Triple Click - Triple Play: Starfield

Episode Date: September 14, 2023

For all, into the Triple Click! Kirk, Maddy, and Jason put on their Constellation outfits and go off into space in search of... now loading... special artifacts that... now loading... are all over the planets of... now loading... Starfield!One More Thing:Kirk: The BearMaddy: Demi Adejuyigbe’s Letterboxd account (link)Jason: Aaron RodgersLINKS: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

Humans are an interesting species, an interesting mix. We're capable of such beautiful dreams, such horrible nightmares, such deeply mid-video game. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. Today we're talking about Starfield, the big new RPG that none of us loved, but there was still plenty interesting to talk about. It's time to hop in our spaceships and fast travel to the stars, so let's do it. I'm Kirk Hamilton. I'm Maddie Myers. And I'm Jason Schreier.

Hello. Hello. Hello, you two. friends, Shanatova. And happy New Year, too. Yeah, happy Rush Ashana, Jason. All my dear buddies out there. Yeah, indeed.

Yeah, I got to eat some apples and honey in this house. We've already gotten some. Already gotten some snacks. That's all I care about. That's what affects me. I'm a big fan of pomegranate. Do you like pomegranate so many? I do.

My mom got us a special chocolate box. It's Rosh Hashanah themed, and it has pomegranate chocolates and apples and honey chocolates. And there's a third one that I forget. but just got those. That sounds delicious. One of the most exciting things going on in my household right now. Yeah, it's exciting.

Well, you're in that kind of post-wedding stage when it's like there's nothing going on, right? God, I know. Intentionally, we've set it up so that we have nothing going on. Like, no joke. We're like, and now, nothing at all for the next year or so. Please. Love it. Nothing at all.

That's a very good way to do things. So someone who did not do that after getting married earlier this year, that sounds really nice. Yeah, you did like a whole lot of things, which is the opposite. Pretty much, pretty much all the things. Yeah. Was fine. That was fun too, but it would have been nice to do fewer things. To do nothing? Yeah.

I recommend it. Speaking of doing things, if you're listening to this and you feel like doing something to help triple click continue to make podcasts about the best and also most interesting and not best new video games, you can become a member of maximum fun. You can become a member of Maximum Fun to support us making the show and support our wonderful network that we're so happy to be a part of. You do that at MaximumFun.org slash join. Doing so, as I said, helps us make this show, this completely ad-free show that we make that way because we don't like ads and we don't want to have them. So you can support that.

And you can also get bonus episodes of Triple Click, which we release each month. and we just released our most recent one, which was a lengthy and joyful conversation about The Legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom, again, that all three of us loved. Good video game, I think. Really good video game. That was very, very fun to talk about.

And there's a million more bonus episodes that you get, too. So that's just a little thank you from us to you for supporting our show. So that's maximum fun.org slash join and, you know, go become a member. Do you want to tell the people what we're going to do

for our next bonus episode? episode, Kirk? Yes. We are going to be talking a little bit more about AI because that has been obviously a very hot topic this year and we did a whole episode about it with guest friend of the show Casey Newton and that was a lot of fun. But there's so much more to say and I feel like so much more has even happened since then. And also I've been reconsidering some art that concerns AI that's sort of about our relationship with artificial intelligence. So there are two films, the film Her and the film X Machina. Two of my favorite, all-time favorite movies, ever.

Two really good sci-fi movies. We're going to watch them. Yeah, Kirk made this suggestion, and I was like, what? Watch two of my favorite movies ever. Make Jason watch more movies he's never seen before. Also fun. One of my other pet hobbies. They're just very good movies.

And I think, so I think they're going to be fun to re-watching. movies too. They are very different. And we're going to talk about them. And specifically, we'll talk about just how we're all, how the three of us are thinking about our relationships to artificial intelligence and technology and what those movies provoking us. So yeah, that'll be at the end of the month. And yeah, all right, let's get on to this week's topic, which is a triple play of Starfield. We promised it last week. And now here we are. The three of us have played some Starfield. And we're going to talk about it. a little boilerplate here.

Yay. I will now read. Starfield is a new first-person role-playing game from Bethesda Game Studios, the creators of the Elder Scrolls, and the current standard bearers of the Fallout series. In Starfield, players make their own custom character, pick a backstory and some unique perks, and within a few minutes have gone from mining ore on a remote planet to charting a course through the vastness of space, hunting for mysterious, powerful artifacts on behalf of constellation, a well-funded but secretive research and exploration group.

Over the course of the game, you will shoot lots of guns at lots of space pirates. You will have lengthy conversations with the backs of people's heads. You will navigate your fast travel cursor to trigger landing cutscenes on dozens, if not hundreds, of worlds. And you will become overencumbered so quickly that you'll basically stop picking anything up. We have been playing since the game came out a couple of weeks ago. I actually burned through the main campaign and started New Game Plus, kind of unexpectedly and do that over the weekend. And I think Maddie and Jason are both earlier on in their first time through the game. And here we are to talk about it. So I want to know what the two of

you think of Starfield. Maddie, how about you go first? I'm so upset by it. I'm upset you call them me first. I'm not ready emotionally. I feel like I need more time to charge up so that I don't say anything too negative. I don't like it when people just complain about video games. I feel like I need to say something nice. I need a compliment sandwich about this game. Starfield is a good name. It's a good name for a game. You know what?

I actually do think it's a good name. And I'll say this. I like that logo. I think it's kind of fun. It's such a good name that they copyrighted or trademarked it like a decade. Right. Yeah. But years before they started working on it.

Starfield, that's a good one. Yeah. I agree. That's a true story. Yeah, I know. For a video game. And, you know, we make fun of video games. game titles on the show a lot. Chances to

inar. We really went on and on last week about that name. And Starfield, great name, great logo, very memorable. Todd Howard looks great in a bomber jacket. He's got a lot of bomber jackets. I don't know. I'm really starting with this game. You did it, Maddie. You said some nice things. I'm really struggling with this game. I don't understand what the point of it is. I've done so much in this game. It's such a quiet game. Like today, one of the, one of the parts I was playing, I was finding another artifact.

Like as Kirk described in his little boilerplate, you go around, you find more artifacts. You're helping this mysterious faction of people called Constellation. They're scientists. They're finding these strange artifacts. That's what gives you your telekinetic superpowers. How do they work? What are they? They're magical.

That's cool. I love things like this. So I was on a planet walking around checking out anomalies using my scanner, outer wild style, to check out anomalies. This all sounds like my shit. Like, I should love this, but I was so bored, just completely silently walking around this planet, like really far away. Like, the anomalies were really far away from each other. Did this happen to you guys?

