Triple Click - Triple Play: Avowed

Episode Date: February 20, 2025

The gang takes a deep dive into Obsidian's latest roleplaying game, Avowed. They talk about the crunchy combat, the ramifications of story decisions, and why the exploration works so well. Plus: SNL turns 50!One More Thing:Kirk: Ladies and Gentlemen…. 50 Years of SNL Music (Peacock)Maddy: Priscilla (2023)Jason: Lisa JewellLINKS:Featuring “Avowed” by Venus Theory and Justin E. BellHbomberguy’s “Fallout New Vegas is Genuis, Here’s Why”: ​​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzF7aHxk4Y4Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinBuy Triple Click Merch: https://maxfunstore.com/search?q=triple+click&options%5Bprefix%5D=lastJoin the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/ Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

Chests. If you've played a role-playing game, you've probably opened one. But did you know that the same company makes every chest in every video game you've ever played? It's their whole thing. It's all they do. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week we are talking about avowed obsidian's, fun new action role-playing game where you run around a beautiful world, getting into fights, having conversations, and opening a whole lot of chests. I'm Kirk Hamilton. I'm Maddie Myers. And I'm Jason Schreier. Hello. Hello. Hello, my friends. It's us again. I went to the DMV today. It was very unpleasant. What? Hopefully we can be a better experience for you than that recording trouble. I hope so, too. Can we clear it?

At this DMV, this is like a new DMV and they make you wait online to get in. And then when you start off before you even get to the desks, you start off at this little podium where this woman is like, here is the paperwork you need to fill out before we can even register you. And what you do is you go to this little table and you fill out the paperwork and then you go back to her. And so I did that. And then the guy who was like in line waiting to get his paperwork started yelling at me because I cut the line.

He was like, there's a line here. And I don't know what happened. Usually I'm pretty nice to people, but like my inner New York got out. And I was like, the fuck is wrong with you. I'm just doing what she told me to do. And it was very unpleasant. The fuck is wrong with you. You just like went full accent.

It was full New York City. Hey, I'm walking here. You were a Spider-Man NPC. It should really got out of hand. That's terrible, Jason. It was terrible. It was a terrible experience. That is an energy that I'm glad that we don't see here on Triple Click, a lovely and calm space that we are able to maintain each week.

Thanks to the support of our listeners. And, of course, thank you to all of them, everyone who is a member of our wonderful network Maximum Fun and makes it possible for us to make this show. And if you would like to join their ranks, go to maximumfund.org slash join and sign up to become a member. support the creation of this show. We do monthly bonus episodes that there are a ton of at this point that you can listen to. The most recent one was a beans cast on Metaphorie Fantazio. This month,

we're going to be making an episode about launch lineups because we're all a buzz about the Switch 2 and about the idea of a console launch lineup. So we're going to be talking about launch lineups in history, what a launch lineup might look like in 2025. It's going to be very fun. That'll be out toward the end of the month. And next month, we're going to be doing something very special for our yearly Max Fund Drive. We're going to do a conundrums episode. This is a shameless lift from the Slate Political Gab Festival of all places.

Which is so similar to us. People are just neck and neck. You know, in some ways, in some ways it kind of is similar. We're very different, but I don't know. Dawn. There are some funny similarities. Anyhow, every year that show does a conundrums episode, that's so much fun, and I thought it might be fun for us to do something similar.

So we're going to just get together and we're going to discuss conundrums. So we came up with a couple examples. Like, you can only play one video game for the rest of your life. Or would you rather play with only sound effects or only music in your game? Or would you rather play games only on the weekends or only on weekdays for the rest of your life? And those are just three that we came up with now. But we want to get your conundrums. So we're looking for conundrums from our listeners.

They don't have to be about video games. They can just be about life, any kind of conundrum of this or that, something that might be difficult or interesting for us to talk about. Please send those to triple click at maximum fun.org. Put conundrums in the subject line, and Jason will get those all organized for us to go through. And we're going to record that in March, so you've got plenty of time. But if you think of one, please send it along. Can I just say we should add?

We're going to be recording that in person because the three of us are going to be in San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference in March. I think we're going to try to plan some sort of casual meetup for any listeners out there who are in San Francisco that week. So stay tuned for more details on that as well. Yes, it'll be a lot of fun. All right, well, let's get into the subject of today's episode. We're talking about a video game, a new video game called Avowed that all three of us have been playing. I wrote a little preamble and then we will get into it.

Avowed is the latest role-playing game from Obsidian Entertainment, the storied story creators responsible for well-loved, if occasionally shaggy genre stalwarts, like Fallout New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, and Alpha Protocol, a game that I should totally make my predictions bet one of these years so that we can all play it and talk about it on the show. Okay. A vowed is set in the same universe as the first two Pillars of Eternity Games, and it casts players as a godlike.

One of a humanoid people who in the Pillars world have been touched by one of the Pantheon of Gods and sent to do their bidding. Godlike also often have fungus all over their faces, which is honestly just really cool. Your character is an envoy of the Adirin Empire and has been sent to check in on the colonization of the mysterious magical living lands, and in particular to investigate a mysterious dream scourge infection

that has been taking over the minds of the people and setting them against one another. The dream scourge may or may not also be tied to an apparent infestation of killer bears, who have overrun the living lands and seem close to displacing the kith and setting up their own bare society. Upon arriving in the living lands, your godlike character, whose god it should be said remains a mystery,

begins hearing the mysterious voice of AWA, who tells them to cast off the chains of the sky people and join the Natvi. I'm sorry, they begin hearing the mysterious voice near the Adra stones indicating some connection to some mysterious force in the land that is trying to make contact. Over the course of the game, you will explore several compact but densely designed open world maps.

You will engage in crispy real-time combat with swords, bows, pistols, or spells, depending on your preference, while occasionally adding new companions to your party and getting to know those that you fight alongside. You will also do the usual ARPG stuff, leveling up, raising your stats, making story-altering choices, collecting an endless supply of upgrade materials, and, of course, fighting bears.

Eventually, if you level up enough in the rogue tree, you can summon your own bear, which is very exciting. It is a cool game. I played a bunch of it, and we are going to talk about it. Jason, you raved about it last week and you won more things. So let's start with Maddie. Maddie, what do you think of a vowed? I think avowed is pretty fun.

I don't know that it's an A plus for me, but I've really been enjoying playing it. I'm pretty far into the game at this point. There's apparently four big areas, and I'm in the third one. So if listeners kind of have a sense of that, I'm not going to say anything else about what that means. And I'm, you know, I like any game where I can just hit things with a really big hammer. And something else that I, Jason, I think you shouted this out.

Or if not, I'll be the one to do it. I really like the verticality of the landscape in this game and how fun it is to explore. And at first, when I was starting the game, I wasn't really fully clicking it with me. It has really strong kind of zombie outbreak intro, like the first couple hours. It's like you're learning what the dream scourges. It's like a fantasy version of a zombie outbreak. oh, what's going on? And it kind of slows down and there's a lot of proper nouns.

But then once I got back in the open world and I was exploring and like climbing big mountains and climbing a lighthouse and finding stuff and then finding some strange ruins and collecting stuff and just coming across quests out in the world without feeling like I was being told what to do, I really enjoyed that. And the verticality part is super cool because it reminds me of Erd Tree, the Eldering DLC where you're like filling out the map super slowly and you think you can go somewhere. But then when you actually get there, there's like a huge cliff or a waterfall and you're like, oh, how am I going to get around this? And that I find really fun and challenging and surprising.

