Triple Click - Triple Play: Marvel's Avengers

Episode Date: September 10, 2020

It's time for another Triple Play! This week, the gang jumps into Marvel's Avengers, a new video game about superheroes who play Destiny. Is this game any good? Is it going through an identity crisis? And just what is up with Kamala Khan? Plus: Samus's Soapbox!ONE MORE THINGKirk: The weirdness of GPUsMaddy: Destiny 2 (really)Jason: The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart TurtonLINKSSupport Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinTriple Click Twitch channel:  https://www.twitch.tv/tripleclickpod 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

When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth and tell the whole world. Yeah, okay. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week, we're talking about the new Avengers game as Kamala Khan gets the band back together for one more Marvel-branded loot chase. Can a meaningful superhero story and an endless loot grind coexist? Let's suit up and find out.

I'm Kirk Hamilton. I'm Maddie Myers. And I'm Jason Shryor, and we are back. We are. We are. We're back for another episode. It's us again. It is.

Nice to see you too, as always. Did you two notice that it's our 20th episode? Ah, Mazel to. Oh, 20 episodes. I think we're like officially an established podcast if we've made it this far. We're not old enough to drink in the United States, but almost. We're just old enough to be annoyed that we aren't old enough to drink because every episode is a year because that's how time works now and that's been established. Yeah, that's, we've established that's what an anniversary is.

So that's how this works. Somehow it feels like we've been podcasting together for longer than that. That can't be right. I think it's only been 20 episodes. I think that's right, too. I don't know what you're on, Jason, but that doesn't sound right to me either. The only show we've ever done is triple click, which is part of Maximum Fun. And while I'm talking about Maximum Fun, I just want to give a special note that if you want to become a member and listen to our Beanscasts, then you should go to maximum fun.org slash join and consider doing that and supporting the show.

And also, I just want to say I'm so grateful to the people who've done that because I love that we own our show and I love that we get to do what we want. Yeah. It's our podcast. It rules. I feel the same way it rules. You all rule. Thanks, everyone who's a member. You're all great.

Pat yourselves on the back, folks. You did it. Good job. You are doing it. Also, we're considering selling the podcast to a private equity firm. Oh yeah. That's actually the announcement for this episode. File under Things that Will Never Happen.

20 episodes, well that's what they want. Real quick, before we get started with this week's episode, I should mention that last week, as many people have pointed it out hilariously, after we did our summer news round-up episode and we were talking about how Nintendo probably has this Mario compilation coming, but they haven't talked about anything. Literally hours after the episode went live,

Nintendo was like, ah, Mario's 35th anniversary and just announced a ton of stuff. So that was pretty funny to see. I think the only conclusion we can draw is that we made that happen. So you're welcome, everybody. They heard our episode. and they went ahead and set that YouTube video live. I think that was exactly how that went down.

I think that's right. I think that that's right. All right. Are we ready to talk about video game? We should tell people on our stream. We should remind everyone about our stream, which is related, I guess. It's related to, right, that is tonight if you're listening to this, and that is related to the topic of this episode.

Yes. We are streaming on our Twitch channel, which is Triple Click Pod, and we're going to play Marvel's the Avengers. And that's at 8 p.m. Eastern time tonight. Thursday, September 10th, except if I'm saying that date and you are listening to this show now, you're probably thinking that's already passed. Or you're thinking it's today and you're really excited to check out the story tonight. It's today, yeah, and we'll put it on her Twitter and

whatnot so people don't miss it. Yeah, that'll be fun. The three of us will jump in. And speaking of Marvel's Avengers, I think it's just Marvel's Avengers. It's not Marvel's The Avengers. A little bit of pedantic stuff. Or it could just be Avengers. I mean, we got to add and that Marvel's though. Well, so technically the Spider-Man game is also Marvel's Spider-Man game. It seems like a thing where Marvel is insisting that they do this, which is ridiculous. It's because nobody knows what Marvel is. No one's heard of any of these properties, and no one knows what comic book company they're affiliated with.

And so Marvel just has to make sure that people finally know they're involved. Okay, so first things first, Crystal Dynamics developed this game. Squaring Nix published it, and it came out last Friday, September 4th. And this game has had an identity crisis since it was announced a couple years ago at E3. It was not entirely clear to me when I was in that press event what this game was going to be. It seemed kind of like a borderlands, like a Destiny 2. And then I played the beta. Still wasn't entirely clear on what that was, folks, and go back and listen to that triple click episode.

But I thought it was pretty fun. You can play as a whole lot of different Avengers in this game. But it wasn't clear to me how that would fit into both a single play. campaign and also multiplayer and cooperative content. That's a lot of different kinds of things, and it's all in one video game. And having played this game, I am still not sure what I think about it, and I think the answer to that depends on which part of the game you're asking me about and can even vary mission to mission. But I am very curious to hear from the two of you who have not read as many Kamala Khan comics as I have, perhaps, about what you each thought of the game.

So, Kirk, do you want to start? What did you think about this Avengers video game? I'll start. So, yeah, I have really only followed this game through your coverage, talking to you about it on the show, sort of seeing, you know, just ambiently trailers and stuff, the people joking about how the characters all look like these kind of knockoff TV, made-for-TV movie versions of the movie characters. and then hearing the kind of middling reactions to the beta and then hearing positive reactions to the game itself. So I kind of was primed for that going in. Like I knew that people were much more positive on the game

than they had been before it came out. So then I started playing it. And yeah, I'm kind of with you. I think that especially in the early going, so I'm not super far in it. I just got to the Ant Hill. And yeah, I think that the game that I really like is the story-based game about Kamala Khan,

who's fantastic and like makes the whole. whole game work for me. She's an incredible character. I love the way that she's written and performed. It's just, they do a lot of those, like, Spielberg shots of her face as she sees something incredible. And she, like, lights up and is like, how cool is this? I'm meeting Iron Man, and she's so excited about everything. And I like that about it. I said this on Twitter, but this game is basically about the power of Marvel fandom. And that would strike me, I think, a lot more cynically if it weren't such a stressful time in the world. But I'm kind of like, you know what? It's fine. fun. I like this. I'm cool with a game that's just enthusiastic about the Avengers being cool

and like collecting comics and merch, which is like literally something that the main character does. It's like what you do in the very first mission with her, which is sort of a, there's a time jump. You start out with her as a younger teenage girl and she goes to a fan fiction competition where she's a finalist. And she's writing fan fiction about real people, by the way, because they're the Avengers. And she's writing stories about them. But that's in the comics too. And it's just as weird in the comics. so they keep that in this game. And she meets the Avengers and collects comic books and you get to be a fan girl right along with her.

