huge article destroying the user interface as like the worst user interface of all time which um was that was all you wrote about the game just bad and then you pieced out it was like the main thing I wrote about it because that was my main takeaway but I did have that feeling of I can imagine reviewing that and powering through it and coming

away being like well that was like a pretty substantial experience where the act of just playing it as a person who didn't need to be playing it. There's a point in that game in the story where it's just like, it isn't even the big twist and the big reveal. It's just gets stupid and loses steam. And then you're forced into a choice about like faction loyalty

that reveals how empty all of the faction stuff was and it just, it is all dumb. Like people don't behave in like reaction to your decisions in a way that makes any kind of sense. And so I've never, I think I've still never finished it. I would go back and try to finish it. I'm like, okay, I'm just going to do it.

I'm going to finish it. And then they'd say, oh, you've got to go, whatever, clear out three outposts or something. And I'd be like, I don't want to do this. I'm just tired of this. It's not that fun. And I think I've still never finished it. Yeah, I remember Patricia Hernandez wrote a great article for Kataku about how it didn't really feel like a fallout game.

I think she reviewed it for us also. And I think she was one of the few, hers was one of the few reviews, but wasn't like totally positive about it. I think I read it at the time. This was the only fallout game I did. play. So I was like, yeah, I think I'm good. I was trusted Patricia's take. Yeah, you didn't, miss much. One of the biggest problems of it, it had a really cool world. The Boston they created was really cool. It had the, it was the first fallout game to build the crafting

system, which would later come back, which we'll get into shortly. And it did, it did some really cool, innovative things. You could take your dog around and, like, give him commands. And like, there's some cool stuff in there, some cool companions to you. You could put a bandana on your dog. You could customize your dog's bandana. Yes, you could. That's important. It is. Dog and a bandana. It's very important. So if Fallout 3 took the RPGs and made them into a shooter RPG hybrid, Fallout 4 took the shooter and like heavily weighted that aspect of it. And it felt very much like a game where you couldn't really talk your way out of situations

or hack your way out of situations in the same way that you could in the past. It felt like you had to be fighting constantly. And that's what was so rough about it, I think, at least. For me, at least the reason I didn't, I probably played 20, 30 hours of it, I also never finished it. I got to the institute and I was like, man, fuck this. But I wound up getting really frustrated with the fact that it felt like my only option most of the time was just a shoot.

I also thought the dialogue just sucked, but that was also a large part of it. You know, that that was a larger symptom, right? I think that there was this issue of the decisions that you were being asked to make didn't totally make sense or feel like they mattered. Like the decision between the factions, for example, it's just totally this super binary thing. Like every decision just felt very binary in a way that was just kind of nonsense. And looking back at some of the decisions you make in the first two Fallout games, they're much more complicated and they're not easy.

They don't present you with like really clear paths. It's just sort of like the choices you make and there's hidden options you can take that take you to other places. And it just is a much more organic and natural flowing process of decision making that in Fallout 4 it never feels that way. You're either shooting at things or you're just making these really weird, like, strict decisions at, like, right angles through the story. So let's get to modern day time. So, E3, 2000. So Fallout is on a great trajectory. Yeah, we can see.

We can see the path, right? It's all good stuff from here, right? So E3 2018 comes around. Bethesda is, Bethesda hasn't released anything since 2015, since Fallout 4. And they come out and they're like, we are going to do a fallout thing. In fact, they teased it ahead of E3. They teased this fallout thing, and they put out a trailer that made it seem like this game was like a normal fallout game.

Unless people listen to a certain reporter who told the world what it really was. Unless it wasn't until Katakka reported that actually this is a multiplayer survival-ish game. But anyway, so they announced it at E3. It wasn't, it was really weird, though, their marketing strategy, like making it seem like it was a normal single-player game for like 10 days between when they teased it and when E3 came around. It almost seemed like there was going to be backlash to that. Yeah, for sure.

