Triple Click - What Makes Someone 'Good' At Games?

Episode Date: July 1, 2021

Jason, Maddy, and Kirk open up the mailbag and take YOUR listener questions on all sorts of things. What makes people good at video games? Why do AAA games seem so bad at "editing"? What's the best book-game pairing? And much more!One More Thing: Kirk: Mythic Quest S2Maddy: Sophie’s Safecracking SimulatorJason: The Great Ace AttorneyLinks:Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinJoin the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/ Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

Here in the United States, it has been really hot. We are in the middle of a heat wave. You know what might cool you off? A podcast. Welcome to Triple Click where we bring the games to you. Today we are opening up the listener mailbag and answering some of your questions. From the future of VR to games being too long to game book parrings. I'm Jason Schreier.

I'm Kirk Hamilton. And I'm Maddie Myers. Hello. Hey. Hey. Hello. Hello, Kirk and Maddie. Welcome back to our little show.

Our little bitty show. It's so little. It's so small. A little bitty little show. But then you open it up and it's the biggest show in the world. You zoom right in. It's really beautiful. It's an optical illusion.

It's like the tardis. It's a bag of holding. Yeah, it's all those things. Nerd reference of your choosing. That's what it is. You find all sorts of stuff in the triple click bag. There's some weird stuff in there, but it's mostly jelly beans. Yeah. It's true. Mostly beans. Hey, if you like our little show, if you like supporting our little show and help it turn into a medium-sized little show, a medium-sized little show, you can become a maximum-fund member and help us. We are entirely listeners supported by you, the fine listeners out there. Go to maximum fun.org.org slash join and you can become a member. And not only will you feel really good about supporting our medium-sized, big little show. You will also.

get a free, well, an included, I always say free. It's like, it's like, we'll throw in a free set of steak knives or something. Yeah, well, it is, it is a free set of steak knives. I mean, and we do throw in a free set of steak knives as well. We do. We mail on the single knives. We don't, we don't, important disclaimer.

Yeah, the steak knives are metaphorical. It's like the knives of our arguments and thoughts. It's like critical steak knives. Well, we pull them out of the triple click bag. Yeah, the metaphorical steak knives in the metaphorical bag of holding. You get a monthly bonus episode, including. the one we just published for June, which was Final Fantasy 6, Beanscast. Here, the culmination of all of our thoughts.

We'll be doing a Half-Life 2 beans cast a little bit later this year. But this month, for July, we're doing something a little bit different. Our bonus episode this month is going to be, we're tentatively calling it deep thoughts with Jason Kirk and Maddie. Basically, what we want to do is we want to do a listener mailbag episode, except we don't want it to have anything to do with gaming. And in fact, we want to get a little bit deeper than we normally do. So what you can do if you're a MaxFund member is send us some questions at triple click at maximumfund.org. Think of some deep. You can get a little intimate if you want, some personal questions, things that you're curious to know,

but maybe we're afraid to ask about the three of us or things you want the three of us to talk about, deep questions, deep philosophical questions. So that's the July beans cast and deep thoughts. So send us your questions, triple click and maximum fund.org. and before we get to today's episode, Kirk, one more thing from you, right? All right, so this episode is going to be some burning questions from all of you. But before we do that, now that we have put Final Fantasy 6 behind us, we are moving on to my game because Jason and I tied the bet. Jason picked Final Fantasy 6 as the game that the three of us must play,

and I picked Half-Life 2 in both episodes. So we are now transitioning to Half-Life 2, which means that I'm assuming, based on how many people played Final Fantasy 6, that there will be some listeners out there who will want to play Half-Life 2 along with us as well. So I wanted to give just a really quick kind of outlay right before we get going, before the two of you get going, and before all the listeners get going. Just to get your head around it, we're probably going to finish the main game, the bulk of Half-Life 2, not the episodes, by mid-August,

and we'll do our regular feed episode on the whole main game. So we'll probably do spoilers for the full main game and then leave the episodes out, and then we'll do a full beans cast on everything, including the episodes, and probably I'll talk you guys through Half-Life Alex as well. That'll be a little bit later. So aim for mid-August if you're going to do a play along with us. And now here are a few things I'm just going to tell the two of you, because here's the thing. Half-Life 2 is a sequel to Half-Life, a game that both of you are probably not particularly familiar with.

Yeah, how did you know that? I thought it was just T-O-O, and it was just like, half-A. Finally, there's two lives. Right. That's it. That's what it's about. So Half-Life 1 didn't really have much of a story. It was kind of, I mean, there was a story.

You play through a narrative, and it's really cool. but it's not like super lore heavy or anything, but I'm just going to tell you really quickly what happened in that game, and I'm going to do it on the air, because I thought this would be fun. And then this is kind of what you need to know going into Half-Life 2. I've already started replaying Half-Life 2 to kind of refresh myself on what the game tells you and doesn't tell you.

The most important thing to know, though, is that Half-Life 2 drops you into the deep end super quickly, and you'll feel like you're in Medius Res. Like, there's all the stuff going on, and people who know you, talking to you like they know you, and you're like supposed to know what's going on, but you're not. You're like, you're supposed to be in the middle of a kind of really perplex

situation full of weird stuff, and you just have to go with it. So that's the most important thing to know. But the very broad strokes of Half-Life One are that you play a guy named Gordon Freeman. He's an MIT scientist. He was at this government facility called Black Mesa in Nevada. He played part of this sort of dimensional rift experiment that opened a hole to an alien dimension called Zen that then set off this invasion of the facility and the world. It seems like the world. The whole game, you just like fight through the facility. You kind of meet some scientists, who then are characters in Half-Life 2, but they're not really characters in Half-Life 1.

They just become characters for Half-Life 2. So you don't really need to know any of the people that you meet. You fight your way through there. You go to this alien world. You fight a big boss there and you beat him. And the whole time you're going through Black Mesa, you see this guy in a suit who's called the G-Man. And he's always, like, he'll just walk by in the background

when you walk into a room. And you never, like, see him or talk to him or do anything with him until the very end of the game. And then when you beat the final boss, he, like, appears to you. and gives you this really weird speech, and he's like, my employers are impressed with you. And he basically says, he gives you two options. You can die, which you could die.

But the canon ending is you will be hired by my employers, and we're going to put you in stasis, and you will be removed at the appropriate moment. And that's how the game ends. So that's basically where things are at going into Half-Life 2, and that's kind of all you need to know. Everything else, anything weird, any questions you have, they'll be answered by the game itself.

You're supposed to be really confused at the beginning. And here are four things that I will mention, about the game very quickly. One, it's better with a mouse and keyboard. This is a good game to play on PC, and I do recommend playing with a mouse keyboard. Two, crouch jumping, kind of a thing. Maddie, you've played CounterStrike, right? Of course.