And then she gets her origin story, gets superpowers, gets to be an older teenage girl for the rest of the game. And that is still not that grim and dark. She's still kind of a perky teenage girl the whole time, which I agree. It definitely sets a certain tone. What about you, Jason?

I know you liked Kamala as well. So I finished the game and so it's very interesting, sitting back and hearing early impressions because I think everyone's early impressions are going to be a lot more positive. So Maddie, so you mentioned in the game as an identity crisis. I can almost see having written a lot of stories about behind the scenes development of games and particularly games like this, including most infamously Destiny, you can almost see

the wheels turning. Like you can look at it and be like, okay, so they have this great scripted, bespoke set of missions at the beginning of the game and then it opens up and then clearly, they needed to fill some space in the campaign because they were playtesting it and realized it only took eight hours to be. And so they added all these missions that were like clearly meant to be multiplayer missions that they squeezed in and like added some dialogue in there. And so this game is just this weird like Camara of like single player Tomb Raider-esque missions.

And then weird like simplistic, super boring multiplayer like go stand on this spot, go push this button, go like defeat waves of enemies and it is just like the biggest example of an idea and then and then at the end it has like these big explosive like comic book moments so it is really just like this the ultimate example of a video game with this massive identity crisis but here's the thing that we haven't talked about yet which is the way that it feels to go around beating up enemies and that to me was really the the kind of saving grace of this game because each character feels totally different you get six of them over the course of the main campaign, they're going to add more later as DLC. But right now, six of them, each of them feels totally different. They all have their pros and cons. I really

love playing as Thor and Thor. If I wind up sticking in this game long term will be my main, I think. But a lot of them are just super fun to play as. And like, it's really fun watching the numbers go up and seeing the treadmill forming, the destiny thing. But it's also really fun unlocking their skull trees and realizing you can actually do all these crazy combos that you wouldn't even think about. It's, it's very much a fighting game, which Maddie, I think you'll appreciate more and more as you get deeper and deeper into the game. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's part of why I liked the beta. You remember what I said about the beta. It was very similar to what you're describing now. Yeah, well, it's a brawler in a way that I didn't even expect. And Kirk, Kirk, you mentioned the other

day or you mentioned earlier today that you were finding it difficult. And I think that's intentional. And I think it is a difficult game. And it's very much a game where you need to be like countering and dodging and you can't just mash buttons like you need to be doing the whole fighting game thing and so all that like for me sort of like how destiny masters shooting this game feels like it really really nails the fundamentals of like brawler combat it's just that the robots are so boring that i can't imagine going back and fighting more of them let me beg to differ a little bit on it nailing brawler combat it's pretty good and like i've gotten more of a feel for it of for countering and stuff. But this game has some kind of like visual clutter awareness issues

that I don't think they've fully solved. There's also just some like general U.X stuff that's a little weird. It's not terrible, but it's, it's just a little confusing and hard to read. And there's a ton of information at any given time. Do you mean in terms of the level design or just the ways that certain characters play? Like who have you, who have you chosen? So I've been mostly playing as Miss Marvel, Ms. Marvel. And a little bit as Hulk. I don't love playing as Iron Man. So those are the three characters that I have right now.

I mean more like it's all of it. Like what's happening on the battlefield, what you can see, where enemies are coming from. You're generally in fights where there's people coming up to you and there's also people kind of taking pot shots at you from a distance. Speed is a little bit hard to judge. Like I find Iron Man to be a very strange character to play as because he's very slow because he has to be slow.

because actual Iron Man breaks the sound barrier in one second. This Iron Man, when you go into flight mode, which works very similarly to Anthem, you go into hover mode, then you hit the run button and you go into like a forward flying mode. But you're moving at the speed of a jog, roughly, and then you'll just get knocked out of it, and it's very hard to gauge dodging. There's just stuff in this game that I don't love the feel of, and I'm sure that I'll get more familiar with it. Also, I'm finding that as I unlock moves, the characters get more, you know, a lot more dynamic to play, and I can tell, like, there's a lot of moves.

You can build, like, kind of really deep builds on some of these characters. But I'm, there's, it's fun, but I'm not going to say that they've, like, that it's this, like, masterpiece of melee combat. Because it does not seem that way to me, at least not so far. I think it has its moments. Bing! Kirk here from the future, taking advantage of my omniscient editor powers to just interject and elaborate a little bit on my thoughts, only because I played this game more since we recorded this episode, and I unlocked Black Widow. And I got to say, Black Widow,

pretty darn fun. My opinion of this game's melee combat is actually significantly improved just by how fun she is to play. I still think Iron Man like needs some work. There's just something off about Iron Man. And the other character is like Hulk even. They don't quite play right to me, but playing as Black Widow, who just controls more like a traditional kind of brawler character. Like her dodge just makes sense to me. She has this grappling hook that lets her close with enemies. She's really, really cool and super fun. I gather that Thor is also very fun too. I hadn't played as her when I made this episode and I figured, hey, I'm meditating. it and I might as well add that so that there's just a little bit more to my opinion on this

game's melee combat, which is certainly still in progress as I haven't finished the game. I'm sure I'll talk about it on future episodes as well as on the stream tonight, and I'll probably have played even more by then, so stay tuned for more of my evolving opinions on the Avengers combat. But, you know, really, it's a pretty fun game. Okay, anyways, let's get back to the conversation. I had just said that the fights get pretty chaotic, and I didn't love that, so Jason is going to respond to me. Okay, take it away, past Jason.

