Triple Click - What's The Deal With: DOOM

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

Kirk, Maddy, and Jason grab their chainsaws and get ready to slay some aliens (demons?) in DOOM: The Dark Ages, the latest game from id Software. They talk about the new DOOM's pros and cons, the lasting appeal of the franchise, and how fun it feels to hack apart aliens (demons?) at 400 miles per hour.One More Thing:Kirk: Cabaret (1972)Maddy: Survival of the Thickest (Netflix)Jason: Golden Idol Investigations: The Lemurian PhoenixLINKS:“Atlan Battleground” from the Doom: The Dark Ages soundtrack by Finishing MoveMick Gordon plays Doom music at the 2016 Game Awards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a9E3n_VZRQJason’s report on Doom 2016’s troubled development: https://kotaku.com/five-years-and-nothing-to-show-how-doom-4-got-off-trac-468097062Triple Click LIVE in Portland, July 11: https://albertarosetheatre.com/event/triple-click-live/alberta-rose-theatre/portland-oregon/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

I don't know about you, but I'm against all the evil that hell can conjure and all the wickedness that mankind can produce. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week we talk about Doom the Dark Ages, in which you shoot demons and punch demons and fling a buzzsaw shield around a battlefield at demons. I'm Maddie Myers. I'm Jason Trier. And I'm Kirk Hamilton. Hello, friends. Hello.

How nice to see you both. To my gaming friends. You guys want to hear a fun story? Yeah, I do. Actually. It's kind of fun, semi-fun. So I have a groundhog who's living either in my backyard, potentially under the house. We're not 100% sure.

And so. Caddyshecks situation. Exactly. Exactly. We're trying to play golf in the backyard and suddenly like, this groundhog just keeps interfering. And so I called this company that like will trap the groundhog for you and then go drive like 10 miles north and let it free. And I was like, great, I don't want to hurt this thing. I just want it

like to not cause damage on my property. And so they set up a cage and like put some apples and stuff inside the cage. And I was like, okay, great. And then yesterday I go and look at the cage. They're checking it every day, but I went and checked it during the day also. And there's a squirrel in it. And I'm like, oh my God, this is so sad. Like this little squirrel is like trying to escape this cage. And I call them. and they come over and they let the squirrel go and then they set up a cage again and then about half an hour later I go out and I look at it

and there's another friggin squirrel inside it and I'm just like this seems like an inefficient system for catching a ground dog if you just wind up with a squirrel at it every hour. Yeah there's a lot of squirrels. Unfortunately a groundhog trap really works well as a squirrel trap. Yes so now I have a squirrel trap in my backyard

which I do not want and so clearly I need to put a big sign on it that is like no squirrels. Like really Elmer Fudd's style where you're like, listen. You have to write in squirrel language warning this is a trap. So the groundhogs won't be able to read it and they won't know what it is. Exactly. The squirrels will know and then they won't get in.

I wonder if it was the same scroll both times, Jason. Because that also is peak squirrel behavior. Associates that area with apples and delicious food. And also the squirrel's like, I got out of this. So this was actually fine for me. I went in, I got some food and then later somebody came and let me out. I'm going to go back in there. Exactly.

You're training a squirrel right now. Exactly. They need to drive a squirrel like 10 miles north and dump it off somewhere. You know what, Jason, I'm going to trust your genius brain to somehow figure this out. And why do I say that? Because we recently recorded. Well, no, the segue is if you want me able to afford to keep setting drops for crowd eyes. This is another good one.

I like where you're going with it, Maddie. They're both good. They're both good. They're both good. We recently recorded a Beanscast on Blueprints for our bonus feed, which of course, you can only get if you go to Maximumfund.org slash join and you become a supporter of our wonderful ad-free show on the wonderful Maximum Fun Network, whom we love. And you know what? It was a fun, beans cast. It was great.

Yeah. Great stuff. Fun to hear some puzzle spoilers and also talk about the story of this game. and, you know, what really happened in it, piece together our political theories. If that sounds fun to you, maybe you want to hear about that. Once again, Maximumfund.org slash join. But hey, even if you aren't done playing blueprints and you don't want to listen to that one, there are tons and tons and tons of other ones in the backlog that you will also enjoy very much.

We did a severance beans cast where we spilled the beans about seasons one and two. We're going to do an and or one soon. that's inevitable. I know we did a season one andor beans. That's way back there if you crawl back in the backlog. So that'll come down the pike. Next month. I mean, we could just say we're going to go on. When do you think we would do it? It would be next month. That would be only logical. Coming right up.

And also coming right up, although not next month, but the following one is a live show. We are going to Kirk's home base. We're going to Portland, Oregon. And on July 11th at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland, we are going to do a live show. There's a link in the show notes, so you should get a ticket so that we know whether or not you're coming. And also so that you have your ticket safely secured. You don't want to miss this. We're going to play multiple songs.

It's going to be great. We made a decision. It's going to be a real extravaganza. We might be a band now. I don't know. We'll also do a podcast while we're there. This isn't just us deciding. we're a rock band, but it might be. It might also be that. So you don't want to miss this.

So yeah, definitely get your tickets to that. Okay. Kirk, what are we talking about today? Once again, I almost forgot who to throw to, but it's Kirk this time. Kirk, what are we talking about? It is. We're talking about Doom, baby. Yeah. We are talking about Doom the Dark Ages, the new Doom game. We are talking about Doom in general, going back all the way to to 1993 when that series began. And yeah, we're just going to talk about Doom and what's the deal with Doom. I think this is a very important and interesting game series. It has had a couple of different eras, each of which have interesting things to say about

the games industry and the video games we were playing at the time that they were coming out. And there's also a new one that's pretty darn fun. So that's what we're going to be talking about on this episode. Can I just say I'm very excited for this episode because Doom is like a complete. blind spot for me. I have zero interest in these games. Do not enjoy a second of them. And I'm very excited to hear from you two, like, what you, what YouTube both really enjoy about them. Is it a blind spot? If you don't like it and don't care about it. Is that still a blind spot? Yeah, I guess that. Blind spot is the wrong word. No, blind spot is the wrong word. It's just like not, it's like totally out of my wheelhouse is

the right way to phrase it. Yeah, but it's still like an intellectual curiosity for you where you're like, that's interesting. Like national geographic style. What's with these gamers who enjoy? I like hearing you two talk about things you're excited about. And like, I would love to leave this episode being like, okay, I see the appeal of Doom. So I'm very excited to hear from you, too, about it. I think we can try. It's also such an important and formative games industry story. I mean, the creation of Doom is one of those video game legends, you know,

Carmack and Romero getting together to a couple of other people. But we mostly talk about those two guys to make this crazy game, you know, just some kids who changed the world. And then, you know, the series has always kind of been synonymous with video games for better and for worse. I mean, it was so controversial in the 90s. It was seen as this ultra-violent, corrupting force. And then it kind of went away for a while and then it came back. But let's start just talking about the Dark Ages.