Of course. Based on Half-Life 2, of course. Yeah, so it's not as big of a thing as it was in the first game, but I was doing a puzzle that was easier to solve with crouch jumping. So look that up. I'll text you both this. But like you jump and crotch at the same time and you can go a little bit higher. There's a couple times where that's helpful.

Do I buy armor at the shop at the beginning of every round? You do not. Okay. Okay. Though it'll feel familiar to you as a counterstrike player. Third thing is, bear in mind, this is all a big physics simulation. The whole game is within this complicated physics simulation. To an unusual extent, even now I'm playing it, and that's really striking to me. And there's a lot of physics puzzles in this game.

And four is it doesn't always hold your hand, and that's something we'll talk about. But there are puzzles where it's a little interesting, the things that you need to figure out how to do. But those are all things that we can talk about in the future. So that's it. I now set you and listeners loose on Half-Life 2. And yeah, good luck. I'm really excited to hear what the two of you think of that game. Me too.

Cool. Me too. Has been years. Okay. So, it is time for burning questions. And I'm just going to read our first burning question because it's not actually a question. It's just a nice listener email we got. This comes from Andrew who writes, I have listened to your podcast since the first year of Katakki's split screen. I followed you over to triple-click gladly, but I never pulled the trigger on a maximum-fund membership for a variety of reasons. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed your episodes about Final Fantasy 6, a game I'm sure I will never play, and I wanted very much to hear more. In fact, I already got two-thirds of your experience of playing the game, a very substantial amount of content absolutely free.

But then I discovered that was all a demo. The last episode is only available if I purchased the full product. I am pleased to report your demo sold me on the full game. I am now a maximum fund member. So thank you, Amber. And I just wanted to share that email because we appreciate you becoming a member. So Maddie, how about you read this next email that we've got from Simon? Sure. Simon writes,

After listening to your most recent episode, I'm just wondering what makes people good at games. I'm 30 plus hours into Returnal and still stuck on Frick by M1. Yet there are many people like Kirk who completed the game in 20-some hours while barely dying and find the game relatively easy, at least according to Reddit. So that makes me wonder, why are some people so much better that games than others?

Is it intelligence, reflexes, experience? I'm an experienced gamer. I'm in my early 40s and played games most of my life. I don't consider myself great at games, but I'm generally not terrible either. After struggling with the first area of Bloodborn, I beat the first two bosses and two tries in the next three and three to four tries

and got to the headless ape and sacro after a lot of effort. I'm not sure if that means I'm just bad at shooters or whether I'm just bad at returnal. I tend to score well on intelligence tests. Oh my God, Simon. Intelligence tests are bunk, my man. I know it's not what you're writing in about,

But anyway, Simon's got a PhD. His accolades go on and on. He's a smart man. The listener can imagine. Yes. Simon says, I also wonder whether developers should aim to make games more accessible to those that struggle with them.

Well, I really love the game. I'm annoyed that I spent 70 bucks on a game I'm only to play one sixth of and miss out on what looks to be a really interesting story. I feel that if you're going to pay that much, the developer should make concessions to allow you to be able to experience more of the game. Or the game should try and help you if you get stuck. when the Mario games give you the Tanuki suit. Why isn't there a Tanuki suit in Returnal? Jason, your thoughts, please.

Oh, well, yeah, I guess all games should just give you a Tanuki suit, the ones are a flyer. Come on. Why not? That would be great. You could just fly over all the rooms and whirl around, get mushrooms. I think there's something to that. It's an interesting debate. I've always had kind of mixed feelings about this debate, and I've never really landed on a side, because on one side of the debate, there's this question of like, Sekiro is a really good example because that's a game that would just be a very different game

if there were difficulty settings. It would not be Sekiro if there were difficulty settings. Whereas, uh, there's an argument to be made that I remember there was an, an article I wrote based on an email I got from a listener ages ago, or read or listener at Kataku ages ago, about how every game should have easy mode

and how he really wanted to play this game, Nino Kuni with the sun and couldn't because the game didn't have like a really easy mode for the combat. And essentially, it's just like the oppressive difficulty of a game can really just like prevent people from playing it and enjoying it. And that sucks. And I'm very much about like accessibility making games as available to as many people as possible. So yeah, I don't know. I'm torn. What do you guys think about this whole dilemma? So on that second question, I think, I mean, we've talked about that before. And I'm actually totally in favor of difficulty settings only because if you make an artistic statement

that involves a certain type of difficulty, you can make it clear in the difficulty selection that if you really want to play the experience we intended, play this setting. But if you want to just see the game or just turn off damage entirely and just run through it, who cares? That's fine.

I can't really think of a game or that's not the case. I am interested in this first question that Simon asked, which is what makes people good at games and why are people better at games than others? Partly because there's been a lot of jokes, joking around like in the triple click Discord about how I did this whatever, eventually 10 deaths in returnal, even though I definitely don't think of myself as good at games. I'm similar to Simon. I'm around the same age. Did kind of have a similar experience with a lot of the games he's describing.

How are you at intelligence tests, though? He score well on intelligence tests. I don't have a PhD. So I don't think of myself as good at games in the way that sometimes I'll be watching like a YouTube video essayist and their gameplay examples. will just be, oh, what's the guy's name? Is it Jonathan Anderson who plays, he does this, he did this video on Hollow Night. Bing! It's actually Joseph Anderson. Bing!

And he's just ludicrously good, and I was watching this nice analysis that he did, and all the gameplay is just like bonkers high-level stuff. And being like, wow, you're just really good at this game, and that must affect how you even view it. Like, imagine being just this skilled at a 2D platformer. He's also really good at, you know, Soulslike games. Hey, Kirk, I don't have to. imagine. That's true. You are really good at platformers. That's true. So anyways, I don't really know

what makes somebody good at one game or not good at another game. And I really don't know why I had such an easy time of it, relatively speaking, with Returnal. I really just don't think that I'm particularly good at that game. I just played so carefully. But you also, you have hours. It's all about time, I think. I think the answer is hours. Like, you have so many hours playing third person shooters specifically, whereas I have so many hours playing platformers specifically. I think about this a lot because I play a lot of StarCraft, and I think about like, how do I get better? How do I get worse? Or why am I playing worse today? Why am I playing better today? And I think there are a few things, but the biggest is always just the amount of time you're

spending with a specific genre and like learning the nuances of that specific genre. And nothing is true or nothing like makes that more apparent than the Souls games where you play a game over and over again and eventually you get the hang of it and eventually you get the hang of the combat and you get better at it and the more souls games you play the more the better you'll be at other types of souls games right some people are naturally better at some types of games than others I think that's the other half of this that is uncomfortable you don't think it's because they just grew up playing those games no I think some people I mean there are so many different kinds of games we're talking about here when we're talking about kinds of games you can be good at and some people

some people are faster at memorization than other people. Some people are faster at pattern recognition than other people. Some people have better eyesight or better hand eye coordination. I mean, that's tough, but it's just the facts of it. And those things do play a role, I think. Like, there are people who just are better at games. And that's annoying to me personally. I don't like that that's true. I like feeling like I can achieve anything and that my body is just some weird limiter and that if I practice enough, I can be as good as so and so. or such and such, but there are also physical limitations. And like, as we get older, we've all referred to this. Like, your reflexes slow down. Your eyesight changes. Like, these are, we are mere flesh husks and we are doing the best we can. But your podcasting ability just gets better and better. That is certainly true.

