Triple Click - What's The Ideal Switch 2 Launch Lineup?

Episode Date: September 7, 2023

Maddy, Jason, and Kirk open up the mailbag and pull out some of your hottest questions. What's the best way to get kids into gaming? What minor video game mechanics could be expanded to full games? And what should the Switch 2 launch lineup look like?One More Thing:Kirk: The Making of KaratekaMaddy: Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-BrenyahJason: Chants of SennaarLINKS: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

One day there was a video game called Star Fox, and it fell in love with a video game named Kingsfield, and together they made Starfield. Welcome to Triple Click where we bring the games to you. Today we are opening up the mailbag and taking your questions on all sorts of things, from playing games with your children to the Switch 2 launch lineup. I'm Jason Schreier. I'm Kirk Hamilton. I'm Maddie Myers. We made it. We really flew into that one.

We really barely made it into the intro this week. That was exciting. Jason, keeping me on my toes. Before we started recording, Kirk had told us that he's having an out-of-body experience. So just seeing us now. And Jason and I were scared and worried while we were saying our names. If you felt like we were worried about him, we were. These are very brief, very brief out-of-body experience.

Okay. Kirk is pulling a Mitch McConnell. I'm back. Yeah. Back in my body now. A glitch McConnell, as they say. Here we are. Topical references. Welcome back to another episode.

Maddie is married. Maddie. I'm married now. I'm actually married now. Maddie married Maddie. Maddie, you're very fun. Triple M as we call her. Two rings on this finger.

Maddie at your wedding, it was so, you look the happiest I have ever seen someone. It was awesome. It was very fun to watch how happy you like. Listeners, it was so wonderful. Yes. It was very happy. Kirk and I had a great time. Yeah, I was just looking out.

at the crowd and I saw Kirk and Jason there and I was just so happy about video games. Yeah, exactly. That's why you said that. I was like, you know, it's been a great year for games. I've been to a decent number of weddings and one thing you did, I've never seen at a wedding before and is like the most

clutch move I've ever seen, which is at the end of the wedding, hanging out handing out bags and like popcorn and chips and stuff. Yes. Which is just the perfect perfect closer to do a snack. That's right. And everyone take a snack for the rest. Snack bag.

snack bag. I mean, I was like, people got a sober up. I mean, people really weren't, people were pretty sober at our wedding. Got a lot of nerds and attended in our wedding. So I wasn't too worried about that. But I was kind of like, all right, people have to drive home. What should we do? It should have glasses of water and like potato chips at the end of the night. It was a good call. Also, extremely, extremely fun to listen to your dad give a speech about how famous you are. I know. That was very sweet. It was very sweet. You got to meet my mother, number one fan of perfectly. Shout out to Maddie's mom and dad, both of whom Jason and I both got to meet, who are lovely. And yeah, Maddie's mom, a triple quick listener, a very fun. It's true. I should say it wasn't actually a speech about a famous year. It was a speech about how, like, how much he, how much of me and my accomplice.

How much pride he took in hearing people, like, know the sites you worked for and like the stuff you did and how, how enjoyable he found that. How his brother always seemed to know when you were on NPR. Yes. It was a very winning speech. Extremely cool. So, hey, we are a listener-supported podcast. If you want to make triple-click possible, go to maximum fun.org. Join and become a maximum-fund member.

Help us make this show. We don't have ads. We just have listener support from all you find folks out there. No ads. No ads. Just vibes. And if you become a maximum-fund member, you support us, first of all. But also, you get bonus episodes, including when we are about to put up, which is about

even be up. It might be up. It might be up. It might be up that you're listening to. The legend of Zelda, tears of the kingdom where the three of us do a deep dive

into that game, spoilers and all. We talk about the story. We'll talk about everything. It'll be really cool, really fun bonus episode, but also tons of bonus episodes. We do want every single month,

so you can look forward to that if you become a member. Otherwise, we thank you anyway for listening to our show, even if you're not a member. Yeah, thanks anyway. Thanks anyway. So thanks anyway.

My daughter, has started saying no thank you to everything. Like anytime you say, like she doesn't want to do something, she's saying, no, thank you. And so it'll be like, hey, are you ready to, are you ready for bad? Are you ready to go to, like, are you ready to go to have dinner? No, thank you. No, thank you. I love the kids do that about something they just said they did want.

And you can tell they're just exercising the power of choice in that moment. Like they're like, oh, do you want that? And they're like, no, actually I don't. I didn't want that. Like, you're sure you don't want this cookie? Yeah, it's like, I just. All you saying you wanted this. Okay.

One of her catchphrases also is in a very cute voice. She'll say, no, not today. That's what she'll say. Hey, are you ready to go to the potty? No, not today. No, I don't think so. Maybe tomorrow. Check back with me in a little bit.

All right. This week, we are doing a burning questions episode where we take your questions, all of your fine listener questions. Wow, you can really support the show in a lot of ways. You can send in questions. You can become a member. We just love our listeners. Just a reminder before we get into it, you can always send emails to triple click at maximum fun.org if you have any questions. Like we always say, keep them short. Your chances of getting read on the show are much higher if you keep them to one or two paragraphs max. That's true. Should we also

say that we're going to talk about Starfield next week? If anyone's wondering, we're going to talk about that next week. We just haven't had time to play enough of it. So next week. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Cool. Let's get on with it. Maddie, start us off with the first question. Okay. This one is from Jesse, who writes, hey, triple clickers, love the show. This question is mostly directed towards Jason, but I'd love to hear input from Kirk and Maddie. My wife and I have a child just over one year old, and we're expecting a second child in late November, 2023. We'll also be having an older sister and a younger brother. As a parent, I've already heard plenty about time management and incorporating games into a new slash busier lifestyle. Coming to terms with reduced gaming time

was not fun, but worth the baby cuddles and playtime. I'm more interested in how you came to discover and love video games as a child. And if you think there's an ideal way to expose your own kids or young family members to games, is there a certain age we should introduce them to certain types of games? Are there specific games that worked well for you as a child? Any other observations you've had with your own kids or family that are relevant? I'd love to hear your thoughts. So it's interesting. Well, even though this question, even though Jesse says this question is mostly directed towards Jason,

my oldest is just about to turn four in a couple of weeks. And she is not old enough really to appreciate games. And in fact, if any of us, any of the three of us can answer this question best, it's probably Kirk, whose nieces are much older. Oh, yeah, they're older. That's true. actually play games. But one thing I will say just to offer my own answer is that I have played a little bit of Super Mario World with my daughter. She like only likes to hold one of the two switch

controllers. She won't even, she refuses to hold both of them. And then I've showed her the trailer for Super Mario. Not today. I've showed her the trailer for Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the new one that's coming out. And she enjoyed that. She was like, she was very excited about Eleph Mario. So that'll be my first attempt to like really getting her into the swing of a game is that one. But Kirk, you know the most about this. You've seen it for Sands. Yes, I have. You've seen a child playing a game recently. Yeah, my nieces are 12 and 9 going on 13 and 10 coming right up here on those birthdays. And yeah, they're very into video games. I think partly due to my influence. They have a Switch and they, I would come down and visit and they would love,

you know, just touring all of the games that I had on Switch since I had basically every game. And then they got really, really into Zelda and it's been really cool watching them play Breath of the Wild and now Tears of the Kingdom. It's the only game that they play and they play it a lot. They're really, really into it. They got really into Breath of the Wild. It was crazy. When I went down and visited, they had done everything. I think I talked about this, some on the show. Yeah, I think you did. Yeah, was this when when it came out? So they were, what, like, what ages were they when they got into?