And so yeah, I'm really like in the thick of exploring it and enjoying it at this point. But I don't ask me to summarize the story. Kirk did a great job, but I don't know that I really know what's going on. This is my first pillars game. I guess I should say that too. I don't know the pillars of eternity world. And I think. you're okay if you don't know them. I'm fine. Like, I'm getting it. Yeah, right. Like, you're enjoying the story even though you don't know. But, but also don't ask me to summarize it. I'm getting the vibes, but I do get some of the fantasy races mixed up from time to time and forget who's mad at who and why periodically. But yeah, it's okay. Maddie, do you ever use

the little lore codex that you can call up in the middle of conversations? I think that's a wonderful feature that this game offers. Really cool. It kind of reminds me of the Final Fantasy game that I otherwise didn't really like. What is that? 16. Is that the one that did this? Where if you paused. Active time lore, I think they call it.

And it, you would show you all this information about each character. This is kind of a similar version of that. That also works pretty well in a game I'm enjoying slightly more. And I've played more of. Yeah, it's actually, it's from the,

it's from Pillars, which had it long before Final Fantasy 16. The Pillars games had this. There you go. Jason, so how about you? You've played, I'm guessing,

some more since you talked about it on your one more thing. And also, that was pretty cursory. So, yeah, what are you thinking of the game? Yeah, I love it. I'm really enamored of this game. I think that what it tries to do, it does extraordinarily well. I've seen some people kind of jumping in and being a little bit disappointed that it's not

doing certain things. It is not the all-you-can-eat buffet of RPG systems. It doesn't have an elaborate mechanic for stealing and attacking NPCs and getting put in prison or whatever. But I think that it's really smartly focused in what it's trying to do. And what it's trying to do is be just a super fun action RPG that has a few really good pillars for lack of a better word. And those are combat, story, and exploration. And those are three things that I love in a video game.

So I'm perfectly fine with that. So the combat, you mentioned crispy before Kirk. I mean, it feels it's very crispy. It's very crunchy. it's very kind of tactile feeling. I've been really enjoying the sword and shields alternating with the bow and arrow, and I've seen people have a lot of fun with the spells, which I haven't even dived into. But that seems cool too.

I really just kind of enjoy fighting enemies in a way that I don't often in RPGs of this nature. The story for me is really doing it for me, especially the companions and the dialogue and the relationships. I find Kai really compelling as a character. doing his side quests and finding them really interesting. I'm also, by the way, in Shatterscarp, the third area, Maddie. I'm about where you are. I was away last week, so I didn't get a chance to play, because it does not run perfectly well on the Steam deck, unfortunately, so it could not really play that on the go. And so I'm really happy with the story, and I find it really interesting. I think that the little moments, the little narrative side quests, or little narrative moments that

aren't even side quests, and then also the side quests, to me, are a lot more compelling than the main story, which is often the case with these big RPGs. The main story, it's interesting. It's cool to try to find out the mystery of this voice that is talking to you or the nature of the dream scourge, the plague that is haunting the lands. But to me, the real highlight has been like stumbling upon a group of animincer's arguing over ED drugs or like the side quests that like take you in unexpected directions or give you a bunch of options that you wouldn't expect, which to me feels kind of peak obsidian. And then the exploration, that's to me, is the real strong suit of this game is just kind of finding little nux and crannies, just

exploring these. You mentioned, Kirk, compact areas, but they're not that compact. They've got a lot of space to them. They've got a lot of certain, certainly a lot of verticality like Maddie mentioned, and a lot of different kind of surface area, I guess I would describe it as. There's a lot of places to go, a lot of sidequist to find a lot of things to do. And to me, that is really what's kept me playing. I think my play counter is like 40-something hours.

is the exploration. It's just that feeling of knowing that if I go, I could go through the front door, or I could go around a side path and find something cool over there, or I could just, if I see some rooftop that looks inviting, it probably has something cool on it. So I really enjoyed it. And yeah, I mean, I love this game. It's one of my favorites of the year so far. Yeah, I'm enjoying it too. It's a very pleasant game to play. And I find it's just, it's great for script. scratching that itch of, yeah, I just want to walk around and do a little walkie, fighty, picky-upy. It's definitely that type game, you know? Kirk, are you, are you a character on Bluey?

You just sound like an Australian. Walkie, fighty, picky-uppy-uppy. And then we'll have some Brecky. Yeah, it's hyphenated as well. That's a genre. I do love Bluey. Yeah, I mean, if you like opening chests and getting lots of stuff and just finding more chests, the chest, make a nice little noise. So you hear one and you're like, oh.

Very fun noise. Where is that? There's sparkly. There's sparkles. Mm-hmm. So, you know, I enjoy that about it. I think it is an important game to appreciate for what it is and not for what it is not. I think you're right about that, Jason. You could go into this game expecting a more simulated and open-ended game like Skyrim, since it does sort of feel like an Elder Scrolls game. And you might be disappointed because it's really more of an amusement park kind of vibe to me, which I don't mean as a bad thing. It just the world feels very constructed. And it is, to me, it feels compact but dense. There's a lot in there. And each map isn't gigantic.

You can cross it pretty quickly. But there's a lot going on. And then it's all been very carefully placed for you to stumble upon something interesting. Have a nice little side adventure, just trying to figure out how to get inside of a building. And then go on your way toward your next journal objective. And then you just kind of move your way through it. And I like that about it. There are some things that kind of.

turn me off. The leveling system isn't my favorite, like, tying enemy difficulty to gear quality. I've at least struggled to find the right balance on that. Which I think a patch just came out that tweaked a lot of that stuff for what... That doesn't surprise me. It seems like something that would be very

easily patched to just lower the crafting requirements. I guess I'll explain that. I'm still giving my initial impressions. Anyways, whatever, that's my initial impressions. I think it's pretty cool. It's not my favorite thing ever. I'm in the second area near the end. I'm kind of bouncing off fit a little bit, but also it's so pleasant and fun to play. It's lovely looking. The combat's super

fun. I do like the writing and the general tone. And it's nice to play a first-person adventure role-playing game like this. It's just been a minute, and there's something about the first-person perspective, the feeling of climbing around and looking around through my own eyes that I just like. So just briefly to explain, at least what I was running into up until this patch, they've made the upgrade system. It's definitely a choice. And I'm not totally sure I'm on board with just this general choice. Instead of leveling up and just doing more damage as you level up and then fighting enemies that are your commensurate level

and doing the right amount of damage to them, you can be fighting enemies who have higher level gear than you. And if you're in the wrong gear tier, either your weapon or your armor, you do 35% less damage or you take 35% more damage from their attacks. And also, probably even worse than that, you have to suffer your companions telling you constantly how much your armor sucks. Yeah, let me chime in here because the patch notes are... Yeah, tell us about the pack.

First and foremost, significantly decreased how often companions comment about players and our armor and our... Amazing. Amazing. Fantastic. Good, good job, guys. And this is a day one patch, so, like, most people who play this game will not run into that issue anymore. That's so funny. And then they also, they changed it basically from like a hard tier-to-tier system. They made it, uh, what they say? dynamic based on player equipment in the tier and sub tier of the enemy.

So tier difference rules now only apply when there is a plus or minus four level gap, which- That's fantastic. Changes the whole nature of... Yes, so take this less as me writing a video game review and more as me offering a way of describing the way that a game was so that you can understand the context of the changes that they made. Because I think that those are very interesting. Yeah, for the two weeks before it launched, this is what this game was like. I mean, there were people who got it.

