Triple Click - What's The Deal With: Video Game Demos?

Episode Date: June 3, 2021

Why do some games get demos while others don't? How did video game demos get started? And what's up with that weird game PT? This week, Maddy, Jason, and Kirk answer the question that's been on everyone's minds: What's the DEAL with video game demos?One More Thing:Kirk: Probing in ME2Maddy: FuserJason: Mare of EasttownLinks:Edgar Wright’s fake trailer for “Don’t”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lttrIPDFplUSupport 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

Hi there, I think I'd like a table for one, but before I decide, could I have a free appetizer? Let me explain. I'm a gamer. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week, we talk about video game demos from the early days of shareware to the post-PT demo landscape in which demos are rare, exciting, little experiences. I'm Maddie Myers. I'm Jason Shire. And I'm Kirk Hamilton, and hello. Hello. Hello to both of you.

Hello. So nice to see you both. It's us. Hello, you guys want to hear a quick story? Yes. Yes. Okay, so for the past few months I've been going to Trader Joe's. A lot there's a Trader Joe's near me and it's a pretty good grocery store because things are cheap.

And they have this thing called chili onion crunch and it's really addictive. It's like chili crisp. You know, chili crisp has become like part of the Zikeys recently. Basically, it's like dried chili peppers and onions and shallots and stuff all mixed in oil and like you scoop it out and you put it on everything. And it's amazing. It's like goes on eggs, goes on chicken, goes on whatever. Sure, sure. I'll take your word for it.

I was picturing you just eating this straight, and I was like, wow, that sounds really intense. And like, make your breath smell bad for a whole day. Yeah, it sounds like a recipe for some wonderful breath. I mean, the thing about working from home is that it doesn't matter what you breath smells. Nobody doesn't matter. That's true. Just your wife and child, but who cares about that? All of our poor microphones.

So for like a month now, the Trader Drosier Me has been out of it. And I've asked them and they're like, there's a glass shortage. Apparently, as part of our like supply chain issues. Oh, my gosh. All across the world, glass is one of the things that's short. In addition to like, Invidia cards all being four times that they should be. Glass is short, at least the Trader Joe's. And so I've been calling them pretty much every week, like before I go grocery shopping just to see,

hey, do you guys have this thing yet? Because they don't have any way of telling whether it'll be on stock. At one point, I even picked a backup that was like this like spicy pepper thing that wasn't quite as good, but it was still good. And then they ran out of that too because of the glass shortage. Anyway, long and short of it is, since they still don't have it, it's been like a month. This is a story of how about half hour before we started recording, I spent $30 to order ChiliCris from Momofuku, the restaurant, because I was Googling alternatives in there. And it was like, people are like, the Chili Crisp equivalent of like paying $1,500 for a two-year-old graphics card on eBay.

Yeah, you got to go pick it up in a back alley. It'll be in a huge garbage bag and you'll just do the handoff, do the dead drop. Just enabling the scalpers, Jason. So what really makes me nervous is that, so at Trader Joe's it's like four bucks for a jar. at Momofuku, ordering it online, it's $10 per jar. What really makes me nervous is that the Momofuku one will be so good that I'll be addicted to that and I'll have to keep ordering it. It'll be like a whole new.

That's how they get you. Really, this whole thing is being engineered by Momofuku. I just want to know how they got their glass. Maybe they have a glass black market dealer. They have a connection, yeah. Wow, they're hand-making glass in the alley as well. Anyway, this is a video game podcast. It sure is.

We talk about shortages of glass all around the world. And also, if you like the show, or even if you don't, I guess, you could go to maximum fund.org slash join and support us, become a member, and get bonus episodes about video games. I want to hear from you. If you don't like the show, but you still support us, I want to hear from you. Especially if you're a MaxFun member who's supporting it. I mean, thanks. And I hope you hate listen every week.

It's like hate support. Yeah. That's what I do. When I hate a politician, I just contribute all my money to it. I'm like, damn it. That'll show them. I appreciate your support. And I hope you really despise this month's Beanscast, which was about Portal,

with Justin McElroy, where he compared the game to eggs, one of my favorite parts of that episode. That was a very fun one. Oh, and we can announce this month also the June Beanscast, which is final fantasy six, the game we've all been playing this year. Yeah, we're going to finally finish it. That's true. And then we're going to talk about it. Yes.

So at the end of this month, so if you are out there playing along and you've been playing along and you haven't finished it yet. You have until the end of the month to get your beans cast play through in. That's right. But today, we are going to talk about demos. Yeah, what's the deal with this week we are doing? What's the deal with? That's right.

Of course. Delos. Have I told you guys, my wife and I have, for like months now, have been rewatching all of Seinfeld. He doesn't actually say what's the deal with that much. I know. Does he ever say it? Seems like maybe one of the scenes that he never says, but he has said it.

Yeah. He said it. in his stand-up, I think, or a couple times in his stand-up. But usually it's the context of, like, George making fun of him and being like, you know, you're bit with the airline penis and what's the deal with, which is funny. But anyway, let's talk about

demos, shall we? Sure. Let's do it. Demos, I think, are really interesting topic, and it's really quite interesting to get into them. Talk about what we like, what we don't like. But first, a brief history of demos. Do you guys remember shareware? Did you ever own or got any

shareware? Yes, I mean, I'm the old man on the show. I absolutely used shareware all the time when I was a kid in the 90s. Yeah, so shareware was essentially the early versions. I mean, I guess there were demos back then, too, but essentially before there were real demos, before demos were ubiquitous, there was this concept of shareware, which is you get a game and it's on a floppy disk or a CD or whatever it's on, and you play the first couple of levels for free, and then you can pay for the rest. So you can just buy the rest of the game after testing it out. This was only PC games. There was nothing like this on consoles or anything, but it was pretty

popular back in the day. It was like a way that like companies like id software would like go around and like release Doom as a shareware and like try to get people to buy the rest, which didn't correct. Did it ever sell you on any games? No. And actually I would treat the shareware as a standalone thing because I was a kid, you know, when when Doom was out, I was pretty young and I would take it. I had it on a floppy disc and I would sneak out. I think I've told the story before I would sneak out at like five in the morning before school because I could only play it on my dad's laptop. He had this laptop that he had for work that was, you know, the size of a car. And I would sneak out and install it and play it and then uninstall it and then get back in bed