And Todd Howard gets on stage, well, there would have been way more backlash if I hadn't reported what it actually was. Like, that would have been crazy pandemonium. We're still waiting for the thank you from Bethesda for that. Yeah, right. I'm waiting for that note. So Todd Howard gets on stage and he's like, Fallout 76 is a little bit different. Like, unlike previous Fallout games, every character in the game will be controlled by another player. And that's when it was like, like, you could hear the wind go out of the crowd.

And everyone was like, what? Sorry, what? guy in the back is like deflating his pit boy like inflatable guy in the back he's like putting it in his pocket and angrily walking out of the stadium yeah um so it comes out in fall of 2018 and it is just catastrophe after catastrophe we don't have time to get into every single debacle that happened surrounding that game but needless to say people didn't love it at all people didn't really like it it was buggy it felt very lonely a lot of people said because of the lack of NPCs because of the lack of personality.

There were a lot of issues with that game. But some people stuck with it. Some people liked the crafting aspect of it. Again, I think that that whole never underestimate the appeal of like certain types of games to reach outside the gamer sphere. And I think fallout is one of those. So I think even even fallout 76, even despite the critical like beating it got, I think there were still some people playing that game for quite some time.

There still are. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I've seen plenty of takes, and this is from various people. What is like up is not jump on YouTube, I think, had a good thing about this. Like people who have put a lot of time into this game and have very nuanced takes on it. You and your YouTube takes.

That's how I nap. I like put on YouTube video game videos and I kind of fall asleep. Oh man, I should try that with my baby. It's pretty soothing. It might work. It might work. There's kind of a lot of swearing and violence, so it might not be appropriate. Anyways, watching a few of these and like just seeing people talk about their like very long,

engagements with this game, which I just can't do because it's like a huge time commitment. It does seem like there's something there. Like it still has this one thing that Fallout 3 had, that New Vegas had, that Fallout 4 had, the feeling of like lonesomely exploring and finding a cool building with some sort of story in it even though it sounds like Fallout 76 kind of falls down on like actually telling cool stories in that way. And then reading Ethan Gatch's review at least at Kotaku of Wastelanders, which is the new expansion that adds NPCs to the game.

It just sounds like, yes, there are people who now talk to you to give you the quest instead of robots, which is what there were before, but it's not like there are people in the way that people who are looking for something like Fallout 1 or 2 are looking for. There aren't factions giving you complicated decisions. There aren't people like arrayed against one another

and you're in the middle and you have to make your way through this complicated conflict and story. And that's really interesting. It's still just going to empty buildings and exploring them. And like that's, I think, appealing for some people. but that's kind of all it is at this point. Well, okay, so I just want to get to right now because something happened to change Fallout 76 quite a bit,

which is the Wastlander update that one of you mentioned a little bit earlier. And so that actually added, that came out a few weeks ago, and it actually added MPCs to the game. And so what's really weird is what happens now, and Kirk, I'm sure your experience this too, is if you start playing Fallout 76 and you jump in and you start going through the story, it's like it leads you along this path immediately,

that just takes you to MPCs, to the point where it's hard to imagine what the game even was before this. So, like, right now, I've been playing about two hours. I am totally not into it and have no interest in playing anymore for a variety of reasons that we can get into in a sec. But what happens is you have this main quest from before that is like follow the overseer, which is the person who left the vault and you're supposed to be following these traces of her as you go. And that's entirely non-mpc stuff. And then there's another quest that I got that's like, go talk to these NPCs at a bar. and they're like two NPCs standing outside

as you leave your vault in the beginning and you can like fuck around with them and make some decision that has consequences like if you lie to them about not knowing where a treasure is or something. Is that quest called Are you happy now? It should be right. So it right away gets these

NPCs in your face to the point where it feels more like a proper fallout game as you're playing except for all the other people running around. But like it's strange. It's hard for me to even imagine. So I texted a college buddy of mine who was really into fall on 76. And I was like, what was it like before this?