This was probably a year ago, so it was pretty recently, and it wasn't right when it came out. So the game was sort of fully fleshed out. I think they had all the DLC, and also Tears of the Kingdom was coming pretty soon. So they were a little bit older. There was also, there was a huge wealth of information online, and

they're really into going onto YouTube and just looking up how to do stuff. They have no qualms about that. They explore the game, but they're just totally happy with just watching a guide for how to do this, how to find that, here's this secret. So when I looked at their save game, I mean, I don't think they'd finish the game, but they had done so much stuff that I hadn't done. All of that monster stuff that was DLC, where you get the monster hats by getting monster parts. They just are willing to explore and play games in that kind of childlike way, and that game really rewards that type of open-minded

exploration. So they're really into it. It's funny, you know, I think back on my own childhood as well related to watching them play. And a lot of my experience playing games as a kid was wanting to play games and encountering limits that had been imposed by my parents, which is also something that my nieces run into, my sister, definitely limits the amount that they're able to play and they're constantly trying to play more because they love the game. It's really, really fun. And it's also addictive in that way that games are. And so they just like, they'll play it. I mean, if you just leave them to their own devices, they'll just, well, so to speak, they'll just wrap their device and they'll start playing Zelda.

They came and stayed with us for a week over the summer. And I mean, it was, I think they didn't bring their switch. But if they had, they would have just played the entire time. They were unsupervised. Yeah. Yeah. And I get it. It's really fun.

But there is this kind of constant push pull with boundaries. And I remember that from being a kid, like waking up super early in the morning so I could sneak out and play Doom on my dad's work laptop and then delete it off the hard drive. So he didn't even know I'd done it before school. Yes, I've told that story many times. I love it. Yeah. Like, yeah, I would go to my grand.

I would be so excited to go to my grandparents' house for the weekend because I could just play games all day and no one was there to stop me. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. So, I don't know. That's my main thought about that, about introducing kids to games, I guess. Well, I guess my big question for you is, do you remember, like, what age your nieces started getting into games or, like, how they first started getting into?

Which ones they started getting into it? So, you know, they're about three years apart. and I think it helped that Clara, my older niece, she started probably when she was around 9 or 10, and so she can kind of help onboard Zoe, my younger niece. And she's just like a little more mechanically capable and could play games in a more complex way. So they play them together.

They have separate saves, but they play them together. They played a lot of Animal Crossing 2 during the pandemic, and that's a much more mechanically forgiving game because there's not really combat the way that there is in Zelda. but they play very differently. They sort of just have a different, I mean, they're very different people, like fascinatingly different really to me,

just as their uncle, like how different they are. And that expresses itself in the way that they play. But I do think that it was helpful since they were two. And Jesse, you mentioned that you're going to have, you know, an older and a younger kid. I think that that'll be cool, like, as the older one gets more into games and kind of reaches that age,

which I'm guessing is probably around there. I'm sure it's different for everyone, but like eight, nine. And then the younger, the younger sibling will kind of have someone to follow and watch and learn from and then they'll probably start playing games a little bit earlier than they would have otherwise and as a younger like as a second child that's definitely the case for everything right is you just start doing everything a little bit earlier than your older sibling yeah that was my experience growing up my sister's two and a half years older than i am and we both had game boys and so we could share a lot of

the same game cartridges and she was always better at every game than i was in part because she's a couple years older than I was. And so having that younger kid experience of somebody else in your house who's beaten the game and can kind of help you figure it out when you're stuck, but also be the challenge because I'm so competitive and always wanted to be better and would always want to be like faster at Mario or whatever it was just to be able to catch up. That feeling of having a sibling who's playing games, I think, really empowers like a younger kid to be interested in it and it's fun. Maddie, did you and your sister ever play Game Boy

via the, was it called the system link cable? The cable that let you do PVP? You know, we didn't really. We didn't really play that much. Yeah, so I got really into Pokemon, but by the time Pokemon was out, Mink wasn't really playing that many games anymore. Like, she really fell off and I kept playing forever.

And I was just, I was just bringing my link cable to other people's houses by that point. I mean, that was middle school era. So it was, I had other people in my life who played games by then as opposed to elementary school where Mink was one of the main people I knew. My sister was one of the main people I knew who played games and I just didn't have that many friends as a little kid. Yeah, Kirk, it's so funny. You would have missed out in this because you're a few years older than me and Maddie. You would have missed out on the Pokemon middle school.

Yeah, I totally missed Pokemon. That's like one of the big generational differences. It's very interesting. Yeah, well, part of the appeal of that game was like talking about it with, all your friends and collecting them and training them and stuff. And the urban legends, new under the truck, et cetera. That's good stuff. But yeah, I mean, Maddie, do you have any thoughts on this before we move on about like when, based on your niece or based on your own experience is like when to get a kid into games or what kinds of games to get them into?

I mean, I think it depends on the kid. Like my niece is about six months older than Jason's kid and she already really likes playing games. But she is super into blocks mechanical stuff. I feel like she just kind of has a puzzle-minded brain, and so she automatically is like, yeah, I want to watch my dad play games and then sit on his lap and move the character around. And you can already tell she's like understanding that and she's going to get better as she goes along. And her parents are willing to let her do that.

And so we're mine. I mean, that's the other piece of it is that like there's so much more conversation now about the idea of screen time, which didn't really exist when I was a kid. my parents really limited TV, as everyone may remember from my entire tribes about not being allowed to watch television growing up. But I was allowed to have access to the shared computer and play computer games. And I had a Game Boy. And like, that didn't really count for whatever reason in my family as screen time. So that was kind of how I got around that. Like, I was playing games very young. Like, I don't even remember when I got my Game Boy, but real young. So probably four. I don't know.