Maddie, you made this year one more thing last week, and I've been playing a bunch since then. So maybe I'll start with some impressions. Yeah, tell me what you think about it. And then throw to you. Yeah. I think this game is really fun. fun. It's a very funny game in that it, in funny strange. It's an unusual game. I would say it's funny, ha ha, and funny strange. It is occasionally if it's very straight-faced, but it is still

somewhat funny. I don't know that it's trying to be, but I'm laughing at it. No. No, I think this series has started taking itself more and more seriously with each subsequent entry. By this series, I mean starting with 2016's Doom and then Doom Eternal and now Doom the Dark Ages. to explain what the Dark Ages is. So it's the third in the modern Doom trilogy, though it is actually a prequel to 2016's Doom. And Doom, you know, originally came out in 1993, and then there was a run of Doom games, Doom,

and then Doom 2 just a year later in 94, arguably the definitive Doom, I think anyways. Having played both of those games fairly recently, Doom 2 is pretty incredible. Then there was a long run in the 90s where just a lot of variants and expansions of Doom came out, because it was pretty easy to just crank out levels. And then, after a whole lot of hype, in 2004, Doom 3 came out, notably the same year as Half-Life 2.

And it was kind of a weird game, like a survival horror game. It was very flawed. It was kind of the beginning of the end for that whole era of game design and of I'd for that era, and also for that style of game. So then many years pass, and they announced Doom, which was... what eventually became Doom 2016, I believe in 2008. So they announced it not that long after Doom 3, but it was then in development hell forever.

It was, I believe, rebooted several times. No one knew what it was going to be. Yeah, I wrote a big story about that at Kataku, actually. Okay, maybe you can relay that right now. What was the story? I admit this was in 2013. And you don't remember it? I have not reread it recently, but I do remember that it was like,

it was rebooted to be more, It was more of a sequel to Doom 3. I think they were trying to recreate Doom 2 in some ways, and then they totally rebooted it and then wound up with the game. But they changed directors a bunch of times. Yeah, it was just a long saga of technical and design woes. Yeah. We'll link the article in the show notes.

Yeah, we'll link the article in the show notes. The gist is that it was really in development hell for a long time. I remember thinking it was going to be terrible and expecting nothing from it when it came out. And when it did come out, it was co-directed by Hugo Martin, who then was the director on, has been the director on all three of these games. And it crushed. It was this incredible game. It had an unbelievable soundtrack from an Australian composer, Mick Gordon.

It rocked so hard. It was irreverent and fast and funny and ridiculous. It was this just huge, stupid story of this basically demi-god called the Doom Slayer, who looks a little bit like the playable character from the original Doom games. is not Doom guy, he's more of this like huge hulking monster, and you just get all of the same guns from Doom, the chain gun, the shotgun, the super shotgun, the chainsaw, and just carve your way through the forces of hell. You run incredibly fast, the game never slows down, and it played quite a bit like those original Doom games, and it was this shocking revelation, I think, for a lot of people anyways, it certainly was for me, that this style of game, now known as the

boomer shooter, was actually really fun and was a viable alternative. to a cover-based shooter like Uncharted or a more thinky, you know, set-piece-based shooter like a Half-Life 2. And so it kind of revitalized that whole genre and shocked a lot of people with how great it was. Then came Doom Eternal, which was in 2020, a significantly different game from Doom. Still fast-moving, still a lot of the same enemies, the same style. But pretty different in its design. It was like a much more rigid game.

It required a lot of complex combos. I didn't love it as much, mostly because I just never pushed myself to become fluent in it. And I think that people who did really love it. I think it's a very well-designed game and well-regarded among people who dig it. So that brings us to Doom the Dark Ages, which is a prequel narratively to Doom 2016. It tells the story of the Doom Slayer in this kind of Warhammer 40K setting. It's like the Dark Ages, but also everybody has spaceships and like laser guns kind of. And so, you know, it's, it is not exactly like medieval doom.

No. There's a lot of technology. Yeah, like there's castles, but people also have, like, iPad tablets and stuff and, like, kind of technology-ish. And there's, like, kind of big hulking, dragony guys and guys of horns and all that stuff. You know, like classic medieval folklore that we're all familiar with. All that stuff happened. Right. Right.

It's a little bit Thor and a little bit 40K. Yeah. And it feels kind of comic booky and very. pulpy and silly. And you are swinging a mace and you have a shield. And you are once again crushing the forces of hell this time as a prequel to set up Doom 2016. So that's what the game is. It's a first-person shooter where you fly around the battlefield. Once again, as heavy metal music plays, Mick Gordon did not do the soundtrack to this one. He had a fairly high profile falling out with Bethesda. He alleged all kinds of mistreatment over what happened with Doom Eternal. And it's

really unfortunate because the music is fine for this one, but Mick Gorton's music was something special. But even so, there's still heavy metal guitar playing. You're still ripping and tearing, and it's still a very fun game. So that's what it is. I've been talking for a while, but I'll just say, I guess, Maddie, I want to hear a little more of your thoughts on it since I'm assuming you've played some more. I think the game is super fun. There's some weird things about it that we can get into, but I'm curious if you've been able to play some more. Yeah, a little bit. I still do think it's super fun. I got to agree, there's sort of like a general consensus that, that of what I had said before, because I'm always right about everything and everybody agrees with me,

which is that the pairing is actually super fun, having that shield, which is like that kind of buzzsaw style shield that I described last time. But if this is your first ever episode, it's like a Captain America's shield, except it's a buzzsaw. You just fling it around the battlefield. There's multiple mechanics that kind of orient around that. One of them is like the shield push where you're like going along with the shield, like zipping across the battlefield towards somebody and pushing them or just using it to stun them. them both amazing. That sense of like connecting different moves together and using the shield all feels great. Almost everything else in the game, like every now and then there's like these

huge battles with a Titan guy or you have to like stand behind like one of those, why can I not remember the name of an automatic rifle? A turret. A turret. I'm just kind of like those, that stuff isn't really what I want to be doing. But that's me personally. I did kind of notice other people saying that and being like, yeah, the pairing and the shield is really fun, all the other gimmicks that they try to introduce not as much. But that's okay with me, because I can just ignore those and then get back to the part of the game that I like. And I'm also continuing to skip all the cutscenes.

But I'm curious what you think about them, Kirk. Yeah, so I think the basic gameplay, the run-and-gun gameplay, is exceptionally fun. Agree that the shield is super fun. And it's not a defensive weapon, which is an important thing to keep. in mind. It's a shield, big air quotes. You can block and parry attacks and parrying is a really fun part of the game anytime there's a green projectile coming at you. If you block it at the right time, you'll send it back from once it came, which is a really fun mechanic. Yeah, and like, hopefully the demon spawn have labeled all those attacks as bright green. So that's the way that you know

you can parry them and shoot it back at them. Yeah, very nice. Doom is unabashedly video games. So color-coded. We can get into it. I mean, this is also a game where the Doom Slayer is collecting little miniature toys of himself. I know. We can get into that when we talk about Doom 1993, which I did go back and start replaying last night on your advice. And I was like, wow, this game is really reminding me of Doom the Dark Ages in a good way.