Right, of course. Of course, only experience points going up and up and up in the podcasting column all the time. There's something specific to Returnal that I've thought about. And it was kind of when I was figuring out how to beat, like how to, to beat Sands or I can't remember what the boss was in Undertail and a couple other bullet helly kind of things which the really tough stuff in returnal is bullet hell and that's actually reading music which is a very similar type of skill and there is a specific head space that I figured out that I could channel for both things and that might have something to do with it like that is at least

a type of skill that you can develop which is the specific skill of like looking ahead and then memorizing what you need to do in the sequence of events ahead of when you're doing it, which is what you do when you're reading music, you're like a bar ahead of your fingers. And when I'm really in the zone reading music, it very much feels similar to that kind of game, which that's not a useful skill in like a first-person shooter where you just need to be reacting and shooting, or even a game like Dark Souls are Bloodborn. But in a bullet-held game specifically, it's like you have sheet music coming at you and you can adjust and, like, you plan out your movements.

And that is a similar headspace. So I wonder if that might be a small part of just return on it. I totally know what you mean by that. I wish it made me a little better at it, but I was always bad at reading music and better at improvisational music. So that might say something. Yeah, it's a different brain thing. I feel like it probably says something about why I like Dark Souls, though,

because that's one of the few games that I was not good at blood-borne as people who listen to split-screen know. But Dark Souls I took two right away, and the friends I was playing with, at least one of them was like, wow, you're very good at this and was, like, impressed by how good I was at things that she was not as good at. but then there'd be things that she found very easy that I found difficult. And that's part of why I've been thinking about that so much and like, why are some people good at some things and some are bad at some things? And why is it that I was naturally good at some of the things that she wasn't as good at? And in my case, it was just mindset. Like, I just had more confidence than she did about rushing into certain

areas. And she was like more hesitant in some ways. And I don't know if that's, I don't even know what that is, but it's almost like calmness and confidence can help you in certain ways and also not caring. I don't know. It's like being in the right mindset of not caring, which I have tried and failed to describe many times on this show with regard to Dark Souls. I think you're onto something broadly speaking, and that's that skill is part of it, but mindset is another part of it. And I think my mindset with Returnal also was like was a part of how I did well. It was because I was approaching it very carefully with the specific approach of not rushing in and being super, super careful. about losing health. And then that's true, of course, of games, of all kinds of difficult games.

If you get in the right head space, you can do very well despite never becoming, you know, the master aggressive, like, super skilled player that you might be. It is an interesting question, though. I think it's something I like to think about, at least, and it's a cool thing to compare yourself with other players. So for Bloomberg Business Week, a couple of months ago, we were doing a how-to issue, and I did a thing, basically you ask an expert how to do something, they give you a little piffy answer. And so I reached out to Day 9, aka Sean Plot,

who was like this pro gamer. And I said, hey, how do you get good at video games? And he gave me this great answer. And the short version is three part answer. First thing is, have a good time. Try out ridiculous ideas. Like load up a game with no plan and have some fun with it.

Second part. Then come up with a plan. And it's not a plan that is like some elaborate contingency plan that is like, this is exactly how to win. It's just a plan for like, I am going to get really good at this thing. So like my plan is I am always going to build workers in StarCraft 2 no matter what.

I'm going to build as many workers as possible. I'm always going to parry in Dirxels to use a recent example, METI cited. Yeah. And then the third piece of this whole equation is the emotional piece. And you have to be nice to yourself. And remember that if you're trying to improve, your goal is not to win. Your goal is to improve and develop the skills that allow you to win. So I feel like following that roadmap will get you way better at pretty much any game.

I like that. Or anything in life maybe? Yeah. It's like good life in place too. Make a plan. Be nice to yourself. Have fun. Yeah.

Great stuff. Love it. Good stuff from Sean Platt. Nice. All right. Jason, you want to read this next question? This is from Stefan. Seven says, love the show.

Max Fun member who changed his subscription mid-year between drives to make sure I included you guys in my contributions. Hey. Yeah. Yeah. I want to ask, have you ever run into a game that you made too long? There's a lot of discussion around games like Valhalla, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, having too much fluff, but I often find myself just bouncing off those after a while. The games that irk me more are the games I get into overanalyzed and get so deep into min-maxing that I eventually end up in analysis paralysis, frozen by the idea of making a wrong decision.

I eventually get bored and frustrated and move on, only to be frustrated with myself for being this way. The three of you ever been in the situation A game that you made too long. What do you guys think? Definitely. I've totally done this. I did this with Assassin's Creed Odyssey where I kind of did everything

and then there came a point there was a point where that was really fun and I was enjoying doing everything and then there was a point where that stopped being fun and I had to consciously decide not to do it which is I think a point I met with Valhalla too if I ever do finish that game it'll be because I'm like okay

as neat as some of the side stuff is I cannot do it all unfinished. And I'm also doing it with Mass Effect Trilogy right now. In Mass Effect 2, I'm really finding, I'm doing all the side stuff, all that DLC they added. Much of it is pretty cool, but a lot of it is just sort of filler. And I talked about this on the show, how I really like probing planets. And I feel compelled to do it all, even though it's taking forever. And I'm like, oh, my God, there's a whole other game after this.

And I was feeling really confident that I was going to beat this trilogy. And now I'm feeling kind of like, so much stuff. And it really is kind of on me, even though I know there is that suicide mission and I guess I need to make everybody happy before that. So it's not entirely on me. It's partly the game. I had that issue with a biowar game as well. I think it was Dragon Age 2. I was trying to remember which Dragon Age it was where I just fell into a hole of doing every side quest, including ones I did not enjoy. And I remember like complaining out loud to the guy I was living with at the time. Like, oh, this game's so long. And he was like, you are doing every side quest. Like every time I walk by you, you. you were taking another side quest from some random gnome walking by, like asking you to deliver his mail. And like, you have done every sidequest. And I was like, that can't be right.