Yeah. One of the, thing that we should probably at least mention is something that I'm at least aware of with a lot of Clara's friends. So that's my older niece. And also another friend of mine who has a daughter around her age is Roblox, which is something that I'm not super read in on and aware of. And I know Roblox is basically a platform and it can be anything. But Roblox is extremely popular and just a different sort of thing than what we're talking about. Like I'm talking about them playing Zelda right on a Nintendo. But I think that a lot of kids, it's like Roblox, Roblox, Roblox all the time and that's that is video games to them.

So it's worth at least mentioning that. Yeah, as like a social space. Like a lot of friends kids just treat Roblox these days the way we treated AOL Instant Messenger. We're like, I'll overhear kids being like, what's your Roblox handle? And like that's the way that they communicate with each other, which is I remember that being communicating with kids about like DMing on aim and stuff. And it's like, yeah, it's also a platform for games, but it's like a social platform too.

And like those barriers breaking down around screen time is just something that the three of us didn't experience growing up, but that parents today have to be like, screen time means all forms of entertainment ever. And I have to figure out which ones my kid is actually doing and whether I'm okay with that. Sounds hard. Something that Jason and Jesse both have to look forward to. I think our generation probably got into games younger because our parents were not into games for the most part. And so nobody was really, nobody was really, yeah, nobody was really doing the whole like slow burn introduction thing. So we're, I think Gen X is really the first generation and then millennials now, the first generations to really like have raise their kids, but also have

been playing games or play games growing up. And so it's an interesting transition. And be aware of like the pitfalls of games and like what can be addictive about them. I mean, not to say that growing up people didn't worry about video games being addictive. People certainly did. No, it was a big, it was the whole thing. The arcade craze. Like people were like in there like, oh yeah, the sticking the quarters and the let's move on. But yeah, this is something I'm sure I will be talking

about quite a bit in the coming years is my oldest gets older. Kirk, why don't you read this next question from Carl? Okay, this comes from Carl. Carl writes,

prompted by some of your other listeners, I've recently started to listen to old episodes of Kotaku's split screen, which is wild, by the way. It's particularly fun to listen to predictions

episodes seven or eight years after they've been made. And for anyone who doesn't know, this is the podcast that Jason and I started at Kotaku back in 2015, 2016. A long time ago, and that we made for a while without Maddie, which Carl and then I joined it at some point. That's true. 2017, I think. Yes, a little bit before, right, he sort of eventually became this show.

So Carl writes, besides the obvious Maddie-shaped hole in the first half of the back catalog, I really enjoyed listening to it. In episode 63, Kirk said that wandering around the apartment blocks of Deus X-Mans, Mankind Divided, reading people's emails and snooping through personal possessions was so fun that it could be its own game. I've been having fun with an early access game called Shadows of Doubt, an immersive sim where you play a detective, and you essentially do exactly that to solve randomized crimes in a small city, which is not unlike Mankind Divided's Prague. So this got me thinking, what are some of your favorite minor mechanics in a game that you think could be expanded into a full game on its own? Something like prey or dishonor two, have plenty of these that come to mind for me, but is there anything that jumps out for the three of you?

Shadow's a doubt, by the way, is something I've had my eye on, but I'm waiting for it to be in actual release and not early accesses, but that guy has been installed. I just haven't had a chance to play it. It does look very cool. So mechanics that could be games. Yeah, I really have tears of the kingdom in the brain right now because we're about to talk about it and I've just been thinking about it.

And that so much feels like a game with a ton of other games inside of it that I can just do for hours and hours and hours. Like I've been unlocking all of the light roots in the depths, which is just a game in and of itself. Like, yes, over the course of unlocking all the light roots, you're defeating enemies, you're exploring, you're discovering things about the depths and so on, like story related things. But mostly just the experience of seeing a light really far away in the extreme darkness and then being like, okay, what is the landscape? escape here look like, okay, I need to shoot some lights towards it and then finally get there. That is so pleasurable to me. I don't, I probably it's the Metroid fan in me that loves that sense of exploration and being like, oh, what's around the next corner? Oh, it's all pitch dark here. I have to scout my plans. Oh, I'm going to wear my mountain climbing gear for this section. And then

I'm going to change into my miners gear for this part because it's too dark. I don't know. I freaking love that. Like I feel like I could just do that for the rest of my life probably. be happy with it. That is the sign of a good sort of maximalist game, I guess, or AAA game, where there are so many different things that you're doing,

each of which could be its own game. You know a game I just started playing that this question makes me think of is Dave the Diver? Have either of you played Dave the Diver? This game is crazy. I haven't, but I have read about it a lot. I've many of those coworkers.

It's really cool. And it feels almost like, well, it's kind of the opposite of Carl's question, in that it starts out as this sort of fishing, rogue-like, thing where you're going catching fish, taking him back. But then you have to help make them into sushi at a sushi restaurant. And then there's a whole sushi sort of you have to work at the restaurant

mini game. But then it just keeps getting more complicated and it adds photography. And then I went and watched the trailer for the game just onto the Steam page. And it's the craziest trailer for a game I've ever seen because it starts out and it looks like the game that I'm currently playing. And then it just goes totally buck wild in a hundred directions. And there's like, guys, there's machine guns coming in and like totally crazy like cinematic happening on like what in the world so it's almost the opposite of this but it makes me think of it and I want to shout it out because

I'm sure I'll talk about it more on the show as I play more but it is kind of like someone took a bunch of those kinds of little things those very satisfying mini games filling up someone's cup with green tea to just the right amount like a kind of bartender game and then just put them all together and almost the joke of

the game is that you know it is so many of those things all jammed into one A couple of things that come to mind, though, is the first act of inscription, which then did become its own kind of stand-alone thing, because that game really kind of lost me a little bit, or it lost steam for me a little bit when it changed. But the first act, we were just playing this kind of deck-building roguelike was just really good. It was just like a really good deck-building roguelike that I got really into. And that mechanic stayed throughout the rest of the game, but it became more elaborate as the game kind of folds in on itself and become. this increasingly elaborate experience, but really they could have just made a game out of that

initial act and had it just be a straight-up game, and it would have been great, as evidenced by the fact that they actually did that. I was waiting for you to continue since you said a couple of things come to mind, but okay. They do. I figured I'd leave some space for you guys. Since you stuck in a one more thing, in addition to your answer there. Kirk with his two one more things special. and tricky this week.

Yeah, my answer is Final Fantasy mini games, like Triple Triad or like Blitzball, those could usually make a game. Blitzball is a controversial example. I feel like people either love or hate it. Yeah, but if you turned it, if you kind of stripped it out of the game and made it into something, you could polish some of the rough edges and like add some more mechanics. With Blitzball, like, I think people hate it because it seems like a sports game, but it doesn't actually play like a sports game.

