Triple Click - Triple Play: Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

Jason, Maddy, and Kirk pull out their spyglasses and zoom in on Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, the remake of the 2013 classic for modern platforms. They talk about the sea battles, the game's gruff hero, and what works (and doesn't work) about this new reimagining. One More Thing: Kirk: Denshattack!  Maddy: Little House on the Prairie (2026) Jason: The Mermaid Mask LINKS: Kirk’s 2013 review of AC IV: https://kotaku.com/assassins-creed-iv-black-flag-the-kotaku-review-1453735783 Stephen’s newsletter on Resynced’s take on the modern day stuff: https://www.gamefile.news/p/assassins-creed-black-flag-resynced-review Background article about the Little House reboot: https://redpopnews.com/netflixs-little-house-on-the-prairie-proves-the-story-was-always-big-enough-for-the-truth-and-authenticity/ Tee Lopes - “There’s A Trick To It,” Andrew One - “Coastline Funk,” Sean Bialo - “Passing Ariake Breeze” - from the Denshattack OST Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

Gather around me hearties and hear the tale of the pirate trio that learned the ways of the assassin. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week we talk about Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, the remake of the 2013 game that blends Hidden Blade Stealth with high seas ship combat and pirate vibes. I'm Maddie Myers. I'm Jason Shrier. And I'm Kirk Hamilton and hello. Hello. You are you maidies.

Yoho. What did you just call me? A matey, a fellow mate. Loose the royals in the tops. There's a lot of a pirate jargon that goes far beyond my typical go-to pirate jargon in this game. I was reacting to Yo-ho. Oh, well, yeah, that's true. I guess, hmm, I guess Yo-ho could be interpreted in a variety of ways, but I meant it in the kindest sex-positive, sex worker-positive possible way.

way. Welcome back to Triple Click. Yoho's parentheses, complimentary. Yeah. This is yet another episode of our wonderful show, which as we all know, I start off by saying, yo-ho, you made these every single week. This week is

no different. And also every week, we talk about the fact that we are a show on the maximum fun podcast network. A network we love very much. And if you want, you can become a member and support our show. We're listener supported entirely. You go to maximumfund.org slash join. And if you were to do that,

you would get our wonderful monthly bonus episodes. You'd get the entire backlog, a full cash, a treasure chest, if you will. Lute, I guess is what we would call it in the context of this game. You get a tunnel loot. You would get our most recent episode, which is a beans cast. We spill the beans about 007 first light, really fun game that we all enjoyed. And the next one that we're about to record and release is going to be about the movie, The Odyssey, which we have all already seen, but have yet to discuss. I'm very excited to spoil the Odyssey movie and spoil the Odyssey, the epic poem and talk all about it with you guys and really cool adaptation. So that's Maximum Fun.org slash join to go and support us and get all of those sweet, sweet bonus episodes. But we've also got some of the

something cool coming up right here on the main feed. So we do an annual bet, a predictions bet. We all try to predict what we think will happen in the coming year of video games. And this past year, Kirk won the predictions bet, which means he gets to make me and Jason play a video game. And we are going to play a game called Soma. It is a very cool game that I played at the time, but haven't played in a long time,

science fiction spooky game. We're all three going to play it, and we're going to spoil it because it's not super long. Kirk, how long is it? 10 hours? 10 to 12 hours is my memory of it anyhow? Maybe longer if you take your time. When you keep saying that we're going to spoil things, it sounds like we're just going to ruin these games. But we're going to talk about them in depth.

We're going to discuss the game in depth, and we're going to fully analyze the entire plot, which I will say has several twists and turns that are really cool. And that is something about the game. And also we're going to spoil them like Taylor Farms lettuce. If you thought you liked this game, you're not going to like it by the time you're done listening to us talking about. No. This is my spoilers is actually a terrible term for what it's describing. Beans.

That's why we spill the beans. We're going to spill the beans on the story, among other things. We're spilling the beans and they will be completely healthy nourishing beans. And anyway, we're going to do all of that in the main feed for our August 13th episode. And the reason we say all that is because, hey, why not play Soma along with us? check it out, enjoy it. And then you can tune into that app and have your own thoughts. You can shout them at us as we analyze the game. You can participate right along with us. Okay, that's enough preamble. Kirk, what are we talking about today? Today we're talking about Assassin's Creed Black

Flag Resynct, which is not called Assassin's Creed for Black Flag Resync. It's just Black Flag Resinct. This is the remake plus, according to our spectrum of remakes, the remake of Assassin's Creed for Black Flag, a 2013 pirate-themed Assassin's Creed game that Ubisoft has just recently put a fresh coat of paint on, really more than a fresh coat of paint. They've added a bunch of stuff. They've really spruced it up and re-released it into the world. We've been playing it, and now we're going to talk about it. So let's talk about it. We've all been playing this game for it. for a little while now. It's been out for a bit. I'm sure a lot of our listeners have played it as well. How are the two of you liking it? Jason, how are you liking returning to Assassin's Green Black Flag?

So, I have maybe a controversial take here, which is that I really like the game until you get on a boat and have to sail around and do ship combat, which I know a lot of people like, and I really do not. To me, the ship combat is very, really slow and meandering and clunky and not fun and just feels that you're kind of just going through emotion rather than making interesting decisions. Whereas the other parts of the game where I'm sneaking around and climbing and parkcoring and fighting enemies of the new combat system, love all that stuff, good stuff. But when they put me on a ship, I get a little bummed out. That said, I enjoy it. It's cool. It's fun. I enjoy that the subtitles all have randomly capital nouns, which I suppose is the style of English writing at the time. Not randomly because, yeah, it's on purpose.

But there are quite a few capitalized nouns. It seems random to the modern reader, I suppose. Yeah, it definitely threw me off at first until I was like, oh, this is an artistic choice for capitalizing nouns because it's the way that people wrote back then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's funny. No, I like a lot of this game.

I just don't like the ship combat and there's so much of it. And I don't like the sailing in general. and there's just so much of it. I think in general, I just don't love sailing in games. It just feels very clunky to me. So maybe it might just be a me thing because I know a lot of people like it. But got to be honest here on Triple Click. Yeah, Maddie, how are you liking it?

Well, guess what? I like the ship combat. So debate time. Let's freaking go. Jason and I are squaring off. I'm throwing cannons at his ship. He's not enjoying it at all. I do like the ship combat in this game.

I will say this is my first time playing Assassin's Creed Black Flag in any iteration. So I was wondering about that. I do not have the context for what is different, and I'm curious about it. I imagine that perhaps you two have played it, so you have a sense of that, and we'll get into it as we go. I got to just enjoy this totally new, which I think is also part of the intention of putting it out, is that people, not everyone played it at the time, although it's pretty beloved. This is the pirate game. I think I would have really dug it when it came out.

I like pirate stuff. I'm a simple woman. I enjoy pirate things, sea shanties, and swashbuckling. I would say the thing that I struggled with in this game, I agree with Jason. I like the regular combat on land. All of that is really fun as well. I think it's very cool. But the protagonist takes a very long time to get around to being a good person.

And that is the narrative arc of this game. But he is pretty unlikable at the outset. And I did not expect that. But I eventually, very eventually warmed up to him. But he really takes his time on deciding that maybe he is going to be a good person. When did you warm up to him? Do you remember? Was there like a specific moment?