so that I could like play Doom without my parents knowing about it. I never bought Doom because it was like the whole first big chunk of the game. I think Wolfenstein 3D also was the whole Castle Wolfenstein. And then there was a bunch more that you could play, you know, if you bought the whole thing, but almost no one was even really familiar with that stuff because there was so much of the game included for free. My main shareware memory is that because this was basically pre-internet, I mean, there was some form of the internet around, but this was something that was actually handed from friend to friend on a floppy disc. It was shared in person, and you would get, like I would get a disc with, you know, drawn in Mark or Doom, or sometimes, you know, you would

draw like the logo as best you could. It was like this physical object that was actually handed around from person to person. And I think a lot of those games, I mean, I know Doom, it really spread, you know, through schools, like kids actually just giving floppy disks to one another, which is way more, you know, like zine culture, kind of underground album culture. It's just video games, kind of their version of that, yeah, mixed tapes. And also some games, what I remember really fondly is that some of these games, either because it was shareware being abused or because people were just like copying floppy disks, a lot of games would come with like anti-piracy clues and hints and stuff like a lot of the original

infocom games like the zork games or like the original lucas arts adventure games would come with like these these printed out guides or clue rubrics that you had to use in order to actually beat the game and so the idea was if you were just getting a pirated copy floppy disk from your friends at school you couldn't actually beat it because you would get like stumble you would stumble on this part and there was no looking it up on the internet or anything so for example there's a game called Zach McCracken and the alien mindbenders. And to make progress in the game, you essentially had to fly around to a bunch of different cities.

And at a certain point, the game would ask you for these codes. I think it was like ticket info or something that only came on a printed out thing that would come in the box. And so you had to have the box to actually get through the game. Otherwise, you'd just be screwed. And some games would include, like, messages that would, like, castigate you for being a pirate.

It would just, like, be insulting you. Yeah. It's funny because that, and that whole thing is a little different than demos, right? Because that's just more copy production. Like the whole, like, there were games I remember where I don't remember which ones. You had to enter a word, what's the first word on page 25 in the manual?

The manual was always kind of tied to it. The best one of those is, I think it's, it was like if you had a ROM of, I think it was a Dragon Quest. Like on 3DS, if you had a ROM, you could just play the game totally like normal until you were on this ship going to the main island after the intro, and then the ship just never

arrives at the main island, and it just stays at sea forever. And you just think that something's wrong. You're like, well, I guess I need to trigger this cutscene and you can't just because the game knows that it's a rum. But right, a little bit different than demos. What was cool about shareware was you knew you were supposed to be playing it and supposed to be sharing it

and it was actually very easy. They were very small. They fit on a single disc. It wasn't the same as copying like a whole Quest for Glory game onto like seven flopches and giving it to your friend. Not that I ever did that or saw that happened when I was a kid. So to your point earlier, by the way, Kirk, about you playing, just playing

the shareware demos, that is kind of the fundamental question at the heart of a lot of demos. Like a lot of, there's still a debate to the stay. Are demos worth it? Like, will they actually help sell copies of your game? If you're a game developer, should you make a demo? And so a lot of people still feel like if you're getting your money's worth or if you're getting your, your contents worth out of just the demo, why play the whole game? And in a bit, we'll discuss what makes a good demo. But Maddie, I'm curious here from you. Do you have any experiences with shareware or with early, early day demos in general? Not with shareware, but I do remember an element.

entry school, my after school program had a lot of games that were just demos and that they just couldn't, I guess, didn't feel like buying the full versions of, I think, Sim City, Oregon Trail. I think number munchers was the full game. But I do remember like seeing how far you could get before the demo part kicked in was a big, big part of after school and also just various people trying to find ways around it, but not really having any idea what they were doing. Those are my main memories of demos is being somewhat irritating because they were a gateway against playing the rest of the game as we saw it. But at this point in my adult life, I think demos are really cool. And I'm nostalgic for them, which is a classic thing that happens about anything that you think is annoying when you're a

child. It suddenly becomes cool. And why aren't their demos anymore? That's what I say in 2021. Yeah. It's an interesting debate about whether they're actually effective. But so yeah, just a little bit more history. So demos were really big in the PC scene. which Kirk is how you, you stumbled upon it, or how you kind of played through so many of them. And Shareware wasn't really a thing on consoles. But demos started becoming a little bit more popular on consoles around the PS1 era. And actually, you would wind up, I think Square was the biggest proponent of this. So what they did was rather than making demos, releasing demos is like a taste of a game.

Well, they did. So what they did was they would sell you a game and then they would package it with a demo for another game. And sometimes it would be like, okay, we're selling you Final Fantasy whatever or some popular game that we know is going to be popular. So we're going to include a demo of a game that maybe you haven't heard of. So you check that out too and you get into it. But sometimes, and this I love, this is my favorite thing. What they would do was they would sell you other games that were less popular and as part of the hook, the pitch for it would be like, Final Fantasy 8 demo included.

And I remember getting the Final Fantasy 8 demo. I think if I remember correctly, I think it was Brave Fencer Musashi. I'll have to look this up to be sure. But that demo really struck me because it was totally different than the actual game. It was in Brave Fencer Musashi. And it has all this stuff in it that makes it feel like a different experience, which I thought was really really interesting back then. It's kind of the video game equivalent of come see this movie and you'll see the first trailer for Phantom Menace or whatever.

Exactly. which is still something that's kind of done today. Come see. Oh, man, it was the Dark Night five minutes in IMAX before some movie. I don't even remember what movie was. Right, right. They'll do that kind of thing. Yeah, a lot of the demos that I played,

there's kind of a, I draw a line anyway between the shareware stuff. I only just mean in my own memory and the PC gamer era of demos, which was a more online time. Like that was kind of the later 90s. I was looking at a lot of the ones that I really remember are from 1997, which was, I was still in high school. And that was like a period of time when I was reading a lot of PC gamer. There was one that had the Shadow Warrior, like the Yin Yang with like a bullet hole through it.

