Triple Click - Why E3 Demos Are Fake (And Why It Matters)

Episode Date: January 21, 2021

Jason, Maddy, and Kirk open up the listener mailbag and answer some of YOUR questions about all sorts of things. What does it mean when an E3 demo is fake? What's our video game comfort food? And why do video game sequels always make you lose all your powers?One More Thing:Kirk: GloomhavenMaddy: Dark Souls Jason: NFL playoff updateLinks:Jason on Cyberpunk 2077: https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1350322423170797568Kirk’s article about preorder culture: https://kotaku.com/the-witcher-3-downgrade-controversy-sucks-1705882405The overview video Kirk watched to start getting his head around Gloomhaven: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw7LI2esvp0Support 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

There's nothing worse than starting a new game and seeing the main character has tons of items and abilities. You just know you're about to lose everything and slowly get it all back. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week we're answering your burning questions about the time wasted making faked-up press demos of games like Cyberpunk 2077, video games that are like comfort food to us, and the agony of having to start every new game at level zero. I'm Kirk Hamilton. I'm Maddie Myers. And I'm Jason Shrier. Hello.

Hello, my friends. Hey. Hello, my friends. We're back. Welcome back to another episode. For another episode of the wonderful listener-supported video game podcast, Triple Click. And speaking of listeners support, as you probably know, but maybe don't know, if this is your first episode of ours that you've ever listened to, we are totally listeners-supported. And that means a lot to us. That gives us the freedom to make the show that we want to make,

and we really love all of our supporters. So if you would like to help us make this show, go to maximum fun.org slash join. And if you do that, you get access to one monthly bonus episode each month. And you can go back through the backlog since we started this show. There's a whole bunch of beans casts, as we call them, because we spill the beans on various stories. And we are actually going to be changing things up in 2021. We're still going to do beans cast. I think the next one for next month will be a beans cast.

But this month we're doing something a little different. It's something called, are you ready? Is everybody ready? I'm ready. I'm so ready. It's called Beans Talk. And that means that we are going to talk. we're going to spill the beans on a subject, which is totally makes sense and is the same.

Does it make sense? Don't worry about it. Makes 100% total sense. Absolutely nothing to worry about. And we're just going to be talking about something because we're not always going to be spoiling things just because it'd be fun to be a little flexible. So this is our first non-beams cast format. And this beans talk subject is going to be our pasts and our futures. It sounds very ominous. Which sounds very intense. And I almost want to say that you have to listen to know what that means. But it's just going to be, we're going to talk about kind of our stories and the three of us and how we came to be doing what we're doing right now. And then we're also going to talk about our New Year's resolutions, including our video game resolutions for 2021. Great. I'm so excited for that. I don't know what you two's pasts are. I don't know anything about either one of you. So I know. I'm excited to find out. We've never met and we all have amnesia. Okay. So a couple more things up top. First of all, as those of you listen, in our predictions episode, no, we will be playing this year,

Final Fantasy 6 and Half-Life 2, including episode 1 and 2 of Half-Live 2. We're going to start off with Final Fantasy 6, and I want to give you guys a brief bit of, like a tentative schedule, or at least the first part of a schedule, since I know a lot of you want to play along with us. So here's what we're going to do.

We're doing a triple play of Final Fantasy 6 on February 25th. So everyone has about a month to get a nice chunk of Final Fantasy 6 in a little bit later in a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks. To find it. To find it. Yeah. To check it down.

And a couple of weeks I'll say exactly where we're going to mark off in the triple play. So I'm not sure what yet. Those of you listening to the game can probably think of a good point. A good stopping point. But I want to see how much progress Kirk and Maddie make through the game over the next few weeks. And then we'll decide, okay, we're going to talk up to this point. Later, down the road, we're going to have a beans cast on Final Fantasy 6 for subscribers. And I'm sure we'll wind up talking about it more.

You guys can bring it up as your one more thing. the next few weeks, et cetera, et cetera. One other thing about the predictions, a lot of you have brought up that my Metal Gear prediction and Kirk's Animal Streaming prediction both kind of already happened. So quick clarification. One is that with my Metal Gear prediction, my prediction was Metal Gear will come back in some form. It has to be a new thing.