I don't know. I think it was mostly just that I got used to him. I appreciate that he has this friendship with Ade Wale, who's his quartermaster. and who is this Trinidadian black man and has this whole experience on the ship of being like, I am in this sort of egalitarian pirate situation that respects me as a person. And that friendship between them was part of what really endeared me to Kenway Moore. But probably up until they started having conversations about that,

I started being like, what is good about this guy? Like, why does anyone like this character so much? People really love him. I don't know if you two are aware of that, but this is definitely one of the characters of Assassin's Creed lore where people say, Edward Kenwe is their favorite assassin. He's a wife guy.

People like that. He is a wife guy. It's true. That's one of his few good motivations other than money, which is his chief motivation for the first act of the game. Yeah, let me think about that for a second. I want to talk about Edwards some more. I guess just to give my background and what I think,

of this game very briefly. So I have played all the way through Assassin's Creed for Black Flag, and I reviewed it actually for Kotaku back in the 2013. This was right at the cusp of the PlayStation 4 generation. So I reviewed it on PlayStation 3, and I remember going to Ubisoft headquarters. They had a press area in San Francisco. And I went there, and I played a little bit of it on PS4 to see, oh, look how the underbrush moves and is animated on PS4 because there's more physics. Look how beautiful the rain looks in HD and the lighting. Those particle effects. The PS4 era.

The power of the PS4. Yeah. PS4, yeah. So I reviewed this game. I'm very familiar with it. And in fact, have replayed it at some point. I replayed, not the whole thing, but I replayed the first chunk of it. Right up until I got to where it becomes less fun and was kind of reminded, oh, yeah,

older Assassin's Creed games were kind of tedious and stopped. Because I do really like it. I think it's just a very... Yeah, where do you think it becomes less fun? It becomes less fun the minute you have to do a tailing mission where you're eavesdropping on people. In the original version of this game, they were still quite enamored of this terrible type of mission where you would have to stay within a circle around two guys while they have a conversation while parkoring the controls notoriously unreliable.

If you get spotted, you fail the mission. There were a lot of these sort of follow missions and also follow an eavesdrop missions. And I think I just did the third one within a couple hours and was like, oh, this is so tedious and kind of lost momentum. But I find this is just, it's such an appealing overall vibe, the way it looks, just the being in the Caribbean, the kind of high fidelity monkey island, you know, nighttime palm trees, monkeys in the trees, a small village lit by torchlight, that feeling that this game gives is just wonderful.

and it's a nice place to be. And I'm really enjoying re-synct as well. I have a lot of particular thoughts and critiques and whatever. Let's talk about Edward a little bit more, though, because I think that that's very interesting. It kind of situates us a little more, or it's helpful to situate him in the Assassin's Creed lineage. Because I'd say, of the three of us, I am by far,

or I am the biggest fan of this series. I've played like every game. Our former boss, Stephen Totillo, and I would talk for, hours about Assassin's Creed. The two of us in Luke Plunkett, who's now at Aftermath, actually, the three of us were like, total Assassin's Creed sickos

and spent much, much time talking about the series. And this game was right at the height of that. I mean, this is after Assassin's Creed 3, you know, it was this period where just Assassin's Creed was popping off. There was so much going on. Assassin's Creed 3 liberation had come out.

The one starring Avaline, Freedom Cry would come after this. Assassin's Creed 3 was also really noted. And let me start there. So Assassin's Creed 3, if you remember, stars Connor, who is half, I think, English, half Native American assassin. And it tells an American story, which was a big deal for this series. Because originally, you know, it was all set in the Middle East and then in Italy. So first it's like, the very first one is set in, I think, like Jerusalem and a couple of other cities around the Middle East.

And then we get the Etzio trilogy. And Etzio, it's surprising that when you say there may be people who. I think that Edward is their favorite. It's Etsio. It's Etsio. I think he's like the cool guy answer to the question. Like, Etzio's like everyone says Etzio, but then Edward is like somebody else who comes up a lot. Maybe.

I can't really imagine why someone would say that. Because, yeah, like, Etzio is the character who was, he kind of proved, okay, if Assassin's Creed has a likable protagonist, then suddenly it becomes something much more. And that's kind of what Assassin's Creed too brought that Assassin's Creed one didn't have. And he punches the Pope. And then he punches the Pope. So following Etzio was a lot of fun because he was just a very charismatic lead. He went on a whole journey by the end of his story and people were really attached to him. Connor was a poor substitute.

There was a lot of interesting stuff in Connor's backstory and making a character, you know, had these sort of two ancestries that are in conflict and especially like exploring the plight of Native Americans under colonists in America. Like that's all really interesting stuff. And Assassin's Creed likes to get into that kind of thing. But Connor, as a character, was just like a bummer. He was just kind of didn't emote a lot and just was not very charismatic. And so that was kind of where they were at at the end of Assassin's Creed 3. The game had a lot of other problems, a lot of major design problems, in my opinion, the stealth was not very fun.

It had just a lot of the systems that they were still using that they'd been using for so long had run their course. And it needed something new. They needed to figure out how to make these games feel more modern, how to make them more fun, because it wasn't 2008 anymore. Like we were in an era where there were lots of open world games with like better combat and better stealth and like everything just kind of worked better.

And Assassin's Creed was still figuring that out. This game, Black Flag, was where they figured a lot of that out and it seemed like, okay, we can actually really blow out the idea of what Assassin's Creed game can be. We can make it a pirate game where you're in the Caribbean.

You can be a completely different kind of character doing all kinds of different kinds of stuff and they also refined the combat. They refined the stealth, which they've done again in re-synced because now if you play, you know, Assassin's Creed 4, it doesn't feel refined. It feels old-fashioned.

So then that brings us to Edward, who I like as a character only because he's so flawed. I was really struck by it this time. He's a real cat at the beginning, just an asshole. Like, he's totally out for himself. And then his story is one of, you know, discovering a greater purpose. And he kind of, for anyone who hasn't played the game, he's just a kind of a pirate, basically.

And he winds up coming up against a corrupt assassin who is in the process of selling the assassin's secrets out to the Templars, who are the longstanding sort of the specter to the assassins' MI6, I guess. They're the kind of counterpart organization. And this conflict between the Assassins and Templars has always been kind of confusing because they're both like, I want people to be happy and free. And you're like, wait, can one of you just be obviously evil? Like, why does it always have to be so confusing? But that's just how this series works.

Anyhow, he meets an assassin. He kills him and takes his robes and then pretends to be an assassin. And for a lot of the first part of the game, he's just pretending to be a member of this order that if you've been playing the games up to this point, they've always been the good guys. You've always been on their side. I kind of like that a lot,

especially because he does grow and has some really wonderful moments toward the end, especially as you realize that he has a stronger character than he seems at the beginning. He is actually more, he has a little more going on. He is an upright and good person. And he gets some really wonderful stuff at the very end, too. Yeah, I mean, I can tell that I'm growing to like him. And I think it's also pretty bold, actually, to have a story where a character starts out unlikable,

even if you understand why he does what he does. And it's clear that the assassin robes that he's stealing, like you understand that that guy is also bad. It's all in the context of you're rooting for this character. But I do think that that's part of why the game is meaningful for people. It's because this is a character who has an arc over the course of the game. They grow. They learn. They change. Like that is at least when does this game come out, the 2010s?

