Triple Click - Triple Play: Cyberpunk 2077

Episode Date: December 17, 2020

Is Cyberpunk 2077 the biggest game of the year? Or just the most broken? This week, the gang dives into CD Projekt Red's hotly anticipated new RPG: the good, the bad, and the very, very ugly. Jason, Maddy, and Kirk talk about their impressions on the game and their thoughts on all the many, many, many controversies surrounding it.One More Thing:Kirk: GhostrunnerMaddy:  Carrie by Stephen KingJason: Call of the SeaLinks:Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinJoin 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

You know, everyone's talking about cyberpunk, but nobody's talking about cyber. Ska! Too, do, do, do, do. Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up. Welcome to Triple Click where we bring the games to you. Today we are talking about the biggest game of the year and also maybe the most unfinished cyberpunk 277. So let's get into it, shall we?

I'm Jason Shrier. I'm Kirk Hamilton. And I'm Maddie Myers. We are back for another episode. Do you look startled? Did we startle you with that? I was like, wow, we're doing the show? Oh, we're doing it. We just showed up on Maddie's computer in a Zoom call. Yeah, it was started out of nowhere. You guys just appeared as holographic images of yourselves in my living room and I'm just dealing with it now. You know how we did that? We hired a net runner to do that. They helped us get in undetected.

Yeah, this is how we're doing the show now. We're all. We're a cyber podcast. Projecting directly into each other's homes. Welcome back to the show for another episode of Triple Click. Before, we get started a couple of things right up front. First of all, a big thank you to all of you who support the show. And to those of you who do not support the show, you do not help us keep running. That's fine. But if you want to, you can go to Maximumfund.org slash join to become a member. If you do that, you get a whole bunch of bonus episodes, not just from us, from a bunch of different shows, but once a month from us, including what will go up next week, which is this month's

Beans cast where we spoil a thing on Gone Home, the 2013 indie video game. So look out for that next Monday on Monday the 21st. But do not look out for an episode next week because we are taking the week off for Christmas. So the only way you will get a new triple click next week is if you are a member, as it turns out. Nice little motivation for you to me. Then you'll get a bean test. Otherwise you'll have to wait two more weeks for our next episode. And we will be getting into all sorts of fun game of the year stuff.

We're going to revisit our 2020 predictions at the beginning of January. It's going to be fun. We're going to make some new predictions for 2021. It's going to be fun times. Should we just stop predicting things entirely? Maybe it's our fault that 2020 turned out how it did. Nope, we can't. Our predictions were the best part of 2020 is spending every day, like, wondering,

is one of our predictions. This is a preview of which of us may have won the predictions. I don't know. I don't, I haven't checked. I don't know about you guys. I actually don't know either. We're not going to find out. Yeah, don't tell us. I'm like deliberately not checking. Same. And all that said, this week, we are going to talk about the hot new video game about cybering. At least that's what I think it is. It's all about cybering 27-7. That's what it's about. Is it the hot new video game? I guess that's my question. Is it hot? Is it lukewarm? Is it new? Is it a video game? It has sold more copies than everything else. So yeah, definitely hot. sales-wise, it is not flying off the shelves.

Yeah, so we're going to talk about cyberpunk. This is going to be a triple play because we have all played the game. Let's see, up front. We've all played up into Act 2. Maddie, I think is the farthest, but we're all kind of there. We'll talk about some plot stuff, not a bunch of like super hardcore spoilers. Because I think a lot of our conversation is going to be about the broader stuff.

And also, so Jason and I both played press account copies of this game, and Maddie bought the game herself. So that is where we're at on. cyberpunk. So, all right, so there's a lot to talk about this game. There is this bigger narrative around the release and CD project and all of that. There's the technical issues. There's also just the game itself. And I guess I want to start there. So, uh, yeah, let's start with the game itself. I think we start there because I'm actually, I think that the other stuff is kind of more pressing at the moment. So let's talk about what we've played. Maddie, what do you just think of,

like, your experience playing this game so far? Well, I don't love it. So, So this is an open world video game. It is a story game. It is a role-playing game. Your decisions affect the end of the game. I made the decision to look up spoilers for the game because I wanted to know if there were different endings. And I'll just say that there are. And I wanted to know also.

And I've heard from talking to other people at work who've played the game that some of the missions play out differently, depending on what you choose in big and small ways. I know there's been a lot of jokes online about whether your choice is actually. matter in this game or not because some of that is pretty opaque, but they actually do matter. The open world stuff to me has been the least fun. So my experience with the game has been almost entirely story missions. I don't know how you two have been playing it, but anytime I try to do something outside of a story mission, I feel like the game is bad. Yeah. There are a lot of other things in this futuristic cyberpunk world. You can work with the cops. You can be kind of a criminal

freelancer and work with randos on the street. But mostly, this is a story about Keanu Reeves being on a microchip inside your head and becoming your best virtual friend. And that story, I think, is probably the strongest part of the game. Almost everything else is not great. Those are my early thoughts. What kinds of characters have you all chosen to play? I'm not so much into the hacking in this game. I don't think it's very fun, so I have just relegated myself to shooting my way through a lot of situations.

But I'm curious about how you two have chosen to go. Jason, why don't you go next and as you're telling us what you think you can also tell us what kind of character you're playing as? Yeah, well, I haven't actually chosen yet. I've just been hoarding all my points because I don't want to make a bad decision. So I guess, so I'm not as far as you are, Maddie. I've played eight hours. I just checked and mostly done story stuff on route to act too.

So the last big stuff I did was like the big hotel heist and all that stuff. And maybe as a result, I actually like the game. I've actually enjoyed what I've played so far. And I imagine that's going to surprise a lot of people who think that I hate CD Project and ran out to get them. But I've actually been enjoying what I played so far. that said it's hard to decouple it's hard to decouple that from the massive technical glitches everywhere and just like everything from tiny things like that just really annoy me like when you smash a glass window and the sound effect doesn't play and so it's just silently smashing a window which is so weird and like disconcerting to bigger stuff like in the middle of an emotional cutscene when a character is handing you something and that something just doesn't exist like it has disappeared in thin air and i'm playing on pc we're all playing on pc we're all playing on pc me too. Yes. So yeah, so that's not even... Which is the good version, supposedly. Yeah, that's not even counting the last-gen console versions, which are apparently like borderline unplayable, according to a lot of people, including CD Project Red themselves, which had to take responsibility for that.

