Triple Click - Triple Play: Helldivers 2

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

Jason, Maddy, and Kirk pull up their strategem monitors and dive into Helldivers 2. They share their favorite memeable moments, talk about the game's unique story, and dive into what does and doesn't work about the hit new game.One More Thing:Kirk: Home Safety Hotline (PC)Maddy: The Insurrectionist Next Door (2023)Jason: Unicorn Overlord (Current Consoles)LINKS:Featuring Johan Lindgren’s Helldivers 2 themeJoel the game master: https://www.pcgamer.com/we-have-an-actual-person-with-the-title-of-game-master-a-single-helldivers-2-dev-named-joel-is-pulling-the-strings-on-its-galactic-war-like-an-all-powerful-dandd-dungeon-master-war-will-become-more-and-more-sophisticated-over-time/Preorder Jason’s Book! https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/jason-schreier/play-nice/9781538725429/Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinBuy Triple Click Merch: https://maxfunstore.com/search?q=triple+click&options%5Bprefix%5D=lastJoin the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/ Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

Prosperity, liberty, and democracy, our way of life. But it doesn't come free. Unlike Triple Click, you can just download this. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the democracy to you. This week we talk about Hell Divers 2, an online multiplayer game about the soldiers of Super Earth, fighting to liberate planets from the deadly threat of who knows what. Never question Super Earth. I'm Maddie Myers.

I'm Jason Shrier. And I'm Kirk Hamilton and hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. It's another episode. or triple click coming right at you. Do you guys like this NPR vibe I'm bringing?

It's another episode. Well, I'm just going to keep it coming. I'm just going to keep the vibes going because I have a lot to say. First of all, it's almost MaxFund Drive. It's so close we can almost taste it, but it's actually next week. So our regular pitch of telling you to go to Maximumfund.com. It still applies. You could still go there and join.

You could still get bonus episodes. But it's like a little more fun if you do it next week when we have all those extra special rewards for you. And we'll talk about that more then. But a little preview is that we are going to do a bonus episode where we spill the beans about Final Fantasy 7 rebirth. That is going to be our big fancy schmancy Max Fun Drive bonus month episode. But of course, we do a bonus up every month here at Triple Click.

It's just that one is for Final Fantasy 7 rebirth, which is the game we're all obsessed with right now. So that's cool, right? So we'll spoil that. game. We'll probably spill a remake in the original game too. Going to be a lot of discussion of Cloud Stripes mental health. All that and more. You can go to Maximumfund.org slash join right now and be a member. Or you can wait and be a member like along with the rest of the cool crowd next week when that starts. Also part of Max Fun. We usually do a Twitch stream and we're going to do

one again this year. We're going to do one on our Twitch channel, which is triple click pot. That stream is going to be on Thursday. day, March 21st at 8 p.m. Eastern. Again, that's at triple-click pod or Twitch channel. And we're going to be playing Hell Divers 2, which, by total coincidence, Kurt, what are we going to be talking about on the episode here today? We're going to be talking about Hell Divers 2. What? Ever heard of it? A fun video game that's been out for a little while that is now probably easier to play than it was when it first launched, that the three of us have played some. And that I thought it would be fun to talk about because I've played a lot of it and think it's a really

great game. So that is going to be our topic for this episode. And yeah, that's what we're going to stream next week on the live stream as well, which will be very fun. We'll at least do a few missions. And then, I don't know, maybe we'll change it up. But I think we'll start with Hell Divers 2 and we'll see how it goes. I think it's going to go great. I think it's going to be great, too. Hell Divers 2 is a very enjoyable co-op PVEE multiplayer game. It's played from a third person perspective for one to four players. And you and your squad play as helldivers, who are stormtroopers for a fictional, fascist satirical earth, sometime in the future, very much modeled on Paul Verhoven's Starship Troopers adaptation, where you go as gung-ho soldiers to fight in a

variety of fronts in a two-front, really, a two-front galactic war against an army of automaton that are basically Terminators and an army of bugs that are basically the bugs from Starship Troopers. You sort of blast in, you land in your hell pod, as it's called. So you kind of land on the surface of a war-torn planet, and you have a variety of different sort of objectives that you have to complete. They range from launching ICBMs to refueling ships to blowing up enemy depots. Do enough of those, maybe grab some optional stuff along the way, and then you get to your extraction where you have to hold off hordes of enemies while a ship comes in to get you out. It is an audiovisual treat with some really lovely visuals and a great theme song composed by

Johann Lindgren. Shout out to him. It's a very funny, very enjoyable game. I've played a lot of it. I think the two of you have played a little bit less, but we all played together over the weekend, which was a lot of fun, and figured that we'd talk about it. So yeah, let's talk about this game some. I already made this my one more thing and have sort of made my love. of this game known. So I'm curious what the two of you think. Maddie, why don't we start with you? Sure. So you mentioned that it's funny. It's hard to convey how without providing some more information about how the game works because it's not like there's a lot of dialogue. Like there is a tutorial that's a couple minutes long and it's very just kind of ludicrous satire of this

fictional super earth. It's like America times a trillion in the worst of the early 2000. post-9-11 era, like the exact stuff that Starship Troopers is satirizing, like sliding into fascism in with a noble cause in theory at the forefront and then it just becomes horrifying. So there's that as sort of like the outset where there's kind of like written satirical comedy. But then the rest of the comedy in the game is slapstick. And a lot of it is kind of based on how the physics engine works and how much the bodies can fly around this maybe doesn't sound funny

when I put it that way, but it really is Looney Tunes levels, and yet that is paired with this hyper-realistic military sim environment where things look pretty realistic. Like there's realistic environments, your guy that you're fighting as looks realistic, but the actual

way that it feels to walk around is Looney Tunes levels of like anvils falling on your head, and anything you interact with can hurt you and usually does. So like when Kirk described hell divers coming in, like they're hell diving in to these various planets to fight, they can kill you if they land on you because they're in these huge metal pods that just

plummet to Earth. And also when you call in like a better gun, because you'll have all these power-ups that you can kind of call in, that also plummets to Earth in a huge metal pod that can kill you if it hits you. And all your own weapons and your own teammates can kill you. Every single thing can kill you that is nominally on your side. And that just level of the world doesn't care about you. The system doesn't care about you. You are just a faceless drone. Like that aspect of the satire, I think is what people find really effective about it. I mean, we can talk more about whether that comedy works. But I think it's something that's really immediately noticeable and effective about this game as compared to, I don't know. We've certainly argued on bonus episodes about like whether

Call of Duty Modern Warfare is a commentary on the military industrial complex or not. It's much more nuance of that game than Hell Divers, too, which is very deliberately saying, this is ludicrous. You should laugh at how upsetting this actually would be to ever happen to real people who are expendable in this game. But I want to hear from Jason, too. Yeah, I do too. I should explain stratagems, I guess.