Yeah. Like you're just... It's fun. Everything's color-coded. Yeah. It's remarkable how well it holds up. Yeah. And how true they stayed to those original games.

Yeah. But yeah, I think the shield charge, which you alluded to, where you hold down the block button and then an enemy becomes highlighted and then you zoom across the battlefield and smash into them is incredibly cool. I mean, it is the blink of this game. This is the most mobility I think I've ever felt in a Doom game. I played quite a bit of Eternal and never felt that mobile. There was never a move where you could like grappling hook your way across the entire battlefield. I love that kind of move.

And it really underlines something that is so fun about this game, which is the sense of weight and mass that you have. I guess maybe those are the same thing. Just the heaviness of the doomslayer. When you jump from a high height and land on the ground, this shockwave goes out for you. Sometimes you'll land next to dudes and they just all blow up into goo because the force of your landing. Or when you do that shield like bash across the field, you'll hit a small goon and a whole bunch of enemies around you will be eviscerated in the shockwave. You feel like you weigh 5,000 pounds. It's very effective.

crashing around. Honestly, this is something that I've always felt is missing from Halo games. The feeling that Master Chief is this huge, heavy dude, because a Spartan is, right? In Halo?

Yeah, they're tall. They're super tall. They kind of show you that in the wide shots where he's towering over all the kind of regular humans that he comes across. And they, they, like, barrel around the battlefield and they're these huge, you know, unstoppable almost like a human tank.

But in the game, they always feel kind of bouncy and light, especially in the earlier Halo games. This finally feels like, When you run, it's like you're this giant dude and you can just hear like, boom, boom, boom, with his footsteps. And then he jumps and you don't, I don't have a double jump yet, but my single jump sends me like 100 feet into the air.

Yeah, and then you land and these shockwaves go out. That feeling of weight and power is so much fun. And then combining that with the shield and just the enhanced mobility, it's a really, really good time. Yeah, totally agree. Can't help but notice you didn't mention the story at all, though. Are you also not viving with that? I don't really care.

I feel like you've played more of these than I have. So am I missing something? Like, is this like a scenario where if I played all the intervening doom games, I'd be like, wow, it's so crazy that the doom slayer's like being brainwashed by a religious cult in this one. And they're like making him do stuff. That's the plot, right? I think it is. Well, the makers or is this one sort of like alien race?

I don't really know. I mean, no, I have never paid close attention to the story of these. And like I said, I didn't finish eternal. Yep. They did all have a story. And there's kind of a memory of, there's a moment early in Doom 2016 where the radio is, is like squawking and the Doom Slayer walks over to it and picks it up. And the guy on the radio who's the voice on the, you know, the Quest Giver, he says,

hey, I'm going to need you to do something. And the Doom Slaher just punches the radio. And then he keeps playing. And it's a great moment, but it's not actually indicative of that game's approach to story. It'd be very cool if the whole story was that way. And there was a story happening, but the Doom Slayer just didn't care. Yeah. And while that's sort of true, he does keep getting kind of roped into doing things for these characters.

And there is this whole story that I never cared about. I just wanted to blow up demons. And then Eternal doubles that. And there's way more story in Eternal to the point where there's like, I mean, there's an opening text crawl in Doom the Dark Angels, which is like not the kind of game that needs an opening text crawl. It's like, so, yeah, I mean, I don't care about the story. But also it's fine. I mean, I'm fighting through a siege right now. and the setup for the siege makes sense.

There's some artifact that my guys have, and there's this demon army, and they're trying to get it, and the doomslayer is temporarily on loan to them from these other creepy dudes in space. And of course, the doomslayer keeps trying to break free, and I know that's going to play into the story, and whatever, it's pretty dumb.

I appreciate that they just kind of drop you into the middle of it and don't tell you too much, and you just kind of get to go start killing stuff. Like they spend a little while on cut scenes, but it never has not over, overstayed it's welcome. It's not weighing me down. It's not weighing me down at all. And nothing can because I'm the doomslayer. Yeah, I totally agree. And I also feel like the moment when they could have introduced a story and didn't in that way is 2016 based on your timeline. Like, that was when

they could have had what Jason might call their Wulfenstein moment where we were talking last week about how the Welfenstein games, also long-running decades-old series. But it has an actual story now. They've really tried. And that's cool. That's like something I think is pretty cool about those games. Doom maybe could have done that with 2016 and just been like, it's still going to be a boomer shooter, but we're going to actually try to have the Doom Slayer be a person and have motivations. But instead, they did something that I really appreciate, which is just lean into the 1993 of it all, but just turn all the other dials way up where it's like, okay, it's also going to be like super high resolution, high tech, everything's going to look great, everything's going to feel

great. It's also going to have a camera that can actually move. And like, that's going to make the entire game feel differently than 1993 for obvious reasons. Oh, you mean like a camera that can go up and down? Yes, yes, exactly. It has free look. But we aren't going to take away the fact that the whole reason why you're here is to punch demons. Well, shoot them, whatever. Or that your run speed is 150 miles an hour.

Exactly. Yeah. But some of that is just like this very pure mechanical thrill that I feel like is, I mean, this is why like Years of War. There's a story, and I actually kind of enjoy. the story of those games, but that's not really the point. The point is that you have a chainsaw gun and it feels really great and it like vibrates and it like has a certain set of sensations where you're like, yeah, I feel like I'm really there. And this to me, I'm like, why wasn't I playing these all along? I don't know what I was doing with my life. They're of fun. I mean, if you like this one,

I would recommend especially playing 2016. 2016 is still my favorite. This game is pretty similar to it and I think it's fun in the same way where it's chaotic and improvisational. I love, the new focus on melee attacks in this game? When you're going toe to toe with a big motherfucker. Okay, can we explain that a little? Because it's so fun. Go ahead. Do you want to try to explain? No, all you. You do.

Yeah. So basically, as you parry, you're stacking up charges for a melee attack, and you want to get three. And once you get all three, you can do a melee attack on a really big guy. So, like, normally with those big guys, obviously you're not going to be able to take him down in one hit. Like, there's a lot of, like, little guys that Kirk was describing. you can just splat them in various comical scenarios. There's some medium guys.

There's some medium guys. Listen, these characters may have names. Those don't matter. A big guy. What if it was like the last of us too? And all of them were just like, oh no, you killed Steve. That would actually be incredibly funny if they just did that where all of them were like shouting each other's names. You killed Sacklore.