Right. So, but the game itself, you're actually feeling. Overall thoughts. Yes, yes, yes. We'll get to that stuff later. Yeah. Overall thoughts. Yeah, I like it. I'm enjoying it. I'm enjoying it. The shooting feels good to me. I'm enjoying the writing and the story and the quest. I'm really into the story in a way that I didn't expect to be. based on the trailers. I thought it was going to be a lot more try-hardy. And I'm actually emotionally invested in V and her character arc and her situation and her buddies and all the characters. Johnny Silverhand. Yeah, Johnny I'm not a big fan of. Yeah. Keanu is not doing it for me. Unfortunately. Oh, he's an asshole, but I think, I don't know, he can be charismatic in his own way. I could see him growing on me. Yeah, maybe he'll grow on me over time. Again, I haven't played that all that much. But yeah, I mean, so far, I literally, just started, the last thing I was doing was like exploring the world a little bit and I could see like if this part of the game is a disappointment that I can see how myself like turning on it pretty

quickly. But at least right now I'm liking the game. Kirk, what about you? What are your kind of overall thoughts? Yeah, I like the story okay. I'm not totally sold on Johnny but I but I you know it's early goings. I'm feeling this as a sort of narrative game. I think it looks really nice when it works on PC, which is just cool. I have ray tracing on and it works okay. It doesn't run great. What's your card? 2080? A 2080. Yeah, this might be, and I'll say now, this is probably going to be a game that I put away and come back to in like six months when it's been patched to hell and has DLC and also when it's possible for me to finally get a better graphics card, just because I think this would be cool to play. And I can't quite get it running to where I

could play with a mouse and keyboard, and I think there's so much business in this game that playing with a controller feels kind of weird. But broader impressions, though, I think that the distinction I had to make in my head when I started playing this to like appreciate it for what it is rather than for what I sort of was expecting and what may have been marketed was that this game is a lot like The Witcher 3, CD Project's last game, in a lot of ways. And it's really like if the Witcher 3 were a first person game, it would actually kind of work like this, where it's basically the world is just a thing you move through that's really cool looking and sets the tone in between stories. missions and side quests and it's not a simulated reactive world like a GTA or a watchdogs or that kind of a game. But it wants to be. It wants very much to be. Well, yeah, it seems like people wanted it to be too. And it's very like shockingly incomplete when you try to play it that way. Like the police system in this game is just bizarre. If you've just shot someone on the street to see what

happens, like the police just teleport in behind you and start shooting. And then if you run away, they don't even chase you. Like it's so far behind. Like, grant, of three is like ahead of this game. So it's just not that kind of game. And leaving aside whether or not it's like okay for it not to be that kind of game, when I put that away and started playing the story, yeah, it's all right. Like it's, I don't know yet whether I love it. But it's pretty cool. Like it's got, you know, just a nice vibe. It's raining through the windows and we're up in this wild super mega skyscraper in a cyberpunk world pulling off a heist and there's robots. And I'm like, all right, yeah, this is cool. So I like that about it. Last thing I will say is that,

that I think maybe all three of us are playing as the female V. And I went through, I think it's actually really interesting how much better the performances. This is a voice actor named Shirami Lee, who I know as Makoto from Persona 5. She was also A2 in near Automata. She's been in a million things. She's a really like a working voice actor, and she's great. The male actor is a guy named Gavin Drey, who is in movies. He was like in that movie Vlarian and some other stuff, but he's not in any voice acting.

And I started this game and I was like, I did the nomad path. At the very beginning, you do this thing where you have to go fix a car. And I started as a guy. I was actually like, I'm going to play a guy in this game. And he started talking, I was like, I don't know, maybe I'm not going to play as a guy. And it's just this sequence where he looks at a car and he's like, it's an engine. And then he has to, you can take one of those blue dialogue options and you think to yourself. And he's like, hmm, what do I do?

And then he fixes it. And then he says to the mechanic, they're like, oh, like, you know, it was no help you talking to me or something like that. He kind of gives some attitude to the guy. and then gets in the car. That's fine. Step aside. What? Got any idea what I do?

I'm thinking. I'm thinking. And your chirping is not helping. So then I restarted it as the female fee, and the acting was so much better immediately. That's fine. Step aside. What?

Got any idea what a do? Hmm. I'm thinking. I'm thinking. And? And your chirping is not helping. Because voice acting is just such a different discipline. Natty, this is something you and I were talking about offline a little bit,

but just it's fascinating to hear a voice actor so starkly set herself apart. Just in the way that she thinks to herself when she looks at the engine, she's like, hmm. I'm thinking. I'm thinking. And it has this feeling of like familiarity and she's conveying so much because she's not, She's used to not relying on her face or anything. And I just think that's fascinating.

And I think she's been great throughout the game. And that's really enhancing the game for me. I think it's a great performance from her. I'm going to bypass the coupling and rig a hotwire. Compressal run on and on. Could seize up. Did anyone ask your opinion? Yeah, I agree.

You have to talk to yourself a lot if you're a video game protagonist. So if you're voice actor, you have to figure out how to do all of those monologues and aside and have it sound naturalistic and not awkward. It's definitely a challenge. But it's also emoting with only your voice and not your face, I think is probably hard for anybody who's making the transition to voice acting. I wouldn't know. Yeah, I think it's hard. And it's the kind of thing where, like, Keanu, I'm not sold on his performance yet either.

And I'm a little like, well, he gets to have himself be in the game. But Keanu Reeves has one of the great faces in all of movie stardom and his face, even because it's so still sometimes. Like, it's not even that he's so emotive. It's just he's this amazing physical presence. When it's just his voice, like when you're playing as him during this. interlude. I'm kind of like, this isn't working. Like, this feels kind of weird. Like, he's not, he's a little lost just because it's such a different kind of work. And I'm a little concerned about that. Yeah. By the way, that intro you described is not the same for every character.