So the Metal Gear Solid movie coming out this year would not count. And Kirk, what's your tweak to the animal streaming thing? Or what's your clarification? Well, there's a fish that plays Pokemon, which I actually didn't know about, but that has been a thing for a little while now. In the past. In the past. So it's kind of the same rules there where it's been a known existing thing.

It has to be a new, a new animal. A new animal. And as for the Harry Potter prediction, since Harry Potter was delayed to 2022, it looks like Manny and I both just get a zero for that one, unless it's mentioned in some way in a trailer or something. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, we'll see.

I could imagine a few ways that you all think. Or if like a developer in an interview has like a pro trans message, I think that'll... Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll talk about it. No more predictions talk. No more predictions. Talked at the end of the year.

Too much predictions. Okay, no more predictions. Let's get to it. This week we are doing burning questions where we take your beautiful burning questions about all sorts of things. Just a reminder you could reach us with your burning questions at triple click at maximum fun.org.

Maddie, why don't you take us away with our first burning question? This is from someone named... What is it? This person's name is Maddie Meyer. and they wrote in a really, really good question that I can't wait to hear both of your thoughts on. And here's what they had to say. I read Jason's story at Bloomberg last week about the development of cyberpunk 2077, and it made me think about the demos and splashy trailers that AAA games put out before a game is even close to done.

Sometimes a game can deliver on the promise of its demo, but that doesn't always pan out. God of War director, Corey Barlog, did an interview with IGN about the games famously impressive E3 2016 on-stage demo showcase, and he described it like this. Quote, we were trying to take an inaugural flight in a plane while building the plane and drawing blueprints of the plane, and it's just taking off, end quote. What happens when you can't build the plane in time? You might get something like cyberpunk 2077. I always joke around about how much gamers love trailers, but could our love of trailers

be the rot at the heart of modern video games? I would just like to say, this is a spectacularly well-written listener email. I mean, just this person could have a future as a professional video game journalist of some sort. Yes, I agree. Interesting, interesting. Very thoughtful question. I think so, too. I think so, too.

A lot of respect for Jason's work and for the show on display here. So, Jason, what do you think about this? I'm surprised that this question didn't open up with, thank you guys. I love the show, especially Maddie Myers. Long-time listener. This person doesn't like the show. This person thinks the show is bad. This is a really good question and I'm glad that we get to talk about this after the past weekend.

Some dramatic stuff with the cyberpunk story. I think that there's a lot to unpack here because when you're making a demo and when you're a game developer and you're making a demo for E3 or something like that, you're making a 15 minute, 20 minute, 30 minute demo. I mean, first of all, that's a little bit different than like a, trailer, which might be a two-minute cut of just some footage that you have lying around, but like a demo, so a chunk of the game that's actually playable in some form and shows some part of the game that you're aiming for. In some ways, that can be a really good thing. And when it is more of, when it's reflective of like a proper vertical slice where it's like

a segment of the game that, so vertical slice and game developer jargon is like a chunk of the game that looks like you want the game to look. So it has all the audio and gameplay and graphics and story, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's all, like, polished to a fine sheen. And what some companies do is because games are so hard to, like, conceptualize, and it's so hard to, like, get everybody on the same page about what kind of game you're making. Oftentimes, you'll hear from developers that, like, we had no idea what game we were making, like Anthem, for example.

It can be actually really useful to see that demo because suddenly everyone's on the same page and it's like, okay, this is what we're making. The problem is that oftentimes what happens is that they don't have to be. have the gameplay systems online in time for a demo, and so they wind up scripting it. And what that means essentially is, like, I don't know, say you have a game where you shoot enemies and then numbers pop up over their head, and then they, some of them are called vex, and if you shoot them in the belly, then their bellies explode. Okay, I'm imagining this.