I just have this vivid memory of that CD. I think I have it up in the attic here. It had, I looked at it. It had Shadow Warrior demo. It had betrayal in Antara, which I don't remember, fall out, a game called Meat Puppet, a demo for You Don't Know Jack, the very first You Don't Know Jack, and Warlords 3. So what PC gamer would do, and this was the hate. day of PC Gamer when like a print PC magazine was still something that people would want because the

internet wasn't widespread enough or advanced enough and you would buy this it would be the magazine would be in a bag and you would get the bag at the usually at the like airport when I'd be flying somewhere I would like buy a PC Gamer to read on the plane and it came with like a sleeve with a CD-ROM in it and they even called the CD's CD Gamer like it was a little joke like welcome to CD Gamer you'd put it in and it would load up a whole like separate interface that they had designed at Future, you know, or whoever, someone, the publishing company that made PC Gamer

had designed this thing. So it was its own thing and you could click any of these demos, like a whole list within this interface that's on the CD and it's like, welcome to CD Gamer. I think they kind of retired. I think you're a CD Gamer. Right, it was, that was what it really was, was S-E-D-Y. And then they changed it to DVD-Gamer at one point

which just doesn't have the same ring to it. And then I think they just were like, whatever, it's PC Gamer. And then those gradually became, obviously, thanks to the internet. But that was a place where it was the same feeling kind of as playing those shareware demos back when I was younger in like middle school in the sort of early 90s. But they were all really collected and they were promoting the games. Like I think the publishers were really keen on having their demos in there. I remember playing the full throttle demo. There were a lot of LucasArts demos. This game Rise of the Triad, which was a first person shooter

that like 3D realms made playing the demo for that. And like those did make me want to buy the game. I wound up buying full-throat. I think I would have anyways, but it was like the whole first area of that game. It had that killer intro, which that game has like the best intro when he's like, when I smell asphalt,

I think of Marine or whatever the thing is and that song. Like it had that whole sequence and it was just enough to pull you in. And then you learned that that was actually like 40% of the game or whatever because it was really short. So anyways, I think I just wanted to shout out that era,

which was its own kind of distinct era, the PC gamer demo era. Uh-huh. Yeah, I feel like demos are really good for games that have a compelling story. and you're hooked on the story and you're like, okay, now I have to play the rest of the game. Sort of in the way that if you're at Barnes & Noble or something and you pick up a book and you read the first chapter and you're like, oh man, I have to take this home with me and I have to let know what happens next.

Which publishers will do, right? They'll be like, and now like the first chapter from this person's next book at the end of the book and you just finished and you'll read it and be like, well, I'm going to buy that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's a pretty good demo. But yeah, no. And then I think demos can be less effective when they're like the doom shareware that you described. maybe a demo of Doom would have been a little bit less content in there. I wonder, though, because they made so much money on Doom and it was this massive phenomenon.

It wouldn't have been as much of a phenomenon if it hadn't been for millions of kids like me able to just play it. No, it would not. I remember the Geometry Wars. I think it was the Geometry Wars 2 demo that was basically just the entire game as well. But Geometry Wars was so popular. They must have been doing just fine. I don't know. But I remember there were demos that were sort of notorious among kids for being the entire.

game, quote unquote. Any racing game demo is in that category as well where it's like, well, how many more cars do you really need? You can just drive this one car. Like all of my demo memories are associated with like not having the money to buy a game. Like they're all from the times of my life when you couldn't actually get the game for whatever reason, either because you were a child or you're a broke college student playing like, you know, dirt or whatever racing game and you just only had the demo. Those are my memories of demos. It's like a gateway and it's like, is it worth it for no money or is it not worth it for no money? Geometry Wars too, though. That was the whole game. That's my hot tip. Right. And then I'm, and I'm sure we're going to get into this, but there's

just been this fundamental change in that now, if you're a kid in that kind of period of time where you have no money, you can just go play. Yeah, great point. As much Fortnite as you want. Like, there's a ton of games that you can just go play. Like demos don't serve that function for young people who don't have the money to spend. I guess that is why there are no demos anymore. Or at least demos of that kind, because there are still demos. Fortnite is the biggest. demo of all in a way. There are demos and they're approached in interesting ways. No, actually, you'd be surprised. I think on consoles there are fewer demos. Demos were never really a huge thing on consoles to begin with, though, which is why we have some memories of like geometry wars too.

And like a few, there have been a few. But in general, demo culture is mostly on PC. And these days, most of the demos you see are on Steam and a lot of games have Steam demos. Game I'm playing right now that I'll talk about a little bit more next week called Backbone, which is this indie adventure game, I believe it's the whole prologue or first, first chapter is available as a demo that you can get right now. And that, again, because it's a story heavy game, it seems like a really good way to hook people. But there are tons of PC games that I played recently that have demos. And you know what, Nintendo has actually been really good about putting out demos recently on the Switch. You can play a lot of demos.

But they've also been, I mean, what happens now in the Internet era is that demos are used in all sorts of subversive ways is that they were never used in a few months a few years a few decades ago. Yeah. One of which being, so for what Square has done with a lot of recent demos for game, for big RPGs like Octopath Traveler and like Bravely Default, too, is they release the demo and then they collect people's feedback and then they use that feedback to actually impact the game, which I think is really interesting. It's essentially like alpha testing to an audience of like tens of thousands of people who

check out your demo. And I remember they've used that to really good effect. Like Bravely Default 2, people had all these complaints about quality of life stuff in the demo and, like, difficulty. And they tweaked a lot of that stuff and made it better for the final game. So I think that's really cool. There's also, and the first Bradley Default is a game that I think of here is there's the way that you'll play the demo, and then you get stuff in the game because you play the demo. It feels like, oh, you're putting a few hours into the game early.

And, you know, it's a little bit of a sort of. feeling when you do that and then you get the game, you have to start all over it. If it's just the intro of the game, you're like, oh, great, I get to do the intro again. But with the Bravely Default demo, it was really a great demo. I don't even really remember all the specifics, but I remember loving it and that when you finish it, you like unlock some progress in the game. So there's a little bit of a feeling. It's like nothing. It doesn't really unlock anything for you, but there's kind of that feeling of, well, I didn't waste my time. And I'm sure it helps them sell games because you're like, well, I mean, I've already unlocked some progress. I might as well go buy it.