Jason I'll throw to you in a second here. But it's true that I kind of left that out, that a big part of this game is that you are calling down air support. So you're calling down strikes from orbit. You're calling down resupplies. The resupplies come in those pods that you can actually aim your own pod onto an enemy as well. True. And yeah, a lot of these strategies, I mean, these massive, like, almost nuclear level air strikes that will kill you in your entire squad if you aim them incorrectly. And a big part of the game is like entering these codes in the heat of battle to like throw a thing and call in an air strike and, et cetera, you know, call down a mech, call down a turret. So yeah, Jason,

what did you think of the game from what you've played of it? So I played a bunch of the first game, which was released in 2015, and it was a top-down twin-stick shooter. So it really felt unlike a lot of other games that I had played or that were being released at the time. And I was actually really disappointed when I first saw the trailer for Hell Divers 2, and I saw that it was now a third-person shooter. It also happened that their first trailer for it was like one of the most generic-looking things that they showed. And so I was like, man, this game is going to be a flop. this game is just a disaster way didn't happen because it looks so generic. Well, it sure shows me.

Sure shows that I don't know anything because this game is a mega hit that is like on track to outsell any PlayStation Studios game. And yeah, I mean, I've only played a little bit. I just played a couple of missions, one with Just Kirk and one with the two of you last night. It doesn't really have its hooks in me. I've had fun while playing just because it's fun. to play games with you guys, but I don't, I haven't really been grabbed by it quite yet. I think part of that is just because it's not really my type of game, like if I'm going to like

get really into a live service game or a shooter, it needs to really feel as good as Destiny and also have a progression system as kind of engaging and interesting and rewarding as destinies does. So that's kind of my bar for games like this. So for the same reason. and I've never gotten into Fortnite because, like, I just don't, that type of game where it's just kind of like sessions that feel pretty independent

without kind of an ongoing hook or an ongoing persistent world, they don't really do quite as much for me. But I'm enjoying seeing the memes. I'm enjoying seeing the viral clips online. You know, let's drill into that a little bit. I think it's interesting that you describe the game as not having those hooks

because I've played quite a bit of this and I'm, you know, pretty far. I've unlocked a lot of weapons. And there are a lot of hooks to playing, but they're a little different than something like, say, destiny, which you and I played a lot of. So there's a battle pass system in this game. There's a bunch of different currencies that you earn while you're playing,

and you play through that battle pass. This is just the free battle pass. There's also a paid one that has gear that isn't as good that I don't even have. None of us have that. Yeah, there's plenty of stuff on the free tier for this game. You know there are microtransactions. And, like, as you're playing, you're earning these medals that you can use to get new weapons.

And some of those weapons are really good. There's like a shotgun in the third tier called the breaker that I've been using. That this kind of was the meta shotgun for a long time. And it was fun to kind of have that, okay, I really want to get this better gun and to work toward it. Or you unlock new stratagems that unlock at various levels. And, you know, I'm almost level 20, which is where the last of the stuff unlocks. Or I guess now there's mechs that unlock at level 25. But at 15, I got a space laser that I can call down that is this like crazy persistent,

laser. I guess, as Maddie pointed out, it's the hammer of dawn from Gears of War. Yeah, that was my immediate reference upon seeing it. It's super powerful. And there are some really big bombs you can call down too. There's like an orbital railgun strike that can kill the like huge aliens that'll come up, the bugs that'll attack you at the high difficulty levels. So there's stuff that you unlock that is really fun to use and spectacular looking and exciting. And I do feel the hook as I play to, you know, gain all the medals and the different, you know, types of points and currencies that I need to get that stuff. But what it doesn't have is a leveling system where you're unlocking new abilities for your character, which is a different kind of progression,

I guess. You compared it to Fortnite, and I believe Fortnite kind of works that way too, where you unlock stuff on the battle pass in Fortnite, but it's not like destiny or World of Warcraft or whatever where your character is leveling up. And I wonder if that just creates a different kind of hookiness than, you know, than the one I'm describing in those more traditional MMOs. Well, there are a couple of things there. I mean, the other hook that Destiny has in World of Warcraft has and Diablo has is an ongoing story with kind of handcrafted bespoke missions that you play along the way. And that's something I'm usually looking for in these games first and foremost, more so than leveling anything. Like, the level isn't quite as important to me as just

being able to get in a game and see like, oh, okay, here's this unique challenge that has been crafted here as opposed to here are these randomly placed missions that are just kind of like you have to kind of find your own fun by blowing up the bugs along the way. So something that Hell Divers Too is doing that's interesting that the first game did as well is this persistent campaign that's happening, which is a little different than anything in an MMO and is actually pretty cool and a little bit of an unknown. Like they've done one cool thing with it so far and it remains to be seen what else they'll do with it, but it's a very cool idea. So to explain it to listeners, as you pick missions, which as Jason describes, they feel like kind of cut in pace.

Like there's a lot of different objectives. Some of them are really cool, but they're not handcrafted exactly. You're like going into automaton space or you're going into bug space, terminids, I believe they're called, and you're fighting some kind of a mission. But when you pick those missions on the map, you see these different planets and there's a percentage that you've like liberated the planet for Super Earth. Right. And then sometimes those two enemy armies will begin advancing and they'll start pushing you back so you can start losing planets as well. There's some great articles. I think Eurogamer had an article about this. There's a guy, I think his name is Josh, who works at Arrowhead, who is just like, oh Joel, that was close. He's just like the

game master for this whole thing and he's sort of managing the flow of these two battles. And it's a little abstract because like you said, you're kind of just dropping into missions and doing them and each individual mission has a tiny impact. But over time, there's this feeling that together we are all fighting in this massive war with like thousands of people. And just recently, we liberated a like, I don't know, a town, I forget the name of it, but it was a city where there was a mech foundry and they were building mechs. And as a result of liberating that foundry, now there are mecks in the game that you can call down and you can drive around in a big mek. And so that kind of thing is really cool if they can keep introducing new ideas and presumably like a new enemy faction that

goes up that you have to fight against and like new worlds that you can fight on. I mean, the sky is the limit theoretically. It's just not clear how much they've made or how long their game plan is. I think it's a really cool idea and I also feel like they're walking a tightrope at Arrowhead and designing it and having it work because too much interference and too much story would make this feel really bad, but also too little can have the same feeling of like, well, are they even paying attention to what we're doing? And are they actually responding to the missions that players are gravitating towards and making it feel like liberating planets feels fair and balanced? Or is it like we're constantly outnumbered? And there's already been kind of some

push and pull. Like, I know some people, there's a, there's been articles. There's like a PC gamer interview with Joel about like his job, which is part of why people even know his name now. I can't remember his last name. My apologies, we can link to the Fisi Gamer article about. His last name is Hell Diver. His name is Joel, Hell Diver.