Sounds interesting. Pretty out there, but, come on. It is a little out there. No, but yeah, so say you have that whole system that you have in your, head. But say that like the actual mechanics of like being able to shoot any enemy in the game aren't working yet because you have another time to put all that together and maybe you haven't made some final decisions about a variety of things. So instead in your demo you write scripts and essentially a script is something that you, that someone manually designs. And so you make it so when

you shoot an enemy, their belly exposed and numbers appear up their head. And basically you're faking it. And that's what people say when they mean a demo is fake is that it's not actually a system. It's just like only works for this one person. If you shot another enemy, that would not happen because there's no script for it and there's no system in place for it. So I think that is where you get in trouble, especially if your team, as with cyberpunk, spends months and months of work doing that stuff

only to find afterwards that suddenly things are broken and you don't really have a lot of work in place on the actual game. And I think for various reasons, the Bloomberg article was edited pretty concisely, and we had to kind of trim it down a lot. But I think if I had a little more context, I think I would have explained that although E3 demos are generally fake, where you really get in trouble is when you wind up just spending way too much time. You make it way too big. I mean, Cyberpunk's demo was 48 minutes of gameplay.

Like, that's ridiculous. The scope of that was just like out of control. I remember it was so long. I don't think I watched the whole thing when it was finally on YouTube because it was so long. Yeah. Well, that, I mean, that itself is like unprecedented. I can't think, like, can you guys think of any gameplay demos and E3 that are like that? long. That's so long. Yeah. Right. So, so what happened, and I wish I'd explain this a little bit

better because I saw it taking off in some weird ways, but what happened was because they had to spend so much time on that demo and so much of it was not really like actual thing and the actual gameplay. And then the other part of the equation is that they didn't have a lot of the, the rest of the game in actual, in any state where it could be played. And I think that tends to be a problem. A lot of these companies just like focus on marketing and marketing is a big part of their whole plan. CD Project especially is very much about like the PR face and the marketing face and all that jazz. So that was another part of this equation. All that said, I mean, I think that like what you're, the question you're getting at of like this demo driven gameplay and like not being able to land

the plane on time, it's really just a fundamental flaw at the heart of all of AAA game development. Yeah. That was how I felt about it in reading about it is just the idea that you create something that's pretty short usually. Usually it's not 48 minutes. Usually it's like 10 minutes. And then the next two years of your game development cycle, you're just trying to measure up to the promise of whatever that 10 minutes contained. And hopefully you can come up with systems that back up the scripted interactions that you created that look like they show off systems, but those systems don't exist yet. And you're going to have to design them and make sure they actually work. But who knows if you can? Anyway, Kirk, go ahead.

There's kind of two axes that I think of this on, I guess. One of them is just there's the sort of, the just grossness of showing people things that aren't real as a promise and the whole pre-order promise. Like just that video games so often feel like a promise that you're buying from somebody. I wrote about this at Kataku a few different times. I think related to The Witcher 3 maybe, I probably put it artfully at the time. But something like that, though. Like it always just feels like this weird, like promise exchange that's. going on. That's just a kind of a strange part of the act of being a person who plays video games

that you're always being asked to sort of buy what they're selling without like it just being a video game. It's why it's so refreshing when people just show you a game. And it looks like a game. And you're like, oh, that's just a game. People are playing it. It looks kind of rough and weird. And it's probably really fun or hopefully really fun. So that's one part. And then there's the like logistical part of it that I think this question is really getting at and that I've thought about more and more as I've read more of the types of deep dives that you write, Jason. I always think back to Bioshock Infinite, whenever that was. They were at E3 a few years. There was the one year I covered them for the Edge Magazine cover story, and I wrote this big thing about the audacity

of this game, and it was the songbird demo, which I think you can still watch on YouTube. And is this outrageously cool demo that was not in the game at all and was totally on rails and scripted, as you described, Jason. And then at the time, I was like, oh, it really sucks that this thing like misled us and I was in the press and I was I like you know bought it hook line and sinker and I kind of misled readers because I like you know was the proxy for this misleading thing where then when I read about all the struggles making Bioschuk Infinite there's also just the pure logistical problem of we spent so long making this thing that we didn't spend that time making the game work and it's not necessarily like nothing is that clear of a trade off but I'm there is that