It's fascinating. Yes, I think that this is a genuinely interesting way to understand how a leveling system might work. Because, as I was saying, that did not work for me. I found myself really scavenging for upgrade materials, particularly because I got a nice piece of rogue armor. I'm playing as a kind of bow melee, mostly ranged rogue. There's a really nice piece of rogue armor that you get at the end of the first area. There's kind of a major story choice that the consequence of going one way is you don't get the armor. and if you start murdering people, you do get the armor.

And I really just killed them to get the armor rather than following my heart in that story moment. I was like, dude, that armor you're wearing. And now that's going to go with these gauntlets and boots I've got. That's going to give me a lot of good rogue abilities. So I got that armor. And then in the second area, it was still Tier 1 and I needed to get it. Or it was Tier 2.

I needed to get it to Tier 3. And I was just taking so much damage because of that big jump. So it's a great move for them to move it to a graduated system as it sounds like they've done. Funny is, we don't need to spend any longer talking about that, though it's cool to play these games early and then watch how they change at day one, because this kind of gripe is an easier one to fix than if, for example, the whole world didn't do anything for me or the story, you know, kind of left me cold. Yeah, it's been a common point of contention in some of the reviews. And it actually, it's interesting. Abstinian games are really interesting.

I think, so I want to talk about a couple things. I want to talk about the development of this game specifically, but I want to put a pin in that because I want to talk about obscenium. obsidian in general. If you look back in history, obsidian's probably most beloved game is Fallout New Vegas, which has become this complete and utter, like, player darling. I don't know if I'd even call it a cult classic because it was pretty successful even at the time, but it is a beloved game. I would say that it's a narrative masterpiece. It really is, especially that H-bomber guy video really drove home for me because he played the hell out of that game and really breaks down how well done the narrative is.

And man, I mean, there's some incredible stuff going on in that game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's gotten to the point where I think player consensus, I think it's safe to say, is that New Vegas is better than Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 for a lot of different reasons. A reaction that people at Bethesda may or may not be very happy about. Filled about it, from what I've heard. But anyway, if you look at New Vegas, if you look at like the Metacritic, for whatever flaws it has

as a useful way of gauging what the critical consensus was. Metacritic is an 84 whereas Fallout 3 is a 93 and Fallout 4 has like an 87. So critical consensus of New Vegas was not quite what player consensus was. A large part of that is because of

bugs that hit at the time. And so it's really interesting looking at that because a lot of those bugs have since been fixed in New Vegas. It's kind of interesting seeing the kind of the critical snapshot and how that actually reflects today. And a large part of me wonders if a vowed, which has like an 80 or something like that on Metacritic, which actually surprised me because I expected it to be much higher, it'll be interesting to see

like as this game grows and as players grow to appreciate, I suspect that there will also be a gap between like where it's landed critically and what players ultimately think of it. Because I think players will start to appreciate what it really does and what it what it accomplishes as time goes on. Yeah. And related to that also narratively, I think I at least don't have a total sense of how it's going to work narratively and how many different ways that it threads together the choices that you make. I have found a surprising number of times that I make a small decision and then get a little callback to it later from some character, which I think is really neat. And it's just very hard to get your head around that with a game that's a big role-playing game just because there's so many different variables. So I'll be interested to see that.

One thing I do really like about the story and the choices that you make are that you're not. being told in your dialogue options, which options are weighted which way, or what's going to cause what to happen, you just kind of have to read them, which I honestly, it was like a switch I had to switch in my brain to start actually reading each line of dialogue and not just going with the one that unlocks because I have the arcane scholar background or the one that unlocks because my perception is high enough, but really reading them all and thinking, how do I want to respond to this person and how do I want this conversation to go? I actually found that by turning off subtitles, which is, I don't know why I did this.

This is kind of a weird thing. I don't usually do this, but I turned off subtitles and I just listened to the characters talk to me. And I have to just sit and listen to the voice actor, just read the lines of dialogue and internalize them instead of reading the line of dialogue and skipping through it with the space bar like I usually do. And as a result, it's led the conversations to feel much more naturalistic to me. Like that paired with the fact that the options that I'm given are just varied options that. I can choose however I want to. Yeah, I can say that I've noticed some really significant story changes as well that I think are really cool.

Like, for example, that fight you described that you got in, Kirk, I chose not to. And then later was like, maybe I should have killed those guys. I won't get into why. But like, it's funny that you mentioned that fight because I don't know about how many other kind of big fulcrums there are. And they don't make them obvious. Like in that moment, I was like, This one seems like a pretty clear one.

But the other ones, I'm like, these could pay off in any number of smaller ways. So there are some that are not obvious. And like, you have to kind of figure out as you go. And they're significant, very significant. To the point where like, again, I think as players like really unravel this game more, they'll really go to appreciate it. So I'll be as vague as possible to not spoil things. But at the end of, I guess, Act 2 or Area 2, there's a major thing that happens. and the outcome of that major thing will vary drastically,

depending on if you did an unrelated side quest to the main story, which would help you lead you to find a certain place and do a certain couple of things that would then change the outcome of what happens. I think I know what you're talking about just from your vague clues. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty, yeah, if you've done it you, you know. But there are also, there are a couple of ways that you can like, you can either accidentally stumble upon this major thing or you could like hear about it from someone else.

There are few ways that the game will kind of breadcrumb you into this thing. And if you find this area and you do this thing, you will drastically change the end of Act 2. And that will have ripple effects for the story to come. So yes, there's a lot of this stuff from what I've seen. A lot of just kind of elaborate choices and consequences. That's very cool, you know, especially to hear because I made the different choice from you, Maddie, at the end of Act 1, I killed someone. You know, it was sort of seen as the pro-empirate

and I was, I actually don't feel sympathetic to the empire at all. Fascist Hamilton over here. I just wanted the guy's armor. Like I said, this was purely utilitarian call. Yeah. I didn't really need it. I mean, the empire sucks at it very clearly, you know, I'm opposed to them. But I actually then found, I was a little disappointed in the second act

because the game repeatedly made it clear to me that actually that was the right call and that guy needed to die. because he was, you know, it sort of excused it. It didn't make me really sit with the consequences of that. It gave me an out. But hearing that there are a whole bunch of, you know, branching options like that, it wouldn't surprise me if that first choice, they kind of give, they soften it a little for you no matter which way you go,

just so that your very first choice doesn't feel like a massive, you know, a massive story fork because it's the first choice that you made. So I'll be very curious how that plays out as I go. I think the way they have this game designed is they want to avoid, like, there's no situation in which you can piss off an entire faction to the point where there'll be hostile on site for the rest of the game. So in that case, it's like if you move against the rebels by killing that guy, the rebels have to still interact with you at different points throughout the game. So they're not going to be like, well, you killed that guy, so now you're dead to us. So it doesn't quite work like that. And the same way you can like fight different factions belonging to the empire, like the steel garote who like,

like pop up early in the game and are kind of there throughout. At certain points you can fight them and I was kind of like, oh man, like if I fought these guys, does that mean they're hostile to me for the rest of the game? But no, it doesn't work like that. It's kind of like, we acknowledge that you did that, but you're still the envoy and we still got to kind of like treat you with like some, at least some, some degree of unwanted, like respect, begrudging respect or whatever it is. So here's some contacts that might help you guys kind of try to look at this game and what it is and what it's turned into. This game had a really troubled development cycle, at least during its first few years. So I interviewed the director for Bloomberg,

Carrie Patel, and I've also talked to various people who have worked on this game over the years in various capacities. And what this game was originally, this game was pitched, I believe, before Xbox acquired Obsidian, which is at the end of 2018. They were pitching this game. And this game was one of those pitches that is like any hot buzzword you can think of is we're throwing at it. It was like destiny meets Skyrim meets like a ton of other things. It was like the most ambitious possible project that could have done. Multiplayer Skyrim with like a bunch of other cool shit in it. Wow. And for its first couple of years, it had a different game director. It was kind of setting out to be co-op. Skyrim had a massive open world. And at a certain

point it wasn't working. I believe throughout this game, they've had three different vertical slices, which a vertical slice is like a demo that you make essentially to kind of showcase the game as you're working on. I get a slice of every portion of it, hence the vertical slice part. And at the beginning of 2021, Carrie Patel, who's the current director, took over. And the two major things that she did were one kind of focus it into this region-based structure, the way it is now, where there are four different regions, I think four, maybe five, four different regions and each of them is its own zone rather than one big massive world like Skyrim, which I think is very smart and a very smart way to approach scope.