Yeah. Well, it's not that it's not very good. It's just. I was like to Lucio Ball and Overwatch. Watch, which kind of is a version of Blitzball. I mean, it's way easier. It's kind of like Rocket League, but everybody plays as Lucio instead of as trucks. Well, so the actual Blitzball is more like a card game than anything.

It just has, it just looks like a sports game, but it looks like soccer, but it's not. It's like numbers and stats and stuff. It's like a little RPG thing. It's been years, but I remember being baffled by it. It is, yes, it is a baffling experience. Those starts in mini games a lot of times, where the best of those really can qualify as Another, the other thing that I was going to say was the Mass Effect 2 probe. Yes.

We've talked about that before and how satisfying it feels. It's weirdly satisfying. It really just comes down to this way the controller vibrates when you press the trigger to fire the thing and the sort of arc of the probe as it lands. Didn't, I feel like someone made a standalone game that was just that, but I can't find it. I mean, I just did a cursory Google while we were talking. I'm not sure about that. I did download an indie game that was just a series of live. lock-picking mini-games.

That would be great. Yeah, because those old Bethesda lock-picking games totally come to mind. It had a lot. It had the mass effect, like, code-breaking ones in it and a bunch of other ones. And I really thought I was going to love it. But then after a couple, I felt like I was, like, eating too big a bag of chips or something. Like, it was, like, too much of a good thing. It's weird how that works, where it's, like, a mini-game that's so satisfying when it's in a

larger experience, when it's on its own. Suddenly, you're like, do I even like that? Like, what am I doing? It's all side dish. It is like a bag of chips with no sandwich. Well, the fallout, that fallout hacking game is basically wordal, right? Like, wordal is essentially, or mastermind, really. You take mastermind or you take the Fallout hacking mini game and you turn it to

where you're like making words. Yeah, yeah. Well, you're guessing. I hate that. Hacking game. I hate it. Anyway, let's move on. Mini games episode when?

Many games that are bad and that were bad about. Bad mini games. Next question is from Max. Max says, hi, I just recently started listening. and have fallen in love with the podcast. Thank you, Max. If we assume that a Nintendo console is imminent to be announced this year or next year, I don't know what games will be included. After Tears of the Kingdom, after Pikman 4, it's unclear what major releases are left for the Switch. Most of the major franchises seem like they've had releases fairly recently, and I don't know what they have up their

sleeve. What would you're expected or ideal launch lineup be for the Super Nintendo Switch? The next mainline Mario game seems likely, and Metroid Prime 4 might finally be on the horizon, but what else could Nintendo be hiding from us? Well, one big question is if it has backwards compatibility, because if it doesn't, they'll sell you the $70 definitive edition of Tears in the Kingdom. And every other game. Yeah, at 60 frames a second. I hope it's backward compatible.

That would be such a tragedy if it weren't. It really would. But everyone will buy it anyway, because it's the Switch 2. It's Nintendo, yeah. So, assuming, yeah. And also assuming it's the same sort of like form factor and same basic concept as the switch. Yeah, there are a lot of potential ones here. Just a full Metroid lineup because, you know, it's so popular and everybody knows that.

So it's probably just like 16 Metroid Games. Well, it does seem like Metroid Prime 4. Like the timing does work for Metroid Prime 4 to be that kind of cross-gen and like launch on the Switch 2. But I'm kind of joking around here because I don't know that Metroid Prime 4 is enough to carry the launch of a new console. Like, typically it wouldn't be. You'd need a Mario or a Zelda. And so, like, obviously they just had a Zelda,

but the 3D Mario, I don't know anything. Yeah, we haven't had a 3D Mario at a little. I'm shocked that Super Mario Archie never got DLC. That game is so right for it. Like, you could have a whole planet, a whole new... Yeah, why not? I guess it didn't, right? Because there is some kind of post-game stuff.

There was like a Luigi thing they added, but it was nothing. wasn't like a real, real content. It was nothing. Wow. Hurting Luigi's cute. I mean, I don't know. Like, Breath of the Wild's DLC was also kind of disappointing. Like, they don't really, like, I know that was actual DLC, but it was still kind of disappointing after the game.

Yeah, it just kind of fits right in there. So, yeah, I mean, do you guys have, like, ideal launch lineup titles or, like, games you want to see you on the Switch 2's release? Let's say, hypothetically, it's next fall, like fall of 2024. So I could see them announcing a 3D Mario that just seems like of their big temples. That feels like the most obvious. It's been six years, so that seems possible. I could also see them releasing a new version of Tears of the Kingdom that's sort of juiced up for the more horsepower in a better console. Like basically, Tears of the Kingdom, there's some expansion that they release as DLC that's also available on Switch.

But then maybe they add like 10 new Zonai devices. That to me seems like the kind of thing where, oh, there's now these, we can make much more complex devices because we have more processing power. So that's only going to be in the new version. And then they bundle it up and they sell it new to people buying that console for, I'm sure, for 70 bucks or whatever. And just bleed us all for everything that we're worth. And then it runs a 60 frames per second or whatever. It runs in 4K and looks way better. So I could see that happening as well.

So my guess is would be, other than some new IP that comes out of nowhere and blows everybody away, a new Mario Kart. It's been a long time since Mario Kart 8. Yes. And it's one of the most highest-selling games on the Switch. Yeah, ever. No, it is. It is the best games on the Switch. I believe it is the newest.

It's really fun. And then also a new Smash Brothers, which I don't really know where they go from Ultimate. I don't either. It's a good point. quite a while. It does kind of feel like it's impossible to make another one. Who knows? Who knows what that'll look like? And then I guess there's a lot

of remake, like, given that they're coming out of nowhere with like a Super Mario RPG remake, they could really go in the remake direction with a lot of different games. The rest of the Metroid Prime. Yeah, I would love that. I mean, I know the Link's Awakening remake is pretty far behind us at this point, but I thought that was kind of an interesting

sign of something that could happen more often, like a total refresh of an old game that not a lot of people have played. I'd love to see them do that for more Zelda or Metroid games. I mean, Samus Returns on the 3DS is great as well, the Mercury Steam version of Metroid 2. I mean, I'd just like to see more versions of old Nintendo games that are totally remade in some form and are easier to play, especially some of those old ones that are like no save points, like really freaking hard. Right. And not to mention the extremely long running, still unfulfilled

rumor of Wind Waker, Twilight Princess remakes, which still could happen at any point. I mean, I thought those were pretty good the first time we're out. Those were a remake rumors. I'm sorry, remasters. They were just remasters, yeah. Or not even remasters

because they were already remastered on the Wii U. So a little bit simpler than that. Yeah, the ones I'm expecting are like an Oracle of Ages, Oracle of Seasons remake in the style of Link's Awakening. Like that feels like the next obvious move. Yeah, the 3DS launched, or maybe it was

shortly after launch. But that first year, the 3DS got an Ukraine of Time remake. Which is a great remake. Yeah, a really good one. And then Majora's mask one later. Yeah.