trade-off. It makes me think a lot of making music in the studio where you can do a lot of stuff to make the music sound really great and a lot of studio magic and tricks and overdubs. And then you have to play it live and you wind up in this weird reverse engineering situation. We were like, okay, shit, now, how are we going to do this? Because, like, I was singing five parts on this and, like, playing five different instruments at once. And like, what are we going to do to make it sound that way where, you know, another band might just be like, well, we're just going to learn to play it and then just record ourselves playing it the way that we play it. And then live, you'll see us and be like, wow, they sound exactly like their record because, you know, they just recorded

themselves in the studio. So there's like kind of parallels to this in a lot of different types of media. But anyways, those are just some thoughts. I feel like there also aren't parallels, though, because the movie parallel doesn't work at all since you can't cut a trailer until after you've filmed at least a portion of the movie. I mean, you can go to examples of really high-budget, splashy movies that change a lot and do reshoots after a trailer or bits of a trailer that don't end up in a movie. Of course, there are many examples of that. But usually you think about the trailer as being the last stop in the marketing cycle for a movie in terms of it's done, and then you cut together a trailer that reflects what the movie is. But for video games,

it's so far away from that because we're talking about a situation where something's being cut together that shows off a game that literally doesn't exist. And maybe in an ideal situation, it will exist and it'll meet that promise, but it's a gamble. Like it's a investor gamble, like you're showing off to your investors what you think the game is going to be, and that's maybe how you're getting funding. You're showing off to the press and guaranteeing to the press that they should give a shit about this game. You're trying to get people to place pre-orders, but you're also just gambling that you'll be able to spend the next two years of your life actually making the game that you promised. And that's not something that movies or albums or these other media really have to.

do in the same way and it seems like it's causing a lot of problems for games. It is different. I think that there's a, the parallel with music is really because you have to perform it in the same way that the game has to perform, which is different. And there is a thing with movie, like, I know there are times where a movie trailer will be made way before the movie's finished and they'll like have this trailer that promises this certain experience and then they'll be like, shit, we have, like that does happen. But it's very different. Like the performance aspect is sort of interesting or that's an interesting parallel specifically between music and video. games. Yeah, well, also, when you make a movie, I mean, you know that fundamentally you're going

to be pointing a camera at something and you're going to be like telling a story in some sort of order and you know the structure of what it's going to be as opposed to a game where there's so many different. A lot of movies they don't know. Like, they can do that out as they go with a lot of movies. No, no, no, no. I'm not saying they know exactly what the story is going to be. I'm saying they know that the movie is going to tell a story and that's all it's going to do. With a, with a game, you have to have a story and you also have to have some. some sort of a gameplay and you have to know what the five minute loop and the 10 minute loop. Oh yeah. I mean yeah. Yeah. They're very different things. Yeah. Right. Well, but I think that's the key thing is that like when

you have a thousand people, 500 people, or it was 500 with cyberpunk, if you have 500 people and you want them all on the same page of like what your game will be, you kind of need to create a demo of some sort so that everyone actually knows what they're looking at. And that's kind of the whole point of like creating a vertical slice in the first place. Um, I think the, the idea that it has to be so polished that it can be shown at E3 might be where we're really getting into trouble here. And like I think that coming up with something where it's like this is a fundamental target of what we want the game to be, but like maybe it doesn't need to be, maybe it can be all gray box. It doesn't have to be all like perfect assets and and shiny textures

and whatever else like you need to show. Or maybe like you convince fans to like you set a tone of like, we're going to show you in progress stuff. And this is really going to be in progress. And that's it. Deal with it. Instead of like the sizzle and pomp of. E3 where I mean at this point like we've all become like the the general gamer awareness has become pretty like it's become pretty clear you see a game in E3 you know it's not coming for five years you know it's fake you know that demo's fake everybody in the world knows that God of War Ragnarach which was announced like last year for 2021 everybody in the world knows that's not coming until 2022 at the earliest like there's nobody who who believes this stuff anymore so maybe it's time to just like

cut off the curtain entirely and be like, you know what, we're going to actually show you real in progress shit and like, you have to deal with that and we're going to be raw. I would love to see a AAA publisher do that and like take the first step and being like, here's the real shit. This is really what games look like when they're in progress.