Like, I had a completely different one because I played as a street kid. And the intro of lewd at the beginning is that you steal a car. And I actually thought it was really bad. Like the opening for the street kid, I thought the pacing of that first hour was so strange. And the jump to six months later, and you're friends with Jackie Wells, which I don't know how that worked for you to. I think it's the same for everybody where there's that time. I like that a lot, that montage. Yeah. That was fun, but then I was like, why didn't the game just start with this? Like, I thought it was really odd that I had to do this entire mission where I stole a car and then you get busted by the cops, but it's not clear why or what happened exactly. And then suddenly there's this time jump. I just was like,

man, it felt like a bad sign to me because I feel like usually the thing in a game that's the most polished is, the first couple hours of it. So that was the moment when I was like, I might be in for a bad time here if I already think this is bad. Well, the funny thing is those intro, I wouldn't count those intro missions as the first couple hours because the thing that we saw at E32018, the vertical slice, their E3 demo was actually the mission after that,

like your first real mission, where you go steal the century or make a deal for the century robot, for the spider robot, with the maelstroms. That was the vertical slice. So that's the most polished mission. Yeah. I don't know, they do feel, the intros feel kind of tacked on, I agree. I was the corpo, so we got to experience all three of them.

And mine was very short, it's very short and abridged. But it seems like, I mean, I would be very disappointed if it wasn't brought up again later because mine didn't resolve, like have any sort of resolution. I gather there's not a lot to these intros, like to the back stories. Like, it's just some dialogue options. I'll occasionally have a nomad dialogue option. We're all say something about the claims. But I think that's about as far as it goes.

Everything I've read has indicated that that's kind of a disappointing. part of the game. Yeah, that is very, yeah, that is very disappointing. Some things come back and some don't. Who can say? I will say, I want to say before we get into the bigger picture stuff, I mentioned this before, but I actually really like the way the shooting feels in this game, and I'm pleasantly surprised by how good it feels, especially as someone who is, I mean, all of us are huge destiny people, and so we've experienced the best video game shooting as to offer. And I've enjoyed it in this, less so the sneaking, which I think the game has not quite mastered, at least not yet. stealth or hacking in this game personally. Well, I wonder if there, so I read an article, I think it was on Polygon. It might have been by Rest Fresh Dick on Polygon talking about how like, is that like a website. Interesting. It is a video game website, but they also cover Game of Thrones for some reason. I feel like I read some Marvel articles there. So it was talking about how how the most interesting options are like on the edges of the perk trees. So like if you specialize, then you'll get the most interesting stuff. So I wonder if there's a lot of stuff that like really makes the game.

those elements of the game, the sneaking and the hacking, more fun. Yeah, it's funny because I've also heard that if you over-specialize, you kind of get screwed because you get thrown into combat a lot. And I think the shooting's okay, but the problem is the AI and the general, I wouldn't even call it buggyness. It just sort of doesn't work. Like, it's so, it's hard with this game to draw that distinction between something that's buggy. Like when someone hands you a thing, I did that brain dance sequence, and afterwards the operator, like, gives me a headset to put on, but she was just what wasn't holding anything. It was like the same thing you were describing. Where like that's just a bug.

But then there are times where just the AI is just so dumb. And like, oh man, like you're in gunfights with Jackie and he's like running around like a total maniac. And I was just like this is a bug. And enemies are just firing the opposite direction from you. Yeah, like you can run directly up to enemies and they will not shoot at you. I've had that experience a lot. And I'm like, well, I guess I could change the difficulty on this game. But I don't know if that's going to help anything.

The feel of the guns is pretty good, considering that this is the last game they made is the Witcher, which is like a third person sword fighting game. Like, yeah, it's like, it's pretty fun and the guns look cool. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about when I say the guns are feeling. When, right, when it comes down to gunplay for me these days, like, it's kind of the difference between playing Titanfall 2, which has really great mobility and good-fueling guns, but in the single-player campaign, the AI is kind of stupid.

And then playing a game where, like, the enemies are really fun and always moving and pushing you, and you have to kind of have that push and pull. And that's when it really gets fun for me. But, yeah, the competency is surprising or kind of okay. Yeah, well, so that part actually isn't surprising to me because I think that, based on what I know, and some of this is public about the development of this game, there have been people started prototyping and like working on early versions of the game back in 2012 when they announced it. And then everybody, pretty much everybody got pulled over to work on The Witcher 3, so 2014, 2015, 2016, so the game didn't really start development until after The Witcher 3. I think they've said this publicly. And I think what happened at that point was there were some reboots and story upheavals and changes from what they had been planning four years earlier for a variety of reasons.

But if they had a couple of people over in the corner prototyping like first person combat, that could have been like that doesn't need to change if you're changing everything else. If you're changing the story world, characters, etc. So that they might have actually been working on for eight years, which would explain why that part of the game at least feels decent. So speaking of that at least, let's talk some about technical issues on this game. Because the reason that I'm going to come back to this game is because, man, it's not, it just feels incomplete. Like, it's not even bugs for me. It's like just weirdly missing stuff. I think I have a few examples written down.

One of the most striking is the fact that you can't change what your character looks like or even get a haircut. Much has been made of this. I couldn't believe this when I started playing the game. And it sounds so small and petty. but given the subject matter of the game and that the idea is this is like exploring this cyber world where the defining aspect of the sci-fi world is that you can totally change yourself

and become this cyber person the fact that it's a really rigid character creator in a lot of ways despite the dick and boob options that everyone has talked about like it's actually very rigid. Well, there are only like two of those options those are pretty rigid too. And you can't change them afterwards

and you can't even change your hair. I was like, oh, I gave myself this huge, awesome frizzy hair and I was like, surely I can change this later Nope, you can't change it. Never see your character. And I just, I think that's such a weird thing about this game world. I guess this is like a technical thing and a missing feature and a narrative thing. It's just that like so much of the best sci-fi is like taking a question, one big thing and saying, what if this thing?

And I just, I talked about altered carbon. I think it might have been back in the split screen days. But like I watched Altered Carbon. Cool first season, not as good a second season, but I started reading those books. The books are really cool. The premise of that cyberpunk world, which is very cyberpunk is that, you know, you. you can put your whole personality and life into this little stack that then goes into the back of your neck

and your body just becomes a sleeve. It's called for your personality. And it winds up being like the whole story. Everything about this like neo-noir, cyberpunk thing is built out of this technology. And it's such this transformative, fascinating thing. It goes in all these different directions. Rich people can live forever.