And he was like, it was really immersive. It was very much like, very, very lonely and like in a good way. And you, the story isn't as linear. The goals aren't as linear. And the story is exclusively about like what happened in the past. And it's sold through these audio logs and stuff. And you're basically just go free to explore around the world. But now it just feels a little bit different.

It feels like you have a lot more concrete, tangible goals. My friend also texts to be saying he had just created a new. character to play alongside me but gave up because it broke his camp and he couldn't actually do some stuff and the game was just broken for him. Wow. Could he get it back afterwards? His old camp or is it gone? I don't know. I had a login message when I logged in, I logged in a few minutes before we started recording to just check it out again. And I got a message saying, your camp could not be placed. Like, would you like to go to another server? And I was just like, I don't want to play this video game. So yeah, Fallout 76 is just, it's just a strange experiment.

Yeah, it's just bizarre in a lot of ways. A lot of it is a focus on crafting and survival and having food and water and scavenging and stuff. But like the Fallout interface is just so not designed for that sort of thing. Okay, I have an interface story and that's that I started playing this game with a mouse and keyboard. and the process of making a character was one of the most maddening and weird experiences I've had in a long time playing a video game.

It is nuts. It just feels like buttons are randomly assigned to things so it'll just be like, what do you want to do? Do this thing? Okay, well, I'm going to have to press Q for that but then R for this and then R for that and everything just feels like it's randomly assigned. Like there's no rhyme or reason to it.

I mean, it was clearly designed for a controller, but it was one of those experiences that I feel like PC gamers had maybe 10 years ago when the PC, when PC gaming hadn't reestablished itself as this obvious, like, huge market and people made good ports. I was just totally flummoxed by it. And I made a character. It took forever. And then I was like, okay, I'm going to start. I'm going to get into the game.

So I start the game in the tutorial. And I'm getting a kind of a low frame rate. So I was like, oh, I'm going to go mess with my graphics settings. And I like tweak the shadows and something else. And it tells me you're going to have to restart the game for this to go into effect. So I restart the game. And I have to make it. new character.

Of course. Is there some template that you can select that will just let you start the game? Yeah, and I can just, yeah, and it wasn't that hard to get back to where I was, but this is a feeling of losing my character in the tutorial, despite having made the character was bad, and I don't know whether that was a bug or that's just something that happens to everybody.

But anyways, I, so Fallout 76 to me is interesting because this seems like, I wonder if this is going to be a destiny thing where the more they fix the game and move away from the weird thing that it was when it launched, the more people actually start to realize that there were things about the way that it launched that they liked, like that the game becomes less lonesome. And that was kind of the main thing going for it. And now it feels like this weird Fallout theme park where there's like NPCs that don't really matter standing around all the time. And I guess here's a question I want us to try to

tackle now that we've kind of run through all the games. And that's just sort of like what is Fallout? What is central to the identity of this series? Both, why do people love it? And I know that that's kind of a, there's a lot of reasons people like it. There are probably different groups of people who like it for different reasons. And what, just what is Fallout, I guess? Like, what do you think? I don't know, Maddie, what do you think Fallout is? I mean, I think you already answered it yourself and the reason why it's so contentious is because there are literal different groups of people in different generations for whom Fallout meant something very different because the first two original Fallout games were in a certain generation of gamers who had certain associations

with those games and memories of them. And then I'm sure there were some people who carried over from that generation and liked Fallout 3, even though it was different. But a lot of people I know didn't do what I did and didn't go back and play those first two games, don't really know anything about them, just play the modern era of Fallout. And to them, Fallout is New Vegas, essentially, is the parabola. It is the peak in their eyes. And I mean, it mostly is in my eyes as well. To be honest, I don't have a lot of love for the original, too. I thought they were okay. But I liked New Vegas. I thought it was cool. And I liked the, at least illusion of choice that that game gives you. It feels big. It feels like a big world where your choices matter. And that's

what you want out of a game like that. But then Fallout 76 is like, your choices can't really matter in the same way because it's not a bespoke narrative because it's an MMO. And so that changes the way that nukes work and like battles work and factions, the idea of factions have to necessarily be different because it's an MMO and in theory the Fallout universe could adapt to those things, but only if people act the way that they act in the post-nuclear world of Fallout, which in MMOs they don't, people don't always act that way. People aren't always assholes to each other. And like, that was always kind of the funny problem that I saw people describe the fallout 76 was that like, it turns out people aren't that evil.