And the second thing she did was she brought a lot more pillars into the story and into the world and made it feel a lot more like a proper sequel to like the Pillars games. And so yeah, this current version is kind of the scope down, just kind of like tailored, focused version of the game, which again, I think speaks to that kind of common complaint I've seen, which is like, this doesn't have enough systems. Like, why isn't this inner, why can't I interact with the world in all these different ways? It's because they deliberately chose, no, we are want to focus on what we're really good at, rather than trying to make this game all things to all people, like the biggest, most vast, most ambitious RPG ever, which never would have worked. Yeah, that's a good call.

Like, you're reminding me of some of the things we said about Star Wars outlaws, which truly felt like it was trying to include so much. And we were like, what if it had just focused on three things? And I really agree with Kirk's take from the top of the show where it's like, this game really does that. And it just does those things. Or maybe you said that, Jason. Yeah, I said that.

Yeah, yeah. But no, that's a great. Star Wars Atlas is a really great comparison point because you're 100% right. And you know what? It's kind of, it's the difference also between a team in Obsidian where this game was made by like around 100, maybe 120 people with like co-dev help out. also outsourcing, which everybody uses these days, but like a pretty small core team, whereas Outlaws, that's a Ubisoft game made by hundreds, if not thousands of people.

And it's really, it's kind of like, you can really see the difference in kind of like a tailored, a focused experience versus a game that is just trying to be all things to all people. And what I really like about Obsidian's approach is that like a game like a Vout, that's not going to have to sell 10 million copies to be profitable, whereas Star Wars Outlaws, that sells a million copies and it's considered a massive flaw. And so I think this feels more like a model of sustainable development. I kind of wish, I was talking to some people about this at Dice last week. I feel like games should have like a price tag on them so we can put that in perspective

as we're kind of playing and talking about them. Like this game costs $30 million. This game costs $300 million because I think that would be a really useful point of comparison when we're talking about these things. Yeah. It feels like it was successfully scoped. It is, I think, beautiful looking. It's an Unreal Engine game.

I think it looks and it runs great for me on PC. And honestly, as much as, you know, they've patched stuff about the upgrade system. There were a couple of bugs pre-release that were patched before early access. It's pretty bug-free, or at least for me. I mean, it's a very polished experience because it is pretty contained. And it seems like they were working well within their scope. I think that when I am most enjoying the game is when I'm taking my time with it. And as I mentioned, turning off subtitles, slowing down and really listening to the conversations,

reading through the lore codex, just enough to understand what something was. For example, something I like about this world is Kith are something that they talk about. Kith just refer to humanoid peoples. And that was not a term that I knew because I played a little of Pileas of Eternity forever ago, but I didn't remember it. It was really nice to just call that up. when someone said it and then see what it was. And also, if you're playing without subtitles, you don't always get all the proper nouns and the spellings,

but if you call up the lore little codex, you get to see how everything is spelled and what it all means. So slowing down and really enjoying that stuff and letting it take its time just talking to you also helps the pacing of the game. And I've found that when I turn on subtitles and I'm moving really quickly through things, and it really just does become a jumpy, climby, picky-upy,

fighty game. It starts to feel much more repetitive to me and a little less fun because I'm kind of compacting the pacing of my experience until I'm just running around from checkpoint to checkpoint to checkpoint. And then it really starts to become clear that, okay, all I'm doing is just picking up materials and I'm fighting pretty samey fights. You know, there isn't a ton of combat variety, which is not the end of the world, but, you know, it becomes more apparent if you're doing fight after fight after fight after fight and blasting through conversations and not really paying attention. So you kind of, for me anyways, it's really helped to control my pacing and slow it down so that I'm spacing out some of the exploration in combat. It helps. This is a game that I think helps your enjoyment to actually do every single side quest. That's certainly true.

Both because of the pacing, like you said, and also because that upgrade material is true. Yeah, they matter. They have interesting consequences and story ramifications. But also the upgrade system, I think this is a game. I've seen some reviewers, including, I believe, Paul, Gagel. On the reviewer complaining about the lack of upgrades. Yeah. I'm looking about the resource management for sure. Yeah, which I think is mitigated if you're doing a lot of exploring and side quests and stuff

because you'll find yourself picking up a lot of items. It doesn't lend itself to the rushed reviewer experience that almost no actual person has. Especially the pre-release version of the game. I know. Which is tough. Yeah, there's some great there are some great side quest. There's a side quest called Dawn Treader, I believe it's called early on. That's a real standout.

Also, the NPC that you interact with is voiced by friend of the show, Matthew Mercer. The whole time I was playing it, it wasn't on his IMDB page yet because it was pre-release. And I'm so attuned to his voice now, as I've mentioned before. So I'm sitting there just being like, is this him? Is this him? And then at some point, he did some laugh or something. I was like, yeah, that's definitely him. But it is more to the point.

It is a great little side quest, a really cool self-contained story with the zealot who's trying to build this shrine. but it also intersects with other characters from outside of the SideQuest who are kind of more a part of the main story. And slowing down, really listening to everything, taking my time and sort of understanding what each waypoint I was moving towards represented and what this area I was really was. It really helped. That might sound weird, but it is so easy with games like this, especially when you have a little waypoint on your HUD to just go from thing to thing to thing. And then you fight some stuff and you pick up, oh, the dooh, the doohykees. and then you take it back to the guy, and then he says some stuff,

and I don't know, you pick some things. It's really easy to go into that mode with this game in particular because it's so familiar. So much of it is role-playing game, stuff you've done before. And I really suggest anyone playing this, try to pull yourself out of that mode

because it makes the game much, much more enjoyable. Yeah. So, okay, so that Don Shredder quest, I feel like encapsulates all things that are cool about this game, like in one quest. Like there's the main decision where, like, or the main story where you meet this guy

who's an Oracle, another godlike like you and he's building this massive contraption and you have to decide what to do about him and about the contraption and there are a lot of different ways in which that can kind of go. There's also the dungeon, which itself is this kind of like level design wonder of full of verticality and really interesting kind of side passages. And then there's also the hilarity of it all in that you meet this dude is this punk kid who was like really sad because he's going to die a virgin and like you save him

and then your characters keep making jokes about now he could go and get laid and like the entire time there's this running commentary from characters about him getting to go and just like all this innuendo and joking about it so to me that one side quest like perfectly captures what the maybe that was the vertical slice i was about to say i wonder if that was their vertical that really that that feels like it captures what this game is all about it's got the humor it's got the choices it's got the visual spectacle and it's got some cool combat and boss fights and it just works super well and by the way kirk one thing that helps prevent the comment from being samey is that a lot fights are really cool and do different interesting things.