Like identity means something completely different. All this cool stuff. And they're constantly exploring it. This world feels so much more shallow than that because it's just like cyberpunk aesthetics and like some hacking, but like you can't even change your hair, let alone like change yourself, which is sort of what this whole premise kind of seemed like it was going to be to me. So I think that that kind of shortcoming actually winds up impacting the game for me too, like how I think of it. Even though you can't see your

character, I would think that wouldn't matter since you can't see your camera a little time. Every time I look in a mirror, it does not register my character correctly. Like it's almost comical at this point. Like it will register her as partially. naked or like she won't her her hair or like she'll be wearing like part of her clothes I don't know it's but theoretically you can look at your character it just doesn't always work so it's interesting you have to like specifically click look at mirror otherwise your character won't show up because it doesn't load all of my character until but it's not even trying to load your character until like you won't see your character on reflections or anything because you see the people found like your

character model has no like torso or head like most of the time except in photo mode I mean that's pretty typical, but it is just funny to see it glitch out in various situations. Well, no, a more typical way to do it would be to have your characters show up like you can see your character on reflections and one. That would too. Right. Just given that these are the people who made a beard system before Red Dead Red Dead Redemption 2, where Garald's beard freaking grew out over the course of the game and it was so like, wild. I wrote about that in my review being like, wow, this is like this ridiculous, silly step forward that's actually neat in practice. And now that it's like, you can't even get a haircut. It's just, I don't know, like, it really does kind of undermine that, that whole core idea of this premise.

And I'm left being like, oh, okay, so this is just a story that you kind of play through. And I guess that's more than just a technical shortcoming. But then also, like, I just modded the game last night so that I could remap the F and E keys, like, so that I could, like, have E, BUs instead of F. because for some reason, you just can't remap that one key in the keyboard remapping. Or like, the lack of auto drive is a real bum. Yeah, or you press one button to get out of the car if you're driving. but if you're in the passenger seat, you press a different button to get out of the car. Driving also feels bad in this game.

Why can you even drive in the game in the first place? None of the cars look good. Well, because they wanted it to be Grand Theft Auto. Right. This is very clearly, like, we want a GTA, but it's not because they have to spend it with all this. They have to combine it with all these RPG mechanics and dialogue and witchery stuff, which is all the good stuff that's the stuff CDPR is good at. Yeah, and like doing a simulation.

is hard. But that's the strength that they have though is the dialogue options and the witchery stuff is the good stuff in the game. So they shouldn't have tried to include all this other stuff which feels like a really, really grand scale management problem. And I think I would be able to observe that

even if I didn't already know that CD Project Red was having all of these troubles that have been cited by various employees about management over the course of the long development of this game. I feel like it's very clear just from playing the game. It's like a too many cooks but too many features.

Scope creep is usually how people refer to it, where everything is kind of bad because there are just too many things in the game. And it's sad. It feels really bad to play because, like, okay, there's all these little exclamation marks on the map, right? If you guys try to interact with all of these little quests, you don't even know what you're going to get with these exclamation marks.

Like, you can get a quest. You can get, like, an entire mission out of them. but sometimes it's like just go and check out this thing. And I was like, oh, that's cool. Like there's a way to just stumble on things. Like in Valhalla, there's the dots on the map and you just go and you see what happens. I'm like, oh, interesting. Or like Witcher 3.

I mean, which are three is question marks all over that you do that. Yeah. But in this game, sometimes it's just like one piece of dialogue with one person and that's all it is. Like you just walk up to one person and you exchange one sentence. And I guess that indicates that they want to make sure you don't miss that because they bothered to put that into the game and the rest of the dialogue, like procedural dialogue is just you walking around town and happening to run into people, but it's not like an actual dialogue choice. So they're like, we want you to know this is here. Or maybe something was there and it was

cut. Or maybe something was there and it was cut. I don't know. It just feels like it's mimicking the idea of a really full game, but it's not actually a full game. And the other broader issue, I'm further than the narrative than you guys. So I have slightly more of a take on that. side of it. Let us have it. Let us have the take. Yeah, no spoilers. Welcome to my Ted Talk. I have an anecdote to tell you guys about this nightclub in the game afterlife. Okay, so here's my anecdote. So in this nightclub, this is kind of like your home base. You go to this bar every now and again. You get missions. There's this cool bartender. Claire, you meet her. You have a drink with her pretty early on. Like, it's cool. Rogue is there. She's like this crime lord, et cetera, et cetera. You keep going

back there. Hang out all at there. So I'm walking around afterlife and there are these go-go dancers who are in these big tubes of water and they look really cool. Like they're covered in duct tape. There's a lot of sex workers in this game and this is like some of many, many sex workers in this game were these go-go dancers who are naked but they got duct tape on and they're wearing like breathing tubes so that they can dance inside of these cool tubes for you. And I was like, oh, this is like really cool. And I was like taking screenshots of it and being like, here's something I like about this game. Every now and then they do like a cool. world building thing. And then I was like, I wonder if there's like fun flavor text about these go-go dancers.

Like maybe I'll just scan all of them and find out what their deal is. So I scan every single go-go dancer in the bar. And there's like seven, eight of them. There's a lot of them. And all of them, they all have boobs and vaginas, by the way, and they all have men's names if you scan them. And then I was like, okay, I don't know if this is some kind of transphobic bit that the game is doing. but I think it might be, and I don't care for it. And so then I was kind of mad about it for a day. And then this story has an epilogue. And then today I was reading about how apparently Claire, who's the bartender, is a trans woman.

And you find this out if you do her romance arc, which I have not done. And apparently it's a really cool storyline. So then I was like, oh, that's interesting too. Like, I haven't played the storyline yet. But like, is there a larger narrative here about how Claire has, like, made this decision to hire all of these trans gogo dancers? I don't know. I don't know if that's part of the game or not. But also, if it is part of the game, then why am I capable of, like, seeing their personal information?

And is there going to be a commentary that's made by the game about this? But there's not. It's not in there. And I feel like this game does that kind of thing a lot, where it includes, like, the idea of the other. And, like, sometimes it's queer people. Sometimes it's, like, the racial other. Like, the Japanese gang or, like, the voodoo boys is, like, the Haitian gang. Like, there's a lot of, like, different othering.