Yeah, or do the other thing and be like, this is a really splashy demo, but it's all smoke and mirrors and we have no idea if this is going to be in the game. But this is what I hope it's going to be. And like, I hope you like this cool thing we made. I don't know. It's a sandbox.

That would be funny. the demo and then halfway through it crashes and they like do a whole thing where it's like actually none of this is real we don't even know what the fuck the game that would rule actually that was part of I mean that sounds like that's like a new stanley parable or something no but in fairness to cyberpunk their demo did say like in progress like may not appear blah blah blah all the standard stuff I think the real issue like from my perspective is again not that the game play demo was fake and that we should have all known they were fooling us the whole time, but more that there were so much wasted work that went into that.

And I talked to a couple of people, I talked to a lot of people for this story. I talked to a couple of people who either came in after the demo or around the time of the demo or like a few months before the demo, and they all said one thing that stuck with me, that stuck with me, which is that they were shocked by how little of the game was made. And through 2019, that was the same thing. Like around E3 2019 was where things started coalesced. and like it started becoming more of like a game but even at the end of 2019 when it was like April 2020 it was just a joke like nobody thought that was even possible even at E3 2019

when that release date was announced people were like this are you kidding me like there's no way in hell we could ever do that and that fundamentally is a problem and we don't know why like people have theories like was the company struggling is a company struggling in some way like did they need to release it in 2020 do they have marketing deals with people that they needed to see through. There are a lot of reasons why the executive team of CD Project might have said this needs to come out in 2020 no matter what. But that is the fundamental problem is that like they wasted all this time on the demo and then suddenly found themselves like studying like up all night and the like the night before your exam, you haven't studied at all and you have to you have to you're forced to

to go into crunch time like literally, literally except this time it's for years instead of one night. And yeah, I mean, that's the really rough part of this. this whole thing is that it's just like executive decision making trickles down. The shit trickles down. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. All right.

Let's go to another question, shall we? We shall. Kirk, do you want to read this one? Sure. This question comes from Patrick, who writes, what are your comfort games? A few of us on the Discord server, by the way. Shout out to the triple-click Discord server. It's a link in the show notes.

A lot of fun over there. A few of us on the Discord server were talking about games that we somehow gravitate back to even when we have no, even when we have new games to play. You know, games that warm you up from the inside, no matter how many times you come back to them. Like a virtual bowl of homemade chicken soup. What are your comfort games? Maddie, what are your comfort games? So I got to go with House Flipper, which is a game that is, I would say it's not well-made.

It's not deep. You don't do very much in this game. You clean houses. You do chores. You click on stuff. You click on trash and it disappears. you click on sections of a wall to paint it. And once you have taken an interior from looking like a pigsty to looking like a yuppie apartment,

it's just satisfying. It's really just, it feels like checking things off of a to-do list, but the to-do list is not real and it's a thousand times easier than cleaning up your apartment in real life. And it rules. It is my go-to for if I feel terrible, but I really want to play a game. But I also don't want the game to challenge me or have any rough edges whatsoever. Houseflipper is my go-to game for that experience.

I recognize. That's a good one. Yeah, I tend to gravitate towards, like, PC games that I loved as a kid. So, like, Heroes of Might of Magic 3, I'll play once in a while or, like, Sid-Myer games. like Alpha Centauri, I'll like go back to once in a while or like old old SIV games and stuff like that. Oh yeah, Siv, yeah. And then obviously Destiny is certainly one of them, although less so these days. And then StarCraft 2 is another one of my big comfort games.

That's a comfort to you, StarCraft 2? Yeah. Yeah, there's something soothing about like logging online and like playing multiplayer matches. Even when you lose, like there's something just super soothing about playing it. I don't know why. Yeah, I mean, you can get into a flow state, I guess. Exactly. Yeah, that makes sense. Mine are, yeah, it's kind of a mix of things.

Like when I don't, I just kind of don't know what to play and I'm looking around. Sometimes I go to new game plus on, like new game pluses on games that I've beaten recently. But that's not quite like my go-to comfort game, I think, in the way that Patrick is asking. So I'd say the older games are I'll always play Half-Life 2. I'll always play Half-Life or Portal. Like, I'll play Valve games. And you're going to play it again this year? What a coincidence?