And then I like loaded up my menu. And I was like, oh my God, I have 100%ed all of these areas. What am I doing? Like, what is happening here? And like, I don't think of myself as a completionist, but there's just something about like BioWare's side quest designs in that particular era where people just make you feel really guilty. They're like, you know, my wife is dying.

And if you don't get this. letter to so and so I'll never be able to cremate her as she's always wanted. It's like, oh, God, now I've got this hanging over my conscience and I've got to like do this freaking thing for this fictional person. But yeah, I don't fall into the whole of min-maxing things. I luckily I can break myself out of that sort of thing. I just feel guilty about fictional characters and letting them down. That is the horrible trap that I end up in. I think that was a big problem for people in Inquisition too, right? To the point where they got stuck in that first area, just doing side quests from.

Hintrylance, yeah. Yeah. That was kind of the game's fault, too. Jason, does this happen to you at all? That was just bad design. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Not really. I'm pretty good about like a tuning out side quest.

And I often do. I'm kind of like the opposite of you, Kirk, in some regards when I'm playing a game because I will ignore anything cosmetic. I will always ignore anything that's usually when it's like an equipment system that's elaborate and requires a lot of thinking in time. I'll just try to ignore it if I can until I absolutely have to think about it. I was thinking about this while playing the Ufi DLC the other day, the Final Fantasy 7th. Oh my God, I just press the Do It All for Me button.

Yeah, I didn't even touch the equipment system. You didn't even have to. But one thing I did as a kid a lot is I would play these big JRPs, and then I would have a save right before the final dungeon or the final boss, and then I would just stop playing it. And for some reason, I would just never finish them. I think this is a common phenomenon. It's like not watching the last episode of the TV show, which I've definitely done with shows.

Right. You just don't want something to end. So I guess I kind of extended those games in the sense that I'm still playing them in a way. Right, though not something that you were super hard on yourself about or damage the game. You just didn't want it to end. It's a little bit different. Well, speaking of not wanting the games to end, so Andrew writes with a related question that I thought would be a good follow-up,

Andrew writes, I think small games are some of the best things to come out of the digital marketplace for games. Without the previous limitation of having to commit to a physical release, developers were able to work on projects that weren't destined to become $60 or soon $70, $40-plus, our expansion experiences. In recent weeks, Jason talked about the Zelda-like Turnup Boy commits tax evasion, and Maddie talked about the series of chat-based visual novels, Emily is Away. I myself have really been enjoying the relaxing experiences of a short hike and Florence.

Both great games, I will just add. Andrew continues, A common theme of conversation on Triple Click has been the tendency of AAA developers to lengthen their games to justify the cost and maintain the studio prestige for those games ultimately wind up being disappointing, frustrating, or boring. This is a big part of your conversations around The Last of Us Part, too. I mean, we also had some complaints about the story of that game. But, you know, anyways, here's Andrew's question.

Where do you think AAA developers fail in the editing of their games? Editing as in trimming excess, not cutscene editing. What do you think these big games could learn from games that are in the one to four, one to five hour range? And also, what are some of your favorite tiny games? What do you think, the two of you? Oh, so, okay, so I just watched something interesting. So I just watched a great interview by our friend Ben Hansen at MinMax,

friend of the show with Mark Dara, who was an executive producer at BioWare on the Dragon Age Games, among other things. And he was talking about how in games, there's no, there's no more, at least in his experiences, there's no such thing anymore as post-production. It's just kind of pre-production and production. He was talking about how like an ideal, in an ideal world, like a game would get finished like six months before its release date and then you'd spend that six months just like playing the hell out of it and making sure it was good, fixing or whatever. But that doesn't really happen instead in the modern world because these timelines are so tight and games are so expensive and complicated. They all just get finished like a couple

months before their release date or a month before release date and then everything's on fire and hopefully things coales. I was going to say, are the case of cyberpunk, they're finished last week. Right. Or they're finished six months after release. And I was thinking about this question in in kind of regard to that because there's so much like there isn't a lot of time for play to really play the entire experience without any bugs and with everything implemented to it. And in fact, when I was reporting on Anthem for my story a couple years ago about what weren't wrong on that game, that was one of the things I heard from people was that like they barely had any time to play through the entire game. And that kind of answers this question when it

comes to editing. And I think like if there was more of an opportunity, if there was more time for people to be able to play a game, not just start to finish, but start to finish in like a near final state with everything implemented. Most of the big bugs finished and not like start to finish like, okay, it's two months before release. We have to play this thing, start to finish, and fix all the bugs that are crashing it. If people had more

time to play to the game start to finish, I think there could be more room for like editing out superfluous parts because I don't think it's all just like the marketing budget, marketing team says we have to have 100 hours. So we're doing it this way. I actually think last of us too is a good example of a game that may be

like with a couple more months of like like really play testing and getting feedback on that thing, maybe you would know to cut down a few parts. Red Dead Red Dead Redemption too comes to mind also the whole part where they go to Cuba. Guam, yeah. Cut out all of them. There are those sections of games that you play where you just can tell, well, they put this in because they just felt like they had to, which maybe they still would have because

that happens sometimes. You just made a whole thing and you don't want to cut it even though it would really benefit from it being cut. Just because some cost fallacy, yeah. I feel like that's also often an issue, although I have no idea if that's true. just my assumption, but it's like once the game, once these beautiful scenes have already been rendered, why wouldn't you keep them in? They're already there. Right. You finish your point, Kurt. Oh yeah, no, that's pretty much it. And that a writer would have that kind of, you need an editor

to be able to tell you, you know, you don't need this section. And then there says, no, but I do need it. I needed it. Because of this crucial character developed me, like, no, look, you can just do X, Y, and Z and like, you can connect these two lines here and cut that out. And you're like, you're right. Okay, fine, you're right. And then you cut it and it's actually a good feeling, and it makes your thing better. We've all been through this as writers. Kill your darlings. Being able to kill some more darlings and video games would. That's a really great point, Jason.

Just having that time after the thing is finished, which is true of any article or book, as you know, Jason, or album. Maybe, as you know, like, you want to be finished and then you sit and listen to it and you write 20 songs and your album is only going to be 10 songs and you cut a whole bunch of stuff and you decide what works and what doesn't. And you have that time because you don't have to just throw it under the world and finish it. I think that's actually a great answer.

Also, like, taking time away from the project, like, the ideal game development cycle, I think, would be like, you finish it. It's like six months before you're released it. You finish the game. Everybody gets a month off. And then you come back to the project with fresh eyes. And it's like, you spend about not even thinking about it. And then everybody plays it. Yeah, you spend them on not even thinking about it.