Bing! the chaos that you talked about is one of the problems that I had with it and I mean really the fact that all these enemies are exactly the same for just mission after mission they don't even have like the distinct like different races the way that destiny was that to me is like one of the games really biggest flaws and something that will probably prevent me from like sticking with it long term is that all the enemies are freaking just robots it's like five different types of enemies and it's funny because that's kind of like that's kind of a ben a criticism of some Marvel movies is that then there's

always a big fight with a bunch of robots where they can just rope them apart and the movie can still be rid of PG-13. Yeah, well, so they can never kill actual people, but still, I mean, the lack of variety in the robots. But then there are actual people in this game every now and that. Yeah, I feel like Holt killed some of those people. I guess we can describe the story, which I don't know, I have all kinds of feelings about this story because they change some things from the comics. And I just don't know if I agree. But no, I'm kidding. It's completely fine to change things from the comics, and I think they did so for simplicity's sake.

So if you two will pardon me, I have my soapbox to get on. Please get on your soapbox to explain what it is that they changed. Okay, Maddie is standing on the chair at her desk now. She's ready to hold forth. We're ready for some comic book knowledge here. This is called, this section will be called Samus's soapbox. Great. So the Inhumans, Kamala Khan is an inhuman character.

In this game, after her gritty backstory moment, she gets infected by the Terrigan Mists, which in this game is caused by this mysterious mega corporation called AIM that is in the comics, although they're not associated with this disaster. And it infects people and their latent superpowers are revealed or it doesn't affect them at all. That's how the Terrigan Mists works in this game. in the original comics, the Terrigan Mists were something that some aliens used to experiment on humans who didn't live on Earth. And then those humans got superpowers from the Terrigan Mists and then they lost their home and had to go to Earth as refugees. And then they were discriminated against because they were kind of perceived as alien invaders even though they were originally human. And that idea of the inhumans in the 2010s was kind of used as an appraisal. metaphor because this is when the X-Men were kind of being sunset in Marvel's eyes because

they didn't have the rights to the X-Men in the movies. So they were trying to come up with other supergroups they could use as a cool oppression metaphor. And the inhumans is what they settled on. And humans were come up with devised in the 2010s? They're like a very recent thing? No, they were devised many, many decades before that. They were reprised in the 2010s. And that is when Miss Marvel, Kamala Khan, her, I believe her first comic came out in 2014, or at least the one that made her famous and well-known and beloved. And I think she's the reason why this gambit even worked is because people liked her so much. And I think the reason they liked her.

So after the inhumans come to Earth, et cetera, et cetera, the Terrigan mist do end up infecting other people on Earth and more inhumans pop up, sort of like this game. But it's still posed in the comics as kind of an alien threat. And then you have this character Kamala Khan who's Pakistani Muslim American character. She is positioned in the comic as struggling with her identity and her play in America, and then also, on top of that, there's this additional metaphor of her inhuman status and how she's being oppressed in that context. And given that it was already kind of an immigration metaphor, I think that's part of why those comics worked so well for people. But in this

game, the immigration thing's basically gone. Kamala Khan is still the character that you know, but that cultural context is slightly removed because now it's just an industrial accident that the Avengers cause at the beginning of this game, or at least they appear to have caused it, which changes the dynamic of what the inhumans mean. And over the course of the game, I think that problem keeps coming up. I haven't played every mission, but I've already noticed some tension with how the inhumans are presented as this oppressed minority, but the game doesn't seem entirely certain what it wants to say about that. It's mostly lighthearted and playing it fun, but I feel like there's an opportunity there to say something more, and it just doesn't

quite hang together. And I think, I again, don't blame the game for this. It feels like that part of the game was almost rushed, or perhaps it's because there are so many other kinds of missions in the game that are distracting from that narrative, because they have to also be there. There's all this other cool superhero stuff in there where you just play as Tony Stark for a second and go get a cool toy, or do you know what I mean? I totally know what you mean. It feels like the game is trying to do a lot of different things. And I think it's actually succeeding at one of them, but it almost doesn't have the time and space to carry it out into the deeper story that it was in the comics. But you can see the bones of that story there, and those bones are really strong.

So that's part of why the game almost works for me, or at least works for me when it's telling that story, because I can bring in my own context and just tack it on and be like, well, I know of the story you were trying to tell here, and so I'll just imagine the trappings of it, and then, but that's not really part of it in this game. This game is mostly just a superhero game about how Kamala Khan finally gets to be an Avenger, and the inhumans are oppressed, but mostly don't worry about it, because there's a lot of cool gadgets. At the end, by the end of the game, it is definitely brought up again, but never actually explored it any meaningful way. I mean, don't expect anything meaningful. Yeah, yeah, I don't. The inhumans are kind of a tool that's used to give the village,

motivations for what he is doing. And at the end, towards the very end, you're like rescuing Inhumans from cages and stuff, but it's never society. It's never like all of humanity that's oppressing the Inhumans. It's just AIM and just this crazy villain who has his own reasons for wanting to take them all out and cure them or whatever. So that what you're talking about, the comics treatment of Inhumans is never actually a part of the game.

Yeah, which is kind of too bad. but that's okay. I can imagine it's there. It's a little bit the version. I mean, it's just like this other version of this game that you can see that we've all talked about at this point is there's this narrative game

that I don't think could exist now. And then there's the Destiny 2 style, like ongoing story. With a lot of other Marvel content in it and like something that you can put in other kinds of superheroes and other stories, which is cool. But what I've mostly seen is people being excited

about the Kamala Khan story. Yeah, I mean, even that is like, I mean, it's fine and all, but at the end of it, you're left with like, okay, now what? So the campaign is very short by AAA game standards. It's about the size of like a Tomb Raider game as an example. But because you are spending so much of it in the bodies of six different superheroes

and their missions where like you'll only be Black Widow, you'll only be Captain America, you'll only be Thor, you're not really getting like a full arc for Kamala Khan. And none of the characters really get their full arcs. it's sort of like jumping into an Avengers movie without having watched any of the, those standalone superhero movies that help you understand all their motivations and like who they are. So it's very hard to care about any of the characters. And frankly, it's very hard to care about the story at all in this game because it's so all over the place.