Like, I was just walking through the desert planes. I mean, you were describing what you spend most of the time doing in this game. Not entirely featureless, but sort of like a Nevada desert kind of moonscape situation. I was just walking by myself. And for part of that, I had this guy Barrett. He's my favorite character. older black guy. He's like really snarky. I like Barrett. He's my character I really like. So I kept him with me. Barrett doesn't have a word to say to me. The two of us are just walking in silence.

I don't know. Somebody else talk. I can't with this game. I don't understand what it's about. All right. So we have gotten some impressionistic, some beat poetry from Maddie Myers. Jason Schreier, what do you think of Starfield based on what you play? Yeah, Jason says something nice. Yeah, I mean, I think it's fine, I guess. I think it suffers a lot from being released so close to Belder's Gate 3. And I know the developers of Balders Gate 3 were worried about Starfield, which is why they released a month early. But really, it should have been the other way around. Because I think the writing especially is such a weakness in this game here. Let me, let me read to you in exchange of dialogue that I jotted down because it was particularly notable to me. And so I was going

around with Adraja in the city of Neon, which is the cyberpunk city. And I just wanted to experiment a little bit with the game systems, just playing around with the sandbox. And so I just shot someone and made everybody hustle. And Andrea left my party. And there was, I got a little quest saying, talk to her. And so I went up and talked to her. And this is the exchange that followed.

She said, have you lost your mind? Is there even a mind to lose? And I replied, I have no idea. you're talking about. And she said, you cannot possibly mean that. And I said, can we just forget about this and move on? And she said that you would even suggest a thing shows how little you understand. And I was like, what is going on with this dialogue exchange? And then I realized it must be some generic like exchange that they wrote where like anytime you do anything wrong in front of her, I guess this whole thing just plays. And that's why they're just speaking in such broad generalities.

And that's just kind of an example of some of the dialogue in this game. And especially coming after a game like Baldur's Gate 3 where everything is so reactive and there's so many different permutations, it's really jarring. I went through the credits list a little bit. Bethesda, I think the way they work is they have their quest designers write the dialogue. They don't have writers per se because I can't find any writers in the credits for Starfield. Whereas Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't have a quest team. They have a writing team and a writing staff that,

is that handles a lot of that stuff. And I think even just that kind of title, that distinction of title, quest design versus writer really says a lot about the prioritization of this game. And that is really, I mean, that's really what's made me bounce off of this game the most. There's a lot of kind of baffling decisions. I mean, the lack of maps, especially in cities, the whole space travel. The control mapping for the maps is mapping. Like when you press the sensor key or the sensing key to use your sensor, it's like press G to see the planet's ground, like the map of the planet that you're on.

But if you don't have your sensor out and you press G, you'll throw a grenade. Like just little things like that, it's like you don't want that to be the same button. Sometimes you reach for your sensor and then you pull out a grenade and pull the pin in front. Yeah, it's classic, classic space, classic mass. Like you're me. You're just in. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of little finicky things like that, a lot of kind of baffling design decisions. But really what has made me just want to turn this off and not play it again is just that the writing just constantly takes me out of it.

It makes me think, man, like, this could have used some pep, this could have used some colors and some editors to get in here and add a little bit more flavor. I mean, I'll just give you, give you one more exchange. Please, more dramatic readings from James McChryor of Starfield. So this one, okay, this one, this one I jotted down. because I was just like, oh my God. A shopkeeper said to me, you lost kiddo, and one of the dialogue responses you could make was, last I checked, I was in adults.

That actually rules. Imagine the same bad. Sometimes they are actually very funny responses to people. And then another part of it is on a macro level, even putting aside the kind of the flatness of the writing itself, the individual minds on a macro level, I mean, everything just leads to the same outcome. So, like, I experimented with one quest potential,

and you could basically this person was in jail and asking you to help them out and you could choose from three different options. And it was like, I'll hear you out. Or it sounds like you're where you're meant to be. You're meant to be. Or what are you in for? Did you do it? And they all just lead to the same outcome. And then you could be like, I don't want to end up in a cell next to you and they ask you to help them out.

And that just leads to the quest starting regardless. They're just like, oh, don't worry, you won't. And then the quest just starts. They'll put them up on your way. It's just such bad narrative branching, and I'm guessing that they chose to prioritize other stuff, exploration and quests and having a thousand planets. But the moment-to-moment gameplay is just so flat and boring and tedious and not fun. The fact that every quest has shooting in it for some reason, you can't talk your way out of things,

just like Fallout Far. It's just such a bummer of a game, and apparently it gets good after 12 hours. I'm like six or seven hours into it. I don't think, I think that's enough for me. I feel like I've seen enough of this game. I just don't have any desire to play more. Like I'd rather start Baldur's K-3 again and replay it for a second time. For what it's worth, you can talk your way out of quest,

but I find the persuasion system to be extremely similar to those dialogue snippets that you were reading. So I have high persuasion and diplomacy skills or whatever it's called in this game. And so I can often talk my way to battles, but it makes the game more boring, usually, because it'll just end suddenly. And characters will just say, like, oh, I guess I'm coming around to your point of view. And then suddenly everything ends and it's over. No, I'm talking about there are many, many scenes. I mean, pretty much every quest I've done, you just encounter a group of hostile people. You don't even get a dialogue exchange.

That's what I'm talking about. There are definitely quests where you can talk your way through them instead of fighting. Like, I've played a lot of them. But not every quest. There are a lot of times where you just have to fight. But, yeah, the persuasion system is a little bit, a little bit funky. And it feels very anticlimactic, especially when you talk someone out of a life or death situation with just like, I just always kind of pick the highest option and then just sort of win. And then they change their mind.

It doesn't really feel. It's so different. I mean, I'm sorry to keep comparing to Ballers Gate, but like the persuasion checks in that game are so rewarding. Like when you talk a boss into killing themselves, it'll always be like this is absurd moment where you're like, what? I didn't know he was going to do that. And like the comparison is so unflattering here. I want to talk about what I think of the game, too. But that is an interesting one in that I think that the way that Baldur's Gate 3 makes the systems transparent by showing you the DC and showing you the dice roll is actually to that game's benefit.