Heldiver the second. And kind of after that, people sort of became obsessed with him. And there's certainly some negative obsession happening on the Hell Divers 2 subreddit. Oh, I'm sure. It's not all good. I think that's fair to say of any multiplayer online video game.

But I do have a lot of admiration for just the way that the team's been approaching it so far to have like a huge ongoing multiplayer game and to try to have mostly emergent storytelling. Like of course they have a hand in what happens in the overarching intergalactic war or whatever. This is just one galaxy. Galactic war. Not a second galaxy yet. But they they don't have like, oh, here's a message from the super earth president with like a bunch of dialogue. Like it's not that kind of game. There's such there's it's such a light touch when it comes to even just the bits and pieces about Super Earth that you get. And I'm kind of mixed on it because I want more, but I'm also like if I had more, maybe I wouldn't find it tantalizing anymore.

Like part of what works about it is that it is kind of mysterious. Like why are we in these wars? Why is any of this happening? But much like the grunts, we don't know, that has never really been effectively explained to us, the hell divers. I'm using the plural first person as well now, apparently. Yeah, I think that they're, I think they're currently in a good place for the balance, just for me, because I don't really need that much more about Super Earth. Like, we get it, and it's just a joke. And if you explain a joke too much, it stops being funny. And you describe the humor of the game as kind of living in these two different theaters of humor. There's the humor of this just like ironic, ridiculous civilization in this ridiculous war. And then there's

the slapstick humor. And the two do interact. Like, there is the, this sort of synergy between them because when you're down with your cape and your armor and your gung-ho and you're fighting and the main character barks in this game are hilarious. Some of my favorites are your guy will just yell, hell divers never die, which if you've played the game is a very, very funny thing for anyone to say, because hell divers constantly die. And another one is, sweet liberty, my arm, which your guy will scream sometimes when he's injured. Or if you hold down the trigger on a light machine gun, he'll just start screaming.

like, ah, like, while you shoot it, which is very funny. So your characters are these ridiculous caricatures who are then being thrown around and murdered and, like, killing one another accidentally. And that in the context of this fiction is very funny. And it requires a very light touch on the part of the people writing this to not puncture that humor. And humor is working beautifully right now, I would say. So, like, the balance that they've got right now is really working for me.

Yeah, they have a cast of all-star voice actors. Yeah. doing these lines too. I believe the pilot of the pelican that takes you out of each mission at the end of each mission, the extraction vehicle is played by Ray Chase, best known as the voice actor behind Blood, Swet and Press Reset. Yes, and also what he was the protagonist in Final Fantasy 15. I know he's less well known for that. I guess a couple people know for that.

Yeah, it's, it's, uh, the satire is fun. The tutorial I really enjoyed. Uh, I think that like, if there, if there was more, if there was like a story that had some of that stuff, I think I might be more into this game. But I do appreciate, I don't want to act like I, I'm hating it or anything. Like, I've enjoyed the parts they played. The thing I enjoy most is actually, um, the teamwork aspect of it and the way that the game is designed to really encourage cooperation and something I really had a lot of fun with was two, two things come to mind. One is, um, the bugs that I think, and also the robots that are only, um, only take damage when you shoot them from the back, which are very clearly meant to be like one player kites them and the other player circles and, and takes them out, which is a cool thing to do, especially, I mean, I, I imagine it's frustrating playing this with randoms, but it's cool playing it with people that you're on voice chat with. Um, and the other thing that I enjoyed was in some of the missions, you're doing a lot of stuff where like you have to communicate.

So Kirk and I did a mission where, uh, I was like on a computer terminal reading out names and Kirk had to go find those the names of those pipes and blow them up like A1, B1, B2. So that's what I think is cool. And there's some cool design there. I also, I enjoy the kind of fighting game cheat code combo entering for the stratagems. Yeah, we should describe this. My coworker Clayton Ashley has a theory that it's because the hell divers can't read, which I'm extremely charmed by actually and kind of think is true. now. That's good.

Basically, the way it works is that anytime you're calling in a stratagem, which is basically like it could be anything from an extra gun to a massive airstrike that like bombs the entire area, in order to call them in, you basically go to either your own personal console or some other in-game console if it's a special in-game moment and you just press like up, up, down, down, forward, back or something. Like there's just a series of arrow keys and you're just using WASD or I guess maybe the arrow buttons. or whatever you're using. Use the Dpad, yeah, on a controller.

On a controller to just hit like up, up, down, down. And I just, like, that is so ludicrous. Like, that was one of the funniest parts of the game to me. And there's also an arcade machine back at the ship. I don't know if you guys have played with that at all, where you can play, quote, unquote, the stratagems and just try to hit those arrow keys as fast as possible. Is it called Stratagem Defender?

It's like a game in the game. Yeah, it's absurd because it's like, well, in theory, Yes, I'm learning how to hit the strategies faster, but why would this be a game in this world? Like, it's, I found that really hilarious when I discovered that was part of it. It's cool. This is something Arrowhead has been messing with since Magica, one of the first games they made, were to cast spells in that game. You had to enter the same inputs with the D-pad. And it was the same feeling of being under pressure.

There's enemies coming at you. And then you're popping up this menu and being like, oh, God, I have to call in a hellbomb. So it's like up, left, right, and my brain gets mixed up. sometimes when I'm doing it and you enter it wrong. You accidentally hit right instead of left or whatever. You're like, ah, I have to start over. Because you have to start over if you screw up one input. That's fun. That's a good tension.

It's great. It's a great tension. And also you have to do that to reinforce. So if someone gets killed, you call in a new hell diver. Because in the fiction of this game... Yeah, you can't resurrect anybody. Your guy just dies. He's dead forever.