They actually just want to build cool campsites and help each other out in Fallout 76 and walk around and find cool shit. They don't want to form gangs and factions and try to kill each other. That didn't really happen the way that Todd Howard imagined it would on stage at E3. And that is what Fallout is supposed to be, but it's like not what Fallout 76 can be because that didn't quite happen. But now there are probably people who like Fallout 76 and like the weird shit that that game is doing because they like building their campsite and like glitching out of the map and like

designing a campsite that can do that and that creates a lot of like fun weird stuff that I know Ethan wrote about a Kotaku a few times. So there are people out there who just want that to be fallout. I don't think they're a minority but they're out there. Yeah, who want a crafting game. Well, I don't know. It seems to me like people who I don't know. I'm sure there are a lot of hardcore fallout fans who are into 76 also but it seems to me like that game, this game is more of an appeal to like rust players or like people who are into survival. Yes, but they're out there. Yeah, those, those people can play this game.

Exactly. Let me put it to you, Jason. What is, what do you think fallout is? Like, what's fallout to you? Well, I think it's a couple of things. I mean, I think it's got it's ironic tragedy and it's got a sense of humor about the apocalypse and it's got, I think you can't have fallout without that vibe of like the 1950s trapped in in time sense where you're like you're going around and you're hearing 50s music everywhere and seeing like those those post-war ads and vacuum tubes yeah it's just got that stuff like sort of retro future yeah yeah and I actually think that's one of the reasons one of the reasons I bounced off the outer worlds which was obsidian's attempt to kind of recreate that vibe in a new setting but I wasn't

into that kind of hyper-capitalistic vibe as much as I was into the 1950s like pastiche style of fallout of the fallout series um but it's also about as many mentioned choices that have consequences and whenever i think about like my favorite fallout moment i think about um as an example that one quest line in fallout new Vegas where you have to go infiltrate this restaurant and it turns out they're cannibals and like or not cannibals vampires and it's like a whole whole quest line but then there's also like fallout three you go into a random house and turns out their cannibals and you discover their secret a lot of that stuff i haven't played enough fallout soon i haven't played enough fallout 76 and where are the cannibals you know what i mean elaborate the cannibals if there are

any of those elaborate quest lines or like choices that you make that actual have consequences but like something that i love about RPGs is like you're playing through a quest and then it surprises you in some way whether because you made some decision that comes back to haunt you later or the quest takes some turn that you're not expecting and that to me was always the appeal of fallout both three and new vegas and that was to me what four was missing in a lot of ways um and that actually it leads to Kirk, I think you jotted this down in our notes, but I want to bring it up as well, which is the game that really captures the fallout spirit today is unfortunately not the out of world. No, to me too. A lot of people loved it, but not to me. To me, it is Disco Elysium,

which is a game we've talked about on the show before. Well, not this show. Right, not on this show. That's true on the previous show. I guess we recommended it. We recommended it as a pandemic game on this show. Yes, yes, that's true. Which is, it's an isometric top-down RPG and you make a lot of decisions. read a lot and go through a lot of quests that are not what they seem. And it's just very much got that kind of like self-deprecating, satirical, very dark humor. It's just got everything that I would want from a fallout game. And really, that could be very easily translated into a fallout game. You had some combat and change the atmosphere a little bit. And it could totally serve as a fallout game. So yeah, that's my answer. Kirk, what's your answer? Yeah, it's along those lines. I think that

the post-apocalypse offers a lot of good narrative, like, stuff to work with because there's no longer a civilization, so you're building a new one. And that always raises just a ton of cool narrative questions. And it's so much more interesting than where it usually winds up in a lot of post-apocalyptic games, which is just you can kill people now because there's no government. Which is basically where they wind up. And I think that the original Fallout games, both from what I remember of them and just from what I've seen, that, you know, that was their thing. Like they were a lot of complicated decisions about people trying to live together, and you had to choose which people were going to, you know, come out on top in these situations. And like that is a really interesting thing for a series to be about.