Yeah, you already started the video game. already half done. Man, Kirkke, you're reminding me of how I had to play the entire, like, first three chapters of Final Fantasy 15, like three different times. Once at a preview event and packs. Yeah, once at a preview event and packs, once when they sent me a preview build of the game before the final build, and then they sent me a final build, and I was like, is there any way I can transfer my save from the preview build to the final build?

Yeah, that's always tough. That's always tough when it's like, sorry, what your save is a different save, but it's not going to carry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then there are demos. So Final X8, I mentioned, is a demo that changes things in the game. But one of my favorite examples in recent memory of a game, Kirkdale, I'll remember this, is the demo for Dangan Rompah.

And so Dangan Rampa, of course, is a... This was like the press demo, right? Or was this the downloadable one? Oh, no, I think you could download it, too, if I remember it. Oh, okay. Fans can check it out too. So Dangan Rumpa, it's a visual novel. It's like a sequence of murder mystery.

So obviously, it's very heavy on the story, and the story is the most important part. And so what they did was they released. this demo of the first chapter where the outcome is completely different in the demo. And so it doesn't spoil the game for you at all because it's a totally different murder mystery and a totally different like culprit. So you solve things in a similar way because you're still like you. So you're still getting to know the game, but you don't actually spoil yourself, which I think it's pretty cool, a cool way to do it. Did they say that at the time when they showed the demo where they like it's it's going to have a different ending or they didn't reveal it? Oh, that's kind of cool either way.

I think they wanted to mess with people, which makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, very dank and rompa attitude there. Uh-huh. I feel like all of us have had mixed feelings probably with like, or like mixed experiences with demos that actually convince us to buy a game versus demos that are like not convincing it. I've seen some game developers talk about how like demos that their buy-in rate isn't great and that like some, I've seen some people theorize over the years that demos actually

turn players off from checking out their game, which your initial reaction to that would be like, oh, well, players found out the game sucks. But yeah, but people just have a lot of conflicting views on this question. Yeah, I wonder. Like, I think it depends both on the demo and on the game, which is I guess maybe like a boring thing to say because, of course, it does. But I'm thinking a lot about what Capcom has been doing lately. I think the demo for Monster Hunter Rise on Switch is really, really good

because it's just put together in a way that puts you into the fun part of the game very quickly. and I wonder, like I feel like that would sell people on that game because it actually removes a lot of the fiddly stuff that you have to learn to deal with when you're playing Monster Hunter and really just lets you kind of fight a monster and that's pretty cool. And that's also a series that I think a lot of people want to get into and are curious about so they're probably more likely to go play the demo and it's good that they have a demo in place that isn't like,

here's all the weird arcana you're going to have to master to play Monster. And it's just like, this is the fun part, the best part when you're fighting the monster. And then another example that's also Capcom, is what they do with Resident Evil, and what they've done with the last few Resident Evil games, which is kind of like what made us think to do this episode in the first places. I was talking about one of the Resident Evil Village demos,

and there were a bunch of Resident Evil seven demos, and those are treated more almost like promotional material because it's like Resident Evil game. Like a lot of people are just psyched and want some reason to be thinking about it. And when the demo comes out, then it just kind of gets Resident Evil fans. Be like, oh, man, I play the demo. Like, there's teasing this thing and that thing. And they are always a little bit different.

We've talked a bit about Resident Evil 7. Maybe Maddie, you can recount the Resident Evil 7 demo since I know we both played it. But that's a great example. Yeah. I mean, not to skip ahead, but I feel like the Resident Evil 7 demo in particular was really influenced by PT, which we haven't talked about yet. But I would say at this point, maybe the most famous demo ever made in part because it never resulted in an actual game. It was supposed to be Silent Hills. Do you want to describe what it is a little bit for people?

Fated Silent Hills project. Yeah, so Pt was a demo. I don't remember what year it came out. I didn't look that up, but it... 2014. So P.T. is a horror game demo that I believe it stands for playable teaser or playable trailer. Mm-hmm. Because that is precisely what it is.

I think it stands for pretty terrifying because that is also what it is. Yes, it does. A game I can't play, but have watched many other things. people play and which has been recreated in basically every game where you can recreate a game, be it Minecraft, dreams, whatever, because people are still obsessed with PT. You go through a house over and over again. There's a creepy baby in there. There's a bunch of different events that you can trigger that happen according to just which version of the house you happen to walk into each time, even though it's the same house nominally every time. So this idea of doing a repetitive action over and

over, entering a haunted house, entering theoretically the same hallway every time, but different things happen, and you do slightly different actions to try to trigger different story events from unfolding. That's something that PT introduced that then influenced a ton of other horror games, including the RA7 demo, which is also, it's not just one hallway, but you are going through the same house over and over again. And in the RA7 demo, it's like there's an actual contained story, much like PT. I don't think PT is the first. example of this, but it was certainly the most, like a high-budget, high-profile example of a demo that had its own contained story that was almost like a prelude to a game that obviously never

happened. But in RE7, it's an actual self-contained preview for a game that then did happen. And it has separate story elements in it that sort of come back in that game. But you don't have to play it in order to understand RE7. It's fine. But it's like it's its own little video game. And the idea of having that be a promotional tool is, I mean, it's a ton of money. Like, that's like an absurd expectation. But it's something that clearly Capcom has decided to do. I don't know if the village demo was as involved as the RE7 demo. So was it long?

The one that I played was quite short. And I don't, I know there was a second one, and I'm not sure if it was as involved. But I don't believe that it was only because what Resident Evil 7 did was there's like a film crew that goes and they're shooting a documentary and you're the cameraman and the whole demo takes place as this sort of interactive cutscene that you're filming and then horrible things happen to so it's like Blair Witch style lo-fi southern fried horror and because of its length it's actually like a great little horror experience on its own because it can just do like it can actually be a more focused horror experience than something the length of Resident Evil 7 or Resident Evil 8

because it can just be like introduction, meet a couple characters, the main guy kind of seems like an asshole, this house seems like a terrible idea, why are these people going into it? Oh, God, oh God, it's over. And it can just be that experience. And that, I think that still is kind of singular, just from what I saw of the Resident Evil 8 demo, it wasn't that.