And you call it a new person. They even have like a new voice actor, usually. So you have to reinforce. And then the player who lost their character gets reinforced. So I've been, man, I've done some really, really exciting high difficulty missions where I'm playing with friends who are a higher level than me and are really good at the game. And we're like fighting bile titans, they're called, who are those gigantic like strider bugs that are in the ads. There's like three of them on us and we're running around and three of us have been killed and we've run out of time. So there's like no, you know, no one is going to reinforce us and one guy has to make it out or there's a cool down on our reinforcement.

So he's like waiting until it counts down and then trying to enter the code to throw it. reinforcement while getting shot at by all these different enemies. And it can be very, very exciting watching someone try to survive under those circumstances. I do love in the world also the little like stratagem-esque mini games that you have to do, partly because as you mentioned, I've never thought of that of the helldivers not reading. But when you go to the screen, it's very funny. I mean, even like the, if you're calling in your, you know, extraction, this little screen and it has a series of up down, left, right, and you have to enter it. And just the animation of your guy, he just is kind of like mashing the screen with a hand. And it's like, you imagine him just being like,

up, left, right, right, left down. Like entering it, which is just very comical in a subtle but very funny way. What happens if you enter the Konami code? Is there like an Easter egg if you do? I wonder if there's any hidden stuff or hidden stratagems. I don't know, because I think of the Konomi code every time, but that feels like the kind of humor in this game wouldn't do. And I mean that is a compliment. Like, it's a very non-referential kind of a game, you know? I could see it not maybe doing that as a right as a reference, but I could see there being a hidden Starship Troopers reference is what I would really be expecting in this.

Like a shout-out to that, although, I don't know. I haven't run across it yet. It just feels like such a clear influence. It's like truly the video game love letter to that movie. Yeah, which is funny because there have been actual Starship Troopers games. And this one kind of nails it. it better than any of those? And other games that have tried to kind of evoke

the Starship Troopers. Just Uvra, whatever it's trying to do, like that specific satire. And I mean, I guess we can talk about whether we feel like it's working or not. There's certainly people who like this game unironically in the same way that people

like homelander from the boys. But like I feel like that's going to happen with every single game of this variety, right? Like I don't know what you can do about that. I do think having played it a bit, that it is very easy to laugh at the characters of the game. And that is kind of the most I can ask of a game that is trying to satirize fascism is even the fact that it's in third person instead of first person and that the hell divers die so rapidly.

And like, I have the randomized voice actor thing on so that's different every time. Like just that emotional distance and the like floppiness of them. And the capes. I mean, we mentioned the capes. every character's wearing a cape. It's like the most ludicrous, impractical uniform of all time. So it really is inviting you to laugh at both this government that created this structure and also at your own character for even doing any of this without kind of provoking you to feel

sorry for them because you don't know enough about any one of these individual hell divers to ever really feel sorry for them in that way, which I think it works. Like to me, I'm like, yes, this hangs together really well as a piece of satchew. But I also know there are people who watch Starship Troopers and are like, I don't understand this film. So it's tough. It's a tough one. Yeah. I think with any satire, there's going to be some contingent at the tales of the distribution who think that it's real. And that's just kind of a fact. Perfect way to put it. Yeah. Like people who think that Don Draper is cool.

Are these, I mean, is this just kind of, are there, is there an epidemic of people thinking that this is real? Or is there just kind of a hypothetical you're posing? I don't know if it's an epidemic. I mean, we wrote a story. about it at Polygon. There's like a small contingent of people who are like really into it in a non-serious way. And yeah. And there's certainly like griefers out there. Like there's people who don't play the game cooperatively. Like there's all kinds of like classic multiplayer game epidemics with Hell Divers too. Like I've had really good luck playing with strangers. I think I'm the only one on the call who's really done that. I've only had good experiences with it. No, I've done a lot of But I've certain, I know that it's a multiplayer game.

There are people who will just enjoy the fact that you can team kill endlessly in this game. You can absolutely just do that and have that be your fun time if you want. Yeah. That may be the case, but I've played a lot with randoms. It's always been fine. I think the game is just generally designed in a way that encourages cooperative play. Yeah, which I think is really cool. To get back to your point, Kirk, I feel like you're about to say something about the satire of it all.

Oh, no, yeah. just that like, I mean, there's always going to be people who think that a satirical thing is serious or take it seriously and kind of miss the fact that it's satire. And that's just kind of the nature of satire, I guess, when you're making something for an audience that big. But yeah, I've found I've had no real problem with griefing or with people, you know, kicking me out. I've seen reports of it and stuff, but I feel like that's sort of inevitable with any game like this. I think they've done a great job of just encouraging cooperative play. I think there's a lot of great communication towards. built into the game for playing with randoms, which like I said, I've done quite a bit of. There's a great ping system, which is super helpful. I mean, you can ping enemies, you can ping objectives. Your character is very verbal. Like, you're always kind of calling things out. You're saying when you're reloading, you're saying when you're calling in a stratagem,

that's not always enough information for people to avoid being killed by your stratagem, but you do say so when you do it. And like, that stuff all makes it pretty easy to play together. Playing with a group of friends on Mike is a whole other thing. It is very, very fun. The friends that I kind of regularly play with are very seasoned. And as a result, I kind of just follow them. And it puts me in a nice position because I'm lower level, so I don't have quite as many cool gadgets.

But also, I can still help. Like, I can call in a reinforcement when one of them gets killed. Maybe the other guy is using his super powerful weapon to kill a charger or something so I can do that. And also, I don't really have to think about where to go, which is a big part of this game, is like navigating around the map, which is sort of cumbersome. there's a lot of friction. You open up the map. You have to be looking at it. It's a hard thing to do when you're under pressure. You have to drop weight points that everyone can see. And that takes kind of a lot of focus and also like an awareness of how the game works. So you kind of know, oh, okay, I see over there that's going to be like somewhere where we can

get, you know, research materials or whatever they're called samples that we can use as upgrades. And a lot of advanced players are all about like sweeping the map for samples and other things that you can collect. So once you have someone else making all those decisions for you, It makes it really easy to kind of follow along. So, yeah, I think that all of those, like, layers of responsibility and communication that are built into the game are really good for all different kinds of players and surprisingly accessible for groups of people who aren't on mic, even though they're even more fun on mic, which is, I guess, true of any cooperative game. Yeah, I also think it, and we've highlighted this a little bit, but it really matters that the game is more fun when everyone's working together. Like, it's not just that, oh, it's designed for that. it rewards you. It actually, it's less fun if you don't revive your three teammates and you just

try to play it by yourself to the point where it would be very difficult and boring and weird to try to do that. Like the enemy design just doesn't favor that. Like, for example, like a game like left for dead, you can just run ahead of everybody and try to shoot all the zombies and kill steal and like get the highest kill count at the end of the match. Like, you can play that way. God knows I've been matched with randoms who have done exactly that. And it's not very much. much fun for everybody else who's trailing behind. But this game, you kind of can't do that. Like, you do actually have to, if you're not on mic, kind of use the body language of the game to be like, okay, let's strafe around this guy. Like, I'm going to, I'm going to be distracting him.