And then the vibe, as much as it is like the funny, you know, retro future 50s world of tomorrow thing, that was part of it. But that wasn't, as I remember anyways, as defining an aspect of the early Fallout games. It really was. It was like, you're in a weird world that's kind of skewed side. ways. And there are all these brands and like, you know, the pit boy and or vault tech and all of that. But like that just allows, it's kind of a framework for like everything then to feel a little different than just some imagined future of our own world where it became more and more of a

defining element of the games under Bethesda at least. And I feel like Fallout Shelter is actually a really important little like side note in this narrative only because that's the game and there's like a Fallout pinball game as well. That's where it started to feel like Fallout was a brand that just was about that iconography of the little guy and the thumbs up and the thing you wear on your wrist and the suits and the jumpsuits and all of that. And like that's kind of a fracture point, at least in this series, to where now Outer Worlds and Disco Elysium, Discoleism, I think closer in terms of the actual game and Outer Worlds, certainly being made by some of the people who made New Vegas. And I'm pretty optimistic about their next game, even though

I didn't love Outer Worlds. I think they could maybe nail it next time. But it's like other games than Fallout. seem to be the ones that are going to do the fallout thing, the way we want to see it done. Or people who liked those earlier games and liked New Vegas want to see it done. Right. And are influenced by it. And now they're going to take that influence and make something really cool out of it. Hopefully, yeah. Cool. That's a good note to end things on. So why don't we take a little break and then come back with our one more things. Hi, I'm Jackie Cajun. Hi, I'm Lori Kilmartin.

And we have a podcast called The Jackie and Laurie Show. Who are you, Lori Kilmartin? Oh, my God. So much pressure. A stand-up of a new stand-up since 1987. I'm a writer for Conan. I've written a couple books, have a couple CDs out, have a special out. Who are you, Jackie? Well, I, too, am a stand-up comic since 1984. And I do The Road, like a Maniac, and don't have a cool writing job,

but I have four albums out working on a new album. We talk about stand-up. We talk about all the different parts of stand-up comedy. So that's the Jackie and Lori Show, and you should subscribe on Maximum Fun. if you want to hear that. And I would encourage you not to. One, two, one, two, three.

Hi, everybody. My name is Justin McRoy. I'm Sidney McRoy. We're both doctors. Nope, just me. Okay, well, Sydney's a doctor, and I'm a medical enthusiast, and we create sawbones,

a marital tour of misguided medicine. Every week I dig through the annals of medical history to bring you the wildest, grossest, sometimes dumbest, tales of ways we've tried to treat people throughout history. Well, lately we do a lot of modern fake medicine, Because everything's a disaster, but it's slightly less of a disaster every Friday.

Right here on maximum fun.org as we bring you sawbones and marital drill over misguided medicine. And remember, don't drill a hole in your head. And we are back and now, Kirk Maddie, it is time for One More Thing. One More Thing. Kirk, why don't you go for? Sure. First, I have a little update from my One More Thing from last week, which is about puppies and playtesting in the ways that puppies and by my sort of assumption

toddlers or babies are similar sort of play test your house and a listener Trevor wrote in with an email that I just wanted to read he wrote, I am a web UX designer and though I've never worked on video games before I've done plenty of stuff for the web.