And it is so fragmented in so many different ways. And that's even if you're just playing through the campaign and like not taking the time to do all the side stuff that pops up on your, on your war table, some of it, which is like just side questions. I'm going to of it is just grind. There's like iconic missions, right, for each character. You're talking about those as part of the story. Yeah, so those are side quests. No, those aren't part of the story.

So those are side quests. But they have their own stories. Like, those do flesh out the characters, I believe. Yes? Arguable. Well, have you done them all? And also, I've done most of them. So most of them are like one mission and then a grind and then a second mission.

And by a grind, I mean, like a destiny style. Like, you have to go around the world, like killing robots and doing special moves and stuff to get to finish this part of the mission and then a second mission where it all wraps up and it's usually it usually feels like it's dangling threads for the future or like it's it's it's never really like an interesting there's very little that's like narratively satisfying except i mean the dialogue is really good all around but there are no arcs here that are like man this is a great story arc that really really helped me resonate with this person or this character and kamala kind is a great character that's the thing it's like as as a person and as a person and as a

protagonist, she's really cool and really great in a lot of ways. It's so interesting to play as this teenage girl who's like a fan of the Avengers and like geeking out every time she meets someone new. Like, oh my God, you're Thor. But there's no real narrative arc for her the way that Lara Croft has a narrative arc. So I think like at the beginning of this game, it's one game for a few hours and it's really impressive. Like that game is basically, I mean, so people who, you know, people who worked on Uncharted, worked on this game. Crystal, that IMX, obviously most famous for making the Tomb Raider games. This has so much

Tomb Raider, and Tomb Raider, of course, had a lot of uncharted, and there's always been, like, a funny, like, cyclical symbiosis between those two series. There are these great cutscene moments. God, there's this, this, like, slow-mo sequence where she jumps over Hulk on Captain America's Shield and, like, and bounces off of him. I was like,

yes, like, there's a bunch of really cool stuff like that. Opening set pieces are really impressive. And, yeah, like you said, so, I actually, so for starters, I think the vocal performances are great Sandra Saad is the name of the actress who plays Kamala Khan. And I did not realize this until I looked this up right now. I knew Troy Baker was in this, but I didn't know he was playing Bruce Banner. I totally thought he was Thor or something, and I haven't gotten to Thor yet, but I just

like didn't realize it was him. He's great. Like, and their scenes together are so good. And there's, I just had the scene before they get to the Ant Hill where she's like despairing and she's like, what am I even doing? She's just like this really emotionally open character. And every time those scenes, like I, especially the scenes between Banner and Kamala are happening.

They're great. Like when they go on their road trip together, there's just all this stuff happening where I'm like, this is good shit. And there really is this hard pivot where the game shifts gears. And you do your first kind of mission that's clearly supposed to be a multiplayer mission. You load in, there's like a matchmaking lobby. You're like watching like AI bots like populate the rest of your squad.

You go out and there's optional chess everywhere. And you're starting to hear all this like generic dialogue about the event. Avengers, Ah, Avengers spotted, and this stuff that makes it clear that this is designed to be cut and paste content. And it really, it's remarkable how quickly the game shifts into and out of those modes. And then I did the whole Iron Man thing where you first meet Iron Man, and then he goes off on his own for a while. They split up. And when I was playing as Iron Man, it's probably that I don't really like playing as Iron Man in this game. It just like doesn't feel awesome to me.

But I was just like, I am no longer into this at all. And then it went back and suddenly, I think it's also I like playing as Ms. Marvel. She's like got great moves. She's kind of like Spider-Man, but also got these long punches. Or like Mr. Fantastic. She's got stretchy arms. Yeah, she's got the stretchy arms. So the minute I was back in control of her, I was like, oh, I'm having fun again.

And then I got this great cutscene between her and Banner. And I was like, this is the shit. So it's very much, yeah, I guess it's an Avengers game. So it's about all of them. And like you said, Jason, it has to kind of mash them all together. And here's a question I want to pose both of you, just sort of related to the Avengers thing. And that is, there's a lot of talk before. before this game came out about the fact that we know all these characters so well because of the

movies specifically, even though obviously they all predated that in the comics. And now there are these other versions of them that look sort of like them and that that was going to be a problem. I have my own thoughts on this, but I'm curious what you two think, like if you two think that is an issue for you as you're actually playing the game. Maddie, is that an issue for you? I thought it was going to be, but it didn't end up being one. And I think part of their workaround is simply that Kamala is the lead character, and we have no preconceived notions about her or what she should sound like, what she should be like in a movie. She's been in some animated stuff, but she's largely been sidelines so far other than having a hit comic book series,

and it was really just a matter of time before she got her time in the spotlight. And this game is very much giving her that. I think it could have been done even better, but I'm still really happy with what we got. And I think that helps a lot. I think it's very weird that the marketing did not signpost the fact that this feels like a Kamala Khan game for most of the first five, six hours. But I don't know. Maybe I'll have a conversation with a marketing person for this game someday, and I can ask that tough question. But I think it helps a lot that you don't have to worry about it being an Avengers game so much as a Kamala Khan game. However, I will also say that it's easier for me to deal with characters like Thor where the voice actor sounds a lot like Chris

Hemsworth or sounds like he's doing his best Chris Hemsworth impression as opposed to Iron Man where he doesn't sound like Robert Dynie Jr. but then every now and then he kind of does and I'm like either commit to the RDJ impression or don't or do something completely different. It's like Nathan Drake doing a like yeah doing cosplay and it that keeps taking me out of it and then like Bruce Banner's another great example where I feel like Troy Baker's just doing something totally different, but I love that because I'm like, you may as well just either do exactly the same thing or do something totally different. Anywhere in between is terrible. But that is a strange answer because I'm basically saying I like Thor who is the exact same and then I also like Hulk who isn't the same

at all. I don't know is my answer to your question. Well, Thor does, I mean, it's kind of the typical Thor accent like you would think of that accent even before Chris Hemsworth did it. But only because of how we see Thor now. I'm saying before. Chris Hemsworth, like, you would think of Thor with that accent, like from cartoons and stuff like that. Yeah, that's true. He has been in some cartoons. It depends on the character.