Like this was pretty innovative for the time to have a story where a character is actually going through that much. and they're making the player take a chance on them for several hours at the outset of him being like, I'm only in it for myself. And you, the player, are like, really? How long is this going to go on before he kind of comes around and realizes that maybe there's more to life than just materialism? Yeah, I've been struck by the writing in this a lot more than I was the first time. So this game was the lead writer in this was Darby McDevitt, who is a longtime Assassin's Creed writer. I've actually gotten to no Darby over the last 10.

10 or so years, a really interesting guy and very knowledgeable and interested in the English language and the literature of this time period. He also wrote Assassin's Creed Valhalla. That was one of his other big ones. He's got writing credits, I think, on other games, but Valhalla was a big one. And if you remember from that game, it may have been the Viking Assassin's Creed, but really it was the, you know, Dark Ages England, like kind of that. It was more about England than it really was about, like, Scandinavia.

and he's very interested in all of that. And I'm just more struck by how much fun they're having with the language in part. Just the dialogue is a lot of fun. There's so much good slang and just like ship lingo that I am enjoying a lot more this time. And just the dialogue in general, I think it really has a great flow to it. And then like you said, Maddie, yeah, some choices in the narrative as well are really cool. Yeah, it also does the thing Assassin's Creed games do that I enjoy very much, which just include the actual historical figure.

of the time. And we talked about our flag means death on this show a while back. And I didn't really know that much pirate history specifically other than just sort of generally thinking pirates are cool until I watched that show and started doing the Wikipedia deep dive on all the actual pirates in that show who all have really cool lives and histories. And then seeing them show up again in this game was really funny because I was like, oh, these are completely different, but also not that different interpretations. When he showed up, I was like, oh, right, because I, it's similar to you, watched our flag means death and was like, oh, this guy, oh, it's Steed Bonnet.

Oh, that totally makes sense. It was great to see him again. And I can't remember the name of that actor who plays him on our flag means up. He's constantly in Tyco. Is that his name? Rees Darby, I think. Reist Darby, so I've got it back. And he's hilarious and I definitely was like, they should just have gotten him to play the role

in this one because, like, it would have been really funny if he was just the voice actor for it. Yeah, I wonder if Rees Darby. B. played this game. This is also where I get to mention, by the way. I think I've mentioned this on the show that I am distantly related to Edward Thatch, aka Blackbeard, the pirate.

Oh, that's cool. The teach slash thatch lineage is like, is connected to me. So I am in some ways related to him. And it's nice to see it in this game. He was a pirate, but he was, he acquits himself okay. Yeah. How some other pirates said. But are you related to Alexander Hamilton?

That's the real question. No, I am not. That's a different. Hamilton line. So there's a lot of new stuff in this. It feels to me, I played the original also, although I barely remember it because I haven't played it since. I played, it was like the first game I played on my

review unit for the PlayStation 4 back in the day. So I haven't played it since November of 2013. But that said, the combat feels a lot more modern. It feels like, to your point that you made earlier, Kirkuk about them just kind of revamping things.

It seemed, correct me if I'm wrong, but the whole skill system in the bottom right, seems like it's totally new and there's a lot of it that seems very new. And I really like the changes that they made and the kind of the way it feels, definitely feels a lot more elegant than what I remember from older Assassin's Creed games. And then on the flip side, I like that they kept the kind of old school parkour system of not being able to just kind of magnetize to everything you see and having to find actual climbing paths, which are often very easy to find and very visibly apparent.

apparent, but still better than the more modern Breath of the Wild style approach when you can just climb everything you see. Yeah, to the combat first, it is revamped pretty significantly. And for the better, it's just a much more modern feeling system. I don't love it. It's not as fun as something like Shadow of Mordor or certainly Batman, the Arkham games, which were out at the same time as these. And even at the time, we're kind of, you know, I think the Assassin's Creed games kind of paled in comparison. It doesn't have the snappy rhythm of those because I think it's still a kind of hybridized system, but they've moved way more in that direction. So you're parrying, you know, you're attacking with the shoulder buttons. So it's closer to something like the later games,

you know, Origins, Odyssey, and so on. And it just has that kind of a feeling. It's a little rubber bandy. I find that enemies hit me. I just can't quite lock in on it. And it just can't. And I don't think it's a me problem. I think it's just what they're working with. They can't quite get it to where a game like, you know, an Arkham game or something would be a game with really punchy, responsive combat. But it's definitely better.

And I agree that quick attacks, like quick firing your pistols is really fun. Or they give you the rope, like there's a kind of a rope attack that you get way later in the game originally. They move that way up so you get it super early. And that's really fun in combat because you can like grapple guys and pull them to you. Or you can just spam smoke grenades and assassinate everyone around you. which is what I do a lot, just to kind of bypass. That's the way to go, yeah.

So, yeah, I think the combat is definitely improved. Maddie, have you been finding the fighting? I really like it. I was a little put off by how long it takes before you get any ranged attacks. I really like that rope weapon. So it's interesting that they moved it up closer because it's so satisfying.

But also the blow dart, I was like, finally when I got that. Because up until that moment, I was like, wow, I've been spoiled by these modern Assassin's Creed games where I have some sort of long-range weapon fairly early on in the game, and I don't have to just really sneak around. But I think that just speaks to the lineage and where the game was at the time and how it was probably more focused on just manually sneaking up to people,

using smoke bombs, and probably prioritizing stealth ahead of any other weapon, right? This one was, the earlier games actually had ranged attacks. There were ways you could kill guys at range that ETSO could this was a little more notably close range than, you know, Connor had a bow and arrow. Okay, that makes sense. Like there were more ranged weapons. And like Etsy, he had like a kind of wrist crossbow that he could use to pick guys off.

So this is a little, it does bring things in closer and it's more about coaxing guys to you, like when you're sneaking than about picking them off at range until you get the blowgun and start to be able to manipulate the AI a little bit more from it. That was like, okay, now we're in an Assassin's Creed game, at least in my view, where I was like, now I can, I have a, a bigger suite of options to kill or put to sleep, various guys in a given area. Up until then, I would often feel like I didn't have great control over when people didn't see me. And that's not really a flaw, though. I think it is also pretty fun even when you do get discovered because the sword combat

is fun enough that I was never too irritated by it. And they don't put so many guys in any given area that if you're discovered, it's completely impossible. to get out of it, which I think is a tough balance to strike. Yeah, we talked about this not too long ago, but the big difference between this and the more modern Assassin's Creed games is that you can insta-kill, assassinate anybody in this game. Yeah, which rules.

Yeah, it's a much different feeling. It feels like in the more modern games, because they have those big beefy dudes and boss types, you can't just insta-kill. That changes the rhythm a lot. You have to get into combat. You can't just sneak around. It's funny how there will be, you know, enemies, like the cats.

captain of the ship is this boss that you have to fight. And if you get in agro, like if you agro him and get in a fight, there's a big health bar like it's a fight. But if you just assassinate him from the, you know, the riggings, it's just over. Yeah, I thought that was hilarious because I, there's one of those very early in the game where I kept doing the health bar thing and I was like, this is actually really hard. This guy's entire crew is trying to kill me. And how am I going to kill this guy? He's got like the biggest health bar. And then eventually I just was like, can I just assassinate this guy? And then I was like, oh my God, I can't.