A lot of them, some of them just take kind of like typical MMO raid boss mechanics where like there'll be a big red circle and you have to get out of it. But still, I found them, they add some kind of spice to the combat, I think. Let's talk about combat a little more specifically.

So Maddie, you said you're playing with a big hammer like you're a melee, melee fighter. Yeah, yeah. No shields required. Classic me. How has that been? I think it's really fun.

And it's not, it's kind of weird because it's, it's not like there's like a lock on dodge roll souls like situation here. It feels a little messier than that. But I can get on board with that and I kind of am enjoying how messy the combat feels. There's like a command wheel, almost like a mass effect style situation where you can direct your two companions to attack things. I really like the way that feels and how it works because I'm a fighter. I can like bring a magic user with me or somebody who has super different. abilities for me and still take advantage of that and feel like I'm actually enjoying all the different facets of the combat. So yeah, I'm really liking it. But I also, I didn't start

playing this game until I feel like they had rolled out some of the resource patches as well. I don't know. I guess Jason said it was a day one patch. But like I feel like it wasn't that bad for me. So maybe I'm just so good at games. But also I'm playing every side quest. To be clear, the day one patch was for the difficulty tier, not the resources. Yeah. Well, I'm talking, yeah. So like to speak to the resource management. I really haven't personally struggled with that and I've found it to be fine, but also like when you're playing with like sword and board style in this game, you just need to get enough metal. And I am never afraid to break down every single item in my inventory and kiss it goodbye. So I'm just like fully like Marie condoing every single thing and and maxing out all of my three

items every single time. And I'm really enjoying that. I think the upgrade stuff is is fun for that. and I don't know. I like swinging a big, big hammer at a guy. Yeah, I've been playing, I think Jason, you and I are both playing rogues with bows, is that right?

Are you still playing that character? Kind of character? Yeah, bow and switching back and forth between a bow and a sword and shields. So like less melee, a little more distance fighting. So how does that feel? I have a feeling that playing with a bow

is maybe it's fun, but it's a little, it gets a little repetitive only because I'm always keeping distance and firing arrows. But I think the magic system might be really fun. I'm kind of considering respect. I know. I'm sad. None of us have tried it. Well, you can respec at any point. It just costs some gold and then just go ahead and, you know,

have a magic user or even kind of dual-wheeled, a grimoire, like a book and a gun, which gives you the range stuff. So kind of be a rogue, hybrid rogue wizard. And the magic looks kind of fun. And I don't know that I feel like looking at some of those ability upgrades. They just look a little more cool than the rogue ability upgrades. I've been a little disappointed with the abilities, the actual active abilities in this game, just because it'd be cool if I could have a double jump or a blink or some other really sick mobility stuff with rogue. But a lot of the rogue upgrades are kind of ranged weapons do more damage or harvest two items when you pick things. And I kind of wish there were a few more things where press a button and something happens in the fight. And it seems

like Wizard is maybe a little more in that direction. So I'm considering re-specking. Yeah, from what I've and Wizard has like all of the cool powers that like gravity wells and like moving people around the battle right a lot of that cool shit is like for wizards I do also kind of like but you know one thing that's nice about about combat and skill building is that it's so flexible like there's nothing rigid about it yes you could go and switch like you could reset all your skills for like a pitiful a pittance of gold and then just go and become a wizard if you wanted to

and just halfway through the game switch gears. So you're not locked to anything. Yeah, especially now that they've made upgraded gear less precious, that it's just easier to switch to a different build and then level up a grimor pretty easily. And that seems like it would be cool.

And I just, I want to stress overall, the combat is really fun. I mean, it's got that whatever, sticky friction, I suppose, is the Tim Rogers term. It has that pop. There's a sound effect that plays when you nail an arrow shot

that lines up with headshot. that lines up with headshots and really just feels very, very satisfying. It's super snappy. It's really responsive. The dodge is cool. There is an amount of dodging that happens in fights like when a big, you know, a big bruiser comes up to me and starts swinging his hammer at me and I dodge backward. And then he misses.

And it really makes me feel agile and like the map is really responsive. Or sort of the battlefield is really responsive to what I'm doing. Good parrying too. Good parrying system. There is a very strong. Yeah. combat and it, you know, I mean, compared to an elder scrolls game, it's night and day. I mean, the improvement here is impressive. That's what I was expecting. Like, I feel like that's kind of

the headline is like an obsidian game has pretty fun combat. Like I didn't go into this game being like, well, this is going to really feel good, but it does. It actually does. Yeah. And, you know, I think all three of us weren't the hugest fans of the outer worlds, which was their previous role-playing game, more of a sci-fi gun kind of thing. And I didn't find the combat in that to terrible, but I didn't find it to be super fun. Mostly with that game, it was the tone and the writing that just kind of didn't draw me in. Though I know that game has its supporters, but this really does feel like this combat is fun, man. I do just like the fights.

If they are able to make another one and add more enemy types and, you know, add more variety and mobility to the combat, I mean, it seems like a very great 1.0 for this type of combat. It could go in a lot of cool direction. Yeah, 100%. And it's worth noting. Obsidian is releasing Outer Worlds 2. this year, like, as at least they've announced that. It's coming later this year, which is pretty wild, too. First of all, the fact that Obsidian has those two games and just released Pentem in a

couple years ago. Obsidian has released more games since it's been bought by Microsoft than like first party Microsoft Studios. That's true. Man, Obsidian kind of carrying Microsoft. Ombudian has released like four games. Grounded is also very successful. That's right. How do they do it? What a studio. That's so cool. Well, they did this dice talk, like the two of their vice presidents, guys who help run the studio. They did this dice talk where they talk about like sustainability and all the things that the three of us love and talk about like not wanting to, not needing to hit home runs and how they want each game to be profitable. But it doesn't have to be like some massive like 10x growth or anything. And you want to know how they do it.

I think that's a big reason how. They also have a lot of people there who have been there since like the very beginning. and before that, working together at Black Isle and Interplay and whatnot. And they just brought back John Gonzalez, right? He just, the New Vegas narrative lead just came back. But yeah, but even, I mean, at the higher levels, Fergus or Cart, the founder still runs the place. Josh Sawyer, I think is a pretty well-known director there.

He directed New Vegas and then Pentiment and Pillars. So they have a lot of people who have been there from the very beginning who were still there. I think that's a big part of it. It's almost like not running out all your talent can pay dividends over the long time. It's really interesting. I think they've had some of their own internal drama too. Don't get me wrong. I don't think it's a perfect place to work, but yeah.

What? Why doesn't that exist? Something we haven't talked about yet that I just want to shout out before we move on from Avowed is just how cool the visual designs are. The godlike looks so cool. And you can design them to look however you want, I suppose. but I love how she looks for me. And like every time I get to see her, I'm like, oh, yeah, I look so sick.

And this is why every time everyone sees me, they know exactly who I am. Because the godlike has this, like, these markings on their face. And you get to kind of decide how they look. But no matter what, you're going to have them. And they're kind of like mushroom growths, like outcroppings on your face. But then also this kind of zombie plague, for lack of a better term, has kind of a similar weird look as well. And then that's kind of like a haunting parallel that I haven't beaten the game. So I don't know how that's going to play out.