You guys cover me. Like, there are many ways to kind of indicate that in game. Again, even if you don't use mics and you don't know who you're playing with, like just those design aspects, then make it so much more rewarding when you win. Also, resources being shared, all of that stuff is just a boon for a game that is basically like, we don't want you to be taking advantage with the fact that you can team kill. Like, friendly fire is on no matter what. So how are we going to design for that? We need to make it not fun, you know?

Yeah, I was playing a mission the other night where a friend of mine got stuck underneath the carcass of a Bile Titan that we had killed, I think, with an orbital strike and it had fallen on where he was hiding from it. And he couldn't get out. So it was like, I'm basically a buzz. or he just couldn't crawl out. So he's like stuck in this one area. And he was like, Kirk, I need you to kill me.

Because I need to respawn and keep playing. So I was like, all right, like, thanks for your duty to Super Earth dude. And like just like blew him away on the ground. It was like a mercy killer. That would be a good. You should have shared that clip on the internet. It was funny. Okay.

So I was thinking about, I want to talk a little bit about how and why this game became such a mega hit. Because it's pretty crazy. I mean, this game is sold like something insane. I don't know the numbers in front of me, but it's way more than you would think. Like it's, I think it's approaching. Way more than they were prepared for. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Well, the technical challenges are a whole other thing. But this game has become a mega-haheat. And I think the main reason, especially when you compare it to the other big live service game that just came out, suicide squad, I think the main reason is that hell divers too is full of these memeable viral moments that make you feel like sharing in group texts. and that gets other people to want to check it out, and it becomes a whole thing, in the same way that lots of other games have kind of picked up Steam in the past few years.

I mean, Fortnite is another good example of a game that just, like, was so viral and memeable that it just took off. And I think that that's what you're describing is really stories like that. The fact that anyone can come away from a match and have some hilarious story about how they got chased by something or fell on something or they broke, or accidentally killed their friend in a stupid way.

Yeah. Or the funniest, the funniest, of course, is when the stratagems drop on top of people and just squash them. And I think that really says something about, like, how these service games take off. And when you look at Suicide Squad, which is a game that none of us played a ton of and all of us really bounced off. That doesn't really have the same thing. I mean, I don't think I saw anyone sharing clips from Suicide Squad. I don't know if it was, it was like to make fun of the story or like trash it in some way or another. Trash the game itself and decisions they made.

I wonder if that's kind of an integral part of making a service game as having memeable moments in there and therefore do all of these service games to be really viral hits. Do they have to have to have that kind of slapstick humor attached to them? I don't know, but it certainly has been a common theme. I think a memeable moment is kind of similar to. just an awesome thing happening. And I know they're different, but at the same time, I've had so many amazing experiences playing this game

just in almost every match where, I don't know, suddenly there's four Bile Titans on us, and it's just madness, and I'm running, and there's one stepping over me and trying to stomp on me, and, like, my guy keeps getting ragdolled around, but I keep not dying somehow. And then an orbital strike, like, hits it right above me, and it dies and, like, collapses to the earth,

and I'm almost screaming into my microphone. and like that would maybe be a viral moment. It would be funny, but it's also just a really exciting, kind of amazing experience. And the game really manufactures those super regularly. So I think it's some of that. It's definitely that it's funny. It's seeing two people hug while a nuclear explosion goes off in the distance. It's like there are these moments that are just tailor-made for being shared on TikTok.

But at the same time, also, I think there's also just exciting, amazing moments that happen in the game regularly. And when you're playing it or when you're watching a streamer play it, you just get that sense. Like, it can't be faked. When you just tune into a Twitch stream of this game, you'll see something crazy happen within like 30 minutes. And that's what it's like to play the game as well. Yeah, and you have those stories to share with your friends. That's one of those things that some of the best games that have these systems that allow for players to tell their own kinds of stories. And I think that fundamentally, like the fact that you can have a, be at,

dinner with some friends and you can just be swapping tales from your recent hell divers adventures, I think is a really appealing thing. Yeah, I think it, I mean, it also helps that it's fun to lose because you still get to like watch another player, but you usually don't have to watch for very long because the reinforcement system is pretty forgiving it. The cool down's pretty quick. So it goes by really quickly. And because the game is so funny, a lot of times you watching your friend play or even

a stranger play is watching something really funny. So it's like while you're waiting to be revived, you're watching something really cool as opposed to something like Counterstrike or Left or Dead where you're just watching somebody just get a million headshots while you wait for a timer to take down. And in this game, you might actually be watching the person trying to revive you or like trying to find a way to revive you. And even if you don't know them, you can usually tell that's what's going on, especially if they like start to enter in the arrow keys and then like, oh, there's a guy right there. oh, oh, oh no, and you're like, oh, my God, oh, my God, you got this, you got this. Like, that is such a different experience of, again, we're all in this together that is purely by design. And there are also just some little design things that I want to shout out as I'm thinking

about this. The walk speed is pretty cleverly done. Like, I often find that I can just barely outrun enemies. And also, individual enemies aren't that strong. There's just a lot of them. Like, usually if you get a headshot off, you're good, but it's easier said than done. And the bugs, there's no heads really to speak of. They're not really recognizably having heads.