Whoa, what? That's amazing. This game is just going to let me sneak up behind this man and kill him. And the fight is already over, which I think is great because it's really encouraging you to take advantage of that rather than going in guns blazing, sword swinging. Yeah, I like it too. I don't see why they had to move to a, to an RPG system just because this is fine. Like if you're clever enough to get close to the guy, why wouldn't he die if you stab him

in the neck with your hidden blade. I want to go back to something you said, Jason, about the parkour, because that was such a big part of this series leading up to this game. Well, leading up to Assassin's Creed 3, I guess. And I still am struck by some of the animations in this game that they added for 3. There's a really cool one where when you're up in a tree and you go around the trunk of the tree, Edward kind of like does this really slick move around the trunk of the tree. He can jump through, you know, the crotch of two trees.

it splits and he does a really cool kind of animation. There's no better word for it for it. That's what it's called. That's just what it's called. So those moves are all Connor animations. And Connor had really cool animations. That was a big thing in Assassin's Creed 3 because in Assassin's Creed 3 quite a bit of what you were doing was you were traversing the frontier.

You know, you were in the trees. The idea was he was kind of, he grew up in a small village and was like fighting colonial soldiers who are moving through the forests of New England. So here, it's kind of similar where there's a lot of jungles, and Edward is like jumping through trees and climbing up in the trees. There's not as much parkour in cities just because none of these cities are that big. I think Havana is the biggest city, and it's, you know, feels kind of big, but it's nothing like Ferenze or any of those huge, the Vatican, like these giant Rome, you know, in

Assassin's Creed 2 and the Eziot games. It's not even close. So then they need to kind of work the parkour system into this very different game. A lot of what you're doing is climbing the riggings of ships. And I like how they've done it. It's still a little bit awkward, but it's much better than it was. Like you said, Jason, you can't just climb anything. So sometimes you're trying to get to a vantage point and you have to actually figure out how to do it.

But what's nice is, man, the old control scheme for Assassin's Creed was this really experimental thing, where you're using the triggers to run. and then in the first one it was all about like the head and the arms and the feet I think where like the triangle was the head and the square and circle were the arms like it was supposed to like

It was designed by Benefadi represent the body yeah it was very it felt very experimental and then you would just kind of drive I'll tell your Etsyo up a wall and kind of hope he goes in the right direction then I think it was in unity

I may be wrong about this but I think I'm remembering correctly they introduced the idea of an ascend button and a descend button, which is where you press X and you'll basically go up. And then you need to get down, which was always a problem in Assassin's Creed, you would have climbed up and then you'd be like, okay, I want to go down this wall. And your guy would just take a flying leap off of a skyscraper and like land in the road. There's just a convenient hay b-bail. And there's just hay bales, though. And he would just jump into the middle of the road while the guy he's trying to kill his looking right at him. So

there was a lot of awkwardness with getting down. Now you can just hold the circle button or the B button and he'd go down. And that was kind of a later series, invention that they've brought in here. This is a good hybrid version. I do sometimes miss the ability to just climb cliffs the way that you can in later games just because I'm like, I don't want to go around. But then when I think about it, it's actually kind of nice to have to look at the environment and think about where I am. Yeah, you have to actually, the funniest animation will always be. And I think this is an older one, but it will always be when you are standing, you are climbing up a tower or something. And there's a giant scaffolding above you and somehow you fling yourself backwards and up at the

same time. The most outrageous free solo move ever. It is ridiculous. And I remember this from like the old school ones too. I feel like that one has been around forever. And it makes no sense, but it is just persisted within Assassin's Creed. It's so funny. Yeah, it is very funny. Yeah, you kind of have magic climbing powers. I feel like that was something I did have to get used to because the climbing feels almost exactly as good as a modern day Assassin's Creed. But then every now and then I would hit something and be like, why can't I climb this? This actually looks. climbable, but that's just my modern sensibilities talking, I guess. Yeah, I do dig climbing in the ships. It takes a little bit of pausing and thinking. Let's talk a little bit about the ship-to-ship combat, because like you, Maddie, I like

it, I think it's fun. I mean, I have no problem with it. It's a little bit awkward. Yeah, I can understand not liking it, even though I do like it. I like it just fine. I think, like, once you're upgrading and you're getting into these mega battles, like, later in the game, there are these, I don't remember

what they're called. They're like super ships that are at the corner of the map. This is a system they've actually carried on in subsequent games where there are these roving mega bosses that you have to be like max level end game to fight. And there are ships that are like that in this that are these just absurd dreadnots with like a thousand sails just bristling with guns. And you always fight them and it's like a storm, you know. We should say the weather effects in this game. They added all these new weather effects. They're amazing looking. When you're in the middle of a hurricane like fighting a huge ship, I get pretty psyched. It's pretty cool. The songs are cool too. Like the battle music is pretty epic. I feel like they're in a movie. I thought you were talking about the sea shanties, which are also pretty cool. Those are cool as well, but I specifically meant like the battle. It really hypes you up. And when there's thunder and lightning on top of that, it's pretty cool. I think it's Brian Tyler is the composer. He definitely got the just do the Zimmer Pirates of the Caribbean thing.

Pretty much. You can tell exactly what he's ripping off, but hey, it ain't broke. No, he nailed it. I agree. I really like the music. So I like those fights. And one really funny thing I've always. I've always enjoyed about the fights. When you're fighting a bunch of ships, you can, you kind of shoot a ship until its health bar goes red. And then it becomes vulnerable and you can board it. And when you board a ship, you know, then you kind of lock on. And that's when you do the, like, you jump from the riggings and cut down their flag and reduce their morale until they surrender. And then you get to choose what to do with their ship. You can add it to your fleet.

You can use it to lower your wanted level, which I don't really understand. Maybe you, like, let them live. And that gets you some credit with the local authorities. Or you can destroy the ship to heal your ship. So what I wind up doing in these big fights where I'm fighting like a big old enemy brig and then a couple smaller ships is like knocking out the little ships

and then when I need to heal, just boarding them and healing my ship in the middle of a really huge naval fight, which I just think is very funny and very video games. But anyways, I really like those boarding fights. I really like the way that it tells you to go and cut down their flag

because instead of just jumping into the fracas, you're incentivized to climb up into the rigging and, like, you know, your sails and their sails are near enough that you can jump. And then there's, like, a guy shooting at you and you have to shoot him and, like, climb up and cut their flag down. And then you do a leaping assassination off of the riggings onto their deck. That stuff is amazing. Like, the fact that this worked on a PlayStation 3 game, which it did.

I remember playing it on PS3 and being like, I can't believe they made this work. Like, that these two ships locked together and become one combat zone, it still feels kind of amazing doing it all these years later. Yeah, that's the part I don't mind. It's the opening part where you're just kind of awkwardly ramming into the other ship and trying to fire your cannon at them that I don't like. But I also, I mean, I've always hated like driving sections in video games for the most part, but also driving sections while you have to shoot and drive at the same time. Like, I hate stuff like that. So I guess it's just, again, it's just a personal thing. The boarding part I'm fine with. It's just the other, the opening fracas that I just didn't.