I am. I'm excited. So there was a long time where I played Half-Life 2, like, every year. That and then for a while, Far Cry 2, weirdly, I would just go back and play it because it's kind of the same. Why do you say weirdly? That's like one of your favorite games ever. Well, because it's not a calming game.

It's like this very oppressive game where you, like, have malaria and everything is against you. And I play on hard and you kind of get killed and just rocked all the time. Like it isn't, so it's not like, I wouldn't describe it as a virtual bowl of homemade chicken soup. It's a virtual bowl of malaria. but I found it calm me because it's just so familiar. I've played it

so many times. And so in that vein, Bloodbourne is definitely one. I mean, I've started that game over so many times and I'll just come back to it and just be like, hey, what's up, Bloodborn? Like I just, especially the first, you know, maybe half of that game

before you really are going too much into the nightmare world. Like it just is, like I know it's so well that it's hard, but it's not really that hard because I know exactly what to do. And it's just a very, satisfying game. Have you beaten that game on like new game plus or new game plus two or whatever? No, no. I always just start new games. When it gets super hard, I'm just like, all right. Like, you know, I'd rather start a new character and play again. I still haven't beaten the

DLC, actually. I'm in the middle of it. But like, yeah, I know. I've played more, I've beaten more blood more bosses than you. Yeah, yeah. We talked about this when you lost the bet. You played all the the DLC and I was like, oh, I've actually never beaten whatever, like Ludwig or that final boss of the D.L. One day. The orphan of cost. Yeah. And then Hollow Night is increasingly becoming a sort of similar thing for me.

Like that game is just, I'm in a replay of that. I know Silk Song is coming out, but I just love it so much. And I could see myself just getting in a zone where I start replaying that pretty regularly. And I just get to know it better. Like, I've forgotten a fair amount of it because there's a lot in that game to remember. But, you know, it's also a game that works its way into the grooves of your brain because it takes so much to kind of master it and learn it.

And I find that so satisfying. to just relive that memory and to be reminded, oh, right, I have to go here and like, wait, what's, oh, yeah, this thing. And it just, it has such a great energy to it. And I love that game so much that I find it very comforting. It's the best. Kirk, I think Bloodborn would be mine and I would have played it more times if there was a way to play it at 60 frames the second. I got to say. I've had a feeling you were going to say that. The choppiness just really kills me. If my prediction comes true, maybe Bloodborn will come out and get a 60 frames. we can hope. Perhaps. God, I hope so. All right, let's do one more question. I'll read this one.

This is from Nick. Nick says, a lot of AAA games now are 30 plus hour open world games, or you have a character that starts at zero and progresses over time. Often when it comes to the sequel, you repeat that experience. All those combos or powers or spells or whatever are forgotten for you to spend all that time to reacquire them. When I play Spider-Man 2 or the New Horizon game, both games I spend 60 plus hours. with, I am dreading the reset to zero. As we get older and free time is more precious. I feel that investment I made is being thrown away and it kills my anticipation for the new game. Do you guys feel similar about having a restart? Is this lazy storytelling or a necessity to gently ramp

new players into the game without previous experience? I would love to hear your take. I think this is, this is like one of the biggest like core game design questions when it comes to sequels is like how to solve this problem and nobody's really mastered it. Maddie, as our resident Metroid expert, what's your take on this? Because Metroid is a series notorious for this. Then it's notorious for solving it in the stupidest way, but a way that we've just all come to accept, which is Samus losing all of her power armor at the beginning of every game and then having to regain all of her abilities again through a variety of contrived plot

devices at the beginning of each one of those games. I don't know if that's a good way to do it, but I think it's something that many gamers have come to accept. This question actually made me think about Kingdom Hearts 3 because my friend Ryan is playing that game right now. And he was telling me about how stupid it is that the contrivance of that game is that Sora has lost all of his powers. And like a huge part of the story at the outset of that game is Sora being like, I just don't remember how to use any of my powers. but it's stupid and it's never really matters that Sora doesn't know how to use any of his powers and it's purely a contrivance to allow him to start at level zero, even though Sora has, of course, been a keyblade wielder for, I don't know, 10 billion years.