They should do that in the next one. And then the Doom guy should. punch them in the face. So the way the melee works once you have all three charges is, it's almost kind of like, uh, you know, that slow mo Batman, Arkham Asylum kind of a thing. The Arkham game is where you're like, you have to time the attack in a certain way, but you only really have to learn that one time to attack. It's not like it's going to get really complex over time. You just kind of do like a slow mo like punch, punch, punch. And it just feels so good. And like for me, I'm like, oh sweet, I've charged up my, it's your reward for parrying is that you have all these

melee charges and you're like, finally, I can smash across the field and use up my full trio to do the punch, punch, punch, and kill the guy. I don't know. It rules. It's the best feeling of the world. Yeah, it's very satisfying. And it's a, it's kind of a stand-in for the chainsaw since the shield kind of works like a chainsaw and there are some, you know, times where you'll cut a demon's head off. But in Doom 2016, your chainsaw is kind of how you get. get ammo back, and that's definitely how the game, how Eternal works. There's this whole weird thing where you have to set enemies on fire. I'm going to forget all the particulars, but if you want to replenish your health, you have to

kill one way. If you want to replenish your armor, you do another, and if you want to get ammo, you do a third way. You have this chainsaw, this is in 2016. You have a chainsaw with limited fuel, but when you chainsaw an enemy, it gets you ammo back. So when you run out of ammo, you pull out your chainsaw and do like this gnarly chainsaw kill. Yeah, and it's all kind of designed around this, like, you're kind of. constantly managing your different levels of your armor and your health and your ammo.

And you have to be thinking like really strategically about what you're doing. And then that was pushed to a much higher level and Eternal, which is something that people who got into it really liked and that I kind of found was too much management. I just want to run around and kill stuff. So I'm finding that Eternal has a good amount of that where I'm kind of thinking about my melee charges, but also I'm using the mace now. Like I just have this huge mace that I just smash into enemies' faces. And I'll just, you know, I'm using the super shotgun almost exclusively because it's so freaking good.

Oh, yeah. It's very good. And so I'll have that thing. And then I've got my shield bash and then I've got my melee. And between those three things, it's just, I'm kind of just this wrecking ball flying around the battlefield. You know, I mean, it's a really good balance. And I think about what I'm doing a little bit, but mostly I'm just kind of in the moment, especially when things heat up toward the end of one of those intense encounters. And it's very fun.

Do you guys feel, okay, so in this game specifically, is there, like, is there a challenge to it? Do you feel like you're slowly getting better at the game? What is kind of, is there an appeal beyond just kind of like watching aliens' heads explode into goo and using... Well, they're demons, not aliens. Yeah. So, first of start, just be clear with the type of video game enemy we're dealing with. It's so different.

They might be alien demons. They might be. They might be. I do feel like getting better is absolutely part of it. And I feel like there's much more of a rhythm-based. component to this game to as compared to like, okay, I actually feel like there's a rhythm-based component to like a from software game as well. But it's a very slow balletic rhythm. All video games have a rhythm. And I know how pretentious I sound by using the word balletic.

No way, man. All video games are musical and have a rhythm. They're just all different. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, it's very methodical in Dark Souls. You're kind of like watching the enemy's attack and you really have time to respond. In Doom, it's much more fluid because it's so movement based that it's almost like you never want to stop moving. And if you stop, then the game just starts feeling bad, at least for me, where it's like, okay, I've miscounted like my health packs or something and I need to like stop and go back. Like, that's what I never want to have happen. So instead, I'm constantly like looking around the room everywhere and being like, okay, so there's some items over there. But there's also these enemies over here. I can probably get those as I pick up those guys.

How fast can I make it through this entire room and clean up every single item I want to get? It's almost like connecting the dots across the room, or at least that's how I'm kind of looking at it, is both a rhythm and a spatial awareness. Puzzle, I don't know if you feel that way, Kirk. No, sure. Well, so some of the encounters that come later in the game are a little bit more designed. So, for example, there's a boss that is fully shielded. And you have to lower the morale of the boss until its shield goes to. down, meaning you have to kill all the demons around it.

Oh. So, unfortunately, no, you don't, you don't insult it. You don't like, yelling it and like, you don't learn its backstory. And your mom doesn't even think you're that cool. She just feels bad for you. You tell it it's getting sold to another company and all of its colleagues are going to laid off. All of these other demons are going to get laid off.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then its morale just bottoms out. No, you just kill the demons. And then, but it is, you do have to then approach the fight in a different way. And usually the leader is always like a boss or one of the kind of sub-bosses. It feels like Diablo, honestly. Especially this game feels to me a lot like,

a lot like Diablo. Yeah. Where just you'll run into an encounter and you'll be up against some interesting sort of mix of enemy types where you can't just plow your way through. Without the lute of it all. Without the chase of, because that's the appeal to a lot of people.

Well, there's loot. You're not picking up, you're not picking up randomly dropped, like, upgraded weapons. But there is a gold. with an upgrade system. So you're exploring the map. And actually, map exploration is really fun in all of these games. The maps are really well designed. There's a ton of hidden secrets that's very true to the original Doom. You'll find a secret key that'll open up a secret door. And then that door gets you a collectible or a currency to pay for upgrades. So there's a lot of kind of exploration. To the point that Doom 2016 felt a little Metroidvania-ish to me at times because I was using the new double jump that I could use to do some, you know, clear some jump that I couldn't do before to reach some item. But, yeah, there is kind of an interesting design layer on top of just run around, don't die, and kill everything. That said, I think this game is easier than Eternal.

It's certainly easier for me, and it's a much less technical game. I think if people who are really into just fast-moving, incredibly technical, difficult shooters, I think get a lot out of Eternal. And that's the one of this trilogy that's probably the most that way, especially if you play on the higher difficulties. And Eternal and 2016 also have these, I think they're really. called master mode or something like that. There are these new difficulty levels that you can do and modifiers that make the game super crazy. And there are people who get really, really into this stuff,

and I think get a whole lot out of it. Some of that hasn't been added to the Dark Ages yet or might not be in the game. I'm sure it'll come, though, right? It seems likely, yeah, especially given that this is a full-priced game. I think this gave us $70 and there's no multiplayer and it's kind of just a campaign, which is pretty expensive for a game

that doesn't seem to have some of the features that the earlier games have. I've definitely seen some people complaining about that. and I get it even though I have a good time just playing through the story. I also didn't pay $70 for this game, so if I had, I think I maybe would want a little more. Yeah, I

didn't either. Well, Microsoft is hiking their prices up to 80, so really this is a budget game. Great point. And it's the like get everybody on to Xbox Game Pass, right? So then you can play it that way. It's true. It's also a game pass game, so that is a cheaper way to play it. Well, they're just trying to motivate people most likely over there if they're not willing to pay full

price. Right. Why would anyone, and pay $70 and you could just pay $10 for a month or $15, whatever it is now for a month, and just play it. I'm sure there are reasons, but I believe that Microsoft would like people to at least be asking themselves that question at least seems likely. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Do we want to talk about the 1993 game at all? Because Kirk, I want to hear about you saying you remembered every single secret. I definitely did not, but I did have a really good time going back and playing it. And it did unlock some elementary school memories in me.