The actual naval combat. Love. And in general, I just, I find navigating around the world and the ship to be very tedious. And I remember thinking the same thing about Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which happens to be my favorite Assassin's Creed. I've been thinking about that game a lot recently, both because of this and also because of the movie. That game is really cool. I really love that game. But in that game, also, I just found the ship parts to be the weakest ones. But it was much quicker because you could sail a much shorter distance and find a new island and just kind of get on with your day, whereas this, a lot of the whole point is sailing around and just maneuvering on the Caribbean, and I just don't

really enjoy those parts of the game very much. Yeah, I think I like the sailing in this much more than Odyssey. Odyssey, it's just like kind of an afterthought. It's just nowhere near his fleshed out. I like the Jackdaw. Like I like that Edward has a ship that is kind of a home base. It's a little redundant that they've and give you the home base on Gradyinagua, and it's like, okay, now I have, like, two home bases to upgrade. Like, they could have just made it the ship, but it would be cool if you could, like, let Adiwalé pilot the ship, and then just, like, it autopilots wherever you're going, and you could, like, walk around. That would be something kind of neat that they maybe could have added for this, that they didn't. But I actually find that pacing-wise, I just really

like when you're just cruising and the wind is blowing, and when you get, you know, going max-speed, it zooms way out and you can just hear like a sea shanty on the breeze. And there's always something kind of beckoning you to go check it out. You know, you can go hunt a narwhal or whatever or like go explore a sunken rack or maybe, you know, there's a settlement over there that you haven't explored. Like I kind of dig it. I don't fast travel very much in this game. I don't actually find the ship travel tedious.

Yeah, I kind of split the difference. I do some fast traveling in order to not spend almost the entire. game on a boat because I do eventually start to be like, wow. Sure. And I do too as well. Much like real people on boats probably feel I start to get pretty bored with my surroundings. And there are quite a lot of sea shanties. But, you know, sometimes you just want to fast travel somewhere.

And they don't have the ability to do that, but I do. So I take advantage. But I largely agree in the sense that I like the vibe of it and the spirit of that throughout the game of having the ship be your core identity and have that be something that's backed up by the characters and how they feel about it. And it's their home. And it's where they spend the bulk of the time of the game. So it makes sense that it's such a big part of everything. And we've kind of referred to the sea shanties the whole time. But like that mechanic is so great that I feel like it really can't be undersold. Like the fact that anytime you're sailing,

your guys are singing all these different contemporaneous songs and sound amazing. I mean, these recordings are wonderful. Like, those are, I'd always heard that about the game as well, that that was a really strong part of the game. And it's so, so great. And does make it feel worth it to spend some time on the boat viving. I can't believe they copy that TikTok trend for this. The TikTok trend copied this, I guess.

I wonder, I almost feel, this game certainly laid the ground. work for that big trend when see shanties went viral. Yeah, they've actually fleshed it out as well. I don't know if they've added more shanties. There are definitely some that I haven't heard, but I'm chasing them down because you have to explain to listeners, you have to go collect them in the world to get more shanties. Yeah, that part is silly. I will say. But you're very incentivized. No, they're kind of, it is fun little chases. They're very short. You know how you're chasing down a song in order to do. Yeah, whatever. It's the animus. It's a memory. I feel like other Assassin's Creed games do that, too, with like, other stuff from what I remember.

Like there's a lot of like parkour chases that you have to do to find various things and fill out your objectives, fill out your checklist for each area. Man, you know, I got to say regarding Adiwale, that's a character note that I kind of wish there was more of him. So neither of you, I'm guessing, played Freedom Cry, right? I haven't, but now I want to because I think he's such a strong character in this game that I understand why they made it a whole DLC about him where you play as him. Or maybe it's just about him? He gets his own whole DLC. He becomes a fully fledged assassin. He gets his own ship and goes on his own adventure.

It's super cool. He's a great character. And you just get so much of him in that DLC. And I've kind of felt like there's kind of less of him than I want. Like he's such an interesting perspective compared to all of the other characters. I just want more of him in the game. And it's kind of like it's because the original developers had a whole story of his that they wound up telling.

Really, the main thing is I want them to make Freedom Cry in this engine. Like, I want them to remake that. It seems possible at least like the content is out there and they've shown that they can do it. It's a lot of the same mechanics. I have no idea if, you know, if they would. But it is hard not to want that, having played Freedom Cry and playing this gorgeous remaster. Like, it would be really, really neat to play that. And I do want more Adiwalé, as much as I appreciate him as a character in the,

base game. Yeah, me too. Stephen wrote a newsletter about all the modern stuff that was mostly lost on me, but he wrote that the kind of the new framing is opening, is like leaving the door open for a lot more remakes that just kind of change things within them because of the way Abstergo is kind of changed and presented in this game. So I wouldn't, and given that this game is sold really well, It sold like three million copies in its first week or two. I suspect we'll see a lot more remakes of old Assassin's Creed. Yeah, man, I want to talk about that. I'm going to put a pin in talking about sales and like what this means for the future because that is interesting.

I want to say one thing about what you're talking about. So Stephen Totillo, who notably a fan of the future storyline, like the modern day storyline in Assassin's Creed, we can link to some of his writing because he's written a lot about this game and has played more than I have. there's a lot of cool additional stuff added to this game. And I've mentioned that, but I want to elaborate. Like, there's a lot. There are, like, character storylines. There are these sort of lieutenants that you hire that weren't in the original game.

They dole out upgrades in a different way. There's new side quests. And there are these, like, animus quests. I just did the first one. But it's like an anomaly in the animus where you go in, and there's this whole crazy storyline going on where there's, you're playing through like alternate versions of Edwards' future, and there's this narrator, but there's like a conflict going on.

There's different people in the animus. This is very common in Assassin's Creed telling you, don't listen to her. She's lying. Like, actually listen to me. Meanwhile, you're platforming through these crazy dreamscapes built out of all of the games, assets, you know, ships coming out of mountains, all these wild traps and sort of parkour challenges.

It was fun as a sort of platforming challenge and puzzle, which I appreciate just. because I like when Assassin's Creed leans into the platforming a little bit more. It was narratively interesting, and it did tie into the broader animus stuff in a way that I kind of wasn't expecting because going into this,

I sort of assumed they were going to trim all that stuff out and leave it and just be like, here's the pirate game you guys want it, okay? We're going to forget all the weird modern day stuff. But no, it's still there, and they're leaving the door open for all these connections to other games. There are even rifts into like Assassin's Creed shadows, for example.

The game set in Japan that came out recently, you can get armor from that game and you can even like encounter things that have kind of come over from that game. So there's this idea that the animus is like the links between all these games, the walls between these games are kind of degrading and they're all connecting into one another, which then fits with a kind of broader ongoing live service game approach to like all of these different Assassin's Creed games. They're always kind of remaking them and refreshing them and connecting them to one another. Yeah, I feel like I lost trust in the Absurgo stuff and the modern day stuff when they introduced all this cool stuff after the end of Valhalla and then just never

revisited it again. I've bummed me out. I mean, they've done that a few times. They did that at the end of Assassin's Creed 3 as well. It has a crazy ending in the modern day. That's the whole Desmond Miles storyline that was ongoing through those early games. This is where Assassin's Creed 4 is kind of where they moved away from that. And in Assassin's Creed 4, you are a game designer essentially at Ubisoft, Montreal.