But like people meet you and they kind of sometimes remark on that. But also you look really freaking cool no matter what you do. And then also there's all these weird mushrooms everywhere in the world. But they're so colorful. It's not like grim dark last of us zombie mushrooms. It's like Lisa Frank mushrooms or something. They really go for it with purple and pink and yellow mushrooms. Yeah, no.

Yeah. It reminds me of Morrow Wind. Yeah, that's a good poll. The Elder Scrolls game with all the mushrooms in it, which is cool because that's a beloved game, and this game already has some Elder Scrolls feeling. It's like a more colorful morrow wind, which I really appreciate it. Yeah, I think the world looks really nice. The music's a little bit of a letdown for me.

I think that it's atmospheric. It's fine, but it doesn't quite have the grand melodies that I would hope for from a fantasy game like this. even while it still sets the mood and supports the visual design. But yeah, I think the visual design is lovely. And it's fun to have a character who is unusual-looking that other characters in the world react to. You know, because you can't choose, you know, whatever type of kith you want to be,

you have to just be a godlike. As a result, they can write slightly more specific reactions to your character, which helps give a specificity to the whole story, which I appreciate. It's kind of another scope thing. You know, just pick one type of character that you're playing as as a result. hey actually we can make the story much more specific throughout.

Yeah, it really worked for me in comparison to something like metaphor refantazio where I guess technically your main character looks different from everybody else, but like to us they actually don't. Right, he actually looks like a person. So it's kind of fun and different to be like, you're super visually different and noticeable and everyone knows exactly who you are as soon as they see you and that's stressful, politically, emotionally, etc. And like, I just met these two characters who are like kind of,

sciencey fetishy obsessed with me as a godlike and I thought they were so funny. It was very weird. And like I loved that like that was a conversation that I could have and that I could like make fun of them and be like yeah, you're really making me feel normal here. Like that I just think is such a fun way to play with just a really cool visual design and have it be something that matters about your fantasy races in your game. Nice. Well yeah, any final thoughts on avowed before we move on? Pretty good. No, I'm really sucked about it. I think for me, a measure of whether a game is really cool is if I am going to finish it even after it comes out and I'm done covering it. And this, to me, feels like one of those.

So maybe we'll talk about it more. Maybe we'll do a beans cast about it at some point down the road. Because to me, this feels like when I'm going to finish. Despite having a million other things to play right now. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot going on. But I want to go back to it too, especially since they made it. easier to upgrade. And also, hey, it's on Game Pass for anyone listening. It's a great

kind of game game game. If you subscribe to that, you can just pick it up and give it a shot. So that is a vowed. It's out on Xbox and PC. It'll be out on PlayStation later. Pretty cool game. Let's take a break. And then we will be back with one more thing. Hey. Hey there. Do you love reading smut? Erotica? Romance. Romantic. Is your e-reader full of horny fairies and sexy shifters? Are your shelves bursting? with enemies to lovers.

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Manners Schmanners, get it? And we are back for one more thing. Maddie, why don't you go first? Mine is a movie. I mean, this is always what I do when we all play the game, right? I watched a really cool movie. So this is a movie called Priscilla. It's about Priscilla Presley, and it was directed by Sophia Coppola, who I love, love her work.

She does some really, really cool movies, usually with female characters at the center. Vibes-based movies is how I would describe a lot of them. Like, just real, like, female interiority style movies. and Priscilla Presley's life was so bonkers that it just is like perfect for the Sophia Coppola treatment. So it goes, it charts her whole life from meeting Elvis Presley when she was 14 years old and he is 11 years older than her, by the way. And that is the age difference that remains for all time because that's how math works. But it's a little different when you're 30 and 41. Well, they don't make it that far.

They get divorced before that, I believe. I believe when she was 27. And so it goes all the way up from age 14 to their divorce. And that's where the movie ends. And this actress who plays her, let me look up her name because she's incredible to. Kaylee Spani is her name. I might be pronouncing her last name wrong. I don't know.

But she, they do such an incredible job with the makeup on her. I truly thought they cast a 14 year old. But she's not. She's like 20 something when she was in this movie and she has to play it all the way through. And so you're really just with her. It's not an Elvis movie. It's just about how basically she was groomed and also kind of treated almost like a peasant girl who the prince falls in love with. Like her parents are kind of blindsided by this.

Like Elvis has taken an interest. This is like very old, but ridiculously, incomprehensibly famous man has taken an interest in their 14 year old daughter. And they just like visibly don't know how to react to this and just eventually are like, okay, I guess you can go live with him. And his castle. Man, Michael Jackson echoes there. It's so weird. And like just Sophia Coppola does such an incredible job of just showing how eerie and like kind of spooky that is and how weird her life is.

And just it's not just that it makes you feel sorry for her, but also you are rooting for her to leave him by the end. And that is spoilers. Is how it ends. Of course, we know that about her life. And I just thought it was fascinating. And I really liked kind of getting to know her. It's produced by the actual Brazil.

Presley. I was going to ask if she was involved because she's still alive. She's so alive and it's based on a book, a memoir she wrote. So like she's very involved. The movie's accurate and like it's really look into what her life was like. And I just thought that was really cool and fascinating. And a good, weird, sad story about some decisions Elvis made in this girl's life and then a woman's life. So I really recommend it. It's just called Priscilla. And a good counterpart to Elvis, you know, the Boslerman one that recently came out as well. Yeah, which I haven't seen. seen. Maybe I'll watch it. This was kind of the movie that I was like, this is the one I'd like to see. Sure, sure. It's appropriate that they would both be out at around the same time. So when you say that they met at 14. Is that when they started a relationship? Yes. When she was 14 and he was 25. Wow. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, it is gross. And the movie really does a good job of kind of depicting how that works and how it plays out between them. It's creepy. Yeah, I've wanted to see it. I'll add it to the list. Jason, how about you? What's your one more thing?

So my one more thing is when I was flying home from Vegas to New York last week from Dice, I was looking at the bookstore at the airport and grabbed a book. And it looked interesting. It was one of those kind of airport thrillers and grabbed it and got on the plane and read it all in one sitting and loved it to death. And loved it so much that when I got home, I started looking up the author's other work and just started snatching up books. I've already read what like her set another book from her. I've already ordered a third book from her. So this is the author, Lisa Jewell, who is a British crime thriller author.

I guess not even crime thriller, thriller author, who is a master of her craft. And so the book that I read on the plane was called None of This Is True. And then I read a different book called The Night She Disappeared. A lot of these are kind of psychological suspense books. There's a lot of just kind of missing people involved and or just kind of of like suspenseful, suspenseful tragedies, like that sort of genre. And she's very, very good. I've read a lot of thrillers over the years.

I really like the genre. And some are just kind of like, some are poorly written, but interesting stories. Others are kind of like just a mess in some way or another or leave you ultimately unsatisfied. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, I was going to say, I was going to say, Lisa Jewell is a master. Like truly a master. Like I'm so impressed by her work, not just in terms of her pacing and plotting and structure her and twists and turns, which I think really good. But also just like the, her writing ability, I think is really, really good, which again, I think is a rarity in this genre. I think usually it's a little bit less about the caliber of writing and a little bit more about telling a good story. And with Lisa Jewell, it's both. So I've already ordered a third book from her and then there were none. I'm very excited to read it and to keep going.

going through her catalog of like 20 something books, which is pretty wild and fun. Nice. Always fun to discover a prolific author or find an author you really like and then discover that they are prolific because I'm really enjoying it. And yeah, I mean, I've read a lot of thrillers also where it's like the twist ending a chapter just fizzles or is like pisses you off because it turns out it's like just a total, I don't know, misleading nonsense moment or red herring or whatever. but Lisa Jule is excellent at pulling us off.