And then you all play it. And you're like, hey, what is good? What is bad about this thing? And then hopefully at that point, you don't have to, like, make massive changes to fix things. But just, I'm thinking more in terms of, like, what you would. would call post-production, which again doesn't really exist in games. Maybe it used to at some point, but now everything is just coming in so hot all the time that it just doesn't happen. I think it's very funny that we're talking about this in the context of having just beaten Final Fantasy 6, which is a game

that had so much extra time and they decided to celebrate that by making it even less edited and including even more ludicrous ideas and having a wildly longer script and not cutting anything. I just, I just think that's funny. That's another thing you can do if you have six extra months, you can just add in even more game and put it out as soon as you're done adding in all the game. But again, the context, we talked about this before, but the context here is that we are approaching games as adults, whereas if we were all 12, we might be saying, man, I love how games are 100 hours because I can just afford one with my allowance and that's all I have to do this summer.

But it's also true that there are some tiny games that are really great, which is the other half this question. So I did, I did want to say, I mentioned White Ocean Big Jacket on our like games of the year episode while back. That's a small game. It takes an hour to play and it's awesome. And also, a lot of the games we've chosen for Beanscasts would qualify for this, gone home, portal, portal to some recents that are really great small games that have a small scope and are effective because they're only a couple hours long and feel really tightly edited as well. I have to rave about overboard at yen because I don't think you guys have played it yet but you really need to.

Oh, it'll happen. It's tiny. It was made in five months and it's incredible. It's my favorite game of this year so far, like by a long shot, overboard. And this is an ankle game. And when a game is tiny like that, it's kind of easier to make that kind of a strong statement or to feel that way. I find that's true of really small games because I really can get my arms around it

because it's only a few hours long. I loved a short hike which Andrew mentioned. That's such a beautiful game. And a really good short one. All right, nice. Maddie, how about you read this question from Ashley? Sure. So Ashley writes, first off, love the show. I'd like to get your thoughts on why the VR gaming revolution that we've been waiting for these last several years hasn't happened yet, or at least in the form many of us thought it would emerge. For several years now, people have said that VR is the future of gaming. I don't think that's wrong. VR technology is truly incredible. But there seems to be a disconnect between that perception and the current experience of many gamers, says her friends don't own VR and she has a lot of theories as to why that is not enough games, cost, ease of use, etc. So I guess my questions are, do you think that VR gaming feels a bit stagnant or no? What do you think needs to happen to get more people interested in and comfortable with VR?

Is the issue that developers aren't creating attractive VR titles? Or is it gamers themselves lacking interest? And while these issues just resolve themselves over time, do you think we're still on the edge of a VR gaming breakthrough? Or do you think it'll remain a relatively niche hobby for years to come? Well, Kirk, what do you think? Yeah, you can tell who picked the questions for this episode. think, I've thought about this, and I think that the answer is we are still a few, it's the technology is the issue and is the reason that this breakthrough hasn't happened. Everything else kind of exists.

It's just going to be about a couple of other things coming down. So I got a quest two, which is the Facebook Oculus headset that came out last year. That one's wireless and self-contained and it plays games by itself. I've talked about this on the show a bunch. It can also like wirelessly talk to your PC. If you have a gaming PC, so you can play how to. Half-Life Alice just out in the living room with no wires. And it's super great. It's the best VR experience I've ever had. But I still play it sometimes,

but it's still that feeling of this big thing on my head. I have to move the furniture out of the way to play the game. And there's kind of this sense of this is still just not a thing that's going to blow up. And I think, like, there will be more software that's kind of like Beat Sabre, or even like watching movies, watching Netflix things in VR is really, really cool. And again, the issue is that you're wearing this big thing on your head. So it seems to me like this, the most recent thing that happened was going wireless, and that's huge. And it turns out, oh, it's possible to just play wirelessly from your PC over your Wi-Fi signal.

And it works, which is not something I think I would have predicted back when like the first Oculus Rift came out. And so that was a huge thing. But there's still a couple more of those things that need to happen are like dominoes that need to fall. One of them is the headset just needs to get smaller. And I think that's probably the next thing that will happen. It's just like way, way, way smaller. even if it means the games are just less advanced, because if you can wirelessly beam it from a PC or a...

It just needs to be a little streaming device. It doesn't even need to have a processor almost. And that, to me, is like, okay, it's just some glasses you put on with little headphones. That's not as far off as maybe people think. I don't really know, I guess, but it seems like it might not be. And that's when you start getting into... Okay, now it's just like, people can just buy this to watch a movie, and then they can sit in a huge movie theater in their living room and watch something.

Or, you know, go tour the world, and it's cheap and easy, and it's just glasses that you put on. We're getting there. It's going to be a niche hobby for years to come, though, to answer Ashley's question, I think. It's still going to be a little while until it happens. But I do think at some point it'll happen because I still think VR is really cool. Well, you're describing it still sounds like a niche hobby.

I mean, look at what having a Google glass. Like, nobody wants to go out and wear, nobody wants to wear things. We don't have to go out in a VR. Or whatever. It was just comfortable. But nobody wants to wear glasses while they're playing games. That's a pretty broad state. when you say nobody, there are certainly people who would wear some kind of glasses or contact

ones or something. I don't think there's enough of a mainstream audience that wants wearable stuff. I'm not sure that I agree, only given the kinds of experiences that are possible. Even the Wii, so the Wii was massively successful, but a lot of that success came from people who just bought one for like their grandparents and it was just sitting under their living room table. And if you look at the software like sales for the Wii, a lot of games just totally underperform because not a lot of people were just buying games for the week. And I think that kind of speaks to the potential of VR, which is like maybe it could, it could blow up one Christmas is a bunch of gifts for people. But like, I just don't see that becoming a main form of gaming

for most people. I do. I think that augmented reality and virtual reality, like over a long enough time horizon, that's just kind of where things will eventually go. Just because, I mean, in 20 years, the world is going to be so wildly different. And I think it's unlikely that we're just going to still be sitting in front of TV screens playing things. But you never know. Maybe you're right. Maybe it'll just never catch on. All right. Jason, how about you read this next one from Jeff? This is another one that's not a question. It's just informing us of something. It's for Jason. That seems fair to say.