So you just try to shoot the glowing body part or whatever it is. But even if you're being overrun, your walk speed is just fast enough, or your run speed, I guess I should say, that you can be running backwards and still kind of getting away while also feeling like, oh, the enemies are just almost barely encroaching upon me and having that high-octane moment, but also more than likely you're going to get out of it, which is something that's pretty hard to design for, and I just find really commendable in a game like this. Yeah, it's funny. I've been playing a little bit of Deep Rock Survivor, which is a spinoff of Deep Rock Galactic, which is itself a co-op game that was inspired in part by Hell Divers One. So there's

kind of, I've seen a lot of that sort of Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man stuff where people will be like, wow, Hell Divers 2 is a real rip-off of Deep Rock Galactic. And they're like, well, Deep Rock Galactic was inspired by Hell Divers One. Anyways, these are games where you're like Space Door who are mining and there are bugs attacking them and you're calling in you know special reinforcements and stuff and a lot of it feels like the first hell divers um survivor is a vampire survivor type game so you're running you know you're just running an auto shooting but you also mine through rocks and i've played a little bit it's fun i never i can't play too many of those after vampire survivor which i played a ton of but it's fun and i was struck by how similar

the feeling of playing it is to those moments in hell divers too specifically when you've run out of reinforces, which can happen as you're playing. And then you have to wait on a cool-down timer for each one. And if you all die, then you just wipe. And you don't lose the mission, which is nice. You get whatever progress you made, but it's like not a total victory. So this happened to us a lot of times with my group on high difficulty where we'd be totally out of revives just because we keep blowing each other up and dying. And so one guy is left and he's running. And it really looks like Deep Rock Survivor where he's like running in circles, cutting a giant army of bugs, including like some armored bugs that are not easy for him to kill no matter what he does.

Just like running out the clock basically. Yeah. Yeah. Or sometimes like trying to get around to where people drop samples. Another little touch is that you drop your samples and other people have to pick them up. There are all these little things like this that we don't have time to get into. But these little touches that add excitement or tension or, you know, a different objective to things that you're doing. And it really is, you're right, that the movement is really well handled where you're slow.

You feel slow. Sometimes you run out of stamina. and then you're really scared. But you do always seem to be able to kind of bob and weave and kind of running back your way through the bugs, especially if you can keep moving. It's a different story with the automaton's because they're shooting at you. Yes. They can be a lot more overwhelming, especially on hard difficulties.

And I find the bugs are a little bit more of a straightforward fun time where the automaton's, it can feel a little more like a co-op shooter because they all have guns, even though they're not quite as accurate or fast shooting as, enemies in some shooters. Which they can't be because it would be impossible. It would be a disaster, right. But it still does kind of have that feeling where like a tank rolls onto the field and it's like shooting artillery at you and you're taking cover, which is very, very different from the bugs. I find the bugs to be a little bit more fun, I will say, than the automaton's. But the automaton's fun in a different way, I guess. I mean, they do still have kind of laser blast, like Star Wars style

where it kind of feels like you can dodge them. Like kind of like the slow moving red line flying through the air is like a very different kind of a bullet than again like a counterstrike or a call of duty where it's like both sides are evenly matched. I mean also just the nature of the game is such that you're never playing against other humans. So you always get to feel like you're all in this together because it's only ever hoard mode. It's only ever you're playing against Joel, I guess. So you have a common enemy. I think that's a big part of the success of the game. It's like one more thing that it does to make you feel common cause with the people you're on a team with.

Because Left for Dead, something very cool that that game did was this asymmetrical multiplayer where other players could be controlling the zombies, like the kind of most powerful zombies that you were fighting against. So suddenly you had to really get smart about how to get through a level. And I think that added variety

to what were otherwise authored levels for the most part, even though they had that kind of AI director changing things up. You were moving through the level and doing the objectives the same. way each time, but it was always unpredictable because you could be playing against other players who would be very clever and how they try to take you down. There's something like that in this game. I could see them adding it, but honestly, I feel like right now the mix is so good for getting

everybody on the same page and feeling, you know, triumphant and like you're really working together, that introducing the idea of other players trying to beat you could kind of sour things a little bit. I guess I could kind of imagine that being a problem, but I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. I'm I can think of some story ways that they could justify it, but none of them seem good. Like, people defecting from the Helldivers and, like, forming a rebellion force. Like, I think that would result in some truly toxic Hell divers discourse. And really, the whole structure of the game, that broader structure, just does not support the idea of players getting to join the other armies. Maybe if the bugs brainwash them, Sarah Kerrigan style, that would work, I think.

Like, that seems like a good way to go. Free idea, Arrowhead. You can have that one. That's another game inspired by Starship Troopers. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's true. One, it's that, as I mentioned, I think in my one more thing, that we have the Zerg and we have kind of Terranish in the robots.

But there is the Illuminate, who are the third enemy faction in the original game and are kind of the Protas. And I would imagine that at some point there's going to be a distress signal from a colony who's under attack from a mysterious enemy in the Illuminator back. Because I think they've been eradicated or something in this fiction. Is there ever an explanation for the robots in this game? Because I feel like it's very silly that those are the two kinds of enemies. There might be.

I don't think there really is. I don't think any of this is really explained. Like even in that way that Starship Troopers sort of explains that, you know, colonists were actually the ones who started the war. Yes. We don't really talk about that anyways. Let's go kill the bugs. Also, more or less, the backstory of gears of war.

It's pretty classic structure. It's like, oh, the humans were the ones who were bad? Hell Dyrus 2 just goes ahead and lets you assume that. And it's like, yes. The playing is the bad guys. That's the game. There's a bunch of robots. They have fabrication stations and they make even more robots.

We must kill them. That's about as far as it goes. All right, well, this is a fun game. I'm certainly going to keep playing it throughout the year. I'm looking forward to them adding more stuff and to seeing how our galactic conflict goes. Yeah, let's take a break. And then we'll be back for one more thing. Back for another game.

You know it. What's going on? Just one more week till Max Fun Drive. Hard to believe. It's been a heck of a year since the last. last one. We're now a worker-owned co-op. We raised $50,000 for charity last year. And we've added a bunch of awesome new shows. But do you think we're ready to do it again? Absolutely. Lovely new gifts are lined up. The episodes will be amazing and wait till everyone hears the bonus content. Yeah, plus they

know to go to maximum fun.org slash newsletter, so they're getting all the news. Oh, like that meetup day is on Thursday, March 21st. Then what's bothering you? Me? Oh. Nothing. We're all set for Max Fundrive to start on Monday, March 18th. I just didn't want you to see this coming. Check. What? Hang on. Most of the plants humans eat are technically grass. Most of the asphalt we drive on is almost a liquid. The formula of WD40 is San Diego's greatest secret. Zippers were invented by a Swedish immigrant love story. On the podcast secretly incredibly fascinating, we explore this type of amazing. stuff. Stuff about ordinary topics like cabbage and batteries and socks. Topics you'd never expect to be the title of the podcast.