It winds up being really cool where in Starfield and in a lot of other games too, they don't show you the dice roll going on. They show you that it's a more difficult option that you're picking to get more persuasion points toward the end of the conversation. It's a kind of convoluted system that kind of makes. sense in principle, but you don't see the role happening, and that actually makes me enjoy it less, because I just sort of don't, I don't even really know how hard what I'm doing is. I'm certainly not role-playing. I'm just kind of trying to game this mini-game. It really, yeah, it feels like a sort of, I don't know, like Mario RPG mini-game or something. Anyways, so I've played more than 12 hours of this game.

Yeah, you beat it. I'm, I did, I beat it, I guess. I finished it. I asked it. It's a game that's designed to be played multiple times, and, you know, without getting into the specifics, like it's sort of, there's a narrative reason for New Game Plus. So once you finish, you're kind of like still in your same story and you can keep going and there are some things that carry over into New Game Plus and you can kind of, I'll say there's a really cool and kind of experimental idea at play with what they're doing with New Game Plus, New Game Plus 2, New Game Plus

3 that I think is really fun. Like it's one of the, it's maybe the coolest idea in the game, like is this one thing, which sounds like stronger praise than I really. mean it. Can you elaborate on that at all without spoiling too much? I don't really want to get into spoilers. So I'll just say that because I want to give impressions of like the actual game that most people will play because I don't actually think, I actually don't even think it's a good idea to rush through to get to New Game Plus. I saw that advice a lot of places. I sort of just focus on the story because I wanted to see the kind of meat of the game before we talked about it. I wasn't really enjoying myself. I wasn't very grabbed by the game. I'm kind of

just feeling adrift with it in general. So I was like, oh, I'll just kind of go through the motions and finish the story, and it really went very quickly once I started doing story quest, and I was like, oh, I'm at the end. Like, there's a kind of big reveal that happens. Honestly, it was probably like eight hours into the game or something, or maybe 10 hours, and I realized, oh, I'm going to finish this thing over the weekend before we record, which I wasn't planning to do. So I did finish it, but I played a fair amount.

I understand, I think, why people like this game. There's a certain lovable quality to all of Bethesda's games. It's a little bit, it's kind of in the way that it's a little flat. and you just kind of wander through it and just do stuff. Like, it's something to do, and it's sort of appealing in that way. But my biggest complaint with this game is that the fundamental things that you do don't work, and they've removed the one thing that they were best at, that Bethesda Game Studios was best at.

They've completely removed that from this game. So a couple of weeks ago, we did an episode on what makes a Bethesda game, a Bethesda game. We talked about Skyrim and Fallout 3, in Fallout for and those older Elder Scrolls games. And the thing I said anyways when Maddie, you kind of asked me, okay, so what does make a Bethesda game, a Bethesda game? And for me, the combat's never that great.

The writing's never that great. Those pieces of it have never really been very good in any of those games. The reason that I like playing them is this core thing that I latch on to and all of them, and that's the exploration. It's the feeling of charting this massive, contiguous map where you can see across the horizon. there's cool things you can see and you can walk over to them and there tends to be an adventure there, something that you can find. That feeling of like walking across the wasteland in Fallout while that music plays, it's a really cool feeling.

And for me, it's basically been enough for me to play all of these games, even the ones that I have major criticisms of, like Fallout 3 and Fallout 4. Like I liked them fine. This game doesn't have that. And to me, that's the game's fatal flaw. Almost everything else, even the writing, which I agree with you, Jason, is like, there's, it just doesn't make sense. there's totally like incoherent character moments constantly, nothing really holds together. The main storyline is like diet, diet watered down outer wilds. Like if you think this stuff is cool, go play outer wilds and it'll blow your friggin' mind.

Like playing a game that actually like really takes on some of these ideas. But all of that stuff almost feels academic because for me it's that they made an outer space exploration game where you don't fly your spaceship anywhere. And like I can't understand that. I really, really struggle with it. Like this game to explain to anyone who, who hasn't played it or read anything about it, you get in your ship, which you get very early on, and you're in the cockpit with a really cool, like, heads-up display, and you're flying,

but you can't actually fly anywhere. If you want to go somewhere, like land on a planet, go to a new system, whatever, you have to go into the map. And the map is like this nestled series of menus, basically. They're just, they look like solar systems, but they're menus. They just have things that you click on them, playing with the mouse and keyboard. You click on them, and then you hold the X button, and then you go there. And sometimes you, you'll, you will, straight up fly somewhere and then you'll just be in your cockpit and then you just go back into the map and then you fly down to the surface through the map like the ship itself doesn't do anything. So as a result, everywhere that you go is a new, smaller, I guess, technically smaller location than any of

the big maps from their previous games. And there's always just like one reason that you're there. Like it's a little different in cities, I guess, but you kind of are just, you land somewhere and then there's an anomaly over there and you look and, oh yeah, sure enough, there's like a temple on the horizon. and then you walked, as you said, Maddie, you just walk straight forward for like two or three minutes and then you get there and then you get the thing you need and then you just press the map button and like

fast travel to the next thing. And it's just like... You don't even have to walk back to your ship which thank God I guess but... I guess, but like it really undercuts the thing that I think Bethesda is so good at and has always been the appeal to me is that feeling of like oh man over there that's the irradiated

really bad zone where there's death claws I was like, but I'm going to go, I'm going to get my power armor and go across it. And whoa, there's this building and I'm going to go into the basement and see what's there. And oh, man, there's this bar downtown in Boston and it's the cheers bar. And oh, man, look, there's norm. Like the feeling of discovery and exploration that they're very, very good at that the studio, like, rules at. It's the thing they're so good at isn't in this game. This game that's like about exploration and pays so much lip service to exploration.

And that is very baffling to me. I really don't get it. It just, it really undercuts the entire experience. So was there a point for you? How many hours have you played? You beat the whole thing. I don't know. My steam timer says like 17, but I bet it's more like 12 or 11.

Okay. And was there a point? Wow, that's it. Okay. Was there a point for you when it like clicked a little bit for like and things felt like, I don't know, smoother, less jarring, better? I mean, I had a good enough time. Like it was, it was fine.

I should say a little more about how I played. it probably would have taken me a few more hours if I hadn't used a couple of console commands that I used which allow you to unlock things. So I was merciless about optimizing this game for myself because life is short, man. And especially when a game takes this long to do some basic stuff, I just didn't have time.

So specifically, I did a couple of mods that are just quality of life mods for this game. I pay a guy's Patreon to get like Nvidia frame generation in this game, which is crazy. Like, he added it hours after the game came out. So it's, I don't think that hard to do. But, like, they didn't put it in the game. So anyways, I've done some mods like Star UI to make the user interface. All of the UI.