Yeah, I've told this story many times on the show, but that I loved Doom, and it was one of the first video games I got really into when it was first out on shareware, and that was a big thing that Doom helped popularize, was the idea of shareware, where they made a demo of the game, which I think was maybe the first 10 levels or something, was totally free, and it just didn't care. They just gave it to people and said, whatever, it's shareware, copy it around, it was on a floppy disk, you know, just anyone who wants to can play it. So I got a copy of it off some BBS or something in 1993 or four, probably 1993, like right when it was pretty new, because I had played Wolfenstein 3D before that, which was their previous game. So I was playing this. I would sneak

up at like four in the morning. I would get up quietly and go play it on my dad's laptop computer, clandestinely, because it was so violent and because I knew I wasn't really supposed to be playing it. Yep. And, but I was so into it just because of the way it looked, the way it moved. I mean, for the time, it was just so groundbreaking. The thing I was struck by going back and playing it yesterday was how fun it still is. It's a great shooter. It really reminds me of Mario in that way. It's actually still really fun. I know. It's the thing where you play Super Mario Bros. And you're like, wow, this is still a really well-designed good platformer for all the advances that have happened in the intervening decades. And going back and playing Doom

feels the same way. I'm like, dude, this is a fun game. And Doom 2 is even more fun because it just dials everything up and there's way more enemies and better weapons and it's just much more exciting. But it's a good game. I mean, yeah, it holds up and I was surprised by that. I really agree. And I also really enjoyed playing it as an adult because I remembered thinking it was really scary as a kid. And I feel like any time you go back and revisit something that you thought was scary when you were a kid, it's like the funniest shit ever. And that also was my experience here where I was like, I guess it's a little scary. Like the parts where the lights are out and you can't see where the guys are.

I mean, I get it. It was kind of scary if you're a child at 1993, certainly. But if you're being now, oh, there's also invisible enemies. I mean, those concepts were really cool and scary to me then. And now it's like, well, yeah, sure, like a semi-invisible enemy. Everyone's done that by now. But I agree, like the mentoroid vany of it all I'd kind of forgotten about, like walking around, finding keys and being and finding like little extra rooms and unlocking the entirety of the map. That's stuff that my adult brain finds really fun.

Yeah, and the way the secrets are hidden is really pleasing. And kind of true to that time period, I guess. Like Nintendo games do the same thing, where there are these weird hidden secrets in Super Mario world that you can only find if you have a certain upgrade and do a certain thing. And the secrets tend to be stranger and kind of more deeply buried. Yeah, yeah. And I also was, I'd somehow forgotten even though, of course, there's no free aim back then. That was something that was introduced later.

but I was kind of looking into it and I was like well surely people have created mods for this where you can look anywhere in the game and it's just like a regular first person shooter and I found some really interesting threads of people talking about how although those mods exist they'd never use them because the game feels really bad apparently I didn't try it but I completely believe it

because since you can't move the reticle up and down you can only move it side to side you, there are a lot of like height based puzzles as a result, like switches that you can only hit if you like reach a certain area. And if you can hit them at any time, the game becomes trivial. And also like there are enemies and boss fights that are designed around the fact that you can't move the reticle. So you have to use either an elevator or some other tool in order to get around it. And I just was like, oh, that's that's so cool. Like to like use this limitation and design an entire game around it.

I just, I don't know, it made me both want to try breaking the game and doing that just to see how bad it feels, but also it made me kind of grateful for the game being exactly what it is and being like a fun game despite its extreme limitation in aiming. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, it is designed to work the way that it works and it works pretty well. And when I played it, you know, the way that you would play these games was moving with the arrow keys and then shooting with the control on the left side. Yeah. Like that was shoot. And now when I play the new version that it had re-released at some point on Steam, you play with a mouse. And I think you could play with a mouse even at the time, but that was just not done.

Like mouse look wasn't a thing in 1993. So using the mouse to just turn horizontally works fine, but it's not necessary. You can just use the, you can just use like the alt key to strafe and, you know, and move with the arrow keys, which was how a lot of those early first-person shooters worked. And it works fine. Yeah, they designed the game to work that way, so it's still totally playable that way. Yeah. Do you think that at any point in developing the new trilogy of Dooms, they were like, should we make it so the Doom guy doesn't just pick up a copy of his itself everywhere he goes and like a copy of his armor? Like, do you think? It's funny. I wonder where all, like, I would love to have been in the room. It's exactly the same. It's exactly the same. I think that they were really smart about sticking to so many of the design ideas from the original series. Just because it was such a breath of fresh air in 2016. We had been, you know, we were coming off a decade of...

Right, like it's retro. Yeah, it's so retro. It's so proud to just be silly and ridiculous. You know, you're going to play this guy who runs at 100 miles an hour, who also then slows down to solve puzzles in the environment. And then the reward for the puzzle is like a little caco demon stuffy that he kind of like pokes with his finger for a second after finding it. Or just that at the end of every level, there's a total upscreen that's like,

you got this much gold and this much like, whatever. You know, you got this person. set of completion. It's incredibly video gaming and they were wise to lean into that, especially in hindsight because the game was such a success. I mean, people just hadn't really seen that. It felt it felt really new even though it was actually old. Yeah. I just respect the commitment to just sticking with that, I guess, through all three trilogy games because Dark Ages is the only one that I'm like really trying with. And just the fact that every single thing and it feels like it should be in a game from the 90s is really charming to me. Yeah.

And you mentioned the vehicle segments when you get into a big Pacific Rimmec and have a big fight or you fly around in like a crimson dragon. The gimmicks. Yeah. Those don't really work very well. And they do feel very mid-2000s where it's like, oh, let's put in a vehicle segment for no real reason. And, you know, the minute you're, within a minute I'm doing them, I'm like, okay, all right, I guess I get how the dragon works. And all right. And I'm flying around.

And then I get off the dragon and I start fighting on ground. I'm like, oh, right. This is 500 times more fun. like when I'm doing this and they really should have just stuck with it. So in that way it does feel kind of like a throwback. I appreciate that it's something different though. I think it's actually a cool thing about this trilogy

that all three of the games are similar in some ways. Tonally, they look the same. They're on the same engine. They move kind of the same. But they're all designed pretty differently. And that's kind of cool. They're all fun and the same kind of player

will probably at least enjoy all three of them. But they are all different. And that's kind of a neat and very, it feels like a very, decision, especially given that they had the same director for all three games. They also have the benefit of the satanic panic just feeling kind of laughable now in a way that I think it kind of probably didn't in the 90s. I mean, I think we talked about this a little bit in our, what's the deal with Diablo episode way back when where like a lot of that game's

fun, goofy spirit, it's like all the pentacles and like the fonts and like just the Diablo of it all. And like that's all really on display here too. But it's like, feels like funny and charming now, whereas I feel like in the 90s, in early 2000s, it was like worrying that video games would be leaning into this imagery. And it was like something that was like, should they even be allowed to do that? It's what makes them elicit. It's what makes Kirk sneak down in the middle of the night and play it when no one knows. You know, it's interesting that we mentioned Wolfenstein. And so the two villains in Doom and Wolfenstein are demons and Nazis. Yes. And demons and the occult are seen as it's kind of silly now.

and they leaned into the silliness of it, Nazis aren't so silly. And Wolfenstein kind of really benefited by taking Nazis very seriously. Yeah. And it kind of goes to show those two, there were two very common video game enemies, but they benefited from a very different treatment in a modern video game. Yeah, that's a good point. I guess it's kind of hard to like take demons seriously as a threat. Well, also demons haven't taken over our country.