Like, some of the characters, I mean, yeah, the, Bruce and Iron Man worked for me. Captain America, on the other hand, I think Chris Evans brings something to the role that whoever is playing it in this game did not. And Captain America in this game is extremely boring and flat. Like, basically what you would think of Captain America before Chris Evans, like, really made him into this great character.

It gives you an appreciation for Chris Evans and what a kind of weirdly hard acting role that was. Because it could be such a boring character. And yet he just has this certain charismatic quality to himself that he sells it and it works. I guess it's that they also, it kind of goes back to the thing you were saying, Jason, about not having their own movies. Part of the reason that I really like the Chris Evans Captain America is that first movie is so great, especially the first 30 minutes or so. 40 minutes is so good when they make him really small. And you totally buy him as this, like, scrappy guy who just, like, wants to do good. And it made me, like, love that character.

And you'll always remember that that's who he was. Even, you know, a million movies down the road in Avengers Endgame or whatever. He's still that kid, you know, that scrappy kid who was always getting in fights. And I think because we don't see that in this Captain America, and the character design on this Captain America is fairly boring, I would say, like just the artistic look of the character. Extremely boring. There are scenes, so whenever you see him, like, in between loading, like, when you're doing loading screens, you'll see close-ups of the characters.

And Captain America is just, like, standing there, like, punching air, and he looks so friggin boring and, like, smug. And, man, it's, it's really terrible. But I also, I hate the way he plays in this game also, unlike most of the other characters. But I was going to make a point before, Kirk, to your point earlier, about, like, the first few hours feeling like a totally different game and having those great scenes in it. There are, this is a game that's full of great scenes and great moments in the way that all of the best. comic book movies are. It's just like stitched together like so weirdly. It's like, it's really like, um, I think the narrative that, that I heard used or used when I was reporting on Destiny 1 and the story reboot was that it was like someone took apart a quilt and then like reattached it.

Um, and that's what this game feels like, although I don't know if there were story reboots or anything like that, but I think it's more of like an identity crisis thing where they have these two totally conflicting mantras and design principles that they have to follow. One being, we want to make this awesome, like, crystal dynamics style, like single player narrative-heavy game with, like, great writing, and character dynamics. And the second being, we have to make a destiny, games as a service. Everything has to be multiplayer and has to work as multiplayer. So the puzzles can't be too hard. They have to be simple because it needs to be multiplayer. And the dialogue has to be generic and all this other shit. And it just, like, feels so odd. And I don't know if, like, this is something

they can really fix over time. Maybe when they add a Black Panther mission and it's like cool stuff and we'll go check it out and it'll be like, oh cool, five missions and this is awesome. But like it's always going to have this feeling of like this is a destiny and that's

all it wants to be is like a loot treadmill or not all it wants to be but that's all it really can be is because it has this multiplayer like games of service grafted onto it. Isn't it perfectly fitting that it would be it's like the two things that define entertainment in the 2010s, superhero franchises and games as a service would come together to

form the Avengers of like zeitgeisty things. Like it's just so perfect. But then it accidentally is good in a couple moments. Like I feel like I was pretty ready. I would say it's not accidental. Like people probably, you're right. People put the work in. Of course they they tried very hard to make it good. Talented people made it clearly. It's a talented team. Crystal Dynamics is it's your game like games of the generation in a lot of it was like the two-maiders series like this is this is a super talented group of people who worked on this but i know that's not that's not what you meant so yeah well it's like good in spite of what it's also trying to do i i think that's the thing i think kirk as you keep playing it you'll start to notice some of the stuff that jason and i did like i

played a mission where it's so clearly designed to be a three-person multiplayer mission but it's part of the main campaign and i just played it by myself and it it would felt horrible because you need one person each to stand in a certain area of the level and fight off robots. And the AI is okay in this game, but it's not good enough. And I'm just like, I don't understand what kind of person I would need to be in order to play an hour of a single player game, then grab two friends for the next mission in the single player game, then get rid of those two friends for the next couple hours, play a couple more single player missions, then call them back on Discord and be like, hey, you guys want to pop in here with me. So then at that point, you may as well be playing with strangers, which I have

done a little bit of, and I don't know if you two have played any of the multiplayer co-op missions with strangers at all, have you? No. No. Yeah, I've done a little bit of that. Is that fun? It's okay. I just really enjoy playing games with friends. And playing with strangers, it's been silent. I don't know them. We haven't been talking to each other. We've just been trying to do the mission together and feeling our way out. And that's perfectly fine. I haven't had any bad experiences with it. But I also feel like the reason why Destiny 2 works and why Borderlands works is because they are an entire cooperative experience if you want them to be or they have discrete single player content. And this game, the fact that it has all these story elements, but then interposed with that are some multiplayer elements is very strange. And I doubt it was intended to be that way.

Like I said, it reeks to me. I feel like I'm peeking behind the curtain because it's very clear that it's like our story was too short. the marketing people, Square Inix executives said, we can't ship a game that only takes eight hours to beat, we'll get knocked on Metacritic. And so they said, okay, we're going to take some multiplayer missions. Put in the other Avengers, put in some Ironman missions, put in some Blackwood emissions. Yes, they took some multiplayer missions and stuffed them in the main campaign, not even talking about the side stuff. I'm talking about actual, like, multiplayer mechanics getting grafted onto the main campaign. It is too bad. I would have loved to see a game like this

that was what it promised to be in the first couple hours for a solid, like 12-hour campaign instead of what we got. Yeah, I would have just played a single-player game. But you know what? We're going to try out the multiplayer tonight anyway, and we're going to see how it goes. So I guess I'll say if I am going to go ahead and beat the game. I have not beaten it yet, but I'm far enough in to have gotten to some of the more frustrating stuff, but I still want to get to the end of the story.