Something we often do is what we call an existence test where what you do is you take a web page that has been fully developed and running for a while and you remove a section with that page and you see if it affects performance. If nothing changes in our analytics then we see if we can replace what we removed with something that might be more pertinent to our audience

or just leave it off altogether. We do this with our kids all the time. We have an 11-year-old son and a five-year-old daughter. If they left toys out all over the house for an extended period of time, then we hide them away in a box in the storage room, and we leave them there to see if they even notice that they're gone. If they haven't said anything about them for a year or so,

then we donate them or throw them away. From time to time, they do ask where this toy or that thing went, and then we pull out of the storage room and give it back. I can't tell you how much more manageable keeping the house clean is when your kids have a smaller set of toys that they really love to play with rather than a mountain of toys that gets played with once

and then left all over the house. So I thought that was enjoyable, enjoyable, sort of... Existence test for toys. Very good. Now, my one more thing for this week is two things that you touch to play video games, the thumbstick and the mouse wheel. So on Twitter, people were tweeting

like their hottest, or most unpopular video game takes or something. And game developer and Twitter like power user, Rami Ismail, tweeted something along the lines of, okay, now we've heard everybody's controversial take. What are your most passionately held lukewarm takes? And my lukewarm take to him was that the mouse wheel

should never have been asked to be a button because I think it's terrible. I just don't think that it works. Interesting. This proved to be a remarkably like a real conversation starter for a, it is a lukewarm take. It's just when I'm like, I just kind of think that's true. It's not something that I like feel is super controversial. But people like to talk about this kind of stuff.

So I just wanted to throw out there and I'll actually be interested to hear what listeners think of this as well. Because after I mentioned that, Adam Conover, friend of, well, friend of the show, he's a friend of split screens. He's a friend of triple click as well. He also has a show on Max Fun.

Max Fun, yeah. That's true. We have all these cool people on our network now. I can't even keep everyone straight. It's awesome. So Adam Conover responded to me saying, in his opinion, he's like, the thumbstick is even worse.

Like right thumbstick click is the worst button. And it led me to the realization that I think all the buttons I don't like are things that do one thing really well and then are being asked to also be a button. So the thumbstick is very good at being a joystick, at being a thumbstick, but it's not good at being a button.

The mouse wheel, great at rolling, really good when you need to roll through things. It's so good at that for scrolling webpages or rolling through your guns, though I actually never use it to select my guns in a shooter. But clicking it, you know, it's like your sniperscope or whatever. No way, man. I remap that immediately to something else.

I just don't think that it's a good button. do either of you have a take on this at all? I agree with you about the thumbstick. I really don't like it when a game makes me press down the thumbstick and then move forward to run. I find that exceedingly tedious in every game in which it appears. There should be an additional button that I press to run. And that is my lukewarm take. Well, the run button has always been a tricky one.

Games have never quite nailed that because oftentimes if you're pressing the run button, you have to sacrifice something and either you can't look around at the same time. You can't shoot it through that. Here's an interesting one. Partly under buttons, they're good for that. I always remap the thumbsticks to the under buttons on the controller that I use. It's too bad the next-gen controllers don't have them by the fall. Though you can get the Sony thing that it like adds on to the deal.

Yeah, you have to pay extra. Well, you'd have to pay extra for a controller with those. Anyways, here's the thing. I remember complaining about, I believe this is No Man Sky, where a lot of games they make the left thumbstick, the run, which means that it's tied to your mobility thumbs. because that's how you move. But in No Man's Guy, it's to the right thumbstick. And I remember complaining about that, being like,

this is a really weird place to put the run, you know, command. And someone kind of called me out or pointed out, you know, it's better than the left thumbstick because you don't have to both push the stick forward to move and click it at the same time. You can just be walking, and then you just independently click the run button without moving your hand from anywhere else, like Jason just said.

So I still don't like clicking thumbssticks, but that was an interesting, an interesting thought. Yeah, yeah, that's an interesting. point. Yeah. I'm the, the question of like what buttons should do what and controller layouts has always been a fascinating one to me and I know to you as well, Kirk and I'm sure to you as well, Maddie.

Good, good observation. Maddie, what's your one more thing? Okay, so I played the Sims 4 for the very first time in my life this week. That's awesome. It is pretty awesome. The Sims 4 pretty cool game. I don't know if you guys know this, but it's really good and really funny. Was there something that inspired you to play?