Yeah, exactly. Like, what's the version of the game that does that? Buffy the Vampires Slayer. Right, that's true. You could do the Buffy version where it's like the demons are actually a metaphor for trauma. And that would be the worst thing ever. That's true, but the demons and Buffy are very silly most of the time. Also, the demons just make everybody act out a musical or whatever.

That is true. That is true. They do have some funny episodes of Buffy. But they also like lean into the metaphor of it all sometimes in the way that like a modern horror movie does. I'm glad Doom didn't do that. No, and I'm glad. I'm just glad that Doom has had such a resurgence. It was such a surprising thing.

I really do remember being certain that that 2016 game was going to be bad, just because I just assumed it would be. I thought it would just sort of be a weird, forgettable thing. And then it was just so shockingly good. And then has led to this just long resurgence of this series. I don't know. It's nice to see. Doom is at once synonymous with video games,

even while kind of, I don't know, like resisting any, anything in the rest of the culture. We were talking before we got on the air about the Doom movie, the one with the rock. There was another one in 2019. It was like a straight-to-video doom movie. I don't think I even knew that happened by the way. I maybe heard something about it,

but was basically unaware of it. There was a Doom movie in 2019. Oh, Doom Annihilation. Wow. Yep, Doom Annihilation. Did it have the rock in it? No, it did not. I've seen the Doom with the Rock in it.

How was it? earlier a movie. What was that 2005? The 2005 movie? Oh, it's incredibly bad. It's a very weird production where it was like a sort of multinational production across a couple of different studios. I can't remember the deal

exactly, but it was like when the rock was not yet the rock where he was going to be in the biggest movies ever. He was not yet cooking, if you will. He was starting to cook. Guys, guess how much money Doom Annihilation made on

on Blu-ray and DVD. I'm going to say $700,000. Maddie, get a guess? $460,000. $78,000. Wow. Wow, it was up by a factor of 10. I overestimated.

Yeah, so, yeah, the first Dume movie is terrible. It does have a first-person shooter sequence with the end. That's all I really remember about it. I remember them putting that in the marketing where they were like, we're going to put the gun. The rock grabs a gun and the camera goes behind the gun and then it looks like Doom for a second. But it just reminds you basically of... I could be playing Doom right now.

Doom is something that you play. You don't want to watch the Rock's gun move around. You want to play Doom. And so it is very much video games. It is. It is. And I feel like other video game adaptations. Like we're in the modern era now where like all the headlines are including my own. I'm including myself in this.

They're like, oh, video game adaptations are good now. And like here's how they're pulling it off. And like they're taking these elements of games that really work in other mediums and adapting them. But Doom is like such a. gamey video game. It really is. It's like, what are you trying to do? It's like trying to do a film adaptation of Twister or something.

It's like, what do you do? Yeah, it's so tonally ridiculous. It's so maxed out. The volume is just peaked. And it's like this just electric guitar solo for the entire time. And that just doesn't really lend itself to an adaptation. Doom in concert. That would be good.

It could be a concert. I would think it kind of is. a concert already, especially those earlier games, where if you look at, yeah, like, Wolfenstein, the new Wolfenstein games could be adapted into a TV show for sure because they lean into the whole dramatic angle because it kind of works. Like that kind of a story, that kind of a story doesn't work here. I mean, I could see maybe like an animated Netflix series. This is why I like the Wolfensine games and don't like Doom. I get it, Jason. But I also would say, Jason, you don't want Doom to have a story. Like, I would say, like, if it had a story, maybe you would like it, but there's

no world where it would. No, there are just some games that I just accept. They're not for me and all, like, blessed me to those people who like it. It's just not for me. Yeah, no, I totally go. But I do like Wolfenstein and other shooters that do other kind of interesting things beyond just the basic shooting mechanics and the really goody of it all. Well, and then, like, Wolfenstein, those modern games also, not only have they embraced the story

and they have great writing and machine games is good at that kind of thing, but they are also borderline immersive sims. They have stealth segments. They have lots of gameplay variety. Where Doom just does not, gameplay variety is not what they're about here. And as we have said, the variety in the Dark Ages

is kind of the weak point of the game. It's really when they're doing the one thing, the electric guitar solo. That's what they're good at. We don't need acoustic piano guys. Like, we don't need the wind ensemble. We want the shredding electric guitar. That's what we're here for.

Just play the hits. Yeah. Play the hits. Yeah. And even when it's varying it up in Eternal, that's like the extent to which varying it up is within those shooting mechanics and just really only doing... That's like 12-string guitar, baritone guitar.

Maybe there's multiple guitars on stage and they're each doing a solo. Some guitar monies. Right. That's as far as we wanted to go. I now think that a Doom live-in-concert idea is actually a really good idea and I would go to that. I'm trying to remember if I feel like Mick Gordon at least played some of the music at the game awards or something. Oh my God.

He might have done a Doom concert at some point because that dude rocks. He's written a lot of really good music. Bing. Kirk here, as I'm editing the episode, just wanted to say that I remembered correctly, Mick Gordon did play the Doom soundtrack at the 2016 Game Awards, where the game also, of course, won Best Music that year, and it's a pretty fucking show, especially for the Game Awards, where it's very hard to rock as hard as they did. So I put a link for it in the show notes. Go check it out. Bing! I mean, people have played Doom Music Live.

Back in the day when there was like, it was a whole, the heyday of bands, like instrumentalists who would reinterpret the music from 90s games that didn't have, you know, CD-ROM soundtracks. Those original Doom songs have definitely been reinterpreted many times by many a metal band. But, yeah, I think Doom as concert is the way to think of it. All right, well, that is what's the deal with Doom? And some more thoughts on Doom the Dark Ages, a pretty fun game that you should play, especially if you have Game Pass. Agreed.

And, yeah, worth checking it out to see how violent a shield can really be. All right, well, let's take a break, and then we will be back for one more thing. Hi, is this Sam? Yes, it is. I'm Brenda, host of Secret Histories of Nerd Mysteries on Maximum Fun, and I'm calling because you've been named Maximum Fund's Member of the Month for May. Wow, I'm really excited to hear that. I love being a member.

I like all the Boco, and I enjoy all the shows that I listen to. I just, I love Maximum Fun. As our member of the month, you'll be getting a $25 gift card to the Maximum Fun Store, A special member of the month bumper sticker. A special priority parking spot at Maximum Fun HQ in Los Angeles, California, just for you. I can't wait to see what the bumper sticker looks like. Oh, yeah. I am obsessed with bumper stickers.

What's your message to people thinking about joining Maximum Fun? I mean, if you really like the shows, I think it's like a really good way to help support them. I'm really happy I'm able to. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for making your show. Become a MaxFund member now at maximum fund.org. It's hard to explain what Jordan Jesse Goh is about. So I had my kids take a stab at it.