And I am also curious about whether they're going to introduce new story elements in the future, which I'll probably play, I own the game now. If they make a Black Panther section, I'll play it. But I am also really curious about the multiplayer, which we're going to play tonight. Do you guys know who you're going to play as? Do you have your mains selected? I don't. I'm not sure. It'll probably depend on if the two of you have a preference, but also by tonight I might have more of a preference. So, you know, I might have a better sense of it. I really like playing. Well, you can play as Miss Marvel if you want. She's kind of the best character in the game. She's pretty fun to play as, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, the big question that I keep wondering is, like, is this game going to have longevity? Am I going to stick with it? Are people going to stick with it long term? And I don't know. It's a tricky one because it doesn't have the same sort of like I could play this forever feeling as a destiny where just shooting aliens in the head is so satisfying. And even you can get past a lot of the frustrations because it works so well in so many different ways. And also because it very clearly knows what kind of game it wants to be. This game, I don't know.

I could see people dipping in and out based on whether DLC is interesting and new campaign stuff pops in. But it's hard to imagine people really sticking with the loop grind and the missions. And it's not like there's some sort of like really compelling loop the way that like a Diablo has or even a borderlands has. And I don't know. It doesn't. There's the only sticky thing is like, okay, it's fun to play as these Avenger characters. I'm enjoying playing as Thor. But I can't see myself like really sticking with this long.

term. Yeah, you know, I think it's got more going for it than that. I think it's like a surprisingly competent games as a service launch. I mean, compared to a lot of these, I guess we don't really know. It could be in a couple weeks, you know, once we really know, like, what the end game is. My prediction is end game is going to be about three hours long, full of fan service. Sorry. Terrible. You know, we don't really know. I think that'll be pretty clear in a couple weeks, and a lot of times these games seem good for a couple weeks, and then they, it all, the wheels come up. Yeah, so there is some endgame stuff that pops up after you finish the campaign.

They're going to be adding like a raid-like thing, whatever they call it, a little bit later down the road, sort of like our Destiny did when it launched. But there is some endgame stuff. And from what I've seen so far, I haven't done a ton of it, but from what I've seen so far, it's all really boring and grindy and full of those same frigging missions. Hey, here's Destiny's Control PVP except you're playing against robots, so it's super boring. Like stuff like that, waves of enemies, etc., etc. And that to me is really what's just killing my interest to keep playing.

Yeah, I do think, though, that it has a strength going for it. And that's just the like Marvel cultural buy-in. I think, like, Maddie, you were talking about the story. It's fun to just see these characters. Like, I know them all. I know this stuff. I've learned a whole lot about comics over the last lifetime. And it's fun to have all this stuff turning up in a game.

And that is a huge leg up on something like Warframe or Destiny where you have to buy into that game for a long time to get enough into the lore, for it to matter to you that like Eris Moran is coming back, where this, it's like Black Panther is coming. Like, and I'm like, sweet, I totally want to know what happens. When they tell me that K86 is coming back from the dead or something in Destiny, I'm like, okay, like that guy that I care about because I play Destiny, but it's not the same thing.

And that's a huge advantage for this game. They could capitalize on that in a lot of cool ways to come down the road. Yeah, too bad. Next year we're going to be like not playing, moving on to something else. And then we see on Kataku or Polygon. Oh my God, Spider-Men's coming in the game next week. like, oh wait, it's PlayStation only, and that is going to be so annoying. We are going to be so mad about that because everybody's favorite superhero.

You can't even play it. They pay, they don't want it on Xbox and PC. They don't want to deprive us. It is sad, but I still feel like it's a pretty big win that each of the characters feel so different and feel good to play, which is part of why it's so sad, the Spider-Man news, that he's going to be an exclusive PlayStation character. But he probably will feel awesome. I will not be any the wiser. But I still think it's impressive that at launch,

the characters feel even remotely good to play and yet also have a very diverse fighting style. I think that alone, even if every, I mean, even with all of the downsides that we just listed about the game, still impressive that Black Widow and Iron Man feels like Iron Man and so on. I hear such good things about Black Widow.

I totally want to get Black Widow. Yeah, she's super fun. She is extremely fun to play as. Bing. Narrator, he's right. She's extremely fun. Yes, credit to the combat team because they really, yeah, I'm very impressed with, like, especially Black Widow and Thor, I think my two favorites. Yeah, so if you enjoyed this conversation, you can listen to us, talk more about the Avengers tonight on our stream.

Check out our Twitch. Yeah. All right, we'll be back in a second with one more thing. I'm Riley Smurl. I'm Sidney McElroy, and I'm Taylor Smurl. And together, we host a podcast called Still Buffering, where we answer questions like, Why should I not fall asleep first at a slumber party? How do I be fleek?

Is it okay to break up with someone using emojis? And sometimes we talk about butts. No, we don't. Nope. Find out the answers to these important questions and many more on still buffering a sister's guide to teens through the ages. I am a teenager. And I was two. Butts, butts, butts, butts, butts, butts.

No. There's nothing quite like sailing in the calm international water. on my ship, the SS biopic. Avast! It's actually pronounced biopic. No, you dingus! It's biopic! Who the hell says that? It's biopic! It's the words for biography and picture! If you...

Alright, that is enough! Ahoy! I'm Dave Holmes! I am the host of the rebooted podcast formerly known as International Waters, designed to resolve petty but persistent arguments like this. How? By pitting two teams of opinionated comedians against each other with trivia and improv games, of course. Winner takes home the right to be right. What podcasts be this?

It's called Troubled Waters, where we disagree to disagree. And we are back for one more thing. Kirk, why don't you tell me about video cards? Okay, so my one more thing is that Invidia announced the RTX-3000 series. of their graphics cards, which are coming out in September, kind of a staggered release. And I use Nvidia cards. I guess I'm still locked into their ecosystem.

If a listener knows whether I still need to use Nvidia graphics cards because I have a G-Sync monitor and can tell me... Oh, boy. You're going to get some emails. Because they unlocked it in some ways, like the other way around there are monitors, where now they're free sync if they were AMD. Oh, we've talked about this before. Right, Maddie, of course.