Like, that's who you are in the original 2013 game. That's been cut out of this. But that was when they began just being like, I don't know, man. Like it really felt like they just did not know where they were going with it anymore. And they were just going to kind of do weird stuff to see, just to see what would happen. Well, yeah, they bring Desmond back at the end of Valhalla and then just never touch it with the whole tree of light thing. And also then Basim appears in the modern day. And that stuff is just never revisited even.

In an Odyssey, doesn't Cassandra also like appear to what's her name, the researcher that you're playing as Layla? Yeah, but that's then, like, addressed in Valhalla, like Cassandra pops back up in Valhalla, but then Bacin... That's all great. I do like that stuff. It is great, but then it's just never, it's abandoned, which kind of sucks. Like, I don't think, Basim even had his own game, and it barely touched that stuff, which is a bit of a bummer. Right, because it's not in shadows. Yeah, I have to wonder if they'll ever come back to it. So anyways, I think something that really strikes me about this game, the fact that it's so successful, and just the broader Ubisoft, narrative is the fact that they spent so long making this game skull and bones, this like

cursed pirate multiplayer game that was not what people wanted and that just did not succeed. And it just, the fact that they just re-released this same game that was very clearly what people wanted it again, just makes me feel like why, like, why weren't there three of these or something since 2013? Like, why did it take this long? And why are we only getting a remake? Yeah. that is that, I mean, Skull Bones obviously had a lot of problems, but like trying to take that

component of this single player game and turn it into a multiplayer live service game, uh, changes the nature of it entirely. Was skull and bones built on this game's framework or just inspired by it? I mean, I don't know. It looks like this, it looked like black flag in action. Interesting. Yeah. It is hard to imagine this really being as good. I feel like part of what's fun about the ship combat, despite its occasional jankiness, is that it's part of an ongoing story. And the characters that we've been talking about are part of what make it powerful and meaningful

for you to be doing any of this. I guess it's easy for me to say this in retrospect, but making that into a live service game is just such a different energy than having a story where you're like, there's a reason why I'm a pirate and I'm doing all of this stuff with my pirate friends. And there's just, there's so much friction and kind of clumsiness in the way the game,

works, that it just doesn't work as a multiplayer game. Like, there have been a lot of Assassin's Creed multiplayer games. They can be fun in small doses, you know, when you're kind of like playing hide and go seek with one another. But it's not, it's just not smooth enough and fluid enough and responsive enough to work as a competitive game. And I'm just surprised that this was that clear to people at the time. Because when you're playing in single player, the fact that, like, Edward goes up the rigging

and then gets kind of turned around and, like, goes back, and then I have to turn him around again, and then he jumps in the wrong direction. and then he kind of lands and then it's pretty inelegant, but I just shoot some guys and throw a smoke bomb and then I win. That's fine in the context of like a 30-hour single-player game where I'm just doing that a lot and who really cares. But if you're playing a multiplayer game, it just can't be like that. If you compare this to Sea of Thieves,

Sea of Thieves does not have that problem. Sea of Thieves is incredibly fluid and responsive. It feels correct when you're playing it because it has to be to support a competitive multiplayer game. It just seems like it was never going to work. And yet they could have made another single player game. It could have even been called Skull and Bones and not been an Assassin's Creed game and just been about a pirate, like a pirate action RPG single player game. And I bet it would have sold a shitlet of copies and people would have liked it.

It just is, it seems galling to me. Or I guess it's indicative. It's emblematic of the 2010s and of the live service, you know, the chase of live service and of all these bad decisions that were made. made over that time period, that it took 13 years for us to get another single player game like this. And it's just a remake of the one that they already had. I mean, it's still kind of like Ubisoft and a We're So Back phase, though, because like Shadows did pretty well and now this is doing well. So I don't know. I still think it's like, hey, it took you a while to circle back around to the thing people like, but you are in fact doing it

again. So hooray. You did it. Yeah, hopefully they're taking some lessons from this. It's just like people like these big single player games. That's the thing that they like to play. Well, that is, that'll do it, I guess, for this conversation. A pretty, a pretty cool, a pretty cool remake. It is a remake plus according to our spectrum of remakes. I love that you're sticking with that. You're like, we're going to open with that and we're going to close with that. I saw somebody cite that in an article recently. I think that they were talking about this. And they're like, well, Triple clicks Kirk Havilton, burk down, all the different types of remakes.

This is technically a remake plus. I love that. This is a new engine and actual new gameplay and mechanics. So this is a, I would say, a really winning remake plus seems to be doing well, which is not really surprising. And I'm going to keep playing it, I think, when I have time. I'm having a great time just cruising around, hunting for iguanas, air assassinating a rabbit from a tree,

so that I can upgrade my gun holsters, you know, playing a video. As one does. Yeah, like you do, when you're a protagonist in an Assassin's Creed game. Exactly. Well, let's take a break and then come back for one more thing.

Hi, my name is Brea Grant and I host Reading Glasses and Reading Smut and I'm here with Max Fun member of the month, Nick Roy. Thank you so much. What episode would you recommend to a new listener who's just jumping in for the first time?

Definitely the one where it's like, let's talk about reading glasses because as someone who started listening, what, seven years in? I even, I was like, Oh, that's why we say that. Oh, my God. Mallory's going to love that you said that because she really was like,

we got to tell people more about ourselves. I'm like, we just talk about ourselves every week. What would you say to other people who are considering supporting maximum fun shows? I would say if you want to keep listening to content that you enjoy and you want to support the creators, oh no, I just won't get a Starbucks once a week and I give you guys 10 bucks a month. Sounds good to me. I love that. And listen to Nick.

Nick's a librarian. He knows what he's talking about, so. Support the shows you love. including this one. Check the show notes for a link or go to maximum fun.org slash join. Howdy there? So sorry to interrupt whatever amazing show you were listening to, but it's time for an ad. I'll be so quick and get back to your show. Don't worry. I'm host Austin, one half of a podcast called Secret Histories of Nerd Mysteries that I make with my good friend Brenda. We talk about the pop culture stuff you like, like Thender Cats and Yu-Gi-O.

Did you know that the Thundercats are cousins with Vera Fawcett or that Yu-Gio once caused the riot? You probably want to know more. You can find us a maximum fun or wherever you get podcasts every single Tuesday. And we are back for One More Thing. Maddie, let me hear from you. What's your One More Thing? Sure. My One More Thing is the Netflix adaptation of Little House on the Prairie that just came out this year.

It's a TV show version of the very old Laura Ingalls Wilder books that were based on her real life being the daughter of a guy who decided to settle in Osage land in the prairie. And that is something that the Netflix show very directly and specifically addresses in a way that the, I think it's the 1970s TV show. I think that's when that one came out. I know Jen Exeter's are very fond of that version of Little House. This show is pretty different from what I understand and it takes a lot with the source material that I think are really fascinating and cool. I really liked this show, and I read a lot of articles about it afterwards because I was really curious how they made the decisions that they did. So they've still included all of the Ingalls family. And they've

kind of written out some more motivations for Charles Ingalls or Pa Ingalls as little Laura calls him all the time. And as I tend to call him because I read these books as a kid, so I still think of him as Pa Ingalls. They've written out his character a lot more to make it such that he isn't entirely aware that he's settling in Osage Land when he gets there. And that I think helps make him be a more sympathetic character, whereas in the original books, he says more casual, racist things, and it's more, I would say, since it's written by a child and we're just kind of basing this on Laura's memory, it's not entirely clear if he knows the situation with the land. Because the land was in dispute during this time period.