Jeff says, I was listening to the most recent Beanscastle on the sat in by the playland. Various websites have listed for Sweet Godin 2. With the guy this game is easily under 20 hours with all optional content, there's even a story scene that is only viewable if you get to the last dungeon of the game in under 20 hours. I only ring this up because Kirk and Maddie seemed outraged by the length and it was saddened me for that to be a reason to miss out on a true gem. Anyway, I love the show. Keep up the great work. That's true, but I feel like if and when you two have to play secret and two, if I win the predictions about this year, I suspect it

will take you guys longer than 20 hours. I was happy to read this at least, knowing that maybe you could be a little bit shorter, that would be nice. It's definitely on the shorter side for JRP's, and it goes by very fast because it has a really good structure. The first couple hours are a little sluggish, but after that it gets a little bit. The important thing is that I don't have to think about a JRP for at least a little while. We can revisit this. At least six months. That was a nice thing to hear that it can be played more quickly. All right. So this question comes from genuine affect who writes, Hi, Kirk, Maddie, and Jason. Notice that Triple Click only runs house ads for other maximum fun podcast and does not advertise products from other

companies as many maximum fun podcasts do. I expect the triple click has a strong enough listenership to sell ads, so I assume that U.S. hosts are choosing not to. I don't recall if it has been addressed on the pod, but I would be interested to hear from you all why you have no sponsors on the show. Thanks and keep up the great podcasting. So yeah, why don't we have ads? Well, we don't want to and we can afford not to, so we don't. That sums it up. Because we can make the show. Thanks to our listeners, because we have enough listeners who support us that we do not need ads to be able to do the show. That's the straight.

That's the easy answer. It's like we're never going to say never because if we lose all our subscribers tomorrow then maybe we'll be like, oh no, what are we going to do? But we are, the three of us are all. I guess in that situation it would be kind of hard to run ads because I guess no one's listening to the show. That's true. That's just a weird hypothetical.

But hey, you never know. Hundreds of thousands of people are listening. None of them want to pay for anything to do with the show. in that weird situation, who knows? I think it's safe to say that the three of us are perfectly happy running the show without ads. Yes. And I don't do ads on strong songs either.

In both cases, we're leaving money on the table and it is a kind of a principled stand. And it's a luxury to be able to take a principled stand and say, but I think that it is cool to be able to take one. Like, it's nice to be able to say, no ads. Like, there are too many ads. Ads are not, ugh, ads. It's very nice that we don't have to, even though. If it was the only way to make the show, of course, I would be open to considering it.

So anyways, that's the answer to that. Maddie, how about you take this next one from Aaron? Sure. Aaron writes, aside from the Final Fantasy MMO, do you guys and gal have any opinions or experiences with any other modern MMOs? I can't recall hearing much of anything, either at split screen or triple click, when it comes to heavy hitters like Black Desert Online, Guild Wars 2, Elder Scrolls Online, DC Universe Online, Current Wow, etc. Love them or hate them.

they have millions of subscribers, raking many millions in micro-transactions and subs, and are increasingly trending away from predominantly PC player bases and towards mobile, although there have been a number of console offerings over the past few years. Personally, these games aren't really my preference, but I have dabbled in many of them just to see what the fuss is about and generally spend as much time in character creation as the actual game until I bounce off the repetitive gameplay or get turned away by the greediness of the cash shop. well we used to be a destiny podcast this is such a sign of how times have changed

it's funny how that wouldn't have maybe counted to begin with but then they consciously became an MMO and that was when we stopped kind of playing the game as much yeah and then I started playing kind of did you guys know did you guys see that bungee is hiring a destiny historian yes I did see that and was wondering if my name is Bife had yeah it should be for the job or considered it since I hope I hope he gets it good luck to him um yeah Yeah, I've played, so I haven't played a lot of modern MMOs, but I used to play a lot of, well, I used to play a ton of muds back in the day. And really, I mean, the original microtransactions where you could buy, like, muds were text-based MMRPs back in the 80s and 90s. I guess they're still around today, but I used to play them in the 90s.

And there were some games where you could buy stuff in game for your character. And like, if you think micro transactions today are ridiculous, imagine spending real money to get, like, extra text in your text-based. Online game. And I played some World Warcraft also in its first year for a while. So I've spent a lot of time playing MMOs, but none recently other than Final Fantasy 14. Yeah, I played some Guild Wars 2 for a while when I was still at Kataku just because I was sort of interested in that game and it looked super beautiful and I was just interested in it and played enough to kind of get to that point that I think Aaron describes too where I made a character and I did the opening quest and I was like, wow, look at how beautiful the map in

this game looks and this music is great and it looks really cool. And then I just was like, okay, I'm just kind of killing things and it's not that fun alone. And I'm not in a clan and maybe I don't have time for this and then fell off of it. And that's where I'm at now. There's no way I could take on one of those games now. It's so hard. It's hard enough to find time to play all of the non-MMO games I want to play. And it's sort of similar to like an e-sport game, you know, a game that just really requires a huge commitment where millions of people.

You're stealing the point I was about to make. Yeah, go ahead, though. Keep talking. I'll wrap it up quickly and you can expound on it more interestingly than I did. But yeah, I mean, it's like millions of people playing them. They're really interesting. There's plenty to say about them, but it's just no longer possible to cover especially those kinds of niches. They're not even niches, like their whole galaxies in the video game universe.

I mean, I said at the time Destiny 2 was the only MMO I ever played, that's still true. But I also think the only comparable experience I ever had is with, as Kirk calls, them, esport types games, which is like, your CounterStrike for a time was the only game I was playing, and it was because my friends were playing it, and I just wasn't playing anything else for a few years of my life. I was just only playing CounterStrike, and it was more of social experience than like, oh, we're all playing a game and getting something out of a game, if that makes sense. It was just something to do and a way to hang out, and I think MMOs offer that as well. And then when I got really into Street Fighter for a period of time, and Marvel versus

Capcom for a bit before that, and Super Smash Brothers for a bit before that, I mean, I sort of had chunks of my life years where I was really obsessed with a game. And that was the only game I was playing multiple days a week with the same group of people over and over again, which is quite similar. I mean, if you want to be very good at a certain game, that is the behavior you need to do. It's just you're only playing the one game for a long time. And so in a way, I feel like I've had that experience socially, even if not in a literal sense. Like, I understand why someone would play an MMO, I think. But yeah, I just, I'm rating in Destiny too.

There was that one time when I did that, and it was cool. Yeah. Yeah, good times. That was practically an emotional experience. All right, well, I'll read this last question just because this is something that we can each just really quickly list a thing for because I thought it was kind of fun. Michael writes, hi, as a fan of both books and video games, I really enjoyed the book talk on this week's episode.