Probably weird stuff. You talk about jobs that are annoying. Hmm, business. I think you probably learned your lesson after talking about business a couple of times. Growing up jokes that I don't understand and there's no pudding making. All the podcasts are going. Subscribe to Jordan Jesse Go, a comedy show for grownups. And we are back for one more thing.

Jason, you were so patient as Maddie and I enthused about Doom. So why don't you go first and tell us about your one more thing? No, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed hearing, like I said, I enjoy hearing people talk about games even if they're not for me. Me too. No, I know. It just felt like I had to pick somebody to go first. Yeah, that's fair.

me, Jason. My one more thing is the new D.L.C. for The Rise of the Golden Idol. It's called Golden Idol Investigations, colon the Lemurian Phoenix. And God, I got to tell you guys, I could play one of these every single month without fail and just have a rockin good time. They're so good. How many have there been so far? This is the second DLC for Rise.

Rise is the sequel to Case of the Golden Idol, which came out in 2022. Rise came out in 2024. And it's awesome. It's funny, I have this kind of ongoing running joke with Wout, who's the PR guy at PlayStack, and people might have seen him actually accept all the game awards and stuff for Bellatro, because he's the PR guy for Bellatro as well. And he'll send me a code, like a couple of days before this new DLC comes out, and like three hours later, I'll be like, okay, beat it.

Because when I get a code, I just drop everything. I mean, just play it. And so he's like, you are the first, person to beat this every single time. And so, uh, proud of that. But anyway, these things are amazing. And, and this new one is, is just as good. All these dealsies have been fantastic. And I highly recommend them. Um, so this new one, it is a pack of, I believe it's five cases. Um, they're, uh, completely solo from the main game of Rise of the Golden Idol. So you don't need to play Rise of the Golden Idol all to enjoy this. Um, there's one character. It's kind of an origin story

for one character who's then in Rise of the Golden Idol. So it is connected. It does tie in somewhat. It does tie in somewhat, but the story itself is standalone. And the way it is structured is that the first case, it starts off with the king of Lemuria getting murdered. And you kind of piece together in Golden Idol style. I won't explain what Golden Idol is. Go back and listen to our old episodes. So many old episodes.

But so you deduce how the king died and who killed him. But you don't find out why. And then you kind of jump to a totally different scene. and it's like completely unrelated to this. And then you get another scene and another scene. And by the time you're done, you piece it all together. And there's actually one cool little moment

where you have to put all of the, the kind of incidents that you've witnessed in chronological order as you're kind of piecing together, everything that happened in this whole story. So it's this neat little self-contained five-episode saga that also functions really well as DLC to the broader Rise of the Golden Idol story. And each of the,

the cases or each of the kind of scenes is fantastic. They're all great and like none of these have been bad at least in my experience so far, maybe a couple are weaker than the others, but like they're firing on all cylinders and it's still fantastic. This one is set like in the 1940s. So kind of a unique period in this country of LaMoria that is the kind of what's the best way to describe it. It's kind of got inspiration from Africa and Indian cultures. It definitely feels like it's kind of the, I guess, the equivalent of like the east to the Europe-centric or America-centric places that we've seen in this world of Golden Idol. This is the more kind of like, quote-unquote, exotic or would be exotic to Europeans. And so it's more inspired by the African Indian cultures.

And there's a lot of just interesting stuff in that. There's a lot of interesting character. a lot of awful characters in true golden Isle of course. Of course. There have to be. Yeah, everybody's so awful and it's so fun to watch them at their machinations.

And also, like, the really bad ones get punished at the end of this, which is very fun. Very satisfying. One of the cases in this actually has you, like, deciphering a language, which is super fun, like a symbol-based language.

Kind of like Chance of Sinar, that game I enjoyed a couple of years ago. So, yeah, it's really good. I highly recommend it. Even if you, like, bounced off, Rise of the Golden the Golden Idol or you didn't play it entirely. This D.L.C. is

standalone enough that you can get a lot out of it. And then go play Rise of the Golden Idol. Man, everyone should just play all of these. They're just so good. And yes, keep them coming. There's supposed to be four DLC packs this year. This was the second. There's more to come. And as always, I will just be dropping everything and playing through them

because they're just so good. Were there four for the first game, too? No. I thought there were two. The first game had two, and each had three each had three scenarios. They were great. They were hard. They were great.

They were really hard. I remember the DLC for the first game. Yeah, we're up. And these, I wouldn't say these are as hard, but definitely is good. Cool. Nice. Yeah, I'll definitely play through it. Maybe when they're all out, or maybe I'll just play two of them right now.

I could use a little palette cleanser. Yeah, you really don't need, because they're not, like, episodic and all connected. You really don't need to wait for them all to be out. Right. I wouldn't wait for that reason. I just would wait because, I don't know. Like, I just don't feel ready to play them. until you're in the mood.

Or just wait because it's like a good pin to be like, okay, now it's my time. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, but they're all so standalone. Like the first one is also completely standalone. Kind of follows what happens to one of the characters who was kind of a loose end from Rise of the Golden Idol. The first DLC follows his deal and kind of tells you a little bit more about what happened

to him after that. The first one actually is more connected to Rise of the Golden Idol than the second one is. The second one is completely independent. That's cool. Or almost completely independent in a way that. So first of a lesson. Cool. Well, yeah, I will definitely play that.

I'll go next. I watched another 1972 movie last week because my friend Sam and I are still on 1972 with our dice rolling Oscar watching game. And because we rolled such an interesting year, we kind of stuck with 1972 instead of re-rolling. So I mentioned last time that we started with the Godfather because the Godfather won best picture at the Academy Awards in 1973. But it was up against Cabaret, which then won ever.

everything else, which doesn't really happen at the Academy Awards anymore, where one movie wins like every single award except Best Picture. That's very rare. But in this case, Cabaret, Bob Fossey won Best Director, Liza Minnelli, I believe, won Best Actress, and then it won, I don't know, like costumes, art design, cinematography, I think. I don't know. It was an adapted score, so that might be, I can't remember. Yeah. Right. And I think it was an adapted screenplay as well, and I believe that the Godfather won that. But anyways, it won, far. more Academy Awards than The Godfather, which is just sort of funny. Now that I've seen it, it's actually not so surprising because Cabaret is a really good movie.

You've seen it, Maddie. Yes, it's very good. Yeah. I knew take Cabaret, 1972 film, a good film. I knew that it was celebrated and, of course, it won so many awards. I didn't really know what it was about. Oh, sure. I've heard a little bit about it, but just didn't, I just didn't really know what to expect.

I know the one song, maybe next time I'll be you. I'll win. Yeah. I mean, Liza Manelli is absolutely incredible in it. I think she looks a little bit like Anne Hathaway in this movie, which is sort of interesting. Like they're very different in a lot of ways, but something in her face looks a little like Anne Hathaway. It's, I don't know. That was a thought I kept having when I was watching it. Maybe I'm the only one who's ever thought that. But maybe somebody out there is like, I've had that same thought. Anyways, this movie is just not really the kind of thing they make anymore. It's the story of a couple of young people really. It centers around two young people.