Yes. So I was between jobs for a period of time still am as far as the listener knows. And I'm not going to announce my new job for a while. Well, you have a new job right now, but you can't talk about it. I can't talk about it yet. I will next week. But last week I was unemployed. And that was fun. And it meant that I got to get in some Final Fantasy 7 time.

But it also meant that I was hanging out at my girlfriend's apartment like 24 hours a day. And her favorite game to play is the Sims 4. So I was like, all right, while we're sitting in the same room playing video games together, why don't I branch out a little bit and try some other new things since I have all this free time? And so we did what I think every couple in the world should do, which is create ourselves in the Sims 4 and give ourselves personality traits, which the Sims 4 lets you do. And I got to designate myself as a gamer in the Sims 4. So did you pick your own personality traits and she picked hers? Because it would be kind of fun to go the other way around. Like, you pick hers and she picks yours.

We kind of did the other way because it's kind of like filling out a resume or something where like you don't really know yourself that well. And you're like, I don't really know what traits I should pick. Like what traits do you think I should have? But it can be kind of like a romantic activity where you both pick each other's traits. She's like, well, you're kind and thoughtful and you're so cool. But I can't say those things about myself, even though they're all factually accurate. But anyway, I made myself a real loser in the Sims.

I was a gamer. and there were many comedic instances of me, like, going to her house, and she would, like, want to hang out with me in The Sims, and that I would just immediately trot up to her computer, and, like, my little thought bubble would be, like, a game controller, and I'd be, like, video games, time to play it. Which, given that I had gone to her house to hang out with her nominally, and I was then playing video games at her apartment, it felt very apropos.

That is weird. That's funny. Was also doing that. So, she's cool. If you pick Gamer and the Sims, do you automatically send death threats or do you have to do that by choice? You have to do it by choice.

There is troll tephorums and they spell it T-E-H in the game which I was like, wow, the Sims 4. You're really taking some 2000s slang and just tossing it on in there. Yeah, my Sim trolled tephorums a bit in The Sims and I forced her to apply for a job as a writer. Wow, so you're really turning her into you.

you're grooming her. Wow. She really... You should have gotten, you should have made her be a community manager for a forum. I should have just to punish her even though I would never do that. Yeah, it's a funny game. So yeah, wait, so what do you like about it? And also, how have you never played the Sims until now? I mean, I played Sim City as a kid. Um, I didn't play Sim City. I don't, I didn't play the Sims or Sim City much as an adult because I just don't play that many simulation games. I mean, I talked about that on when we talked about Animal Crossing. I just, I don't really play that many games where you make yourself. or you make a house.

I just don't really do it, but I do think that stuff is cool. And so I'm trying to branch out and expand my gaming horizons. That's great. Here's what's cool about the Sims 4, and then I will kick it over to you, Jason. The cool thing,

I can't believe I'm saying this, but it reminds me a little Far Cry 4 in the sense that you just walk around and weird shit happens to you. Like, funny things happen in the world, and you just have to react to them. Like, people show up at your house and do weird things.

and you just kind of have to roll with it. And there are also all of these like weird events that happen in the game because the Sims is actually like very funny and aware of how dumb its world is. So like it has like the version of Thanksgiving, for example. But like it's this magical realism version of Thanksgiving where like gnomes actually show up in your house and like you have to appease them by like doing Thanksgiving activities. And like I don't know, the world of the Sims is very strange and it's not really that much like our world and you can like try to recreate our actual.

world, but it won't work. And those tensions are what makes the game really entertaining, because just silly things happen and you have to react to them. And I found it hilarious because I had never seen the Gnomes before and was charmed by absolutely everything that happened in the game. And so, yeah, I recommend The Sims 4. Well, this seems like a game that it would be fun to play with Emily. I feel like we're having so much fun with Animal Crossing that I bet we'd have a good time playing the Sims as well. I think you would. I think you would have a good time with you. Well, the Sims, I mean, the Sims is one of those series that has traditionally appealed to women, a lot.