And, like, it's flavor. it's for coolness and sometimes it's like kind of fetishizing. But then there's other parts of the game where I'm like, there's something more interesting happening here. Because like the larger storyline, it's about Keanu Reeves getting stuck in a woman's body and he's a misogynist. And so he's like having all this anxiety about like being stuck in your body. And I'm like,

that's like this inherently queer story. But like they're not quite navigating, but they feel like they want to. Like it's like the game wants to do a lot of stuff. and some of it is interesting it's in there. But then a lot of people worked on this game and some of them probably also have shitty politics. So it's like, what are you going to do?

Like I don't know. So I'm probably going to beat the game just because I'm like, I want to know what it's all going to add up to be because I keep going in and out on what I think about all of these things. Yeah, it's hard to give them the benefit of the doubt because CD Project Red has a history of like transphobic tweets or anti-trans tweets.

And marketing of the game. marketing and issues like that. And similarly, it's hard to give the game the benefit of the doubt when something happens because oftentimes you won't know if something is a bug or if it's intended to happen. And there's nothing worse. I talked about this with Valhalla, but there's nothing worse than like that feeling of mistrust that you have where it's like, okay, this person just turned hostile or like this thing just happened. Was that supposed to happen? Or is it a bug?

It's so frustrating to play a game like that. I think that even translates out to like the story and even like the idea of the feeling that you're articulating Maddie. of is this going somewhere? Am I right in buying into this story and carrying about these details and these characters because I'm going to be rewarded for paying attention? When the game is so clearly surface level and has all these huge holes

and is just missing all this stuff, like it just doesn't feel like there was a considered point of view or idea. It kind of even goes to the altered carbon thing. Like the idea of Johnny Silverhand taking over your character's psyche and then body which is sort of the ticking clock of this plot is really interesting and seems like it could go out of places and it has that kind of same altered carbon idea which is like what is consciousness what happens if you put a new consciousness in or an old consciousness in a new body like can you come back after death like that stuff's all really cool but playing the game even the amount that I've played it's it just seems like there is no way that a game that is this slipshod in so many ways technical narrative you know that's so patched together this game is not earning my narrative trust in its story.

A lot of the people were willing to give this game the benefit of the doubt before it showed up was The Witcher 3 earned my trust. And I know Kirk, it's one of your favorite games ever. And I would think that the writers behind The Witcher 3, a lot of whom are on this game, would bring something great to the table for this as well. And so far, I've been really into it. That's the one thing that's really impressed me about this game is how I've been, I've found myself just like emotionally engaged and hooked by the main storyline and, like,

actually impacted by character moments. And I won't spoil anything, but like anyone who's gotten to act too probably knows what I'm talking about. Like, I actually was affected by certain things that happened. And I'm into the story so far, I will say. That's the one thing where I've bought into it. And that's actually the one thing that is making me want to keep playing the game, even though I know it's frigging unfinished.

And I know that I would have a better time if I wait a few months. I just want to see how the story plays out. Yeah, I will too. I mean, I just wish it wasn't an open-world game. is really what it is. Like I wish they'd just done The Witcher 3 and just had it be on the rails and told the story and really worked hard on making the story more nuanced because I think there's some really interesting stuff in it that they could have done. But it's almost like because they had to, or decided they had to include all these other aspects of the game. I don't know.

I guess I'll see what I think when I think. Yeah, I mean, Witcher 3 is open world, but it had the benefit of not having to be as dense. Well, Witcher 3 is huge, but it doesn't have to include. not having to function as an open world game in the way that we're talking about. Right. It can be a lot of forests and can be, well, this game wanted to be DeaSX and mix that and GTA and GTA and the combination isn't really as effective. I think looking at DeasX is interesting. I re-downloaded Mankind Divided because I'm a big fan of those games and I think that that approach, the Hubworld semi-opened, dense, no cars, like just spend more time on the stealth and the AI and the storytelling. Even though Mankind Divided is a game that, like, weirdly just ends after its second act and, like, does feel incomplete and frustrating.

When you're in Prague in the first acts of those games, of that game, it's still, it's like a great experience. Like, I love that part of the game. And cyberpunk, it's so, it's spread out across so much more space. And, like, it just is like, well, yeah, a version of this that was just much richer and in a smaller amount of geographical space could have been good. But then it wouldn't have been the game that CD Project was selling. Like this huge, massive city that's like the most amazing experience you ever had. That already isn't that. So I do want to talk about that, just about the game that was promised, I guess, and this backlash

that's happening, the whole refund situation. It's all kind of in flux. It seems to be happening pretty quickly. The internet is very mad. It is remarkable how the worm has turned or how quickly everyone has done a 180 on this game. I mean, so Cali Plaggy famously from, like, probably at least the most high profile version of this gave the game a 7 out of 10 at GameSpot. I read a review. It's a good review. It's like a pretty, it's not a super negative pan or anything.

Like, she's just says it's got some problems. Kind of a lot of what we've been saying. And she played it on PC and gave it a seven and then was, of course, inundated with harassment. And then days after this, I mean, like two days later, now the CD Project Red, subreddit is like exploding with people going crazy. There's a huge post there being like Callie Plaggy was right. Because the review embargo was a few days before the game came right. Which is never, never great for reviewers in this specific kind of. kind of circumstance. CD Project Red really tightly controlled access to this game. Even beforehand, people played previews based on like a streaming version that they've played on a

computer that CDPR had. Like they, the last-gen console version. Which in fairness is the only way to do previews in the time of COVID. Well, that's true. Yeah, I guess. They offered very limited previews to out. And there was no access. And they didn't give out PS4 or Xbox One codes. They only give out PC. There was no access to last-gen console versions and those versions are a complete disaster. If you've watched videos, I haven't played them, but holy cow. And also, they barred reviewers from using their own gameplay footage. So you couldn't even show what the game actually looked like. You had to use their footage.