Sally Bowles, played by Liza Minnelli, and a young man, an Englishman, whose name I'm forgetting, but he is played by another well-known actor that you'll probably recognize if you've watched any movies from this time period, playing a sort of drifting young man who is an Englishman who's in Germany. They're both living in Berlin in 1931 and Sally performs at a cabaret. And then the whole story is kind of, it's not a musical like people start singing in the street. It's more that there's a framing device, which is just the cabaret, hosted by this incredibly great MC, this guy who like sings every introduction to every song and is always kind of the master of ceremonies on stage with all these women dancing and performing

and the band full of women playing instruments and everyone is scantily clad and being scandalous and dancing around. And so they'll sing a song that sets up. Sounds like a night at Kirk's house, am I right? Exactly. It's pretty much just a day in the life. Yeah, that's all boring. Yep. they'll sing a song sort of setting up the next part of the story.

But really, it's kind of just a story of these two people living in this boarding house in Germany and the people that they meet. And it's mostly just a story of like a kind of a love affair. And, you know, he's kind of figuring himself out sexually. And she's very much like a prototype manic pixie dream girl. But also. I was going to say, I feel like that too. A little more tragic. She's very manic pixie in the sense that like he's so fascinated.

by her and she's kind of like a metaphor for what's happening around her, I would say. And she blows into his life and is so sort of irresistible, but also like very selfish and kind of flaky. And over time it becomes clear that she's like a very sad and lost person. So that's all cool. But what makes the movie work or what makes the movie so fascinating is that it's set against the backdrop of Berlin during the rise of the Nazi party. So this is the end of the Weimar Republic. And this is as Nazis are coming to power. So it's a prequel. a wolfen scene. Exactly.

But it's also so backgrounded that it's not, I don't know, it was like, it's not what I would expect from a movie like this. And if someone made a movie like that today where the Nazis are in the background rising to power, it would be completely different. It would be much more heavy-handed. It would be like full of dread and doom. It would have, it would really leave you feeling much more sure of yourself in a way. And while Cabaret is absolutely.

absolutely has this undercurrent of dread and violence. And it's just so subtle. I really was just so surprised by it. I mean, the ending shot is famous, and I think I'd kind of heard about it. It's this really striking and terrifying final shot as the, you know, the Nazi bar joke where you can't let a Nazi into your bar? Because if you don't kick the Nazi out,

then eventually you're running a Nazi bar. That is basically what happens in cabaret, slowly and very much in the background. While in the foreground is just sort of this love story, these two people, you know, this kind of regular, just dramatic romance, whatever. Like in the background, there's this sort of Nazi bar tragedy happening. And that really just makes the movie super fascinating. I think it's really interestingly directed. A lot of extreme close-ups.

The camera work is really remarkable. Liza Malia, of course, like I said, is amazing. Really, this is just an incredibly cool movie. I'm guessing there will be some people out there who've heard about Cabaret, have probably heard that one song or heard some songs from it, but never seen it. it, it's totally worth taking the time to watch it. I was really surprised by it and just left. We talked about, I'm still talking with Sam about it. It's just such an interesting movie and very appropriate for the current times that we're living in. There really are a lot of parallels to how it feels in America right now, though there are of course differences as well. Yeah. I mean, I think

it's probably worth noting like Sally's character is an American too living in Berlin. And like that is a key part of what she represents is like the idea of an American just moving to Berlin, living there during this specific time period and deciding she's not going to care what happens because she's like ultimately a selfish character. And like Liza Minle's portrayal of that is incredible. Like you you don't, it's not that you never have your moments of feeling sorry for her and, and whatnot. But like she she's just a really fascinating character that by the end you're like, God, you're so full of shit. But like what an expertly played woman. And even that, it's not heavy handed with any the character stuff either. It's really subtle the whole time, which is wild. I mean, it's,

it's cool to watch a movie where you're like, they are not going to spoon feed this to me. I'm going to have to sit back and be like, is this a commentary on Americans' approach to the rise of the Nazi party at the time? Guess it is, but the movie's not going to tell you that. And the musical's not going to tell you that. And the musical is not going to tell you that. And the musicals are typically the opposite of subtle. Like a character facing you and being like, I'm going to sing exactly what I'm feeling. Cabaret is very much not that, which is fine. Very much not that. And that makes it so cool. So yeah, big recommendation for me for that movie. All right, Maddie, close us out. What's your one more thing? It's something extremely frivolous, but why not? Why not

end on that? So, Tina and I've been watching a sitcom on Netflix. We're about halfway through season two, which is there's only two seasons out right now. It's called Survival of the Thickest. It's like a classic 23-minute sitcom starring Michelle Boutot. She's a plus-sized black woman who's a stylist, and it's just about her shenanigans dealing with like a very sizest and sometimes racist industry. But Michelle is a comedian. Like this is a very, very funny show. So like it's not a downer at any point. You can really freely root for her.

You know she's going to succeed in every scenario she ends up in. And that can be really gratifying to watch sometimes. It just kind of be like, this woman is somehow figuring it out through this world that, doesn't always care for her and is going to be very funny throughout it. I don't know. I just think Michelle Boutchev is really funny. And I already thought she was like cool as a comedian. And this is like her show that she got and the thing that she decided to make.

And it's refreshing. I think the cast around her that plays her group of friends is really fun. I also didn't really know a lot about like stylist as a job. Like she does a range of things between like dealing with rich people and styling them, which in her case she's trying to find like plus size. women who are also famous and just as like, I want to be there for you and actually help you feel like comfortable at events that you have to attend where oftentimes your other stylists are not going to make you feel that way. But she also like styles photo shoots and there's like

celebrities who make cameos in the show. And then, you know, Michelle Boutot's character is like starstruck by them in the context of the show. And that's really fun as well. I don't know. So it basically just if you want to watch something really lighthearted, that is fun. Uh, survival of the thickest. When you said survival of the thickest, I thought it was going to be like a reality show. I know. Doesn't it sound like it? It's not. It's fiction. Something about people losing weight or gaining weight. Like a too hot to handle spin on. It's totally the opposite of that. That's good. It is very much like a lighthearted, kind show about Michelle Boutotow, just creating a character who's like, maybe not based on her. I don't think it fully is, but it's fun. And clearly is, you know,

sometimes it's a bomb. Sometimes you need something that's fun. And that's what this show is. Yeah, I hadn't heard about this. Netflix, it's that Netflix thing where there are these shows that sound charming and then you just don't hear about it. You never hear about them. And then if you're in the right algorithm, then they'll tell you about them.

And then hopefully you listen to a podcast. That's what we're here for. Yeah, exactly. We're here to curate it for you. So, yeah, we have told people about the things for another week. We did it. We hope you enjoyed all the things we told you about. This was a lot of fun.

And, yeah, Yeah, The Blueprints, Bean's Castle will be out on Monday, so that'll be out in a couple of days. So you have the weekend to finish the game if you're still working on it. And yeah, we hope you all enjoy that. Thanks, as always, everybody who has become a member and who supports us making this show. And yeah, I'll see the two of you next week. See you next time. 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 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. shows supported directly by you