Secretly, incredibly fascinating. Find us by searching for the word secretly in your podcast app. And at maximum fun.org. And we are back for one more thing. Jason, I want to hear about this game you're playing. So you go first. I'm playing a truly incredibly titled video game called Unicorn Overlaw. word. This is the latest game from Vanillaware, the makers of 13 sentinels and dragons crown.

And you can tell as soon as you look at it, that's the same Artsdale, art style as all their other games. This kind of like vivid 2D kind of figures. And this game is interesting. So it's kind of, it's a very, it's a strategy RPG. It's reminiscent of the classic game, Ogre Battle, not to be confused with tactics ogre. I assume neither of you have played that, but essentially think of Fire Em well, in the sense that it's a top-down strategy RPG where you're controlling a bunch of units and there's a grid and there's relationships

and there's rock, paper, scissors style kind of counters and stuff. But there are a couple of key differences. One is that rather than unfolding on a grid in turns, it's more real time. All of your units are moving around the battlefield at once and you can pause at any time. but you're basically sending them all in different directions. And so you might send one guy to go take out a village over here and then another guy to go take out a bridge below you and so on and so forth. And then the other, the key difference is that each of your units is actually a squad composing several soldiers up to six or something like that.

And so the way it works is when one of your squads runs into an opponent squad, they battle each other. and then it gets into like a JRP turn-based combat kind of screen where both teams are fighting, taking turns and fighting around another, except you don't control any of it. It's all automated. And so what you can do ahead of time is you can set up your positions and your squad configurations and your equipment and the strategies.

So there's like a system where you kind of program this kind of rudimentary AI for each one saying if this happens, you want to do this, and you kind of do things in order. that way. And there's a lot of strategy behind that. It's also extremely overwhelming and you can really get, you really have to have kind of a willingness to embrace all of the details and the fiddliness and the menus and really get into it. But it's interesting. It's, it's very different from the strategy RPGs that I usually like to play, the more grid-based kind of individual micro-ing type ones. But yeah, I would be enjoying it, except

tears a rub. The story is like the most generic, boring shit I've ever seen, and that kind of has made me not really want to keep playing. It's like this fantasy story where it's just like, hey, you have to go, you are a prince, and you have to go around rescuing your kingdom from these evil people. And at first it's kind of, it sets up as, it's like this, this interesting political thing with like warring people and people betraying each other and all sorts of stuff where it's like one of the first battles you fight is against a former ally. turned enemy and it's kind of like okay what kind of interest is there's going to be something interesting here and then at the end of the battle it turns out that this guy is just brainwashed by the enemy and that's the

case for most of the villains you fight they're just brainwashed by the evil magician um and to to save them called like the unicorn ring or something like that and and you save them with that so you're the unicorn overlord i i don't feel like that's a good thing to be don't ask don't ask okay fine i i don't care who the unicorn overlord is it doesn't matter so yeah Yeah, I mean, because of that, I don't know how much more I'm going to keep playing, and I don't know if I would really recommend it. But if you're into kind of crunchy strategy games where you, like, really can plan out really interesting minutia of your units and set up these squads and face them against enemies and kind of find interesting ways to go about that. If that stuff sounds appealing to you, then this could be a cool game for you. Although the other kind of flaw is that everything seems super easy.

I might have to turn up the difficulty mode if I do play more. Actually, I'm not sure if there's, hopefully there's one. Because it's really simple so far to steamroll enemies without actually thinking much. And in fact, just like in true fire emblem style, they give you a dude on a horse who just rips apart everybody because he's 20 levels higher than everybody else.

Oh, funny. Oh, Frederick. Yeah, I mean, in this game, he's called Joseph, so it's the same sort of thing. That's a great trope. Yeah, it is. It is a strange trip because it's just like having a cheat code and it just kind of makes everything trivial. So yeah, I'm not totally sold on this game.

But yeah, Unicorn Overlord, definitely a memorable title. Nice. I will go next since I'm also playing a different game since I have finished Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth or at least finish the story. I have my life back. Thank you. And I can play other things. And there have been a few games on my docket that I wanted to check out. I played some Bellatro.

Jason will have to talk about that on the show at some point. I have also been playing Home Safety Hotline, which I first heard about a little while ago. It's been out for a bit, and I was intrigued by. I've had it installed on my PC for a little while. It started playing it, and I think it's really cool. I figured I would at least mention it just because it's a very different kind of a game, and I'm really enjoying it. So this is an operating system game, meaning you're playing on a PC within a PC.

It looks kind of like a late 90s Windows PC, so it's like a CRT monitor and a kind of Windows like operating system, double-clicking on a lot of stuff. There are a little dot MOV files on your desktop. And you start out, you are an operator for the home safety hotline, who is appear to be a hotline that people call with problems, and you have an automated database where they call, they tell you what's wrong, you put them on hold, and then you diagnose whatever it is that they have wrong at their house, and you kind of send them a packet of information for how to deal with it. So an early example of this, someone will call in and say, oh, there's something wrong in my house. Like, I, you know, I'm hearing sounds in the walls, and there's like,

it looks like there's kind of coffee grounds all over the ground. And then you go look through your entries and cockroaches. There's an entry for that, and it says cockroach droppings can look like coffee grounds. So you realize, oh, okay, that's the game kind of telling me, all right, this guy has cockroaches in his house. So you, like, tell him there's cockroaches in your house. And then you send it off to him. And then you don't hear back until later if you get it wrong, like the next day even maybe, you might get a call from someone being like, you told me they were cockroaches and that's not the problem and it keeps getting worse and I can't sleep, and then they hang up.

So you've learned that you were kind of wrong there. Okay, so that's how it starts. You send off that kind of thing. You've got like black mold, mice, bees, a couple of things. So your first day goes like that. I'm already anxious. Your first day goes like this and it's totally normal. So then the next day you get another call from your manager who's like, you've been doing a pretty

good job. We're going to open up some new entries. you have this big database of problems, and a lot of them are redacted. So on the second day, some of the entries open up, and there's some interesting stuff in there, like a fracture hob. And it's like, this is like a normal hob, only it exists only around fractures and cracks in the wall. It does have a false face, unlike other hobbs. And that's all the entry says.

And it's like, if you want to deal with it, just don't approach it directly. Be sure to leave a saucer of milk out every night, or it might metamorphosize. And you're like, okay. So there's a few like that. A couple other memorable early ones. One is false beet, which looks like a beet, like the plant, a beet. And it says this is a false beat. It is actually an animal that looks like a beet for anyone with a garden.