Fix is too strong of a word, but it makes the interface a little bit less terrible. But the thing you can do on the PC version is you can open up the console and then just like give yourself any item that you need. Or in my case, the main thing that I did was I just removed encumbrance. I just gave myself maximum carrying ability. Nice. The way that you're supposed to level up encumbrance in this game is that you like buy the encumbrance, like the strength perk. And then you have to, I believe it is you have to run a certain amount with more than half of your carry weight full.

So you just have to like run around with heavy things to gain the ability to pay another perk point to get more inventory storage. And I was like, no, I'm sorry, but no, I'm not doing that. Like I just don't want to worry about this because like I mentioned in my boilerplate, you get, you become overencumbered within like, two minutes of playing this game. It's ridiculous. And it's just not fun. It's so fiddly, the interface or the inventory is so bad. So anyways, there are a couple little things like that that I use console commands to get around. So if you played this straight up and you maybe, I don't know, had to spend more time like in menus dealing with your inventory, it might take another hour or two, but I don't think that would really lead to the game clicking at all. So to answer your question,

I got into a groove with it, I guess. It, you know, it never flows because, you you never stay anywhere for very long. And so, I don't know, I think of back to, like, Fallout 3, where you make your way through downtown, and then you come to that beach, like, destroyer, that battleship that you get on where Rivet City is, and then you're going through Rivet City, and there's, like, quests there.

Just the feeling of having covered some distance to a place where there are now quests, and you're kind of going to hang out there for a little while. This game never had that, because you're constantly hopping around, like, all over the place. Just even in the middle of quests, It's like you don't need fuel for anything. There's just no sense of...

Yeah, it's free. There's infinite fuel, seemingly. It's very weird. You know what's funny? Yeah, the fuel thing, that looks like a vestige of a system that was like scoped out of development. What's funny is that even when you're on a city doing Quest on that city, it's still like four different loading screens as you go, oh, this doctor's clinic has its own loading screen. Once I really started to see the game as nothing but loading screens, you really start to kind of experience it in a way. It's like seeing the framework. of the game where everything in the game is just the most they could fit in between two loading

screens, which usually isn't that much, even if it's a pretty short one when you're opening a door, though I gather on console, they're longer, on PC, they're pretty short, but it's like you're always just loading in between things. And there is one exception to that that I'll say there's a quest near the end. It's just a story quest. It's the one quest that has a spark. The concept is borrowed, to use a generous term, from really two other games that come to mind. I'm not going to mention it just in case anyone's playing wants to find it. It's pretty cool when it happens. And it does some, like, hopping you around between different areas seamlessly without loading screens in a way that's really cool.

And I was like, oh, there's a spark here. Like, this one mission is really cool. And then it kind of goes back. But most of the missions are just, like, go here and, like, kill someone and get a thing and then bring it back to a person. There's a whole series of the powers, the quest that you do to do powers or to get powers. This guy Vladimir just gives you a planet to go to. Yep. You fly to the planet.

You walk across a field to a temple. You float through these like glowing orbs in the temple. Oh my God. That was so annoying. Horrible. It was like so many times, Jason. You have to float through so many hours. I thought it was, I thought it was doing the wrong thing.

Yeah, I thought it was broken or something because it took so long. Nope. You do it so many times. And each time you get a new power. And I want a lot of new game plus is built around doing them even more to get more. Oh, wait, wait, wait. You have to do that every time. I didn't get my second power either

Okay and it's always the same Okay when I said that took so long I was talking about just I've just done it once Like getting the orbs You have to do that multiple times We'll get ready to do it many many more times I'm not gonna get ready Kirk I will not because I will not be playing

Any more of this game I will not get ready sir I literally deleted it at like 455 today I was like it's over Starfield Relationship ended Okay so I will say from what I've played I've seen hints at like some of

the cool side stuff that you find in Bethesie games floating out in space like at one point I don't know if you guys found this maybe everyone runs into it like I got encounter I got radioed by a teacher who was like hey and like she was on this like magic school bus looking thing and her kids were talking on the radio and saying hey hey

is that a like vanguard that's cool yeah there was like there's stuff like that you run into it's just like so in organic, the discovery of it, because the only way to find it is just, I guess, to fast travel to random locations or like, hope you run into cool stuff on your way to SideQuest, which, I mean, just

doesn't really seem, I'm guessing that if you really get into a groove within, and maybe this is what people are talking about when they say it gets good after 12 hours, you figure out the rhythm of like, oh, okay, if I go to this place, maybe there'll be something cool over here. I could land on this planet,

maybe there'll be something interesting to discover. And I do suspect that there's a lot of buried good side quests, good narrative, environmental, storytelling and exploration and stuff. It's just that, like, this game makes it so hard to get to that, as opposed to previous Bethesda games, to your point, Kirk, where you could just see something and be like, oh, here's a cool thing. I just landed in Skyrim, and almost immediately after the intro sequence, I can just walk in a direction and find a bunch of cool stuff right away. So, yeah, that is a real, a real bummer and a real

I mean, you said it well, fatal flaw for this game. I mean, it's tough that Traversal just in general is so unfun. And obviously we've talked about the fast travel and the fact that that feels like loading screens are just selecting things on the map. You can do a little bit of it manually, but then if you get close to a planet, you just press R

to dock and that's over and you watch the same exact docking cutscene every single time. There's actually a mod to remove the docking cutscene that I was very tempted by, but I felt like that would somehow I don't know. That felt like a bridge too far to me for whatever reason. I suspect it's in there just so you could see your cool spaceship that you build because

otherwise I'll never see it. No, well, the docking cut scene, in the docking cutscene with a space station, you don't even see your ship. It's a first person shot of the dock as you lock with it. Well, you see your ship right at the very last second where it's like connected to the dock at the bottom of it. Yeah. Okay.

I don't think I ever saw that. Look, it's not, I can't blame me for spacing out during those moments because it is the same cut scene over and over. But anyway, I just mean traversal on the planets themselves. So I actually installed No Man Sky after uninstalling this game just to try because I'd never played it before. And I just played it for an hour and change. Had a great time because the opening of that game does so much to indicate to you where you should go on a planet. And a lot of that is like color design and visuals and the scanner in that game makes it really clear which elements are important versus not. I mean, no man sky looks like a Lisa Frank painting compared to Starfield.

I'm not saying I need every single thing to have like that level of color saturation. That's not really where I'm going with it. But it is much more visually exciting. And it's also much more dangerous because you're constantly like, oh, I'm running out of air. Oh, what happened to my ship? Oh, I need to collect resources so that I can continue to survive. There's much more of a survival element to it. And Starfield, you just never really feel any sense of urgency.