Though it is still that thing where it's like setting up various aspects of the game, reusing elements of the game. I don't think, well, the guy you play as in the demo that I played, it wasn't really a named character. think there's any evidence of him in Resident Evil Village or the way that in Resident Evil stuff and you find the videotape that they shot and you can kind of watch the movie of the demo in the game which is just so freaking cool and so there's nothing quite like that but it's the same kind of idea and I hope that those demos are all that those all exist like

those are kind of maintained alongside of the game just because they're kind of essential parts of the experience like it's more than just you know the self-contained game experience those types of demos go beyond the game and they expanded into this kind of meta thing like a collection of smaller experiences that are kind of essential parts of the finished game yeah i remember playing that r7 demo for hours with my friends because it was the post-p-t landscape of people feeling like a secret could be embedded in a demo and like there are some sort of secrets embedded in the demo like you can certainly find different outcomes but there were nearly as many yeah there were nearly as many secrets as we're

would have wanted there to be, but like we just combed through every inch of the demo together and we're like, you know, trading around the controller on the couch all up all night, playing it. It's still such a fond memory even though I'm like, was the demo even that good? Or is it just that culture, the post-PT horror culture of like horror games could be hiding anything and like even something really tiny could be a clue about what kind of thing is embedded in this, this horror fantastical world. And that just felt really. magical at that time and cool. And I don't know. Maybe that era is gone, but maybe it's not. I feel like it could come back. I mean, we talked about this a little bit in the episode that Patricia

Hernandez guested on way back in Halloween where we were talking about like itchio mixtapes. Like I think she talked about bundles of people like sharing games and there's like a specific horror game demo bundle. I don't know if you two have seen this, but it's like in the style of PS1 demos, demo discs. And you can like download all of of these horror game demos on Itchio. And they're not demos for real games. I mean, I think some of them are, but some of them are just just a demo. And it's like designed specifically to be a demo.

So there's certainly people out there, at least in the horror space, who are really fascinated by the idea of a short form prelude to a story and what you can do with that format. And also just the idea of a secret being hidden in something is, is a very exciting horror concept, I think. Right. It kind of, it's like ties in with the whole creepypasta. thing of like, have you heard that there's this demo for this game that never came out? Or like

the Polybius conspiracy, that podcast I was complained about that I thought was trying to be real, but then it was actually just actors like pretending and telling a fictional story and they weren't clear about it. But it was the idea of the urban legend about the arcade game that like brainwashes you and turns you into a government, you know, like a secret killing machine for the government or something. Like those kinds of, there's just so baked into horror culture. and, you know, the ring even, you know, or ring you, like a movie that you watch and, like, hidden in the movie is like a thing that'll, and there's actually a ghost that'll come out and kill you. So the idea of a haunted demo is just right there. It's perfect for it. And it's really, that was actually, that was fun to talk to Patricia. Who was the master of that kind of coverage? Even like during the PT days, I feel like she was writing about PT and just all those cultures that were coming up around it. There's a thought I had that's a slightly different angle, but it's sort of related. about demos that I think that also demo culture feels to me related to speed running culture,

because so many people grew up with demos that allowed you like one level and or maybe a limited time to move through the space. And so many kids were just like, well, I just have this one level and I'm not going to buy the whole game because like my allowance won't allow me to for you know, another two months. So I'm just going to get so fast at this and then I'm going to figure out, oh, actually you can like break the level and you can go around. And it wouldn't surprise me. I'm kind of just basing this on like how games work and how our brains work. If a lot of people kind of got their start or like started thinking that way in this sort of speed running mindset by playing demos back when demos were a thing.

And even now, still, still by playing demos. Yeah, that's an interesting thought. I do remember some demos that were like, give you a timer and you had X amount of time to do everything you could. And it's like, can you finish the whole game? Yeah. The concept of a demo is a standalone experience as like a piece of. of art that's just created as its own thing is really fascinating. It's almost

like not even a demo. It's like its own little game in some cases. And oftentimes, yeah, oftentimes in those cases. And really, I mean, pretty frequently you see demos that just like do not, are not slices of the final game. They're just like standalone experiences that are meant to

reflect other parts of, like parts of the game or reflect the tone of the game or something like that. I'm so fascinated by the way that people who make art have now learned the language of selling art and presenting vertical slices of their art to the point where they can create art that is

those things. Like I think about Grindhouse, do you remember the double feature, the Quinn Tarantina, Robert Rodriguez's double feature? In the middle of that, there are just all these trailers for movies that don't exist. And it's like, there's that one Eli Roth when it's just like Thanksgiving. And it's like, they're just murdering people

and it's like turkey and stabbing. And it's just a fake ad. Well, then one of them became one of them was machete, which then became a real film. Which then became a movie. There's an Egg or Right one, it's like, the house down, or it's like based on the house down the block. I can't remember what it's called. Bing, Kirk from the Future here, the Edgar Wright trailer is called Don't. It is hilarious.

We'll link it in the show notes. You've got to watch it. It's really good. All right to the show. Bing! It's so funny. They're all great. They're all on YouTube and you can just watch them.

And it's a lot of like horror masters sort of spoofing the art of the horror trailer, which is again horror. It's like yet again. Like horror directors, horror game creators tend to be like masters of their genre in a certain way just because there's like a kind of, it's such a specific vibe and there's so much sort of specificity that they learn it. And the horror game like demos are the same kind of idea, like creating that sort of what would ordinarily be a vertical slice of a product that's being sold, but it's not. It's just everyone knows what a demo is like. And so they're creating

a fictional version of it, which is so cool and so interesting, I think. Yeah, there have been times when I've gotten really into a demo. Recently, I got really into the demo for Delta Rune, which is the sequel to Undertale and Toby Fox, the creator of both games released a demo. I mean, he called it like chapter zero or chapter one or something like that. That was essentially like a two hour demo for what would be Delta Route. And then there was also a demo for Undertale. And there have been demos for like other RPGs or related games that I've kind of like like tried to find every nook and cranny, every secret, that sort of thing, which is always fun. Which makes a lot of sense for Undertale, which is a world that has so many secrets in it. I mean, it's not technically a horror game, but it also kind of is in its own way. It's like a horror. Well, there's some fan theories surrounding the horror being a video game. Yeah. Yeah. So the idea of having a demo for any game that has a rich world, like that just inherently is going to bring out the people who are looking for those secrets. And then at that point, it does feel like just another chapter. And it's not so much a trailer or an advertisement for the game anymore. It,

it has a soul of its own. It's its own piece of art. And it just usually it's free, which I guess is then the risk proposition for a creator of like, well, I am still technically trying to sell my game off of this. Should I be releasing this free to our chapter or not? Yeah.