So there is precedent for some of this stuff. Oh man, and they could still port link between worlds. That still hasn't happened. Yeah, there are a bunch of these, a bunch of games that haven't made it to switch. There's a bunch of like DS and 3DS games

that are just trapped there in a weird Nintendo purgatory. Yep. Yep, yep, yeah. Any of those could run on the switch, but they could also bring them to a,

to a, to a new hardware. But really, we all know that we're just going to have to re-buy Super Mario Brothers one again on the newest version of the virtual console. Like, they start a brand new system for that. All right, let's get to the next question. Maddie, read the Eric, Eric's question.

All right, Eric writes, non-game music question. I'm not as good as Kirk, but I enjoy playing saxophone. Hell yeah. I work a non-musician job, which means I can only practice it and I have a toddler, which means I cannot make loud noises at night. Essentially, I can't practice at all. I've seen ideas like stuffing a sock in the horn to muffle the sound, but that will screw up low B-flat and other low notes.

Is there any real serious way to be able to practice a wind instrument while not waking anyone up? Bonus non-game question. This is a hilarious email. Nearly all my saxophone experiences with classical music. I have an alto. How do I get a tone like Kirk has in the triple-click theme song? My tone is not nearly as colorful, more muted.

I assume this jazzy tone is a combination of mouthpiece, read, and procure, and practice. I don't know, Kirk. You tell me how to pronounce that sax word. Well, welcome to strong songs, a podcast about music. I'm your host, Kirk Hamilton. And we're briefly here to talk about saxophone. We slipped in this strong song discussion this week. This is good.

This is good. I can give a very quick answer to this. lovely question, Eric. I would say, no, there's not really a great way to practice saxophone quietly, which is a bummer. I've always been jealous of brass players who have a thing called silent brass. Since there's only the one hole on a trumpet, you can put this thing. It's like a mute in that then goes to headphones and you can hear yourself. It's so cool.

And you can't really do that with a saxophone because saxophone has a lot of holes. And they make these, like, bags, these things you put over the horn that's supposed to mute it. I've never really tried one. It just seems very weird to me. But you can kind of try those. What I would recommend is actually trying a wind sense. I don't know what your budget is like, but I've got what I play as a Roland Aerophone, and it's basically an electric saxophone.

Somebody recently beat Eldon Ring, a no-hit run, playing the Roland Aerophone, the A.E.10, which is the one I used to play. I got an A.E. 30 now. Wow. But it is basically, it has fingers, you finger it like a saxophone, it has little keys. They're kind of buttons, and then you blow into it, and it has all these different sounds. I can do a million different tones. It's super, super fun.

It can be a MIDI controller. It's incredible. If you can play saxophone, you can do so much cool stuff with it. And it's not the same for, like, developing your tone because it doesn't require you to, like, make the reid vibrate. But it is good for just practicing scales

and keeping your fingers loose. So that's an option for playing, and it's totally silent. You can just play with headphones. So I play an Aerophone and I like it, but there's a bunch of different companies that make them. And then as for saxophone tone, yeah, I mean, it's just you got to play

with a different setup. It's something I've been thinking about with tears of the. the kingdom actually. Yeah. There is a... Good sax game. Great saxophone. There's an alto saxophonist. I think it's just one sax player. There might be a sax section on some stuff, but it might be one person overdub. But there's an alto sax that has that very kind of classical, more muted tone. And it's not how I sound.

It's not how I play the saxophone because I learned jazz. And it really is about the mouthpiece that you're using in The Read. And I'll just say, Eric, I play an AutoLink seven, a hard rubber mouthpiece. And I used to play Bandorian Java two and a half. half reads, but now I play RICO Select Jazz Medium. I play kind of lighter reads. But yeah, you need a more open mouthpiece. And then it's all about your ambassure, that hard-to-pronounce weird word, ambersher, which is mostly going to be your lower lip.

You want to practice rolling that out a little bit more than you might be, and that'll open up your tone. It takes a little work to get it in tune. But anyways, shoot me an email if you have more questions and I can answer you off the show, but I'm happy to get to talk a little bit about saxophone. More sax jargon. I like it when the sax goes, brum, brum, brum, Yeah, we do. I think it sounds cool.

Nice. I probably record some saxophone that'll be playing behind us right now. So just demonstrating my mouthpiece. Very cool. We're hanging out in a jazz lounge. Kirk, what's the next question? This comes from Paul. Paul writes, Hi, gang, I absolutely love cool cities in video games. They offer so many things to explore and people to meet. A well-designed city feels lively, while badly designed video game cities feel like a computer program.

What are your favorite cities in video games? This is a good question. Liberty City in GTA 4. I'll just throw that out there. Unstoppable. I mean, just an incredible video game city for reasons that have been very well documented. I mean, to be fair, they have a bit of a model that they could, they base that one off. It's a pretty cool city, too.

But, you know, there are how many versions of New York are there in video games, and yet there's still only one that feels like Liberty City. It's something in the design of that game that I've always loved is that I'm not sure if this is 100% true, but there are almost no dead end alleyways. And I think that's a really important thing for that game. Something I've loved to do in GTA 4, man, this was a real moment in time for me was. So bring the camera all the way in on Nico's shoulder so you don't have a great field of view. And then you just like shoot at a cop so you get one star and then just start running. And then run from the police while they chase you and see if you.

you can get away. And because of the design of the city, you almost never get cornered. And so if you can just keep on your feet and keep thinking, it makes you feel like you're being chased, like, through the city, and it's really thrilling. It's a very exciting experience. So that city let me do that, and I've never wanted to do that in another game. So that's one example. Spider-Man's New York is pretty cool, the PlayStation for Spider-Man. Yeah, I was going to say that. I also really liked Harlem in Miles Morales, the Spider-Man version of Harlem there. I know it's not accurate exactly, but it just had a little bit more personality in terms of just the number of NPCs you could run into.

Like then going back and playing Spider-Man, the first one on PC, I was like, oh, yeah, this doesn't quite have the same level of NPC personality and like bad guy personality that Miles Morales had. I really noticed the difference, mostly in terms of scope.

The other example I was going to give is Revacal, Ravichal and Discolysm, which, again, I mean, it's almost entirely narrative-based, in terms of what I like about that city as opposed to the placement of the buildings or anything like that. It's just the fact that it feels like a place where people live.