Or at least I didn't feel any urgency about collecting. artifacts. And even when you collect the first one, constellation is like, oh, wow, we didn't actually expect to, like, discover anything about this. That's, like, really exciting that you actually discovered something sick, I guess. And it's like, well, what? We're not about to save the galaxy or anything? Like, I need a little bit of Star Wars in this. Like, I need something here. Like, what am I doing here? Like, okay, yes, I'm all for just the exploration for expiration's sake. But if that's the case, then I need some outer wowsiness. I need some mystery I'm uncovering, which I guess Kirk is what you get to after the 10 hours are up or whatever,

you kind of keep progressing in the main story. Like the mystery of the artifacts is revealed to you. But they need to give you something early on to make you care. Like as it is, I'm just like, why am I doing any of this? Because it's so boring. I wouldn't even really say that the mystery is all that compelling or is really like an exciting reveal. In fact, I would say that this game, if I were going to make a narrative critique of this game, it's that it fails according to its own stated goals.

That is that they want to have a debate about faith versus science. That's something that the developers of the game have talked about in the press. And it's something that will happen in Constellation HQ frequently. You'll bring back a new artifact. There are different characters. There's one character I think his name is Mateo, who is has a, he believes in something bigger than himself. He sort of believes there may be some spiritual or supernatural explanation.

for what's happening. There's another character whose name I'm forgetting. She's very into science. They're trying to represent these different views in this discussion a little bit,

it's a little bit Sagan-esque. Like if you've read Contact, it feels like a very, very, it's hard not to say childish, but it feels like a childish version of the discussions that are happening in contact, which is a fantastic book

and a really interesting imagining of what would happen if we made contact with some impossible. thing. How would we talk about it? And like, how would faith and science intersect? I mean, that's the fundamental question of contact. And it's a really interestingly, it's, of course, a very interesting question and explored wonderfully by Carl Sagan. In this game, it's pretty, it's facile. That's a, I'd say a less insulting word for it. It just feels very surface level. People are like, and what do you

think? And I'll sort of be like, well, I'm science all the way. Or like, I think it's, you know, I believe in something bigger than me. Exactly. It really feels. like that. And there's not a lot of nuance to the discussion, let alone people actually challenging one another or it being like a real point of contention between characters. It's more like they're all just thinking out loud. And then you go off and do the next thing. The problem, I think, narratively, is that eventually it doesn't really matter. Like the questions of faith in science, like science certainly doesn't matter because nothing that happens has anything to do with science. Like it goes so far beyond science and just becomes kind of like comic book stuff. Like it's

just like, whatever, no, there's no real explanation for what's happening other than some kind of vague quantum whatever. So it just isn't about those things at all. And those conversations, like the game just never really reckons with them. And I would compare it to Outer Wilds to pick a more, you know, in another video game comparison, in that Outer Wilds is also about exploration and science. But it's a game that through teaching you and through your learning process, it achieves meaning in that way so that in the end you have to draw your own conclusions about what happened based on the information that you've uncovered, and you use all of the learning that you did to understand what's happening.

And what's happening is explained according to the science of the game, to all the things that you've learned, the elements you've discovered, the different properties of, you know, what's happening with the star. Like, it all makes sense. And you sit there and you have these moments of like, oh, sure. So that's what those people were doing. And that's why they were there. And it, like, winds up being really profound and incredible and about,

science and like the unknown and exploration and our fates and the stars and all these big questions and starfield is just like totally not an entropy and cycles yeah really cool um can i share another dialogue exchange please okay um so andrea turned uh i talked to her andreja whatever i talked to her and she says here i have something for you and i get a few dialogue options and i select it's about time And she says, do not make me regret the decision. And then after a couple more exchanges, I say, I'll have to find out how much it's worth. And she, like, says something again dismissive, like, oh, you don't have to keep it if you don't want. And then at the end of this conversation, I see in the top right corner of my screen, credits 379 added.

So she gave you money. So she said, I said, I'll have to find out how much it's worth. and she said, you don't have to keep it if you don't want. And what she gave me was 3179. This is the thing. She gave you a huge chunk of cash. She just gave me a check. I think that, and this was a downside of moving, of like focusing on the main story,

that the side characters frequently would just be grabbing me after 15 minutes of playing. And they'd be like, we need to have a conversation because we're like moving too quickly through their character progression. And that's one reason why, like I said earlier, I don't actually think that that advice to rush through and get to New Game Plus is good advice, especially if you're playing this game and you're enjoying yourself because there are plenty of people out there who are enjoying it. And anytime we have one of these discussions with a game like this

where there are people enjoying it, I always feel the need to at least mention those people. Because, you know, that's fine, even if we didn't love it. Well, it feels like it's a game. You have to kind of meet it on its terms and try to figure out what it's trying to do and look past a lot of baffling design decisions that will hopefully get fixed in the coming months

and, you know, one thing, yeah, I mean, the one thing that I'm sure they will add, or at least someone will add, hopefully a modder is maps when you're in the cities because those things are just like impenetrable. I know. But really, I mean, there's just like,

so there's a lot of systems that I certainly haven't engaged with like the research system or like really diving into all the skills because it doesn't really seem like a good use of time or like building outposts, but I'm sure there's some people who are really into like going around and harvesting minerals from planets to put into their outposts and like building playing around with that loop and stuff.

But I just cannot, cannot get a grip on it myself. But yeah, I don't know. I really think that it's just, I think that when you've played a game with as many choices and player options and as many possible quest permutations as Baldersgate 3, it's really hard to move to an RPG that is so resoundingly not that, but on its surface looks like it should be that. a lot of times I'm just like, why are there even dialogue options here when they all lead to the same outcome? And it almost, it feels like it's just kind of by, like, I don't know, tradition that they have to feel like they have to include all this stuff. But it feels like it could have been a better game if it wasn't trying to do so many things at once, if it's streamlined some of this stuff. And they put more focus on, like, making some of the systems deeper.

It feels like a game that's going very, very wide and not very, very deep. and that I think really makes it feel like just, I mean, to continue the metaphor, a shallow experience all around. Yeah, I agree, especially when it comes to the crafting systems, which I did engage with a bit. Like I kept getting a cough. I really tried to venture out and like do things and explore because I was like really trying to meet this game on its terms, which meant I explored a lot of featureless planets and stumbled into outposts where I would kill space pirates and then move on with my life. It's kind of like an anti-metroid or something where I explore. is an exciting and you never find anything.