This was back in March. Sometimes in my reading, I try to pair a book with a game I'm playing at the same time, like The Histories by Herodotus for Assassin's Creed. Odyssey. Was that correct? Did I say it right? Herodotus? I don't know. No one knows. Herodotus? Or Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurdy for Red Dead Redemption 2. Lonesome Dove, that's a good book. Are there any book game pairings that the Triple Click Squad have paired up for each other or think might go well together theoretically? So I figured we could each come up with one for this, and I'll say that mine is, because I'm reading it right now, the seven and a half deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle would be a great pairing with Hitman 3, because

Hitman 3 has a level that is set in a sort of manner where there's a mystery, and the story of this book is that it is a very much, you know, there's a party at this manner and there's a murder and you need to solve it. But the hook of the book and the hook of the game is that you can replay the manner level over and over again, and you learn all the ins and outs and all the different motivations of everyone who may be trying to commit this murder and also, you know, just what's going on. And I think it would be kind of fun to pair those two together. That's a great book that I'm reading on Jason's recommendation. I'm sure a lot of listeners are reading it too. So that's mine anyways. It's so funny, Kirk, because my pairing is also a book by Stu Turton, the same author of The Seven and a Half Dets of Eminem Cosmo.

He's a kind of mechanical-minded writer, you know. Well, he's a big gamer. He did an article for, or like an interview with Eurogamer back in the day. Anyway, he wrote another book called The Devil in the Dark Water that is essentially the book version of Return of the Albert Dinn. And I think that's a really good pairing. Because I know a lot of our listeners, just like the three of us, are really into Return of the Overton.

You play that. You're in the mood for you. for more like nautical mysteries in the ancient times 200 or so years ago, go check out The Devil in the Dark Water, which is a great book. Also about a nautical mystery. Maddie, what's yours? Cool. Mine feels easy because I feel like I did it in real life,

although I can't remember if it lined up, but I'm going to go with Frankenstein and Dark Souls because Frankenstein, I did listen to the audiobook, and I think Dark Souls is a great audiobook game, just as an aside, because there's a lot of quiet repetition in Dark Souls. But also Frankenstein is about the nature of being human and being a self and who you are. And it's spooky and weird. And there's a lot of just long soliloquies in there.

And it just feels like a really good fit for what Dark Souls is bringing to the table philosophically. And yeah, so that's my pairing. Nice. That is a great pairing. Well, listeners, if you have any book game pairings that you want to share with us, write to triple click at maximum fun.org. And you can also send questions for our next burning question. Deep thoughts.

You also send us your deep thoughts. That's true for our next Beanscast. And yeah, that's it for now. So let's take a break. And then we'll be back for one more thing. One, two, one, six, three, three. Hi, everybody. My name is Justin McRoy.

I'm Sidney McRoy. We're both doctors. Nope, just me. Okay, well, Sydney's a doctor, and I'm a medical enthusiast, and we create sawbones, a marital tour of misguided medicine. Every week, I dig through the annals of medical history

to bring you the wildest, grossest, sometimes dumbest, tales of ways we've tried to treat people throughout history. Well, lately we do a lot of modern fake medicine because everything's a disaster, but it's slightly less of a disaster every Friday. Right here on maximum fun.org as we bring you sawbones and marital tour of misguided medicine. And remember, don't drill a hole in your head. Hey, it's John Moe. And look, these are challenging times for our mental and emotional health.

I get it. That's why I'm so excited for my new podcast, Depresh Mo. We're tackling depression, anxiety, trauma, stress, the kinds of things that are just super common but don't get talked about nearly enough. Conversations that are illuminating, honest, and sometimes pretty funny, with folks like Patton Oswald, Kelsey Dara, and Open Mike Eagle. I have his public facing self, and then I have my emotional self that tends to stay hidden. It was about finding a way to communicate to somebody that, like, there's terrible shit going on back here. Plus, psychiatrists, psychologists, and all kinds of folks. On Depress Mode, we're working together, learning, helping each other out.

We're a team. Join our team. Depression Mode for maximum fun, wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back for one more thing. Jason, what is your one more thing? Hello. Okay, my one more thing is the Great Ace Attorney, which is a new game in the Phoenix Wright series.

It is. So this summer, Capcom is releasing this compilation. It's two games, actually, the Great Ace Attorney and the Great Ace Attorney 2, which were both released in Japan for the 3DS a few years ago. This is a remaster on a bunch of consoles, including Switch, which is where I'm playing it. I got a really early code, which is awesome, because it's a humongous game since it's two of them. And I won't get too in depth because I'm not actually that far. I'm only two chapters in.

But it's awesome. It's really, really, really good so far. This is starring Phoenix Wright. Like, these are Phoenix Wright games. So this is a game, so this is a spin-off series that is set in at the turn of the 20th century. So it's in like, I believe it's 19th century, Japan and Great Britain. So it's like 100 years before the actual. And you play as his ancestor, Phoenix Ray's ancestor, who is this lawyer, this budding lawyer.

And you meet someone named Harlock Sholmes, who is a detective, a wild detective. You know what's so funny is I just watched the second half of Lupin. And Arsene Lupin, the French literary character, has a thing where he goes and, like, meets up with Sherlock Holmes, but they call him Hurlach Shomes. What? And they talk about it on the show. And I think that it was for like copyright reasons. Anyway, sorry, that's so random. This is the second time in like two days that someone has mentioned. It's a whole thing. No, it's a big, it's a big thing. It's like a whole thing. I won't get into the story. I won't get into the story. I won't continue. It's a copyright. It's a whole copyright. That's what I figured. That's really, that's so funny.

But anyway, the game's really cool. One thing that struck me playing this. I won't get into the story or anything like that. And I'll talk more about this down the road once I've finished it. One thing that strikes me is that, like, the Ace Attorney Games, as you both know, is very formulaic in that every single chapter starts with the murder. You investigate it. You go to court. It can play out in a lot of different ways, but there's always, it always unfolds in that sequence. In one chapter of the Great Ace Attorney, at least so far, there actually isn't any court sequence at all. And like you unfold, this mystery unfolds and you have to figure out what happened without actually going to court. And like the chapter ends without actually a court scene, which,

I think is pretty cool. So it's at least subverting the expectations you would have in at least a couple ways. Very high on it so far. Very excited to keep playing. Sure. Yeah. Great Ace Attorney. Very excited. But yeah, I'll talk about this more closer at least because it doesn't come out until late July.

Oh, nice. I'm excited for that game. Yeah, I could definitely play another Ace Attorney game. Yeah, maybe we should do a triple play. Maybe we should. Maddie, what's your one more thing? Okay, so I played a game called Sophie's Safecrack. Simulator, which is a game by indie developer Sophie Holden. I believe it's a solo effort. And she originally made it for Game Jam and then sort of fleshed it out, put it on Steam.

I think it's only $3. It's real cheap and so weird and awesome. So as the title suggests, it's not really a game at all. It is a very literal way to learn how to crack a safe. It is a simulation of cracking a. real safe using actual tools that somebody who's trying to open a lock would need to use. And the whole game is kind of just the tutorial that teaches you how to crack a safe. And then once you know how to crack a safe, the rest of the game is just you creating randomized versions of locks that you can crack and then timing yourself to see how quickly you can crack it.