You can just run into so many people who feel like they straddle a lot of different class and identities and just the way that a city feels where you're like a whole bunch of different kinds of people live here. I mean, that's what's great about living in a city in real life. And Disco

Alisium really mimic that. Like you can just get into random arguments with people and like street tuffs will pick on you and make fun of your outfit. Like it just, I don't know, it feels like a city. There's just something about it. It feels like a couple of blocks of a city, which is an interesting approach to that too. And it tells the story of the city.

Like you learn of this sort of failed revolution and the siege that happened in the harbor. And there are these buildings that were destroyed and rebuilt. And you can kind of find a building and it's explained to you as you look at it, the different layers of the building that you're seeing, which is something. I actually remember Cliff Plasinski talking about this when he was talking about Gears of War. But in regards to the World Buildings. of that series and how he approached it, that so many video game cities look brand new, and that you don't really get a sense walking through a lot of them.

And this was back in 2006, 2005, so he was talking about much older games. But you don't get a sense of the actual history of a city the way that you do when you go through a real city. There's all kinds of historical monuments and placards being like, this building was originally used for, you know, this totally other thing. And like, you know, whatever was some part of the immigration process into New York. And people stayed here when they first came. And then there's photos and stuff, and you look at it.

I found this a lot, actually, in Australia. Australia is very tuned into their history. And in a lot of places, maybe it's that we were in more, like, touristy places, too. But there is just a lot of really cool history. And that's such a part of a city that a good video game city tends to feel like it has an actual history. It's cool when it's something like Disco Elysium where it's a fictional history. It's not based on somewhere in the real world. I have another one.

It's, now I'm forgetting the name of the city, though. It's New Orleans in Red Dead Red Dead Redemption 2, which was called New Bordeaux. Is that what it was called? St. Brough, St. Verde. I'm going to look it up. New Orleans in Red Dead Red. St. Deney. Thank you. It's called St. Deney.

And it serves a different narrative function in addition to being just incredibly beautiful looking and well-realized, like everything in that game. It serves this function of being this kind of horrifying. blight a little bit on the wilderness, which I think is a really interesting part of the story of that game. Something that I talked about a lot in my review of it is the way that this, the game is about the unstoppable march of progress and the destruction of progress, and how just this, you almost feel trapped in this move toward the future and this move toward something better that's actually worse, and it's in the end kind of destructive, right? That's this Western where they keep going east and they can't get they can't stop going back toward civilization and at the

point in that story when you arrive in what's the biggest city that's ever been in a red dead game and it's just totally stands in stark contrast to everything else in that game it's horrifying that the scene where you first see the city it's all just like factories and it's arthur and dutch and dutch is just like man well there it is progress like it's clearly shown to be a bad thing Like it's just this ugly, polluting factory city. And then when you go explore it, there's a lot of really cool stuff there. In civilization, it's neat. It's amazingly drawn.

But I could never fully get away from that feeling being in it of like, this feels wrong. I've been out in the just woods. I've been sort of away from this. This whole thing, this whole American project is in some way destructive. And I think that's like a really, really effective thing that that game does. Kind of throughout the whole game, but especially with that city. And that's something very cool about, about St. Any cool theater shows, though, despite the whole.

Yeah, unbelievably performance captured. My answer is Midgar and Final Fantasy 7, which I think has really been beaten for me in terms of a city that just feels fully realized and crazy cool. The concept of like this big pizza pie, as Barrett calls it, where like the haves live on top and the ham nuts live on the bottom. It's pretty wild. Something I really liked about remake was how they visualized it. It reminded me of the lower hang shaw parts of DeSX Human Revolution, where you're in this lower city and you don't even see the sky because you're underneath this plate, which is a very time-tested cyberpunk idea and something that even exists in actual cities in the world. But I never really got a sense of that in FF7, the original, because you're always kind of looking down. You can't look up.

And so you can imagine it eventually, but when you're actually below it looking up, it's. the very beginning of FF7 remake. I remember being like, oh my God, like this alone is revelatory, this perspective shift. And then it makes it matter way more when the plate is damaged because you're like, well, I got to know this entire city down there. And that only matters later because it's, it's affected by what happens up top. It really works. I think we have time for one more and more quick question. This is from Alexander. He says, I don't think I've heard you talk about strategy games. especially 4x games. When was this email written?

Well, this was written last year, but I wanted to focus on 4X games. He mentions real-time strategy games. So 4-X games, we never really talk about games like civilization and paradox games and stuff. Have any of you played any of the strategy 4-X games? Any favorites? Any thoughts? Because I am actually a big fan of the Sid-Myer-type games. Oh, yeah.

Siv? I think we all like Siv. All be Siv fans. Yeah, it's been a while since the last Siv. Yeah, it's just dangerous. I mean, I don't play them because they lose whole base of them. They suck you in. You can't stop playing them is the issue with those games, really.

My favorite as a kid, my problematic fave now you would call it, was Sid Meyers' colonization, which was the American, like the exploring the new world and colonizing it version of the 4X games, which I still, every once in a while, we'll pull up and play. So it holds up. Still very buggy, but still fun to play. Mm-hmm. I always like to say five. I think that was the one that I started to really get into. I think I played four, but I remember five being the one where I was like, my laptop's getting really hot and my hands are being injured by this experience, but I have to keep going. I can't stop playing this game. And all I had was a laptop at the time. Yeah, I had a similar experience with five. And I never really got into six for that reason because I was like, I can't. Yeah, it's dangerous. Dangerous. Yeah. It'd be really fun to play Crusader King sometime. That would have been a good, that'd be a good, like. And I never really got into six for that. That'd be a good, like bet pick for one of us to make all of us play Crusader Kings.

I feel like none of us are super into it, but I think I would enjoy it if I ever try. Yeah, that's why I think it would be fun. I think it'd be a little out of all of our comfort zones, but also it would lead to very interesting conversations, only because I've heard a lot of interesting conversations about that game. So I could see that being pretty cool. But even though I've never really played it. You should make a year bit pick then.

That'll be hilarious. I might for next year. But I'd always lose, so then I'd be ensuring that we never play it. Okay, cool. Why don't we take a break? everybody who wrote in. Once again, send your questions to triple click at maximumoffund.org. Let's sing Rick and we'll be back with one more thing. Somewhere in an alternate universe where Hollywood is smarter. And the Emmy nominees for outstanding comedy series are JetPacular,

Airport Marriott, Spruple, Dear America, we've seen you naked, and Allah in the the family. In our stupid universe, you can't see any of these shows, but you can listen to them on Dead Pilot Society, the podcast that brings you hilarious comedy pilots that the networks and streamers bought, but never made. Journey to the alternate television universe of Dead Pilot Society on Maximum Fun.org. I'm Jesse Thorne. Bullseye is celebrating 50 years of hip-hop by bringing you an entire month of brand new interviews with rappers. That means jeezie. I put my pain in the music.