There was a lot of shenanigans leading up to this, which, like, I am definitely not one for the, like, raw, raw consumer right stuff. Like, that makes me uncomfortable just whenever I see it happening because so often it's used as, you know, a way to attack game developers or just an excuse for shitty behavior. But, man, like, just there's a lot of chicken. canary leading up to the release of this game. So I'm curious what you two think of it. I guess, Jason, you've done so much reporting on CD Project Red. I'm sure you've been following all of this. How are you feeling about all this? Yeah, I mean, I think it feels like a betrayal to a lot of the Reddit crowd, a lot of the pro-consumer crowd, or the I'm a proud consumer crowd, which I take issue with a lot of the times, but a lot of them had always been like CD Project Red. They care about

gamers. Look, they don't sell microtransactions. They give us free DLC. They don't put DRM. They operate Gog, which is a pretty good store. They're like, has no DRM. All this other stuff, they've been just creating this grand image for themselves as this pro-gamer company, even though they're run by, like, billionaires and 100 millionaires who, by... They'll be pro-gamers. Gamers made them billionaires.

But, yeah, I mean, they're, they're... You think of, like, evil menacing, like, corporations in the games industry and the rich people on top. I mean, CD Project Red is, is also run by very rich people. But anyway, they've created that illusion, and I think this was just like puncturing that for a lot of people, this whole rollout and launch. And a lot of that was just like this community of like uber toxic people who have been in love with this game for years and expected it to be the best thing ever. And at first when it became clear that this wasn't the best thing ever, well, really, at first when a certain reporter started reporting that they, that CD Project Red has been crunching hard on this game, the backlash was immense. not just from fans, but from our colleagues in journalism who, like, actively set out to

deny stories that are very much true. And then also... This is, to be clear, these are stories that Jason Schreier very admirably reported and did each other. I know you're being a little coy about it, but these are your stories you're talking about. Yeah, I mean, I think people generally know that. And I think that, like, and then it became more and more clear as launch came closer, as the game was inexplicably delayed after it had gone.

gold quote unquote, which is like never a good sign if your game is, if your game is, if you've announced that your game is gone gold and then you have to delay it three times, that means this thing is coming in hot. And then the reviews came out and I think that like at that point, these fans who were in this just like this rabid state like really went after the negative reviewers because their illusion had been punctured and they didn't know where else to go. And now they're all just railing at CD Project Red, finally accepting that this game is not the ultimate fantasy that they all expected it to be. A lot could be said about the way that this whole ecosystem has been created

and how CD Project Red has stoked this community and just like created this us versus them narrative by positioning themselves as this pro gamer company. Everyone else is lying to you. It's similar to a lot of what you see on YouTube from YouTubers being like the mainstream media is telling you, is steering you wrong. I'm the one who's going to tell you the truth. And for that to like go the other way, for that to come out as a betrayal,

just like causes fury in people, the likes of which you will not see with other games. It can certainly be fun to go on the same subredits that were just like slamming me for many, many months and see that like they're suddenly saying, oh shit, like, can't wait for the Jason Shire article about this development of this game. Fuck you, Reditters, who didn't want to read my reporting when it said things you didn't want to hear, but suddenly you want to read it. Can I say, though, for the record that I am looking forward to the Jason Shire report about the development? of Cyberpunk.

The thing is, I was going back through some old emails, and I had gotten an email, I tweeted about this the other day. I had gotten an email from someone in April of 2019 after my big story went up about the development of BioWare's anthem.

And that person was like, hey, replace the word anthem in the story with CD Project Red and like Cyberpunk and you got the same story. Now, granted, I heard that from a bunch of other developers, including The Last of Us 2

and others who were like, hey, same story here. But yeah, but I mean, I think that like when the story eventually comes out and I hope it does and I certainly will be interested in in hearing and talking to CD Project Red developers. But I think it'll be a similar story where it's like a lot of floundering and pre-production, a lot of decisions made and then changed and then changed again. A lot of just like, oh shit, we have to ship this thing and cutting and scoping to make it work. I think what's interesting about this game is what I've heard. This is a, I don't remember if I've said this publicly.

Actually, I think when we had Marsha Nowinski, the CEO of CD Project on the podcast last year, I was kind of gently teasing him about this. This was on split screen. This was on split screen. They had originally targeted internally the game for 2019, which just imagine that now. Then it was officially announced for April, then September of 2020, then November, then December, it got delayed three times. But I think with this game, they just had such an unreasonable timeline.

And who knows if they were in a financial crunch or it was because of like, unreasonable shareholders, who knows what the reasons was. But I think that was particularly interesting and unusual about this game, is that they really expected this game to come out way faster than it possibly could have. And it turns out that even December 2020 was way too early and this game needed like at least another few months. Yeah, I wish they had delayed it again. And I hope that this whole situation causes more people to think about delays differently and development cycles differently. That's a very optimistic statement for me. I don't know if anything will change it all. But I'm just really,

hype cycles. I would hope so because I, people were so upset when this game got delayed multiple times and now it's here and it's still really not done. And you can tell when you play it that it's not really done and that it needed more time to bake. Yeah, although I should say I've seen some memes on Twitter about this. Like the game was not released in December because of fans. It was released in December because of shareholders. Like that is, well, we don't know that because CD Project Red has also claimed that wasn't the reason. So like, why did they release it in December?

That might have been the reason. They released it in December because of shareholders. I can promise you that that is the reason. Fans on Twitter are getting angry about delays. Do not prevent future delays from coming. Like, no boardroom has said, we're not going to delay this game because people will be angry about it on Twitter. It is always financial reasons behind delaying or not delaying.

The self-reflection that I would like to see is people reacting so negatively to reviews of a game that they haven't played. And I would like to think that the extremely quick turnaround between the few really critical reviews and then the game being so obviously kind of a bigger shit show than the reviews even said, it was so fast, it was so pronounced, people were so up in arms about the reviews and then so quickly faced with their own, you know, Reddit history, looking at the comment they wrote two days ago shitting on a reviewer and now posting like, oh, this game actually does suck the review was right, that I would think that at least

it's easy to be like, oh yeah, whatever, people will never change and to just feel cynical and jaded about it, but I do think, hopefully some small percentage of people do look at this and think, oh, okay, so in the future, maybe I don't want to do this again, or the next time the situation repeats, well, they think back and think, you know,

I kind of remember cyberpunk though. So I'm just going to, I'm going to like, whatever, keep my powder dry and not, you know, totally sound off on this until I've played the game. Yeah, I mean, the funny thing is after all this, like it still has a 90, on Metacritic. Like, according to review scores, it's still one of the best games of the year. I think a lot of that, having read the GameSpot, Calle's review at GameSpot and read a lot of

other reviews, I get the feeling that people probably were so scared of reactions that they tended to skew higher than they might have otherwise. Although a lot of outlets have done away with scores and aren't eligible for Metacritic anymore. And so the kinds of sites that are on Metacritic are smaller sites that might be more likely to just give a more enthusiast-press type type of a score to a game. This was a point that John Walker made in that essay that he wrote for Katakia, which I think is true, that more and more of the sites that have the most, you know, I'll just say sophisticated, critical approach to video games, like tend to not have review scores and thus don't always turn

up on Metacritic, so then it kind of raises the question of what is Metacritic even for? Like if the best critics are increasingly writing reviews that don't have scores, like they're not even over there. So then you just get a lot of people giving it tens. Yeah. Well, it used to be for bonuses. It used to be for CD Project Red bonuses. Still is for bonuses everywhere else and a lot of other places. That's what Metacritics for.