And also the risk, the other part of this equation is the resources it takes to actually make the demo. So like for some developers, it's pretty much nothing. If you're just releasing a slice of your game as your demo, it's not super time intensive to chop

that up as a separate executable file. But if you're making a demo, for example, before your game even comes out and you have to actually dedicate separate resources, like the Resident Evil games or like some other games we've seen where the demo is out a few months in advance of the game's release date, then it can all be a time-consuming process. But then again, a lot of these developers have to make demos for like E3 and trade shows, packs and stuff anyway. So it comes to the point where sometimes you might as well just release it. If you're polishing up this slice of the game for trade shows, you might as well put it on Steam also, right? Yeah, there's such a world of difference.

I mean, it's kind of like an encapsulation of how different video games can be between, you know, this huge polished AAA game where they're working super hard to make a demo that's playable. The thing gets released on Steam and when you go look in the discussion, it's all like, oh, I actually kind of thought the demo sucked and I don't want it. And you're sure it's like, oh, should we have even released this? Between that and, you know, a person who is like a small team of people or, you know, who are making a game that's maybe nowhere near as difficult to make and not. as high budget and intensive. Difficult to make in other ways. Sure, but I mean like not as labor intensive. It doesn't require as much for sure.

Difficult is the wrong word. And then it's probably like really refreshing to be able to think, I just want to make like a one hour thing that's its own thing and it's going to just delight people and will, you know, no one even really knows about my game, but I think it's really special. And now I'm going to have this weird idea that I'll just put out and like word of mouth maybe will work.

But I just want to like delight people and freak them out and show them something really cool that'll get them talking about this game. And it's actually nice to just lower our scope and think, okay, what's something we can do that's an hour long? Using these tools that we're very familiar with on our much bigger game.

They're just such different propositions just because video games can be so different. Yeah. Or if you're a mobile game developer, then you release a demo and then you fill it up with timers that people have to pay to buy that. Well, and that's that line, right,

between free to play and a demo, which is... Yeah, I feel like the mobile game equivalent is whatever those ads are on Instagram, but like the ad is just showing a video game that doesn't exist that you can never actually play. Like those those are the demos of the mobile gaming world where you like see a really cool puzzle game and you're like, but if I downloaded this, this is not, it would be a completely different video game. And it's not at all.

That's funny. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, I feel like more games should have demos. I feel like it's safe to say that.

I feel like most games. Like, I don't know. I mean, we kind of, so I guess we kind of touch. on this, but in general, have you guys, I guess one way to frame it is, have you guys ever played a demo that made you not want to play a game? Not like a demo that you got too obsessed with and didn't want to buy the full game because you were just playing the demo like with Doom, Kirk. But have you ever played a demo that was like bad enough that it made you say, okay, I'm not going to play this? I feel like at this point when I'm playing a demo, I already

know I'm going to buy the game. And demos are so scarce that it's not, I'm not doing the thing that I think, say, Nintendo would want me to do where I'm scrolling through the Switch store and I'm downloading a bunch of demos and then I'm spending an afternoon, trying them all, and maybe buying one of those games. I don't really do that.

And maybe I should. That would be a fun day. Actually, it sounds great now that I say it. But, yeah. Maddie, we know what you're doing after this show. Yeah, that sounds really cool. I'll go do that right after this. And it's hard to say,

because, like, of our jobs and because of how we've, you know, it's like I've played so many demos as a professional because you play a lot of demos were used to when they were in-person press events and like those are just their own thing. So it was just like for more than 10 years

I would have played a demo of every single game that was coming out. Right. Or I've, you know, edited someone who did and so I knew all about it. So it's just sort of hard to say. Back when I was playing lots of demos, like when I first got my 360

and was just like, I'm just going to play demos for stuff. There were certainly games where I would play the demo and be like, oh, well, that was cool. But, you know, I'm not going to buy that. game because I'm going to get X, Y, or Z. I don't remember any specifics, but like, I think when I would just go through demos on the Xbox Live arcade, you know, and try things out, yeah, for sure, there were times where I tried a game and wouldn't play it. Just like there were times where I play game, like, oh, that's actually more fun than I maybe thought it would be, you know,

consider it. Yeah, well, so, I mean, I guess there weren't a lot of, like, console demos, like I mentioned before. Otherwise, like, there's some games that I bought that I wish I had had a demo for and oftentimes they're on console and it's like oh man like I wouldn't not have I I should have known that I should have like known that I wouldn't enjoy this I wish I had gotten to sample it for an hour or something and it feels like that is kind of missing I'm sure because the people behind them like no yeah yeah I feel like I've had the other experience though like I remember the destiny demo being really cool oh that's a great example I didn't like destiny very much but the demo was really cool and I bought that game and did not like it. No, that's true though. I mean, I've struggled to like destiny for a long time. I had a super conflicted feelings about it until like the Taking King was when I really started liking that game. But that is true.

That demo, though, it had that cool fan. Peter Dichlidge was there. He didn't sound excited to be there, but he was there. We all knew he was. Was that different than the beta? Was there a beta and a demo or the two? I think it's kind of the same thing. We're kind of mixing them.

It's like it was the thing you could play. that was basically like the cosmodrome first couple of missions and the strike, the one strike. That was where that wizard came from the moon came from. That wizard came from the moon was in there, I believe. Yeah. Yes. And that was in the demo. Well, so the problem with, yeah, the problem of the game like Destiny is that it's amazing when you play just

like an hour until you realize the next 20 hours, like 400 hours are all the same thing. And in Destiny's specific case, that strike was actually stronger than the however many three strikes. that shipped with the game. That one strike is really cool. And when you play it, I would remember play it like a year later and be like, man, this strike really was super cool. Like, it kind of had all the cool stuff and made you really think there's going to be a bunch of cool shit in this game. And then you played the finished game and it was like, oh, there's like nothing new in this game. Like I'm kind of playing the same bosses and like that tank was actually only happens there in one other place. Like there's like very little in the finished game

because it was designed to be. Well, with online games, with online games, when demos, I mean, they essentially call demos betas, even then they're not really betas. Right. They're actually demos, but they're often used to like help servers stress tests, among other things and like balance. I remember playing a ton of the StarCraft 2 demo back before that came out because they released a demo like months before the game. That was just a multiplayer beta.