As it was for many, many, many decades of American history, this was a time period when that land was still technically owned by the Osage people, but other people were choosing to live on it. And that was a matter of great contention, obviously, for the people who wanted to keep living there, the Osage. So they've introduced all of these other characters in this show, Osage characters and written them out and had them be sympathetic but also complicated. And those characters are not present in the book.

But they've also included characters in the book who I had totally forgotten about. Like, for example, there was this black doctor who helped the Ingalls with, I think it's malaria that they all get. And that happened in the book. But when I was watching this Netflix show, I was like, okay, like, cool. They introduced this black doctor character. It's probably part of like the different stories that they're telling about. contemporaneous things at the time and then I looked it up and I was like, oh, this is a real guy from

the book and he's like an actual Civil War veteran of the time who's like one of the first like notable black doctors of this pioneer era and like that was really cool to learn about. Anyway, this show, it's just really cool. I think it's interesting. I also appreciated hearing about how some of the motivations of the native people who worked on it was that it would be a family friendly show and that it wouldn't just be focusing on some of of the sad aspects of the Osage people's history and that it would be something that would allow families to have the conversation with kids who are Laura's age in the show. She's like nine or 10. She's like a little girl. But it's like an approachable way to have conversations about pioneers

who moved to these places and the dangers that they were facing, but also the fact that they were living in other people's land. And I think that's cool and an interesting project. So, yeah, Yeah, I also really liked these books as a kid and as an adult have had to be like, wow, those books included some really messed up shit. So it's, I was really curious to see how they adapted and it's interesting. So I recommend it. Obviously, it's called Little House on the Prairie and it's on Netflix. Nice.

All right. It's, yeah, that and yesteryear, we've got a lot of media. A lot of pioneer media. Interesting. Yesterday year is very, very different. No, I know. It's just, of course, very different. but similar focus on a similar time period.

There's something to that, I'm sure. Jason, what's your one more thing? My one more thing is a video game called The Mermaid Mask that came out last week, and it is really cool. This game, it's by the makers of Tangle Tower. This is a sequel to that game, if you remember it, and also Crow Country and Snipper Clips, so a very diverse group of games.

Crow Country is so good. So this game is a, it's kind of a hybrid of like a deductive game, kind of like Golden Isle style deductive game and a point and click adventure. It is set aboard this submarine and the captain of the submarine is found dead and you playing this pair of investigators who are very funny have to go and figure out who killed the captain and what happened here by interrogating. these eight suspects and investigating the entire submarine looking for clues and trying to piece together what went down. And so there's a few different kind of types of gameplay that play into this one is these little minor puzzles that you can find while you're investigating little logic puzzles and whatnot. The other is interrogating people and trying to figure out what to ask them about, who to ask them about. By the end, you'll probably be asking all of them about every single object.

found in your inventory and then figuring out what each of their stories is because all eight of them, even the ones who were not responsible for the murder, all of them have their own secrets and you can kind of piece together what those secrets are, what they're lying about, what they're telling the truth about. And they're all really weird characters. It's a submarine full of weirdos, which is very delightful. The writing is really good in this game. The dialogue is really good. The voice acting is really good. The pacing is really good. It's a very well-constructed game. And I really liked it, really enjoyed it. Played through the whole thing in just a few hours. It's a nice, nice chunk of, it's not too long. It doesn't wear out. It's welcome. And I really

enjoyed putting the whole thing together. It's got some legitimately hilarious moments and some clever writing and just a great solid mystery that I think both of you would really enjoy. I think it took me like six or seven hours to beat. It's really not much of an imposition at all to play through at all and just a really enjoyable experience, I would say. The point and click adventure aspect of it, by the way, is a lot of just kind of hunting for clues in each of these rooms within the submarine. And there's a lot that you can click on and a lot will just lead to funny dialogue with your investigators, your duo of detectives. And yeah, it's just really well done. I just really enjoyed playing through it. Did you play this with a controller like on Steam Deck or is it actually

point and click with a mouse? I played it all on Steam Deck, but you can also use... And it's just controller. It's controller friendly, but you could also use a touchscreen on Steam Deck if you wanted to. But yes, I played it all on Steam Deck. I feel like you can assume that every game I talk about, I'm probably playing it on Seamedic. No, right. I ask because on Steam Deck you can use the track pads and play it with a mouse.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some point-in-click adventure games aren't great with a controller. Yeah, I feel like these days, so many of these games are being built with controller in mind. Even that game from last week, the incident at Galley House, I played entirely on Steam Deck, and it was also had great controls. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, no, it's a good question. It's a legitimate question. Thank you.

Thank you. You would be a good interrogator. You would be a good detective. See if you could catch me in a lie there. Yes, the mermaid mask. I played it on the steam deck and yeah, we just really, really enjoyed it. Although I ran into, there are a couple of annoying glitches that I ran into over the course of playing it. But one thing I did discover is that if you want to play a game,

game on your Steam deck while your wife is using the Steam machine. I think I told you both that I've been getting Amanda into Blueprints for the first time. My wife who doesn't play a lot of games I've been getting her into blue prints. She's really into it. So she was playing that in our bedroom on the TV and I want it on the Steam machine on the TV and I want to play on the Steam deck, but you can't play games simultaneously on the same Steam account. So what I did was I took the Steam deck offline, turned off the wireless and then I was able to do it. But it causes some issues. Like Steam doesn't like it when you play games offline on the Steam deck. It starts trying to update things and chugging along and whatnot. It was causing me some problems. But I still, I made it work. Anyway,

the mermaid mask, really cool game. It's gotten a lot of buzz. I think it's one of the top rated review games of the year. And I think it's been doing well commercially too. I recommend it. It's really cool. Definitely one of my favorites of the year so far. Cool. Nice. Yeah, that's on my list for sure. I am looking forward to. You will both enjoy it quite a bit. Playing it, yeah, it looks really good. Well, my one more thing is also a new game that's fantastic called Denshetak. And it is a lot of fun. Are either of you aware of this game? Yeah, I've heard of this game. Okay, so this is a game made by the undercoders, who are a Spanish studio based in Barcelona. The undercoder's. It is, I mean, it's a skateboarding game where you control a train. And I think that's probably how most of our listeners who have heard about it will have heard it described. It's, it's. It's a train and you're doing like kickflips and, you know, ramping off the tracks and doing skateboard stuff. Densha means train in Japanese.

It is very much a kind of combination of Tony Hawk and SSX tricky. I see a lot of people compare it to Tony Hawk. I actually find the gameplay to be closer to an SSX game, a sort of snowboarding type thing, because you're flying forward on the tracks and then you're doing sick tricks and you're memorizing each run so that you can do better and better and find the right moments to pop the narwhart earliest tricks in midair. So I would use those as the two comparison points, but I would say for me, and for me, it's closer to SSX tricky, and I love SSX tricky and I've never totally jelled with Tony Hawk because I'm not that good at them. So that's actually a really good thing for me.