Yeah. All right, well, there's a ton more to say about this game. We'll probably come back to it. I'll probably come back and play it again in six months or something. Until then, though, let's... So you're just done now, you think you're just going to stop. There's so many other things I want to play. I just, I really, it's so, it's fair.

And I just want to wait. Like, I don't feel a burning need to play it. I'll definitely play it at some point. But there's just, I've got all these other games I'm playing. Which we will talk about. I'll talk about one of them anyways. And one more thing after these messages. Hey, you like movies?

What about coming up with movie ideas over the course of an hour? Because that's what we do every week on story break, a writer's room podcast where three Hollywood professionals have an hour to come up with a pitch for a movie or TV show based off of totally zany prompts. Like that time we reimagined Star Wars based on our phone. owns auto complete. Luke Skywalker is a family man and it's Star Wars, but it's a good idea. How about that time we broke the story of a bunch of Disney Channel original movies based solely on the title and the poster? Okay, Sarah Highley is a 50-foot woman. Let's just go with it, guys. Or the time we finally cracked the Adobe Photoshop feature film.

Stamp tool is your Woody, and then the auto film is the new buzz light. Join this as we have a good time of matching. All the movies, Hollywood is too cowardly to make. Story break comes out every Thursday on maximum fun. I don't know why I'm using this voice now. Hi, I'm Jackie Cachian. Hi, I'm Lori Kilmartin. And we have a podcast called The Jackie and Laurie Show. Who are you, Lori Kilmartin? Oh, my God.

So much pressure. I'm a stand-up of a new stand-up since 1987. I'm a writer for Conan. I've written a couple books, have a couple CDs out, have a special out. Who are you, Jackie? Well, I, too, am a stand-up comic since 1984. And I do The Road, like a maniac, and don't have a cool writing job, but I have four albums out, working on a new album. We talk about stand-up. We talk about all the different parts of stand-up comedy.

So that's the Jackie and Laurie Show, and you should subscribe on Maximum Fun if you want to hear that. And I would encourage you not to. All right, and we're back for One More Thing. I'm going to go first. My One More Thing, it's a cyberpunk game where you have a sword and you run around. It's made by a Polish development studio. Okay, okay. It's called Ghost Runner, and it is not Cyberpunk 277. and it is really, really cool.

It's on, I think it's on like every console and on PC. It's made by a development studio called One More Level, and also 3D realms helped make it. It came out a couple months ago, though it's been sort of a staggered release. It's now like on Switch. I can't imagine playing this game on Switch. I've been playing it on PC, and it's so fast. I feel like you would need a mouse and a keyboard.

But it's really cool. I've played a couple of hours of it, and I just want to kind of tell people about it real quick. It's like Hotline Miami meets Titanfall 2 meets a little dishonored maybe Okay, okay You're this like Cyber Ninja You're basically Genji from Overwatch

Or insert Cyber Ninja here It's in a kind of generic cyberpunk world Like it's one of those kind of double A games Where it looks pretty sweet But it's not like It's not like cyberpunk 2077 It's not like oh my god this costs hundreds of millions of dollars to make make. It's much more like we had a really cool gameplay idea and we executed it with like

the cleanest level design and like look that we could get. So you're a ninja, you move around and the whole game is kind of working your way through these levels in this kind of cyberpunk city. And you move really fast. You have a sword and that's kind of it. You can do wall runs and the whole levels are they're all set up around wall runs and you have the ability to do it. Cut from cyberpunk 27. To do a blink move is kind of your main move where you can hit it in midair and like slow down time. And like if you're jumping toward a guy and he shoots at you, you hit it in midair and then you press right and you start kind of sliding to the right and you go around as bullet.

But you're really fragile. Like one hit and you're dead. So it's like Hotline Miami in that way where you start going and the level you die. Like you die over and over and over again and you die and you respond so fast like Super Meat Boy fast, zero friction. Bam, you're right back at the checkpoint. Go again. And the whole game is just running through these.

increasingly elaborate combat challenges where you have a sword and you're super fast and the other guys are kind of slow and standing still but they can kill you very easily and you just have to kind of solve the puzzle take out the shield generator, go around, slide under, kill the guy. And once you get going, it's really fun. It's such a shock of adrenaline

playing it after so many of the other games that I've been playing which are more like RPGs or sort of like spirit fair which is a lot of like planting crops and like taking a nice ship places and hugging animals like this is just like go go go go And it's great. It's really fun. It's kind of stressful, but I really dig it. I'm going to play more of it. So basically, that's just my sort of surface level endorsement of Ghostrunner. It's very cool. A lot of people had recommended this game to me knowing that I like this kind of game. And I do. So Ghostrunner, it's unlike every system. It's easy to find. Sounds dope. Natty, what's your one more thing?