more than your average shooter game. Like a lot of girls grew up playing even if they weren't into a lot of other games. Because it was marketed to them and people will just buy into those gender assumptions anyway. I mean, God knows I did. So one of the cool, one of the reasons that it's appealing, I think to a lot of people, not just men, is that it allows for romance. And one of the cool things about the Sims is that it was like, it was a whole big story back in the day that it allowed for gay kissing. And like they had a gay kiss on. stage at E3. I think I read about this in Simon Parkins' video game book. I think it's called Death by Video Game. And he tells the story. In fact, I think he actually wrote an article about

it too, maybe on The New Yorker or something. He tells the story about this programmer, who was a gay programmer at EA who like really fought to get this in and almost thought he didn't and then it came on at E3. It's a great story. You should go look at this. I should. What's your one thing, Jason? So my one more thing. So I haven't had a lot of time to play video games because even though I am also between jobs, I am taking care of this child. most of the time, and that does not allow you to play a lot of video games, because she is not so young as she was back in the day that she can just sleep on my chest while I play games. She's too old and active for that, but I also can't have her like stare at like around while I'm using screens.

So it's a whole big thing. Even though I've been playing, for some reason I've been playing for Persona 5 still. But I'll talk about that. Another time. My gaming time is limited. So I'm only, so for some reason I'm playing a game I played around. playing a 700-hour RPG. That I've already finished.

But I'm trying to get to the new stuff. So I'm going to talk about that another time when I get to the new stuff. But anyway, my one more thing is a TV series, mini-series called The Plot Against America that my wife and I just watched. It's six episodes long. It's based on a book by Philip Roth

called The Plot Against America, and it's based on this alternate history America. It's set in 1940s, early 1940s, where instead of being re-elected in 1940, FDR is challenged by Charles Lindbergh, who joins the America First Party and becomes this Nazi fascist and makes peace with Hitler. And it tells the story of these Jews living in New Jersey as like the creep of fascism comes in and what they have to do and how there's this rise in anti-Semitism and America first. Relaxed, like feel-good shows.

Super relaxed, super feel-good. Now this show is Ed Burns and David Simon, right? Made this show. Yes. So it's co-created and written by Ed Burns and David Simon, the creators of the Wire. among other things. And it was great. It was really, really good, really well done. Definitely not relaxed, but a good show and a really good story and terrifying in that my wife and I were looking at each other and saying, hey, you know what?

I think we would move to Canada if this happened. But it feels very, like especially in the Trump era, it feels it's very, very disturbing to watch. But good. I highly recommend it. It's really good. And really good performances by a lot of people I hadn't heard of, except for John Chaturro who is in it.

has this great role as like this this rabbi who is like sucking up to he's like a like a an accommodationist who is like sucking up to Lindbergh and things is it streaming somewhere yeah it's on HBO um so very easy to watch it's only six episodes so that's like one of the things that's really appealing about it is that it's super quick and easy to watch heavy watch but hey it's only six episodes so you can take it yeah contained mini series there's not going to be another season. Yeah, it's worth it. It's not, even though it's, it's, it's heavy subject matter, but it's like entertaining and a fun show to watch. Like the wire, it's like you'll enjoy watching it even though it's heavy. I've already been planning on watching it and that's

cool here. It's good. It's good. It's really good. I liked it a lot. Cool. Well, that is it for me. So I think that is goodbye for this week's episode. Wow. Amazing. That's it for triple click. So I will see you guys this week. Next week. Same time. Same time. Same time. Same podcast, same network. Same games. See you both 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 DJ. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network. And if you like our show, we hope you'll head over to maximum fun.org slash join and consider becoming a member. Doing so helps support us and gets you

access to an exclusive triple click episode each month. Find us online at triple clickpodcast.com on Twitter at Triple ClickPod and send email to triple click at MaximumFun.org. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximumfund.org. Comedy and culture. Artist-owned. Audience, audience supported.