So there's like a clock. And there are different tools you can use. Like you can use like a lock listening device to more accurate. accurately hear the pins and so forth and the turn of the wheel and know like just what the inner workings of the safe sound like because that's the only way you could possibly tell how big each of the little wheels inside the safe are, which is extremely important in order for you to figure out a combination to a lock. So I would say the only downside to this, well, there's a couple downsides. One of them is that there's only one kind of lock in the game, which is just because

it's a very simple game. You can randomize the combination and like how many levels the lock has. or like wheels inside of it. But it's basically like a locker combination lock. Like if you had a locker in high school growing up, at least you grew up in the States. I don't know if everybody has these. I'm assuming a universality that may not actually exist. But like a three number combination lock,

that's the kind of lock that's on this safe that you're cracking every time. And then the other downside is just the tutorial's incredibly dense. And I loved it, but you really have to sit there and read and also listen insanely closely to the, the lock. So I was like, this is not a podcast game. This is the opposite of a podcast game. I'm just sitting there in total silence with my headphones on like everything turned all the way up listening

to just the tiniest clicks and like fully focus on this lock. And I don't know. I felt like my brain grew a thousand sizes while I was learning how to play this game. And I had to like reread parts of the tutorial multiple times to be like, what? What is this? And then got it and was like, okay, because I was actually learning a new skill as opposed to, I mean, I guess I was playing a game. I don't know. Anyway, I really recommend it. It was cool. I feel like I learned something. And now I feel like I can crack a real lock, but I haven't tried it yet. So, yeah, I was going to say, are you going to go out and crack some safe style? Are you going to Maddie Myers bank robber? I could steal some high school textbooks, but I won't because that would be morally wrong.

Yeah, I was expecting you to say the first part is this tutorial where they teach you to crack a safe. The second part, you go and rob a bank. A bank that uses one of those number combination locks on all of its own. You put together a team. You find a demolitions expert. Right, right. Nice. That sounds really cool.

Oh yeah, I want to play that. It is cool. It is cool. Well, my one more thing is Mythic Quest, season two, which just wrapped up in which I just finished watching. This is an Apple TV Plus show that is about game development. It is good.

And I liked season two a lot. I thought it was a little scattered, I will say, as a season. It was a little bit more, well, the season one was scattered too. They're kind of starting to zoom in on some interesting stuff that's a little meatier than what season one was about. This show is made by Rob McElaney, is that how you say his name? And then Charlie Day and the rest of the Always Sunny folks. And it's about a game development studio that I think is in L.A. Are they supposed to be in L.A.?

They're on the West Coast somewhere. And they're making a game called Mythic Quest that's an MMO. it gets a little fast and loose with the game development and it's intercut with a lot of Ubisoft cutscenes which is always funny so I'll just I'm the worst when I watch with Emily I'll just be like it's Diablo actually they added Diablo

there was some Horizon Zero Don in season 2 I was like hey that's Horizon Zero Don intercut with Assassin's Creed and Diablo that's weird those are all different games but I'm like always saying out loud what the games are which is annoying I'm sure for someone who doesn't care but yeah I thought it was pretty good

the thing that I really liked about the season is that they're using Ashley Birch a whole lot. This is Ashley Burch who played Aloy in Horizon Zero Dawn. I wonder if that's why that featured in there. She plays one of the testers at the studio. She is, of course, came on Kotaku split screen back in the day. We know her a bit. She's really cool.

And it's really neat to see her, having known her from when she was making YouTube videos with her brother and being a goofball and hosting things at GDC and then gradually getting more into the entertainment world. She's really in this season a lot. so good. She's like so legitimately funny and great and she's also

a writer on the show and it's just cool to see that at every opportunity seemingly they're actually placing her with each of the main characters and having her be this like major sort of counterbalance to each of them and provide this other perspective and she's just like really good at reacting to people doing ridiculous

things in addition to being funny yourself. So that's my main takeaway is like rock on Ashley Birch and I hope that you become famous because of this and she's like she is now in movies and stuff because it's really cool see her, like, find the show and for them to realize what they've got in her. So, yeah, you watched it, right, Jason? My main takeaway was that the CW Long Bottom episode was incredible. I liked it. It was, it was paced a little funny. It was a two-parter this time, the flashback,

but I thought it was interesting. And I like that actor's voice, the guy who plays CW. Longbottom. Well, the flashback wasn't a two-parter. It was just a story, though. That's what I mean. Like, whereas in season one, the flashback episode was a standalone thing, This was actually directly concerned with what was actually happening with his character in the real world and with the game. And yeah, I like that format that they'll always kind of do one off format flashback episode each season. Well, so far they've both been banger. Yeah, they've been cool. And hopefully they're, I don't know if they picked it up yet for season three, but it's a cool show.

I'm sure they will. It's a popular show. Maddie, you'll love it when you watch it. Yeah, I just haven't gotten to it yet because Deanna and I are watching all of billions. My Second time. Nice. Oh, that's a good re-watch show. Because one, Kirk Hamilton hasn't ever seen billions.

The recurring theme of triple click is that the two of you are trying to get me to watch billions. Us forcing, no, it's really just all three of us each forcing one of the other thing to do something that they don't. To consume. Might not even have an issue with doing, but like, it just becomes a bit. Kirk, you should have, billions have such good politics. I'm convinced. I've always been convinced and I've always thought it sounds good. It's never like I'm being resistant.

It's just one of those things. You know what? I think you shouldn't watch it because of how. bad it is. And now that I'm rewatching it for the second time, I've realized how terrible it is. And you should never watch it. Anyway, that's not my one more thing. I have nothing to say. Next week, on triple click, my one more thing. I watch season one of billions. It's so good. It's so it'll happen one day. Just give it a try. I've been rewatching, my wife and I are still rewatching all of Seinfeld, by the way. We're up to the last season. Nice. What can you do?

It's always good to have one thing like that. It's still incredible. It holds up incredibly well. Well, some moments have not aged well, but the show as a whole holds up very well. That's comedy for you. All right, well, that's this episode in the bag. This was a lot of fun. Thanks everybody who wrote in. Again, if you want to send us a question. Remember all those bag stuff we said at the beginning? That was weird.

That's true. This episode is now in the bag as well. Thanks everyone who wrote in if you want to write us, triple click at maximum fun.org. I'll see the two of you next week. See ya. Bye. Triple click is produced by Jason Schreier,

Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at Maximumfund.org. Find us on Twitter at Triple ClickPod.

Send email the triple click at Maximumfund.org and find a link to our Discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximumfund.org. Comedy and culture. Artists owned. Audience supported.