Angie Stone. You know, hip hops. We called them hops back then. Master P. Music is what's going to open the doors for us, but whatever we come up with after this, it's going to be bigger. Plus, Chika, Saba, even the greatest of them all, Rakhim. That's this September. Open up that podcast app. type in bull's eye and hit subscribe you're not going to want to miss any of this and we are back kirk mattie it is time for one more thing i'm going to go first uh i got a text last week from our old boss stephen titillo and he was like hey you should check out this game it's this year's version of case of the golden idol slash return of the ever done and it's a game called and that's your code phrase that's your manchurian k today immediately it took me like

Just activate. I was like, okay. You purchased it. Took me 20. Well, it wasn't out yet. So it took me about 20 seconds to go to my computer, send an email to the PR people involved, get a code. And since then, I finished the entire thing. It's a game called Chance of Senar, which is kind of a terrible name.

But I try to remember. Ch, H-A-N-T-S. Yes. Chance, like, singing Chance the rapper. And let me tell you about it and why it has come out of nowhere to become one of my favorite games of this year, one of the best games I played this year, a shoe-in for my top 10 list at the end of the year. Chance of Sinar is a game about language. And so the way that it works is it's kind of, it's got this beautiful, really kind of a stunning art style where you're, it's reminiscent of journey. It's a lot

of stylized colors and really interesting-looking characters and shapes. And you play as this little dude and you wake up, you kind of rise out of a coffin at the beginning of the game, and you wake up and you start walking, and then you run into someone who speaks this language that is just glyphs, and you can't understand it. And then you see a door, and you see a lever, and the lever is next to a set of glyphs as well. And you can look at the glyphs, and then you pull the lever, and the door opens, and then you pull the lever the other way, and the door closes, and then you realize that the glyphs translate to open door and closed door. And then you start to understand that this is the premise of the game. So you go around this world that has been crafted and you kind of have a notebook where you can figure out what each glyph actually means in English. And it's structured in the same way as Return of the Obridon where it's pairs of three or four. And once you have a page right, it'll tell you that you're right and it'll automatically fill in. So then when you go and you keep exploring and you see that cliff, it'll be translating for you automatically. And it'll fill in the page right. It'll fill in the page right. It'll fill in the page. It'll tell you that you. It'll fill in the page. It'll fill in. And it'll fill in the page. And it'll fill in the right. So then when you can. So then you can the words that you do know and it'll be blank the words you don't know so you can kind of try to

figure it out as you go. You can also enter guesses so those will show up on screen as like maybe it's this. And it's really, really cool because it's entirely, it's a big logic puzzle. As you go, you might see someone and they'll say to you blank, blank, blank, blank, and maybe you recognize one of the words from before or maybe you john in your notebook that like, oh, he's holding a flower, so maybe blank means flower. And then you see somewhere else, oh, this person is also a flower and mention the same glyphs. So maybe that definitely means flower. And you kind of have to piece it together by exploring these landscapes and figuring out what everyone is talking about. And then, as you go, you get past the first area and you learn the first language, and you get into a second

area, and there's a second language, and then there's a third area, and a third language, and so on and so on. And you realize you're climbing this big tower, and that actually all the languages are connected to each other in some way, and all the different people are connected to each other in some way. and there's one big kind of, I wouldn't call it a mystery, but certainly a world to explore and a various peoples to connect along the way. The story is based on the myth of the Tower of Babel, which is essentially that everyone spoke one language, and then they tried to build a tower to reach God or take on God, and God punish them by splitting them into different nations that all spoke their own languages. and this game is kind of an interesting take on that. And it's brilliant. I loved it. The music is phenomenal. Kirk, you will love every,

I mean, both of you will love the music. And it's just such a good kind of pallet cleanser in between these massive RPGs that everybody is playing. Baldur's Gaden and Starfield, this is such a good, like, I'm going to chill and lie in bed and play this for an hour, and it's going to be awesome type of game. I cannot recommend it highly enough to everybody. It's called Chance of Sark. Sonar. Again, terrible name, but it's an incredible video game. Really, just go check it out because it's really, really cool. And I think it'll be the surprise kind of gem of this year in the same way that, like, games like Oberdin and Outer Wilds and Bava's, you have kind of come out of

nowhere to really surprise people over the past few years. So yeah, go check it out. I wish it had a better name so I could be really telling more people like, hey, go check out this catchy name, and they actually remember it instead of being like, what was it? Like, like, songs of bizarre. It's tough that it's a homonym, chance. Yeah. That alone makes the title hard. It's just a bad name.

And I think that might hurt it pretty badly. But still, go check it out. My game sounds cool. I want to play it. I'm also just pouring one out for all of the Tunic fans who are listening to you talk about that. Yeah. And not comparing it to Tunic. Why didn't these guys like Tunic?

Yeah. Remember the combat. We all struggled with it. Yeah, we all kind of bounced off of that. I know. I know. We don't have to relitigate Tunic. Yeah.

I agree with you. It had some good ideas. And I mean, you know. But I know that was another game that introduced an interesting language and a lot of cool. If that game had no combat, I mean, this game has their combat. It has a couple of stealth sections that might annoy people, but I actually thought they were pretty fun because they're less like random stealth sections and more like, okay, I have to figure out exactly how to do this. Yeah, it sounds really good. So my one more thing is a very cool archival project that I actually contributed to.

I wouldn't say I worked on it, but I played a role in the creation of this. promotional one more thing. So this is a bit of a promotional one more thing. You can just fast forward through this if you don't want to hear someone talk about something he was involved in. Well, we did just say we don't have ads. So, Kirk, this is... That's true. This is...

I'm not being paid in any way, though I was paid to create something for it. So anyways, that's the making of Karatica, which just came out and is extremely cool. This is made by Digital Eclipse. One of the editorial, I think the editorial director, someone doing editorial on this is Chris Kohler, our former colleague. from Kotaku, who got in touch with me to make something for this as well. But this is made by Digital Eclipse, who do these kinds of archival documentary video game projects. Their last, I think the last thing they did before this was Atari 50, which was very similar and was a whole bunch of classic Atari games,

where you load the game up in Steam or wherever I played this on Steam, and you get a menu that sort of has the game and then different versions of the game that you can play through along with video clips, and design documents and just this sort of whole history of the creation of the game. In this case, it's Jordan Mechner's 1984 game Karatica, which was his first game. This is a karate game where you're the karate master, the Karatica, who has to go and save the girl from the bad guy.