Yeah. So I read Carrie by Stephen King, which I think I said on this show that I wanted to read. And then I downloaded the audiobook, which is read by Sissy Spac, who I believe plays Carrie in the moon. Oh, heck yeah, she does. She does a great job at that. I haven't seen the movie. I think I might watch that next now that I've read the book. Movie Rips. Why not? Why not watch one of the most famous films ever after reading one of the most famous books ever, Stephen King's first book? And I loved it. I thought it was great. I just wanted to quickly say something that surprised me about it and impressed me about it is the structure of the book, which I didn't really know anything about. I knew the ending of Carrie. I think most people probably know the ending of Carrie, which I guess I won't spoil in case people somehow don't. But the structure of the book, it's told out of order and you find out what

happens when Carrie goes to her high school prom kind of in the middle of the book, but then you find out more and more information about why and what happens up until you get there to the climactic ending. And it's kind of anti-spoiler in a way that I thought was really fun and cool. And it's about just this one event and the impending dread leading up to it. And I liked it. I just, I wish more media did stuff like that, where it's not necessarily about revealing a big puzzle box or some mystery solution or like, oh, what's going to happen at the end of the book? It's more just about Carrie as a person and the other people in her life. And you're in suspense about what's going to happen, but then pretty soon you know what's going to happen. And then it's more just about

why it happens and how everybody feels about it. And I thought that was really cool. It was a cool, cool book. And people should read it if they never have. King is good at that. It's like semi-epistillary. Yeah, I should read it. I love Stephen King, but I have not right. Oh, man. It's like, yeah, it's not very long. So I read it in a few days. Short killer. But yeah, Stephen King is very good at doing those character studies that you're talking about, Mani. Yeah. Yeah. You should read. My favorite King book is 11, 11, 23, no, 22, 63. You got there. I always get it wrong. about the guy who goes back in time and tries to stop JFK from being shot, which is connected to Gone Home.

Gone Home. Which we'll talk about in the Gone Home Veenscast next week. Yeah, I just a second, that endorsement. Yeah, 1122.663. Really long, great book. And a good ending. The rare Stephen King book with a good ending. And then, well, so he has, it has like an entire like 200 page segment where it's just

about the main character, like living a life in like 1960s and 50s, like, Texas. And it's amazing. It's really incredible. I'm sure it is. The next thing I want to read, though, is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Ah, do it. Do it. On the young Frankenstein being scat.

It's great. Oh, I'll be excited to hear what you think of it. Nice. Look forward to that in several triple-click episodes. Nice. All right. Jason, what's your one more thing? Cool.

So my one more thing is coming in at the end of the year. One of my favorite video games of the year is one I just played over the past week. It's called Call of the Sea. And it is an adventure game. It's a puzzle. If you don't like puzzles, you'll probably not like this. But if you do like puzzles, you will probably love this. The premise of the game is you play as a woman named Nora.

It is the 1930s, and you wind up on this island near Tahiti, where you are looking for your husband, Harry, who is missing there. Nora is played by Sissy Jones, and Harry is played by Yuri Lowenthal, and they're both incredible in this game. Good old Yuri. And as you go through the game, it's a pretty short game. It's like six chapters of like puzzle solving and exploring. this island and finding the mysteries behind it.

Turns out there's a lot of HP Lovecraft in this game and there are a lot of just like direct references to Lovecraft stuff and and horror stuff. Well, it's not really horror. It's just more like supernatural stuff. There isn't really any scary stuff. The puzzles are fantastic. The story is fantastic.

The voice acting is fantastic. Everything about it is great. It's very mist like. It's very much like the old PC game missed in that the game just kind of presents you with things. I wouldn't say it's not as, esoteric and obscure as like some of the puzzles in missed but like the game doesn't hold your hand through things yeah no miss could be a little bit like like it stumped me as a kid when I was

yeah I know but but but yeah this game is is it presents you with these puzzles and you have all the information you need to solve them but like the game will give you any hints and there's no way to get hints you need to just kind of sit there and and and ponder over it and you will like it it might take you a little while but you will and I look I took a few breaks while playing this game it's a good game to take breaks in between each chapter. But yeah, I loved it. I found a fascinating. The end of the story made me, definitely made me

tear up. It's great. Really, really good. I highly recommend this game. Call of the Sea. I played a little bit of this just because I knew you were going to talk about it. Oh, yeah? Yeah, it's really neat. I like it too. It's funny that it begins, like, she voiceover narrates, and she, it begins

with, like, the most like, her just giving exposition for, like, four lines. She's like, ah, yes, my family and me and the history and my husband, and here we are, and I'm looking for this one. I was like just kind of laughing because it's like setting all the stage for basically this island covered in puzzles. And I also enjoy that, of course, you like this game, Jason, because this is a game about being on an island and solving puzzles. So it's like lost. It's just another game that's like lost.

Yeah, it is lost of any game. No, so I think one of the flaws of this game, and it's kind of an unavoidable flaw, or at least I can't think of how they would do this differently, is that it just plays by the same tropes as gone home and every other. like first person exploration like narrative game that has ever come out which is that oh hey there's a conveniently placed letter over here and then like an hour later just when you're supposed to find the continuation of that story like it's it's very clear that like it's a linear story where it should not be because you're going all around these different places of the island and like it does the game finds a way to set it up so it's like okay they were here and then they moved here

because as you're going you're like finding these abandoned tents and reading diary entries and letters and finding photographs and, like, piecing together the story of, like, Harry, your husband and his band of compatriots and what happened to them all. So it does kind of work in that way, but like oftentimes it's just like, nobody would have written this down. Nobody would have left this here. It's just kind of that typical video game problem where they had to get you that information and that was the only way. Or like, nobody would have recorded this audio log and left it here. So yeah, there's some silliness in that sense, but the story is so good and riveting.

interesting and like well written that it made up for it. Shout out to, so this game, Colise is a game. The developers are called Out of the Blue. The director is Tatiana Delgado. They're this team in Spain, this like indie team in Spain. So it's really cool that like this Spanish, I mean, you don't hear a lot about like the Spanish indie game scene, but this Spanish indie game developer has come out and come and released one of my favorite games of the year.

And so that is super dope. That's super cool. Yeah, I'm definitely going to play more of it, just hearing that investment. And it's on Xbox Game Pass, so a lot of people out there can already just play it without paying it. Best thing when a game that you like is on Xbox Game Pass and you can just tell people to play it. Yeah, it's on, so you can play it on the new Xbox or Xbox 1 or PC. It's not on any other consoles yet. I think they have some sort of timed exclusivity arrangement.

But yeah, call out the C. Everyone should go check it out. I will definitely mention it again when I'm talking about my favorite games of the year. But yeah, go play it. All right, well, that's that. For now, I'm sure we'll return to a lot of these games and talk about them more in the future. But for now, I'll see the two of you at our Gone Homes Beanscast. And everybody else, I'll see you in two weeks. 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 click pods,

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. Maximumfund.org Comedy and culture. Artist owned. Audience, audience supported.