But so I did try to like create like aid supplies and stuff in the crafting system. But the problem with that is that because of the encumbrance mechanic, you never quite have enough stuff. I never did install a mod that removed encumbrance because I just, I was just trying to meet the game where it is. And that means- It's really just a console command to be clear, not even a mod. You just type one line into the console. But nonetheless, I just kept the encumbrance as it was. And as a result of that, you just never have enough crafting items, or at least you don't,

if you don't go back and revisit your ship. visit your ship constantly to like have enough in order to craft anything. And, and it's like, okay, if you want it to be a crafting game, if you want it to be as fun as I think cooking is and tears of the kingdom and building all my, my devices in that game, then you need me to have infinite inventory because otherwise I'm going to not have enough crafting items ever. And if you don't want it to be a crafting game, you want it to be more survival and dangerous like no man sky or even outer wilds where I would constantly die and asphyxiate in that game, great. But then you need to add those elements of danger to traversal and have that be exciting. Or you need to have like the

Metroid situation where there's something, some reason why I'm progressing to certain places because I'm getting rewarded with a new power that actually feels satisfying to use. And there's like a reason why I'm there that's fun. I felt like none of those things apply. I think you're mentioning No Man Sky is interesting in another way because I've been playing that game too and have played a lot of No Man Sky over the course of all of these updates. And one of the coolest things about that game now is something Hello added, I think about a year ago, which is you can make a custom game, you can make a new game that's a custom game mode, where you pick the difficulty up against a ton of different things, and you can just customize the game into basically any of those

types of games that you just described me. You can make it a game where there's no grinding. You can just be like, I get everything for free, there's no crafting requirements, I can just make whatever I want. I never run out of Starship fuel, and I can just fly around. You can make it so there's no combat, nothing ever attacks you. you can just explore and build bases and try to find the coolest looking planet. Or you can make it like super hardcore survival.

Like you need to really take care of everything or any mix of those things. And there are all these different variables and you can make, like I've really tailored the game to my playstyle, which is very cool. And I was kind of doing some of that with Starfield, with the console commands. Like giving myself unlimited inventory totally changed the game for me because I was like, cool. I can just pick up everything. I don't have to think about it now. I can spend some time in inventory looking through all these cool items I picked up.

It was much more pleasurable to me. And that's like a nice, it's really a type of accessibility, like a way to customize the game. Then I wish this game actually just offered. I mean, they kind of do by including console commands at all. But they should just put them in the menu. To be clear, Kirk, when you talk about console commands, this is actually on the PC that you can get, right? Can you do this on the Xbox too? No.

I was talking with some folks in the Discord about that, about how they're not called PC commands. and yet you cannot do them on console. The console command goes back away as in PC gaming. Wow. That's so deep, man. You hit the Tilda key and, like, you get a prompt. And then you just, you type, like, player. Dot add item and then an item code, and it's like you get 10 med packs or whatever. And there are all kinds.

There's websites everywhere with all of the different codes for items. And you can give yourself abilities. You can do all kinds of stuff. They're cheat commands, essentially. These would be considered cheat codes, yes. They are cheats. And I should say, if you do them, they disable achievements in the game. But then there's a mod that you can download.

that reenables achievements, which I do down. Wow. Which is nice. Because it shouldn't disable. They should let you customize your game however you want. Like, come on. Give me a break. Well, especially because the game as is is no fun.

Like, freaking encumbrance. Why have you done this to me, Bethesda? Like, don't take away by achievements. It's a start. But it would be cool if eventually they added that to the menus to just let you completely change your experience of it. Yeah, that would make the game a lot more fun. just anything to reduce

well I was going to say to reduce friction but it's not that this game has like very weird friction they need more fun friction yeah I mean I think it's mostly just playing this game I'm like I can't wait for more modders to just write fan fiction stories basically where they're like go to this specific planet and I designed a whole quest that you should play like people will just do that I think there is stuff there it's just it's very hard to find it

unless I guess there's some more discoverability stuff that comes up later or like you have to follow us in the chains and stuff. Kirk is already like, no, there's not. It's like if you get to a new solar system, usually you'll get hailed, you'll get a radio signal and that'll indicate, oh, there's something going on. There's like a side quest.

And yeah, some of those are very cool. I've done a few of them. And yeah, they're fun. They're still typically, the ones I've done have been kind of disjointed still because there's just that feeling of loading screens and of like, okay, well, we need a grab drive for this ship. So you're going to go all the way across the frigging galaxy

to get it, but you just fast travel in menus. And then you're back, give him the grab drive and it's like, what am I even doing? It still has that feeling, but the stories are cool of some of the ones that I did. So, you know, yeah, I think it's, you just have to decide to just sort of go to random solar systems and see if someone hails you or you get a notification of something. Or you could just go to the House of Hope and try to steal the Orphe's hammer from Raphael. You could play a different game. Yeah, I think we all, we all were pretty frustrated by this one, but it is an interesting game, and it's not without its charms. I do think

it has its, it has its, there's something lovable about it just because there's still, there's just something lovable about BGS games, even ones as flawed as this one. So there is true. Like seeing an NPC just fully back turned telling you their life story. There's just something very charming about it. I will say, I'm still excited for elder school six whenever that comes out. I'm excited for Starfield too. I think they'll just have one now. I think they're going to figure it out. It's going to be good.

Hopefully. Well, all right, let's take a break. And then we'll be back for one more thing. Throughout history, sirens have captured men's attention, enticed men with their feminine wiles, and fulfill men's primal needs. The sirens allure persist. They have not. Unless the primal need is I need to be smashed on the rocks.

Yeah, smash me. Smash me, mommy. Smash me, mama. Smash me, mommy. The sirens allure. Why do we do this to ourselves? Strand me, baby. Strand me, baby.

So, yeah, this is my brother, my brother, me, for maximum fun on Mondays. It's just like that. It's just like to have more of it. There's more of that. And we're back for one more thing. Maddie, your one more thing looks fun so you can go first. All right, sure.

So we have continued to watch movies once a week as we do. It's our date night. And I could still be picking movies as my one more thing. But I feel like the last few movies we watched don't really merit that. But I have started using Letterbox, which is sort of like a social media app where you can log what movies you're watching and rate them. And I use it in a very minimalist way. I don't recommend following me. But I do recommend following Demia de Juibewe, who is an internet denizen of your people probably know him.

He's the September guy. He's the September guy. He's a comedian. I would say he's a writer and a musician. What's the name of that Earth, Earthfire and, uh, Earthwind and Fire. There's a strong songs episode about it. Yeah.