I mean, it is like a video game from the era. Exactly. It really established a lot of the sort of the rules of what a video game could even be. It was super groundbreaking, a game that I didn't know that much about before I began working on this project and then learned a whole lot about in the process of making it. And one of the coolest things about it is that he worked very closely with his father, Francis Mechner, who is a fascinating dude, a really interesting guy who, among other things, composed the music for this game. And that's where I come in. So I recorded a sort of 20-minute strong songs like music explanation that's included in this game. So if you play this game, if you have it, there's all kinds of archival footage, famous video game people talking about this.

this game and its influence, and then there's just 20 minutes of me talking to you about the music theory and the sounds and the different motifs and how they work in the game. It was really fun. It was super fun to make and really educational for me. I just learned a lot and came to really appreciate this game for just what a big deal it was. This isn't an era of games that I've traditionally paid that much attention to, but it's made me really just want to learn more about this stuff because it's so interesting and so approachable.

I think anyone who checks this out will find, you can really understand how they made this game because it's just not that complicated. It doesn't like watching the Double Fine documentary, like Psych Odyssey, where you know, you kind of get a sense of what they're doing when they're working in Maya or whatever and doing really complex 3D animations and level design. But it's like five different people talking and essentially code about this very complicated thing that's taking months to do. This was just one guy who had been kind of, there's a lot of his prototypes who are included in this of earlier games that he was making where he was super young. I mean, he was like 16, 17 trying to make video games before anyone was even making video games and just trying to figure out how to make these very old, simple computers, do stuff, like render things on screen, like do rotoscoping animation so that the karate moves match up so you can play

the game. And it's really, really cool, the more you watch him do it. And then, for me, at least, the story of him and his father, and the way his dad is just really interested in trying to help out his kid, his very precocious, brilliant son. who's just trying to do this weird thing is also just a really, really neat story and it's awesome that they have all this footage of his dad. And then especially for me,

seeing his dad explain the music and even having the idea of having music in a game, like this was kind of the first game to do that where he's like, we should have a motif. Like you should write a motif for the hero, and it can kind of play. And Jordan Mechner is like, okay, well, we have basically no way to do that.

And he's like, all right, well, because he's sitting there at the piano being like, what about this? And he plays the car picture. He's like, okay, I can do like two notes. So which two notes do you want to do? And watching them figure that out is really cool.

So I wanted to recommend it mostly because it's, well, because it's really interesting because I learned a lot. I had a lot of fun working on it. And also I just, I hope more people do this kind of thing. It's so cool to see an interactive documentary like this where you have multiple versions of Carotica. There's even a remastered version that you can just play with like a modern controller. And it's just, it makes history, like video game history.

make sense, I think, in a way that a movie about this wouldn't because you can play it. You can actually interact with it because that's so fundamental to video games. So I really think it's a special project. I'm super proud to have been a part of it. And yeah, I hope people check it out. So that's the making of Karatica. It's on, you know, various platforms. It's definitely on Steam.

That's where I played it. And it's super cool. So yeah, give it a look if you think that sounds interesting. Yeah, it does. Maddie, what's your one more thing? Mine is yet another book. So it's a New York Times bestseller. So maybe people have heard of it.

I felt like I heard about it a lot before I finally got around to it. It's called Chain Gang All Stars. And it's by Nanaquami, Ajay Brenia. And it is pretty different from the fiction books that I normally read, not politically or thematically, but just because it kind of feels like a series of short stories. And I kind of wish I'd known that going in. So it's why I'm happy to explain that to the listeners now, because usually with a fiction book, I'm excited to meet a hero and follow them on their journey.

And that's kind of what happens in this. But mostly it's like this Hunger Games-esque, super terrifying, near future dystopic world about a series of prisoners who get to fight for their freedom, potentially. Although I have a feeling. I haven't finished this book yet. I have a feeling that no matter how many other prisoners you defeat in gladiator combat, you don't ever really get to be free because that's usually how dystopic sci-fi prison gladiator stories go.

You usually don't ever get to be free, but I haven't completed it yet. As they say, one way out. That's right. That is true, one way out. It's very much in theme with the sort of political sci-fi that I like to read. And so that's why I was so excited about it. But it does kind of have two main characters, two black women who are very famous fighters and very well known and have a huge fandom. There's other fighters who have fandom as well because this show that all of these gladiators are competing on is televised and it's controversial societally, but it's also very lucrative, of course, for private prisons.

And since it's sort of a near future dystopia, it sort of just makes clear. to you, the extent to which, especially just the brutalization of black lives in media is just normalized and profited upon. I mean, that's very much the message that the book is making. But the weird part about it is just the fact that it feels like a series of snapshots. I don't think that's a bad thing. It's just, it's very jarring. And I think that goes with the way that the book wants to operate. It's mega violent, like lots and lots of descriptions of just people, getting killed within seconds because it's gladiator battles. So you'll get to know a character really well after a few paragraphs and know everything about their life and then they'll die.

And that can be kind of hard to read. But it is fascinating. And I get why people are super into the book because it really just kind of smacks you in the face with how brutal it is and draws some pretty clear parallels between our prison system and just the idea of that being a televised event that people enjoy in that way. There's chapters about protesters who are against it and their experiences and then chapters about like people in the audience who are like super fans. And it just jumps around a lot. And it's kind of an unusually structured book for that reason.

But yeah, I recommend it if you like science fiction and that type. I wish it was a little more Hunger Gamesy just because I would love it if I could follow one character more. The book is kind of that. Like there's a little bit of that. And maybe as I read more and more, it'll, become more of that. But I think it's more about the world itself. So if that sounds good to you, I do recommend it. It's very, it's very well written. It's beautifully written. And again,

very violent. It's called chain gang all stars. It is what it sounds like. It is chain gang all stars. And yeah, it's a book. So yeah, that's my thing. That sounds good. I'll check it up. Yeah, I recommend it. Awesome. That is it for this week's episode. Thanks again to everybody. who wrote in and yeah, stay tuned for the Zelda episode. Or maybe it's already out and you can listen to it right now. Maybe you can just go listen. We don't know. Who knows what the future will hold?

Who can really say? The only person who can say is Bing Kirk. That's true. Bing Kirk here from the future and I do know. In fact, I know that the Zelda Beanscast is out right now. So if you're a member, you can go listen to it in the bonus feed. And it was a whole lot of fun. So we hope you enjoy it.

head. All right. Bing. Hmm. Is the episode and you have to discover it through a series of puzzles? This episode is secretly a Yeah, it's a secret that was with us all along, flying around. Wild, wild stuff.

Kirkiship and spoiler beeps on everything the Maddie and I just said. All right, that is it for the sixth episode. See you guys next week. Yep, see you next week. Bye. Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music.

Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun podcast network,

and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at maximumfund.org slash join. Find us on Twitter at Triple ClickPod. send email the triple click at maximum fun.org and find a link to our Discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening.

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