And if you eat it, it implants itself in your stomach and feeds off of food. And the way to avoid them is just to not grow beets in your garden. Because if you do eat one, you can never remove it without dying. Oh, no. And so there's a bunch of stuff like that. They all have very funny names. I think false beat is still my favorite, or bed teeth is another good one. I had beats for lunch today, like literally earlier today.

Are you sure it was a true beer? I don't know now. I don't know now. So you get calls from people, and it's basically that's the rhythm of the games. You'll get a call. Someone will describe what's going on. And based on their kind of sometimes frantic descriptions of there's a weird glowing coming from my basement, or something is watching me while I sleep, et cetera, et cetera.

You have to figure out what it is that's, wrong and you get kind of rewards the better you're doing. And then as you go, there's kind of a narrative that's unfolding. You're getting emails from a former employee. You can kind of imagine how these sorts of games work. Yeah, this sounds awesome. Who made this game? It's a studio called Night Signal Entertainment. I think it's a couple of developers. It's a pretty small team. And it feels like it was made by a small team, but in a way that I think is charming. Like the voice acting on the calls is really fun. They got a lot of people to do weird accents and do the lean in. And yeah, I don't know how it ends. So I haven't finished it.

So, you know, I don't really see it going too far beyond what they're doing here. You know, they're making it a little more elaborate. There will be network outages, but I'll still be getting calls. So I'll have to go for memory. And just the, you know, I'm gradually having to lean into not only the diagnosis, but also, like, what might happen if you don't treat it because someone will say, you know, oh, well, you know, the basement totally smells like really, really bad. And I don't know why. And I'll realize like, oh, well, if you have like, whatever, a bar. art in your basement, there can be a really bad smell.

But that's a little further down the entry. So I'm learning more and more about this weird world. And yeah, it's really enjoyable. It has that same feeling of, you know, the paranormal and the kind of innate humor of that that Control had that the Bureau of Control implied in a lot of those. The SCP Foundation. Yeah, those kind of, yeah, an SCP. And really like those redacted documents in control.

There's even an item. I think it's called like false object or something that's like a, a television or an appliance that, you know, the children can hear strange noises coming from, and it's very much like the objects of power and control. So it's really good at that vibe and at the kind of like late 90s, early 2000s, JPEG, creepy images and emails kind of energy. And I really dig it. I think it's a very creative game and has been a really nice palette cleanser

after some of the other kind of bigger and more explosive games that I've been playing. So yeah. Just watch out for false beats. I know. And bed teeth. Ugh, you don't want to get bed teeth. Those are really bad. So that's home safety hotline.

It's on PC right now. And it's definitely best playable on a PC with like a mouse and a keyboard. I would say that's the way to play it. Yes, that's me. Maddie, what is your one more thing? All right. So I'm already feeling like I messed up and I should have picked Shogun instead of this really creepy documentary that Tina and I watch.

We can talk about Shogun next week. But maybe we can talk about Shogun some other time. So Dean and I watched this documentary called The Insurrectionist Next Door, which is about the January 6th, just kind of particular. And what's interesting about it is that it's made by a woman named Alexandra Pelosi whose mom is Nancy Pelosi. And so she literally just asks a series of people, why did you try to kill my mom? And they're like excited to answer it because they really want to get the message out there. And it is a wild watch. And like you might think you know, I feel like you might think you know who attacked the Capitol on January 6th.

But actually, you probably don't because there's a huge diversity of people. And I don't just mean racial and gender diversity, although that's present too. But also just like each of them has like a different pet conspiracy theory that made them think that this was the right thing to do. And at least a couple of them, I left feeling like, oh, they were really manipulated and they did not understand what they were doing at all. And I now feel very sad for them. But some of them you're like, this person is scary. And I'm worried about Alexandra Pelosi talking to this man for so long. But it's incredible.

I didn't really know anything about her. I still don't. But just based on this documentary, I was pretty impressed by her work as an interviewer. She really puts herself in the story in a very literal way in the way that only one can in this scenario. Like, she's not really approaching it as a journalist so much as just a person who has a camera and is just like willing to sit down and talk to. people and be like, I actually want to have a real conversation with you about why you did this and understand it. And without spoiling it, I'll say there's at least one person who kind of starts a documentary with one perspective. And by the end, it's like, I was wrong. And that's like a

very haunting kind of trajectory that was also kind of rewarding to me watching it because I was like, these people can't be convinced. Like they believe in some truly bizarre conspiracy theories that have no basis in reality at all. And that's scary to watch. because you're just like, how do we even get out of this? So they do kind of end on the person who changes their mind so that at least you kind of feel at the end like, okay, like this person got out of this. Like they kind of like realized that this wasn't factual

and like it wasn't based in reality. But yeah, it's pretty haunting. We actually watched this several weeks ago and I've just been thinking about it a lot ever since and I kept meaning to make it a one more thing because I thought it was a really interesting documentary project for someone to do and pretty brave. honestly. So yeah, it's called The Instructionist Next Door. It's on Max. I don't know. I think we watched on, I don't know what we watch. Max, the Max app. I don't know. HBO produced. How much of it is like in Veep when her daughter is a documentary? It does have the dark humor of Veep actually. Because just the tone of it is so weird that you kind of have, it has like almost a Veep like sensibility.

in certain ways, if that makes sense. Like I think Alexander Pelosi's like maybe a little bit more put together as a person of the fictional character in V that is like the daughter of a politician. But it is, there's a lot of dark humor there because like there's nothing more weird than like somebody being like, so why did you try to kill my mom and the person having to actually try to come up with an answer that doesn't make them sound terrible? Like that is like you got to laugh or else you cry when you watch interviews like that. So yeah, I don't know.

I recommend it if you want to feel really weird for like several weeks. I mean, I don't know how long I'm going to feel weird, probably forever after watching this. But yeah, it's a movie. That sounds interesting. I think I will watch that actually. That sounds like a good one. All right. Well, hey, that's it.

That's it. Another week. Another episode of Triple Click. Look at us. Did it again. We made it. All right. Well, very excited for Max Fun Drive to start next week.

We'll talk about that then. And I will see. both of you next week as well. See you next week. Bye. Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music.

Our show art is by Tom DJ. 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.

Join. Find us on Twitter at triple clickpods. Send email the triple click at maximum fun.org and find a link to our discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artists-owned shows. Supported directly by you.