He used to be Electro Lemon as like his handle on most accounts, but I think he's transitioned to just making people learn how to spell his last name and bless him for it. So I recommend looking up his letterbox account because he actually writes in-depth reviews of all the movies he watches. And in addition to just being a really funny person, I mean, if you've seen his old vines or anything else he's made, I'm sure you'd expect these reviews to be funny and they are. they're also just really incisive. He has great taste in movies.

It's not really something I necessarily thought of Demi as being an expert in, but I don't know why not. And now I've gotten really into reading his letterboxed reviews. And I super recommend them. So, yeah, I would say check out movie reviewer, Demi and did you have way. He's turned me onto some pretty good movies. And also I've really enjoyed reading his reviews. So, yeah, letterboxed. It's a website where people do that for free.

They just put content on there and no one gets paid for it. That part's not great. I'd like to kick Demi a buck for his reviews. Oh, well. I saw him give a talk at XOXO in Portland like five or six years ago. Yeah, we were at the same XOXO at the time? We both saw that talk. Oh, were we?

The talk about jazz? Yes. He gets on station? I can't remember exactly, but there's a, the screen behind him says jazz, bad music for psychopaths or something. And he like starts talking about it. And he like played clarinet with. without knowing how to play clarinet and, like, clearly knew nothing about jazz or pretended to not know anything about jazz.

It was very funny. He's a very experimental performer, and I like his work a lot. It's varied, and it's good. All right, well, I'll go next with a show that I have been watching and just finished that is one of the best TV shows I've seen in a really long time, and that is The Bear, which is an FX show that finished its second season. third season is of course up in the air due to the ongoing strike but um there are two seasons of it and it is so freaking good i can't believe how good it is i really want both of you to watch it jason i know that you started it um i just want to convince you to go back and watch the whole thing because it's i'm about halfway through season two for what it's worth oh you are oh okay yeah

oh my god uh this show is incredible so this show is created by christopher store and co-show run with Joanna Callow. She of Bojack Horseman writing renown, which tracks with this show. It has you can see it anyways. You can see some similarities. Although it's live action. It's not a cartoon. Just as dark.

So the show is about a character played by Jeremy Allen White, who I was not familiar with, but is in what's the show called? There's a show that he's from. Anyways. An actor named Jeremy Allen White, who is an incredibly good actor. He plays Carmi Brazzato, who is a

A young chef. Yes, shameless, that's it. So Karmie's a young chef whose brother dies unexpectedly, and he returns home to Chicago to take over his brother's kind of down-and-out sandwich shop, which is called The Beef. And it's really a show about grief at first and then about recovery and finding yourself, I suppose. It's about second chances, and it's about food. And it's so, so, so good.

I am just amazed by it. So some of the reason I love it is that I am not a Chicago boy, but I have many friends from Chicago. I grew up in Indiana, and I'm very familiar with the city and it's peculiar energy. And this show really, really captures Chicago in a way that I love. Also, it's just anchored around a couple of incredible performances. I.O. Adibiri plays Sydney, who is the other sort of lead chef. She's incredibly good.

And then I would say, walking away with the show is Ebonne Moss. Backrack, who, people know from Andor, actually. He had a really pivotal role in the sort of heist sequence of Andor and who also played, what's his name, John Carrieroo. John Carrieroo in the dropout. But he plays cousin, he plays Richie, who is not actually anybody's cousin, but is this extremely toxic, extremely unlikable guy who then undergoes what I would say is maybe one of the greatest character arcs I've ever seen in a TV show.

Maddie, you'll, especially when you finish season two. I mean, you can, I guess I haven't completed any level of redemption arc for him, but I love Richie despite how detestable he is, and I always have, because he's just as such a well-written, detestable, unhappy man. He's a very fully realized person. He is, and I know Chicagoans love him. He does it. Yvonne is, I think, a New Yorker originally.

Actually, fun fact, a friend of mine gave him guitar lessons when he was learning guitar for girls. He was his guitar teacher, which I just found out, and I'm like, now I'm like obsessed. I'm like, dude, you kind of like put us in touch or something. Nice. So anyways, he's a New Yorker, but he does a pretty good Chicago accent, and I gather that Chicagoans love him for his depiction of this kind of puffy-faced, angry Chicago. There's an episode in season two called Forks that when you see, oh my God, it's just like, there's two, fishes and forks.

There's like, anyways, the show does so much amazing shit. They do a couple of times now, once in each season, they have done these just death-defying tracking shot episodes. There's an entire episode in season one. It's a shortened episode, but it's like an 18-minute tracking shot. That's one of the most stressful and incredible things I've ever seen. And then in the season two finale, they do it again. And it's even like more unbelievable because they add all these new elements to it.

And it just, it gives you the sense of like the chaos of the kitchen, the love of the food, the conflict between the way you like kill yourself doing something that you love. but you get so much out of it, the inspiration out in the world of food itself, of being an artist, and of like second chances and changing. I really, like, I'm so amazed by how good it is. I just, like, absolutely loved it.

I know everyone said it was good. I'm probably the last person to watch it, though, I guess, Maddie, you're right there with me. No, we kind of took a break from it because as much as we love it, it is very stressful. And I think in the midst of wedding planning, we were like, we can't keep watching the bear. This is so much.

But we have taken on, like, Like, anytime our takeout is late, I'm like, oh, it's a real bear situation over there, which, like, Jason, when you see it, you'll understand what I mean. Like, the amount of stress that they have on the show when orders go wrong. I'm just like, I can't, I can never order food again. I already tips so well when I order food, but I'm like, how do I help them? Like, are they okay? It's definitely, yeah, it makes you really viscerally feel the dysfunction of a kitchen. Yeah.

Even while you also like, the food looks so good. There's an omelette in season two that I'm obsessed with. I know. It makes you hungry too, even though you're also like, I'm worried about everyone. Anyway, it's a great show. I just wanted to throw that recommendation out there for anyone who's heard that it's good but hasn't watched it. I really just can't recommend it enough. And even if you start it and you're like, oh, this is kind of stressful and not my thing, keep watching.

Like it really is like a show that blooms and all the characters bloom and blossom and grow and it like becomes just such a rich and rewarding experience, much like a fine dish. Sorry. Jason, what's your one more thing? Oh, man. I'm ready. I'm ready, Jason. I'm ready for this.