And just to kind of give you a brief description of like what actually happens in these books, the one I read on my flight, none of this is true, is about this woman who is kind of like a relatively successful podcaster who like interviews women about their lives. And this woman, Woman One, runs into a second woman at a bar. Turns out they both have the same birthday. And the second woman becomes a little bit fixated on Women One. eventually like discovers her again in a park and goes up to her and is like, hey, you should do a podcast about me because my life is really interesting. And then the two of them start talking.

And women one, the podcaster, she starts to get a little bit like, uh, uh, icked out by the second woman and a little worried that like maybe her life is in danger or something like that. But she's so, uh, hooked on the idea of being able to tell this compelling story in her podcast that she just kind of like, let's let's her guard down a little bit. but lets this woman into her life in ways that maybe she shouldn't. Whereas women, too, she is like trying to inch her way into women, into the podcaster's life and like starts taking home some of her things. Parassocial podcast thriller.

It's quite interesting. It's quite, quite interesting and tragic. I want to read more books about podcasters. Yeah. Sounds great. They're actually... It's like a new single white female, but with a podcaster. Single white podcaster.

It's funny you say that, Kirk. It's actually, over the last like four years, it's become almost a trope of the thriller genre, like the psychological thriller, like a lot of... Like only murders in the building, too, even on TV. Yeah, I mean, it's become this thing where like, that at least is a little more farcical. A lot of times it'll be like a woman.

There was one book I read a couple years ago, or last year called, Tell Me the Lie, and it's about this podcaster who like goes home to her old. It's always about all these books like in the in the um the spirit of jillian flin's sharp objects it's always like uh someone left their their small town uh and comes back 20 years later because there's also in the spirit of every hallmark movie ever it's true but comes back later to discover a murder mystery that has not

yet been like that is a cold case that was never properly solved and using their podcast they find a way to solve it that's like the story of like 15 of these thrillers it's funny you know it's like maravistown was that trope except that that mayor had never left the town, and that also made for a very interesting story that she had always been there her whole life. But yes, a familiar set up. Yeah, I mean, there are definitely subversions of this. But yeah, but the podcaster thing, that's become a very, very common trope in these books these days. It's kind of a good, it's a good profession for this kind of story because a podcaster is in other people's lives and interviewing them and learning about them and doing investigations.

And, like, publications don't exist anymore, so she can't be a journalist. Right, it used to be a journalist or maybe a private investigator. Now she's an independent podcaster. Yeah, you need, yeah, exactly. You need the excuse for the main character to be poking around in this sort of thing. And in this book in particular, and none of this is true, the main character needs an excuse for why she continues to allow this woman into her life. Right, yeah. Because she wants the story, and that kind of adds another kind of interesting angle to this clearly creepy psychological manipulating situation.

The thing is, so if I wrote a thriller, about a podcast or the problem would be, there would be whole asides where two people have long conversations about which microphone is better and the main character would have all these internal thoughts about the Electro Voice RE20 and how it sounds better than the SM7B. Yeah, and that'd be really good.

My editor would just delete the entire book. Yeah, it'd be too much. You joke, but it's actually, it's quite a skill being able to like immerse yourself in that much research or in your case personal, part of the first day of knowledge and tell a compelling story that feels true, but also is paced well. It's like,

It's a really interesting kind of, may or may not be something I've been thinking about a lot recently. Of course. But storytelling when you're like intimately familiar a world, I think is a really interesting kind of skill and muscle to really build. So yeah, that's my one more thing is Lisa Jules. None of this is true and also the Nike disappeared. This is the Tom Clancy effect where he's so into just the coolness of military vehicles that he winds up writing whole chapters about the treads on some armored vehicle or something instead of. It did work for him. It's true. All right. Well, I will go last. My one more thing is a really, really great documentary that I watched last week called Ladies and Gentlemen 50 Years of S&L Music. This is streaming on Peacock. It is directed, of course, by Questlove and also Oz Rodriguez. The Questlove's fingerprints are all over this thing. It is a very long, like a three-hour documentary chronicling the entire history of musical guests on Saturday Night Live. So SNL is currently doing this 50th anniversary thing. They started in 1975 and have been going for 50 years, which is kind of wild.

And I haven't caught a lot of it. I'm sure some of it is very self-congratulatory and, you know, puffing up SNL and their importance and everything. But I heard nothing but good things about this documentary. I've watched one of Questlove's other documentaries, Summer of Soul, which is also an amazing music documentary. So I knew, I mean, he is an incredible director. This is his calling. I mean, he's a great drummer and a great musician and a great podcaster and everything, but this, man, he is good at this.

And so knowing that he was the one behind this movie, I was excited to watch it. Oh, man, it's so good. It is, I would say, equally good as a chronicle of Saturday Night Live. I know there are other 50-year anniversary chronicles of the guests and weekend update and whatever, all the different things that each of us may remember from that show. But actually looking at the show through the lens of the musical guests is a great way, to understand Saturday Night Live. Some of the biggest controversies of SNL,

you know, Shnade O'Connor ripping up the picture of the Pope or Rage Against the Machine being the musical guests on an episode that Steve Forbes hosted, which I had totally forgotten the Steve Forbes hosted SNL. And then they wound up almost like attacking his family because they got in an altercation about hanging the flag upside down. Man, there are some wild stories. I'd heard the story about fear.

There was a punk band fear that John Belushi got on. as the guest artist. This was in the 70s. And they brought their whole crew of rowdy punk boys to come and thrash around the stage. And it turned into this pretty awesome, actually, like a very violent but pretty amazing spectacle of just guys on stage and everyone's getting thrown around and the mics are getting knocked down while the guy is singing, beef, beef, beef, beef bologna, and like yelling. And the stuff that was happening on that show in the 70s, I mean, I've rarely, I've barely watched any SNL from the 70s. And the musical guests they had were wild Captain Beefheart is there.

Keith Jarrett, the jazz pianist, just played a set on SNL. They had so many different guests. And seeing them all just back to back to back to back to back, with interviews with all kinds of people. You know, you got Billy Elish and Olivia Rodriguez, but then you've also got all these classic folks who are on there. Eddie Murphy's there talking about James Brown. When Prince first came on, before Prince was even really Prince. And you get to see all these performances. And then because Questlove just is such a chronicler of music and has so much care and understanding, he just, he presents it beautifully.

It opens with a montage, the supercut that he's put together that must have just taken a thousand hours of work where he's overlaying songs and kind of mashing them up to move through, I don't know how many different performances, so that they're overlapping and bouncing off of one another and mixing and matching tempos. And it just feels like this overwhelming thing. I want to watch it five more times. So it's a really, really, I mean, it's just like a pure pleasure to watch it. Whatever your relationship is with SNL, you know, I grew up in an SNL house. We loved it in the 90s in particular. There's a lot of focus then on that era, you know, when Adam Sandler was singing the red-headed sweatshirt song or the Hanukkah song. And, you know, just all of these different musical moments.

And I don't know, it really made me realize how musical a show SNL was and how important the relationship between comedy music is and especially how important comedy and music in New York in the 1970s was. So I cannot recommend this documentary enough. It's fantastic. It's streaming on peacock. It's called Ladies and Gentlemen, 50 Years of Essinnell music. Go watch it. What are you doing?