So let me rewind or zoom out and explain a little more like what the game actually is. So it's a really brightly animated, beautiful-looking game. It looks like a dreamcast game. Like, it really looks like your memory of a dreamcast game. It has that kind of really bright, brilliant game from, like, kind of Y2K video game. Look, you are actually playing as a young woman named Emmy, who is a ramen delivery driver in this kind of, I guess it's a post-apocalyptic or at least a like, it's just a future version of Japan where due to climate change and a bunch of degradation of the world, like most people live in these kind of cities that are connected by train tracks, that are controlled by a single company. But then some people still just kind of live outside, and maybe it's fine, so it's totally clear what's going on.

I'm not super far in the game, so it might be that this stuff is all explained. There is that, like, megacorp overseeing everything, and they're definitely kind of looming in the background as a potential antagonist. But Emmy just delivers ramen, and the way you get around is you drive a train, and it's basically a subway train car, like a single train, like an engine for a subway train. And then because the tracks are designed by video game designers, you're constantly ramping yourself up in the air and doing flips and like jumping from one track to the other to, you know, avoid hazards. And eventually jumping your train up onto a rail and doing a rail grind where you're balancing left and right and doing all kinds of Tony Hawk SSX type, you know, snowboarding tricks.

There's a storyline where like Emmy, who is just a naturally brilliant train pilot, learns that. that Denshotak is this whole world of people who are essentially competitive athletes. Each one has a really cool style and they're all these like really fun kind of stylized characters with a lot of attitude. And she gets, she and a new friend who's a photographer and kind of publishes a zine about Denshatech. Like he kind of brings her into this world. Pretty soon she's meeting all of the, you know, celebrities of the Denshattuck world and rising in their ranks. And that's, it's a very 2000s video game kind of story, but it's very charmed. It's just the characters are really fun.

There's really cute loading animations. The whole, like, the complete package of this game, it just lands on both feet sprinting. Like, it is totally self-assured. From the minute you start it, you're like, oh, these people know exactly what they're doing. They've played all of the games that they're referencing, and they've got it nailed.

Like, there's no uncertainty. Like, they really, they got the brief and they nailed it. The art style reminds me of Hi-Fi Rush. Yeah, hi-fi Rush is a recent one, which again is another one that feels kind of like a throwback to Jetset Radio and to those types of games. But yes, it definitely looks and feels kind of like high-fi-rushed. It's not a music game, but it's very rhythmic. And the music plays a big role in it.

It has a killing soundtrack. Unsurprisingly, a game like this just needs to have like, you know, it's full-on, synth fusion, Sega, you know. It sounds kind of like that Sonic, that Sonic music, like a 3D Sonic game. And it gets you just really pumped up. Bing, Kirk here with a little bit more about the music to this game, because, well, I said it was good. I think I kind of undersold it when I was talking to Maddie and Jason. The soundtrack to this game is absurd.

This is Coastline Funk by Andrew One. The game's primary composer is named T. Lopez. Here's one of theirs called There's a Trick to It. Gives you a sense of the time period. They're emulating. And a composer named Sean Bialo also wrote a bunch of tracks. At least I think I'm pronouncing his last name right. He wrote some absolute bangers.

Here's an early one called Passing Ariake Breeze. They also got composers who have worked on actual Sega series. There is a track by Richard Jacques, who composed for Jet Set Radio. Persona composer Shoggi Maguro does a track for this game. There are so many great composers on it. There's just way more music than I even realized. and in addition to all of its other great attributes, this game is quite a musical accomplishment.

So just wanted to say that and give this music a little bit more love since it really is so good. Okay, back to our conversation. Bing! Man, this game is so much fun. I don't play that many games like this, but I loved SSX and SSX tricky back in the day, and I really did get into repeating runs

so that I can learn all the moves, which I think is a big part of the joy of this game. It is a, you know, there's a series of track, tracks. Each one has its own little secrets and challenges and sort of secret routes that you can figure out and ways to maximize the score. You're going for time and you're going for tricks and you just have to kind of learn the track. And you could just play through this and you'd probably get through most of it and you wouldn't have to replay too much. And there's a lot of stuff in this game. So you'd have a good time. But the joy of the game for me has been in replaying a level and like really getting it locked in and kind of, you know, the way that I used to play games. games like this back when I had more time and was on my friends PlayStation 2 or whatever, playing SSX tricky. It kind of, you have to embrace it in that way, or it helps to embrace it in that way. And yeah, it's also just full of surprises.

It's not just fun levels. Each level that I've played so far is introduced new mechanics. There are these setpiece moments that happen that are like really surprising, like, where I'm like yelling and delight, you know? Emily is like playing Animal Crossing on the couch next to me, and I'm like, oh my God, and she's looking up and we're both cracking up at something really crazy that's happening, where it's designed well where when it throws something totally unexpected at you, it's in a way where you're able to react and keep playing the game.

So you feel like you're doing something totally insane. You don't just immediately crash because suddenly you're doing something you didn't expect to be doing. So it kind of moves you through those sequences in a way that makes them maximally entertaining. There are boss fights that are really cool. I gather there are some later that I haven't gotten to that are like incredibly memorable. So this game is pretty sensational, I have to say. I'm really, really impressed with the developers, the people who made it, like, are just super skill that everything they did, like the art, the music, the feel, the design, the level design, the narrative, the characters, the writing.

It's just like all really, really strong. So I'm going to keep playing it. It's just come out of nowhere, and it's such a surprise. It's not like the kind of game that I really go for or that we even really talk about here. You know, we have our styles of games that we like. This is a different thing, and it's very old-fashioned in some ways. But for me, that's been so refreshing. It just feels like something completely new. You know, I was playing a lot of Assassin's Creed the last couple of weeks, and in this last week, I'll just play some Densha Tech for a little while. It's like a great way to break up another game. You just do a couple of courses. It's super fun, have a great time, and then take a break because, you know, it's very, it lends itself to bite-sized gaming. So I wholeheartedly

recommend this game. It is incredibly cool. If you think you will like it based on my description, you will like it, almost certainly. It is a very much, a known quantity, despite being constantly surprising and delighting. So just a great game that I really recommend. Awesome. Sounds awesome. It is. And yeah, and that's another episode of Triple Click, folks. Yeah, so we'll be back soon to talk about The Odyssey. I'm excited for that one. We'll be back, yeah, within the week, within the the week. I kind of want to go play, replay Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

Man, playing Black Flag did make me want to see what, I just go back to Odyssey and play it again. I played too much of that game, though. I played so much of it, but it'd be fun to play it again. Me too. I played so many hours. That game's so frigate long.

I think I probably played more hours of Odyssey than any other Assassin's Creed game. It was so long. There were so many regions. Oh, my God. And then they added all those, like, mythical creatures that you could fight. God.

Yeah, and there's DLC that I never play. Yeah, right. There was a whole Atlanta's steel see. Yeah. I think, yeah, I never really played that. I think I started it and I was like, oh my God, I can't. I'm at 85 hours. That's enough. Too much. Yeah. All right. Well, maybe we'll play that and talk about it in the future. But for now, I think we're actually... He just randomly did that. We're going to play some Soma, something very different. And yeah, and be back for another episode next week. So I will see the two of you then. Yeah. See you then. See you next time. Bye. Bye.

Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun podcast network. And if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at maximumfun.org slash join. Email us at triple click at maximum fun.org and find links to our merch store and our Discord server in the show notes.

Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artists-owned shows. Supported directly by you.