We go way back on this. We got some good emails, though, about this. Are you just using our podcast as? your technical support as like your technical advice? I did it. I did it on split screen. I was buying a new monitor and I was like people need to tell me what to get. That's so loud. I'm not, I'm not objecting to this. It sounds a little like you're objecting, but no, that is what I'm doing. Because this is the kind of thing that you can look into and try to get a clear answer to you, but listeners really know this stuff. They do. And they'll tell me. Anyways, I am locked into

Nvidia and I'm fine with Nvidia. I don't have any gripes. So I'm probably going to get one of these. But you, wait, hold on, give us your history, because you just upgraded. That's the important part here, right? You just got an RTX 2080. Two years ago. Okay. So like a thousand years ago. Oh, no, well, I guess video card time. All right, so I'll explain my process for this first.

I upgrade every few years with GPUs because I find that that's a good way to do it economically. They're pretty expensive, but if you sell your current GPU when you buy a new one, you can get pretty good value. Like an RTF 280 is still worth a lot on the

second-hand market. So it it defraise the cost a whole lot, and if you wait too long, your graphics card becomes increasingly worth less. Though graphics cards really kind of retained value, which is nice. So I've found that it's a good cycle to like every other cycle or so. Like I skipped the whatever that last one was called. I can't even remember now. It was like the 2080 like extra series or something.

I skipped those. Yeah, well the TI, those are gnarly. And so, and that's another thing where you could buy a 2080 TI. That's like over $1,000, like well over $1,000. where the new the 3080 will be faster than that, or as fast as that I guess, for like 700 bucks.

So, you know, there's always like a waiting game with the price stuff, and I find that it's kind of good to go every other year, every two or three years. So anyways, that's why I'm doing that. But, so for starters, I was thinking about how weird GPU stuff just is, like how the launch of these things is always weird. There's always, you can never get them.

They're always really hard to get. It's a staggered, thing where first the 3080 is going to come out in like mid-September and then a week later the 3090 which is like $1,500 and it's just ludicrous is coming out and then sometime in October the 3070 which is the cheap one I think that's like 500 bucks and that's the that one's really good that's the one that everyone's going to want but they're all coming in time for cyberpunk and that's what really matters well they are except like you totally have to pre-order because they're impossible to find but then there's also the fact that like invidia sells their own

versions of these that are always fine but then all these other like MSI and all the other companies they'll make them and they're usually cheaper but not always sometimes they're faster sometimes they're like overclocked

and it just gets very confusing very quickly and I never totally know what to do and always feel like I'm flying blind a little bit and I've always had good graphics cards like it never messes me up but it's sort of a stressful proposition I guess just buying an Xbox series X that's that's how you are

that's the way easy solution of this become a console gamer instead of a PC The thing is, with consoles, though, I just, it is, I don't think it's the same with resale. It is something I've thought. It's like, people will talk a lot about how, like, PC gaming is more expensive than console gaming, which I do think is true. But when a new console comes out, your current console is definitely going to become worth a whole lot less almost immediately, because the new console is just the new console.

Where with the graphics card, it's kind of different, and the old graphics card is still worth a lot. I mean, there's also the whole, like, cryptocurrency thing, though. I don't know if that's still a thing. But, like, there are other uses. is for GPs too. But anyways, I've been just sort of pondering, I don't know, the process of... Lost in the GPU, yeah, the process of upgrading.

I thought you would be pissed because I feel like the RtX 2080, I feel like got criticized for being really expensive and not offering the type of like upgrade that people expected. And this is coming in cheaper than the 20, 3070 is coming in cheaper, like, and more, like, faster and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I feel like that happens every time. Yeah, I mean, I do, I did kind of feel like the, 2080 and I didn't do a ton I didn't really care I just was upgrading but I did feel like the 2080 wasn't this like huge quantum leap upgrade over I think I had a 1080 before that like it was faster but it wasn't wild it was just but it held me over it yeah I have a 1080 and it still has been holding up perfectly like Avengers that's a good card so if you upgrade to like a 3070 or something you're gonna that's a huge upgrade like you'll be making a giant upgrade I'll see how cyberpunk runs yeah yeah I guess the only thing that matters I guess they didn't show those traits trailers of how cool cyberpunk looks on those various GPUs.

So you can just... Ray tracing turned on. Just watch those trailers and salivate, I guess. I don't know. I'm not going to upgrade my GPU. I'm saving my money. Anyway, cyberpunk will look like shit. Anyway, Jason, what's your thing?

Okay, so it is... This is such a funny coincidence. So as Max Fun subscribers, members know, last... In August, we did a beans cast about Time Loop movies where we all watched a bunch of time-lub movies and talked about it. And somehow I stumbled upon this book, not even knowing that it was actually a time loop book. It is a book called The Seven and a Half Deaths of Evelyn Hard Castle by Stuart Turton.

And I picked it up just on a whim. I think I saw some review somewhere and I was like, oh, this is interesting. It came out a couple of years ago. Yeah. And I bought it and I read it and pretty much zip through it on a Saturday. Like in one day, you know, it's like 500 people. is long and it is incredible. It was like a page turner.