Do they get into Lonely Island, too, in there? Oh, yes. There's a whole thing on Lonely Island. They talk all about it. They've got Timberlake on there. They got Sandberg. Everyone talking about how they came up with all that stuff. Can we talk about SNL just for a second?

First of all, I watched last week on the flight two. Vegas. I watched a flight a movie called Saturday Night, which is a very different kind of. A movie that almost doesn't exist, even though I know of it. It came and went. Yeah, I don't know people liked it. I thought it was awesome.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great. Nothing against its quality, just that it, I barely realized that it had come out. I feel like that's true of a lot of movies. It's just how movies work. So weird climate for movies now, yeah. But it's all set on like the hours before the first ever

SNL and it's a dramatized version. And part of the fun is seeing these kind of younger, current actors playing Chevy Chase and Lauren Michaels and Gilda Ratner and all these kind of classic characters. Andy Kaufman, what's his name? The guy from Succession plays Andy Kaufman. The guy, cousin Greg from Succession. Oh, nice. Okay. Plays Andy Kaufman incredibly.

And also plays Jim Nelson, the creator of the Muppets, incredibly. That movie is extremely enjoyable. But also, did you guys watch the SNL-15? like the anniversary special? No. No. Oh man. It was really wild.

It was really weird and way too long, but self-indulgent also, to your point, Kirk. I'm sure. Also fun to watch. Adam Sandler did a new song just kind of playing tribute to SNL, and there was some fun stuff in there. Yeah, I saw headlines about that. A thing that I really, really liked about the Questlove documentary is that it never once felt like self-congratulatory nonsense. It never felt like propaganda, even though it's so common for.

shows doing their own 50th celebration to fall into that, it always felt like an outsider's perspective. I think because Questlove, as much as he is a staple of New York entertainment and of TV even, you know, being on the Tonight Show, he is kind of an outsider to SNL and it had that flavor, and I really found that refreshing. And I think I'll probably watch it just because I'll watch the actual 50th celebration. But that stuff, it feels inevitable with that sort of a documentary. And it feels very special that they also made this separate thing that has. has more of a remove. Yeah, I mean,

some of it, some of the self-indulgence is justified, because SNL is such a titan. Like you could trace back so many comedy careers today to SNL. Some of it is a little much for sure, but there's some fun moments. I mean,

there's like Andy Sandberg did like a song, a music video about how everyone who worked on the show had anxiety. And it's all about just like all these different people, like having to pitch the Lord. There's like a section of it about like, well, it's true. We're not coal miners,

but hey, coal miners didn't have to pitch the lawn. It's just like a fun thing. Yeah, I'm sure I'll watch it. It's got some merit. Yeah, I guess it's not to knock that. It's more to say how special I think that aspect of the music documentary is. 100%. Yeah, I think that the 50th anniversary has like four different musical performances.

You should, and you should watch the music thing. You both should. I will watch it. It's so good. I would like to. It's really, really great. Yeah, I didn't realize how involved it was. So thanks for the rec.

Yeah, beautifully, beautifully done. But SNL, it feels like it's such a, like, vestige of culture. It's such an institution. It's like there's nothing else that is that kind of dominant as the culture has gotten so fractured in television. Half a century for 50 years. There's something else that's, it's still like capable of watercolor moments in a way that nothing else is, which I think is just kind of like really interesting. And I wonder how much longer that'll be the case. I have to wonder, right, especially when Lauren leaves.

Like what it will mean? It depends what happens. Like, the rumor is that like someone like Tina Faye or Seth Myers would take over, which I think could be good. Tina Faye feels like the proper successor. But I don't know yet. It's fascinating to think about it. Yeah, it'll be really interesting to see.

Yeah, man, SNL. 50 years, half a century. It's wild. It's wild. It's wild. Well, what really makes you just kind of like your head explode is to think that when we were watching it, in the 90s with Chris Farley and Sandler and Spade. Yeah.

It was only 20 years old then. Yeah. They were doing 20th anniversary. I remember them. But I feel like I had a lot of ability to recognize that because my parents had all these old VHS tapes of the really old SNL sketches that they remembered. So like even as a child, I was like watching Chris Farley back to back with like Eddie Murphy. No, no, no.

But that's that's the point, Maddie. Is that like back then it was only 20 years old. it's been 30 years since we were that age. I don't know you're talking about. It's only been two years. It's been no time at all. It's fine. The 90s were like 10 years ago.

Yeah, right? Right. Maybe we can do an S&L beans cast or something at some point. I feel there's actually a lot with S&L to talk about it. Yeah, I would love to do that because like a lot of those sketches are like just things that my sister and I watched over and over and over. And I feel like all three of us probably have that. And it might be fun to talk about that.

Oh my God. the inside jokes on my family, the list. It was never the good sketches. There was a fake ad for... Yeah, there would be weird, like, family favorite sketches where it's like, no one... Not that the family likes it, but certain families, like, pick a sketch

that they're like, this is the one we're going to quote to each other repeatedly. Yeah, I think, and I think every family was like that. For us, there was an insurance sketch where there, he said, we're going to take all the people we insure and write their names down on a list and we'll keep the list in a safe place.

And we will not lose the list because that would be bad. And it's just this dumb, it's a very mid-grade fake ad. And yet somehow in my family, losing the list and, oh, you cannot lose the list.

That became this catch-all phrase that meant everything. Oh, that would be bad. Yes. So there were a lot of things like that. And I do feel that you're right. Every family had that kind of.

Still things will pop into my head. Like, da bears are like, there's so many things. A van down by the river. That one was like every one. I was that sketch. Uh-huh.

There's so many just lines that will just randomly pop into my head. And when I try to think, oh, where's that from? Oh, yeah, it's an S&L in the 90s slash 2000. You're too wild and crazy guys. Too wild and crazy guys. You up. I mean, even from the older SNL that I didn't watch, I still knew Hanson France. Wain's World.

Don't get me started on Wainz World. Oh, my God. We're not worthy. I legitimately like Wain's World. Like the movie, Wain's World, I think, is good. I will come out and say that I think it's good. Penel B. Sphere is classic. It's a great movie.

S&L holds up. Wayne's World holds up one of the most quotable movies ever made. I mean, there are a thousand quotes from that movie that I still quote. Remember when SNL led to like really good comedy movies that would just spin off of it? That's how you know things will change. Well, even back then, some of them are awful. I mean, Wayne's World is kind of an exception. Yeah.

It's true. And also I say that and like I love Pop Star never stop stopping and you could argue that's what it is. So like what am I saying? Yeah, although it's not based on it. But Popstar was a massive bomb. Wainsworld was also a box office hit. Popstar like lost tons of money. Popstar shouldn't have been a bomb.

Popstar shouldn't have been a bomb. No, I agree. I love that movie. But yeah, there were some bad ones. I mean, I always liked, like, Night at the Rock Spray, but, like, that movie was terrible. I love that. It's not good, but I love it. Yeah.

Or, like, Blues Brothers. Oh, my God, okay. Maybe, maybe, alright, right, right. We're going to do, we'll probably do an S&L episode. We should. We should go through. This is fertile ground. We will, we will talk about it more in the future.

For now, though, I think this has been a very fun episode of Triple Click and a vowed. Cool Game and some cool one more things as well. well. So let's say goodbye for now. And we will see everybody next week. See ya. 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 maximum fun.org slash join. Find us on Twitter at triple clickpod. Send email the triple click at maximum fun.org and find a link to our Discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artists-owned shows.

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