And I played a whole lot of that. But yeah, in general, I feel like more games should have demos. And I think they demos are pretty cool. And I love this trend of standalone demos. And I hope we get to see more of that stuff in the future. Cool. Why don't we take a break and then we will be back with one more thing. 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 Mode. 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 Dera, and Open Mike Eagle. I have this 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. Maximum Fun is a network by and for cool, popular people. But did you know it also has to be. has an offering designed to appeal to nerds? A show for nerds? On maximum fun, the devil, you say. It's true. It's called The Greatest Generation,

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I've been watching... I watched the show over the weekend called Mayor of East Town. Have you guys heard of this? I know all about us. They have heard of it. It's like in the past 24 hours, suddenly everyone. only everyone. It just ended. Nothing but talk about it. So it's a seven-episode

miniseries on HBO and it just ended and that's why people are just talking about it. But what happened was over the weekend. I was with my family. It was pouring. So they told me we should watch this and we watched it and got really into it and watch it all over the weekend and it ended and so it's a complete series

now. It stars Kate Winslet as this kind of hard-boiled detective kind of your typical cliche like noir detective, except it's a woman instead of a man, which itself is pretty cool. A nice little flip of that. She's, like, got substance abuse issues, and she's suffering from a lot of grief.

What do you expect? She plays by her own rules, but she gets results. Yeah, all that stuff, all that good stuff. And she eats a lot of Philly cheese sticks. And she is in this small town, East Town, in Pennsylvania, and the show deals with the giant cast of characters and a whole bunch of stuff, everything from the opioid crisis to grief and motherhood and all sorts of interesting stuff. Lots of fun topics.

Lots of fun topics. It's a really bleak show. And the premise is that essentially, I won't spoil too much, but essentially there's a murder and Kate Winslet has to figure out who did it. She's a detective. I'm like relentlessly avoiding spoilers

because Emily's being out of town this week and she's not super into it and I'm going to watch it. So there's like headlines that are increasingly getting more and more specific and I'm like, no back. Be careful. Be careful.

Be careful. Be careful. Be careful. try to watch it without learning more. Be careful. Gene smart is in it and she's amazing and a bunch of other really good. Jean Smart. She's everywhere these days. Really good performances, really good actors,

really good writing. Everything about it is excellent. It's just a fantastic show. Highly recommend it. Maddie, there is a girl who is queer and has a queer relationship and she has the same haircut as you. She has the same hair as you. So you will really enjoy that. Of course she does.

It's a badass haircut. And yeah, Kate Winslet. I mean, the The real reason that this show stands out is because Kate Winslet is just a force of nature. Like this is one of the best performances I've ever seen in anything ever, which shocked me. Because I didn't know how good Kate Winslet was. Like, all I really knew her from was Titanic. And like, um, she was a child at the time. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, not literally. But that movie, I mean, it's a, it's a, that movie has its prose. But the acting is certainly not something you would come out of that movie thinking, man, love the acting. You saw like eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. No, I haven't really seen her in much else. She's really good in that.

I saw her. I remember him in that Steve Jobs movie being fine, but like I've never seen her like this and I've never seen. Like this performance is incredible. She's a great actor. Not only does she nail this like Pennsylvania, like rural Pennsylvania accent, she just like every, you can't look away from her. Every scene she just steals. And it's a really good cast. So it's not like she's only, um, there are.

a bunch of other great performances. It's making me very happy that Gene Smart isn't everything. This isn't my one more thing, but we've been watching hacks in that show is also really great. And she's the lead in that and is like so good. And of course, she was amazing in watchmen too. Julianne Nicholson also is in it and is great. Guy Pearce is randomly in it. Oh, Guy Pearce.

Evan Peters, who plays Pietro in Wanda. Yeah, just a lot of really great stuff. Nice. And yeah, it's bleak, so get ready to be depressed as you watch. it. Like, there's some really, really sad stuff. It's really, really sad. Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. Say no more. I'm sold. But it's great. Where is it? You guys should watch it. It's on HBO. Um, okay. Mayor of Easttown. It's called Mayor of Eastown. Um, and she's like the mayor of Eastown. And it's mayor. It's like M-A-R-E. Like a female horse. Because she's a horse. Yeah. Okay, cool. She's a horse. She's a,

yes, it's about a horse who's the mayor. And it's really depressing. She was on a sitcom in the 90s. The horse has to solve a murder. It's about a family who gets adopted by a horse and the horse has to be their father and it's called a horsing around. Maddie, what's your one more thing? Okay, so mine is a video game called Fuser, which I think I talked about on this show months ago whenever it came out. And I kind of gave it another chance this week. So I was participating in a friend's charity stream this last weekend for Palestine and I

decided to play Fuser in the stream. That makes it sound like it was my decision. That's not true. Our friend Gita Jackson suggested that I play Fuser and she guested on the stream with me and was like, it would be really fun to play multiplayer. And I was like, that's probably true. So Fuser is a game where you are a DJ and you have to mix beats live. Definitely fun to play in front of a crowd, which is not how I was playing it before.

I was just playing it by myself. And I think when I talked about it on the show, I was talking about how playing it, especially during the pandemic, it made me really misperforming and live shows. And I'm an electronic musician. And so if I play live, I am doing a lot of queuing up clips and trying to mix things against other things. So there are some things about Fuser that remind me of that, although, of course, I mean, you can design some of your own clips in the game, but it's fairly rudimentary. I didn't love the pad that they have you used in the game and controlling that with a mouse. I was like, this doesn't make sense. I should just open up garage band and compose some electronic music if I want to do this.