So let me, let me zoom out for a second. So this is a book, I didn't even realize going into it that it was going to be a time loop, but it's a book about a time loop. So it's a book about a murder mystery. And the murder mystery happens as a time loop

because the person who is trying to solve the murder mystery winds up at the end of each day inhabiting a different person's body within the quantum leap style. So it's quantum leap meets Agatha Christie meets Groundhog Day. Oh, well, that sounds great. If I haven't sold you yet already, so it starts off with, like, all these mysteries and all these questions, and the questions are gradually answered as the time loop reveals itself, because you'll see the time loop from different perspectives. So it's almost like, it feels like this elaborate plot that the, that the

writer, like, put together. And it reminded me of dark in some ways, actually, Kirk, which you're watching, and I finished a couple of weeks ago. And, man, it's so good. It's such a good book. I recommend that you both read it. It's really good. The author is a big video game fan and I found someone afterwards I tweeted about it the other day and someone sent me a link to a Eurogamer article where they talk about his video game inspirations and how like this is very inspired by like Metroidvania and stuff like that. Okay. It has, yeah, definitely has shades of like, okay, like this person has this knowledge so now they can figure out this thing and oh, this person. And it also explores all these, it's written really well and it explores all these interesting ideas

of like how much of the mind of the person that you're quantum leaping into, like, actually can, like, can do things and, like, influence the way you think. And so, like, the main character, as you're going through the book will have these different thoughts and, like, have these different personality traits and, like, different kind of has to control himself in different ways based on who he's inhabiting. And it's really, really good. It's just, like, beginning to end, straight up. Excellent book. Highly recommended. You want to say the title on the other hand, Jason? The Seven and a Half Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton, and I'll put it in the show notes as well. Killer, I want to read it.

Shout out to that book. And because I know a lot of triple-click listeners wonder, like, want book recommendations all the time. I try to read a fair number of books, but I won't bring them up on the show unless, like, I really like them and want to recommend him. So this is one that I really like and want to recommend. Nice. Cool. Maddie, what about you? What's here one more thing?

Oh, boy. It's Destiny 2 again. Oh. The joke is truly on me. The ultimate one more thing. We're in a time loop where every single week Maddie says the same one more thing. Ty? That can't be right.

I know. I really apologize for this one because I honestly feel like I could have beaten Marvel's Avengers and time for this episode if I had not spent as much time this week on Destiny 2 as I did. Were you rating again? Yeah. So we, my rating group, we are very, very, pure of heart, but we're not very good at raiding. And that's fine, but it means that it takes us a really long time to do things. And so last week when I talked about our raid, I was saying we did

the first Leviathan raid where you do a series of sort of puzzle-like missions where you shoot stuff, but you have to do certain actions in a certain order in order to get to the end of the puzzle. And then you defeat or try to defeat Callis at the end of it. I won't spoil anything else about the raid because raids can definitely be spoiled mechanics wise. And we did not manage to beat that raid, but we saw enough of it that we got a sense of what we had to do. And so then when we rescheduled, we were like, great, cool, going to go awesome. And it didn't. And we did not beat the raid.

And there was definitely a night this past week when we were up until 1 a.m. or 3 a.m. in some people's time zones that we were just at the end. On the callous fight. On the callous fight. Are you getting nostalgic? Oh, that fight is tough. Yeah, I have had some late nights.

I think way back when it launched trying to beat it. It's like when you go over the wall and then you go flying into his mouth. Yes. So you have to divide into two teams. It's a six-person raid. And so there's a team of three who goes into the shadow realm and the other team stays back and shoot stuff. And we were in the, my team, half was in the shadow realm. And it's like if any one person screws up, the whole thing is over.

And so you really have to practice forgiveness of your friends. in that moment. And yourself. And yourself. And yourself. I was very hard on myself. Although, honestly, the jumping puzzles and the sewers were a lot harder for yours truly than the raid actually was, as everyone knows.

I'm not the master of Destiny 2 jumping puzzles. But the raid I could handle. So there were a lot of moments where we were just like taking deep breaths together and just being like, okay, we can do this. It's the raid experience. By the end of the night, we did not beat it. And we rescheduled it for Monday night. and then one person in the raid, his partner,

he had to pick her up from the airport at a different time because of airport shenanigans and the entire thing got canceled and the raid resets on Tuesdays. And so now we've lost everything. You were having so many like peak destiny experiences right now. This makes me so happy. Even though I know it's very frustrating. Like just everything about what you just said is like so,

like every destiny player listening to this right now is being like, oh my God, Maddie is one of us. It was great. And we were all completely like, go get your partner from the airport. It's fine. Like, it's all good. Like, all of us just, like, knowing that the next time we log in, we're still going to have to beat this rate. And now, of course, we're doing the schedule.

And I'm like, none of these times work. We are never going to make this work again. But you know what? I probably will. Well, so over time, I think the way that it worked for me, if I'm correct me if I'm misremembering this. But I think at first we were very precious about, like, okay, the six of us have to do this. But after like a week or so, it's kind of like, okay, if someone can't do it, let's just find a sub.

And we wound up with like a group of like 10 or so people and people would just rotate as needed or as they could. And it was especially hard for West Coast and East Coast people to coordinate. There's something special about your first grade group and really beating it together. It sounds like you're so on the precipice that I can understand wanting to stick with it. I know. We're so close to the end. And now we know how to do each individual section. So I feel like the next time we play way better at it.

easy, but maybe it won't be. Knowledge is really like mostly the most important thing. Like except that callous fight, execution is tricky on those, those sions, like if one of them bumps you and then you get hoised. I know, I know, you got to kill them right away. You just got to. It's really like stressful and you're calling out the things on his forehead. Yeah, you're calling out the symbols. And if somebody doesn't call out the symbol fast enough, everybody's yelling at them. What's the symbol? Yeah. God, Desi. God, good one. A great game. Why don't you two like Destiny 2. You've never played it and I don't understand. We should play. We should really check it out. Anyway, that's what I've been up to.

Man, when Beyond Like comes out, the three of us have to really dive in. We're going to get in there. We're going to get in the mix together. Yeah. Well, this has been another episode of Triple Click. It has been. We did it again, folks. I hope people will come watch us stream tonight on our Twitch channel, Triple Click Pod on Twitch. Come, come watch us be Marvel characters. And yeah, I guess we'll see you next week. Yeah, I will see the two of you later tonight and have another podcast next week. All right, bye guys.

Bye. Triple Click is produced by Jason Shrier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network. And if you like our show, we hope you'll head over to maximum fun.org slash join and consider becoming a member. Doing so helps support us and gets you access to an accessible. exclusive triple click episode each month. Find us online at triple clickpodcast.com, on Twitter at

triple click pod, and send email to triple click at maximum fun.org. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximumfun.org. Comedy and culture. Artist owned, audience supported.