So I was going to talk about a cool book I read, but then the New York Jets decided to be the New York Jets this weekend. So let me give you guys a little bit of context. The New York Jets are a snake-bitten franchise, which means they are cursed. For the past 40 years, they have failed to develop and maintain and keep a competent quarterback. They've had some good teams, but quarterback as a position, has just always alluded them, especially in recent times. They also have not been the playoffs in 12 years, which is the longest drought across any of the four professional major leagues in North America. So, okay, so this offseason, the Jets score a guy named Aaron Rogers, who is a legendary quarterback,

one of the best of all time. He's kind of, he's at the end of his career. He's 39. Quarterbacks don't usually play that long, but he still probably got a couple of good years left in him. And the Jets had a really good team last year, aside from quarterback. So he was like the perfect puzzle piece that they needed to fit in there to make a contending team. And all offseason long, it was like, oh, Jets could be a Super Bowl contender. It could be like a really good team. Things are going to go great. This is going to be good. I feel good about this. It's going to wrap up really well. Nothing bad is going to happen. But then you remember it's the New York Jets. So, okay, Monday night. Jets are playing Monday night football, big marquee game, national television

audience. It's 9-11. There's a big ceremony. Aaron Rogers comes out. He's holding an American flag. He comes out. The stadium is electric. They're at home. All the New York Jets fans are just going crazy. A bunch of reporters tweeted they've never seen like the Jets stadium like this before, like never seen so much excitement, so much hype. Even my most cynical Jets fans, friends were just like so optimistic about this season. So Aaron Rogers comes out. He plays, he throws, he is a throw. He throws, again, a penalty, so they advance to another first down. And then he gets hit. And at first, it's kind of, it doesn't look like such a bad hit. And then he's on the ground, he gets back up. But then you see him. He stands up. And then he's like, nope, and he sits down.

And then it turned out, we find out gradually over the course of the night, that it turned out, he popped his Achilles and he is out for the season after playing four snaps with the Jets. And then they have to bring in Zach Wilson, who was their quarterback last year. Going from Aaron Rogers to Zach Wilson is like going from Balders Gate 3 to Starfield. Really, really, it's like, ruin. I hope you guys listen to the show. Mr. Wilson, our condolences. I should, let me take that back.

It's like going from Baldur's Gate 3 to Gallum. Remember that Gallum game came up last year? Zach Wilson is the worst quarterback in the league by far. He is the reason they had to get Aaron Rogers because he's just this disaster of a guy. But hey, the Jets defense is still pretty good. They were good last year. They're still elite. They're flying around the field.

They hold Josh Allen is a pretty good quarterback. They get him to throw three interceptions and lose a fumble. They keep it pretty close. There's this guy named Quinnin Williams on the Jet Team is this incredible player, force of nature. It was best known for in an interview after he was drafted. He's in the middle of talking. He sneezes. he says, bless you, thank you.

And then he keeps talking. So he does it all himself. That is a pretty weird thing to do. It was incredibly weird. Garrett Wilson, their superstar, Fledged League superstar wide receiver, makes this insane circus catch, one of the craziest catches I've ever seen. Zach Wilson basically is about to throw an interception.

Garrett Wilson, like, deflects the ball out of the defender's hand and somehow, like, maneuvers it. So he catches it, juggles it in the air while he's landing. It was incredible. Anyway, the Jets are up. It's 16, 13 at the end of the game. Bills drive, they drive, they drive, they get into field goal range. They kick a field goal, and it hits the up right.

Like, it goes doink, but then it bounces in and goes in, and so they get it. They bring it to overtime. The bills get the ball first. It's like, up, same old Jets. Like, they're going to score, and they're going to win this game. But no, the Jets defense holds strong. They hold the bills. They get the bills to a three and out.

Bills punt the ball. And it lands in the hands of this guy, this undrafted rookie. who barely made the team named Xavier Gibson. And a little bit of context on this guy. Before the season, the Jets were on this show called Heart Knocks, which is like in a documentary behind the scenes documentary about training camp. And this guy was like one of the stars of that show. And in fact, the Jets loved him so much, they did like a little fake out at the end of the season

where they pretend like the GM, Joe Douglas called him up and was like, sorry, man, you made the team like at the end of the season. So it was like a heartwarming story. Like this guy, he was such a good person, like it's such a fun person. personality, such a good dude. He's seen like, so he's the punt returner. He gets the punt. He starts running. Jets gets some blocks. He keeps running. Jets gets some more blocks. He like is leaving in and out. Somehow he gets all the way into the end zone and scores a touchdown. And the Jets win on a walk-off punt return touchdown in overtime. And Jets fans are going crazy. And then

they're like, oh, wait a minute, we lost our quarterback who we were hoping. Yeah, how are you going to do it again? The face of the franchise. And now we have to have Zach Wilson the gallum of NFL football players. Oh, no. So, like, even this, like, wild win that everybody should be stoked about just, like, has a massive asterisk on it. Aaron Rodgers, in his four snaps of the Jets, had zero completion, zero yards, but somehow he's still, he's still, somehow, he's still the greatest NFL quarterback to ever play for the New York Jets.

Wow. That's our team. That's what it's like to be a Jets fan. That was a great story. That's a bummer. My condolences to him and to you, Jason. Yeah, man, I mean, look, any proper Jets fan knew that this was going to happen. Like, I did say to a couple of buddies and family members, like, look, I mean, we got to watch out for injuries. This guy is 39.

I mean, I'm 36, and I can barely get out of a chair without, like, grunted. So you're injury prone when you get to that age. But who knows what will happen this season. I'm still, the Jets defense is still so impressive that I still am going to enjoy watching them. but man, such a bummer. What could have been is just so sad. And what's really sad is that, like, I mean, he's a character. I mean, he's, like, a bad dude in some ways.

He's an anti-vaxxer. He's, like, said some harmful shit. Yeah, Aaron Rogers. But, like, Hard Knocks watching him, he just seemed like he was such a lovable dude and was, like, making all his teammates happy and was talking about how he was, like, finally happy for the first time in years to be playing football with the Jets. And it was hard not to, like, be like, okay, I can root for this guy. But no, not to be.

Wow. All right. I'm pressing F for Aaron Rogers. So it goes. We'll have to keep us posted this. This season continues. Yeah. And yeah, that's it. We did it. We made an episode of triple-frey. All right. Back to Space. And by Back to Space, I mean, I'm not going to go back to space.

I'm going to play some other stuff instead. Yeah, I'm going to play some baller's game, I think. It's a pretty exciting time to be playing video games. All right. Nice. All right. See you guys next time. Yep. 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. join. Find us on Twitter at triple-clickpod, send email the triple-click at maximum fun.org and find a link to our Discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artists-owned shows. Supported directly by you.