But you can also make mashups in there and you can make, you can like mashup call me maybe and, you know, smash mouths all star or whatever. And it's hilarious. As one does. As you do. And that, as it turns out, is significantly more fun for a live audience than it is alone in your home with absolutely no one watching. Because of course, you know, you've got my friend Gita egging me on in real time telling me which clips to add or not add. and that's fun anyway. But then also you have a live chat of people enjoying the track or booing the track

because you've mixed just an unholy abomination for them. And it was extremely fun. And I think that Fuser might be a really cool game, actually. I think this is a classic case of harmonics, just needing to make another one of these that refines some of the ideas a bit more. And then I think it could be really great because there are some things in Fuser that I think works super well. But then some of it, like the sort of rudimentary mixing stuff,

I mentioned with the pad just needs a bit more polishing. So I never know what's going on with harmonics financially. I hope they're okay, but it's harmonic, so one never knows. It's still baffling that they're still around. Yeah. I know, but I do think there are some cool ideas in FUSR. Shout out to Harmonics, because those guys are chipples. And I think, yeah, and I think maybe if they marketed it in a different way, like if they did some deals with streamers and musicians and like sort of emphasize the live performance aspects, like they recently did an update to the game that has more multiplayer stuff where you're performing for other players, and that seems really cool. So I'm kind of cautiously optimistic about it now, and I think it's, I think it's an interesting

game. So if you're listening to this, and it sounds cool to you, I would say give it another chance, even though I was cool on it before. I think there might be something to it. It's called Feele. It's on the epic game store. Yes, play it for your friends. Play it in a house party now that people can have parties again if you're vaccinated. Do that. Kirk, what's your one more thing? Well, my one more thing is something that I didn't talk about during our Mass Effect episode that I want to talk about now because I don't know if it needs to come up if we do a beans cast on those games, but it's just been something that I've been doing a lot of lately and thinking about and feeling feelings about, and I just think it's really interesting. And that is probing planets in Mass Effect 2.

So I am well into Mass Effect too. We did a whole episode about Mass Effect. I'm just not going to explain what Mass Effect is because you all know. I'm playing it too. I'm right there with you. I don't know what Mass Effect is. Can you explain it to? Jason doesn't know what it is. Well, the Mass Effect Relay system is like originally created by the Prothians and it's a way that we can do faster than light travel between different star systems in our galaxy. Now, so in Mass Effect 2 you have to go probe planets to get resources.

There's four resources. Palladium, platinum, is it Illyrium, aluminum, something like that. And then there's Element Zero. There's the I-1, the 2P1s. and element zero. And there's so many things about this mining game, this like probing game, that are so incredibly well done, despite the fact that, like, overall, it's this totally brainless, like lizard brain thing that's completely degenerate and disgusting.

And I find it so fascinating and so appealing. And I love it so much on one level and, like, hate it so much than another level. It's got to be, like, one of the most divisive things about Mass Effect, too. Just because I was looking around as, like, Googling. because I kind of had this memory that there was an indie game that was just the planet probing from Asifact 2 as its own game. And I was trying to, I was like just really quickly

trying to find it before we recorded it and couldn't. But I just Googled it and there were so many articles mostly from back in like 2011, 2012 that were like, the probing is the worst thing. It sucks so much. What a time sink. It's so stupid. And I just, I didn't feel that way at the time.

I remember just being like, I don't know, I kind of like doing this like in between, you know, story missions and big elaborate set pieces and conversations, you just go. And there's a planet, and the planet just sits in the middle of the screen, and you rotate it with one thumbstick, and then you move a little crosshairs around while holding down the left trigger to scan. Your controller starts to vibrate,

and there's a little, like, sort of seismograph over on the right. A ripple effect, almost, when you're hitting an element of some kind, yeah. You get rewarded. It starts to pick up, and it's like... It's like a big metal detector. So... Yeah, kind of, yeah. Yes.

The audio, video, and rumble design of this thing is so fucking good that it's like dangerous. There's a, yeah, the way that it moves, the way that it jumps when different things spike in different areas, you have to kind of move your thumb around your left thumb while you're holding the trigger to scan. And then like it makes a different sound depending on the element. So it's like and then it's like and it's like and then also on top of all of this, the three that you're looking for are really common, the I and the two peas.

But then element zero is really uncommon because and you only need that for like, by stuff in certain upgrades. So then sometimes you'll be looking at a planet and it's like, like it'll start making the element zero time. You're like, oh shit, we got an element zero planet. And just when you press the trigger to fire a probe, Edie is like, you know, probe fired or whatever, probe away. And it shoots out in like an arc.

It's so satisfying looking. The whole screen, the focus on the planet jumps when you shoot. So like the HUD stays put, but the planet like, shimmers for a second. There's like an impact. And the rumble is like perfect. Everything about it is like so lizard rain appealing. And I just will put on a podcast and like just go probe planets, man. Like sometimes you find side missions while you're probing. Like, you know, it'll be like anomaly detected and then you go and land. And there's some little fun side stories you can uncover. I'm definitely going to like probe every planet in this game just to find all of those. Because I think I found them

all last time I played, but I don't remember them. But some of them are pretty cool. But even when I'll find an anomaly. I'm like, okay, I'll come back to that. I'm going to keep probing, though. I'm probing all day. I'm going to be probing for an hour. Just listening to whatever podcast, probe and probing. I don't like always listening to podcasts because I do like the audio. But anyways, I just want to say that my name is Kirk Hamilton, and I like to probe planets and Mass Effect too, and that's okay. Damn it. It is a good part of that game and a nice way to break up the rest of the game, even if it is a little bit too much fun. Kirk, I'm proud of you. I'm proud of you. I'm finally owning who I am.

I think I'm with you. I haven't gotten full into the probe zone in this play through yet, but I remember having that experience the first time around when I was just playing it on Xbox and just lying on my couch. This is a pre-podcast era, or at least before I was listening to a podcast. So I was just silently alone in my home, probing planets. And I do remember probing a bunch of planets in a row

and just really being like, this is mindless drudgery. And yet I can't seem to stop myself from probing another planet. But I don't know if that's good or bad. It might be bad. Yeah, it kind of has no place in the game. And yet, as a way to break things up, it's kind of, kind of works. Like, I don't know. Yeah, I have mixed feelings about it.

But I just, when I'm doing it, I'm loving it. Yeah. Yeah. Prove those planets. Kirklander, probe those planets. All right. I think that is it for this week's episode. Probes and demos aside.

It is time to say goodbye and that we will see you all next week. Yeah, see you all next week. Bye. Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes.

Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at maximumfun.org slash join. Find us on Twitter at triple click pods. 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. Maximumfund.org.

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