I don't even know how you measure time in the Kingdom Hearts universe because it's meaningless. But in that game, they have to come up with some reason why Sora can't remember how to do anything. And it's barely justified to a point of hilarity because it's like why. why wouldn't he remember how to do anything? And I have no answer to this, except that I guess I find it very funny now when a game does this, because there's no... It's like as though we've all just had to accept

that this is stupid, and games kind of know that too. So it's like this recurring bit that we do every time we start up a new game where it's like, oh, Peter Parker suddenly lost his gosh darn spider suit and he's going to have to build a whole new operating system for the new one. Like, I don't know if that's what they're going to do, but it'll be something like that. Like, it's dumb.

I don't know. Kirk, what do you think? Yeah, it's an annoying trope. I think of God of War, which does the same thing, where you start out and Cretus is like annihilating a continent and he has every weapon in the game. And then Zeus is like, I will strike you down. And then he like punches you and you watch all of his like items and his like health bar shrinks.

And you're like, God damn it. And then you start down at the very bottom of Hades and you have no anything. So it's like an imperative for a game. They can't just give you all the cool shit and set you loose because they want you to be gradually learning skills. So from a learning perspective, you can't be overwhelmed. You don't overwhelm the player. And also from a progressive progression perspective, say that 10 times fast.

From a progression perspective, you want to be feeling like you're making progress and getting cool shit. Like that's a motivator. So I understand why they do it. But it's tough. The thing that bugs me, and maybe I'll just pick a little bugbear, that I don't like is when games make you repeatedly unlock bullshit abilities. Like it isn't, you know, the dual blade or the sweet sniper rifle, but it's like the ability

to pick up items from the back of your horse or the ability to sprint farther. Pick up resources from your horse. That's the worst one. Right. Like it's like, I think that's, that was one in Horizon, I think, is when you're on a horse now, you can pick up, you can loot like, you know, plant. And you have to spend ability points to unlike that. Because I think it was a DLC or something, and they were out of things to spend points on. So, like, here, just, I don't know, here's a new thing that we added to the game that we're going to hide behind an ability gate because you probably have 50 points to spend anyways.

But I hate that. And something that Assassin's Creed did eventually was they did get rid of some of those. If you remember at the very beginning of Assassin's Creed in the first couple ones, or at least in AC2, you had to unlock the ability to jump while climbing. It was like a thing that someone teaches. Etsio how to do way into the game. Like in the third city, they're like, this guy's like, hey, check it out.

If you jump, you can climb higher. And then Etsy was like, oh, wow, you're right. And then you suddenly have this ability to like do a little, you know, jump out from the wall and up. And in future games, they get rid of that. I mean, they've overhauled so many things about those games. And that kind of thing is nice when they just, you know, Assassin's Creed does a good job of this because you're always a new character.

That character is always kind of learning how to be an assassin. So even if they're a skilled warrior, they don't know how to climb or do the jump. And I think that stuff can be actually kind of cool, like when you're learning things the right way and they streamline other things. Like in Valhalla, the way that Avor jumps at first, like, doesn't do the leap of faith and just kind of jumps off of a cliff and is like, all right, I don't know, and just jumps into the water. And then later learns how to do the leap of faith. Like that can actually be kind of a fun thing to watch the character learn this iconic move from the series. So sometimes it's cool. A lot of times it's tedious.

So one game then I think does it pretty well, actually, is ORI too, ORI in the Will of the Wisp's. Yeah, yeah, totally agree. That's a Metroidvania game. So like the first one, you're going around collecting powers. But it doesn't, and you don't have any powers when it starts. But it does, it like puts you on the ramp really quickly, really quickly. Like it speeds you up really quickly.

So you've gotten the double jump like 20 minutes into the game, 30 minutes in the game. And then immediately you're getting like a dash. and soon you're like zipping around. And it feels like an hour into the game like you've made all this progress. So I think that can be a solution is just giving you things really quickly, which kind of helps solve the problem of like, okay, we want to ramp you up. We don't want to throw everything at you at once.

But we want this to be super fast. And I imagine a game like Horizon 2 or even Spider-Man 2 would do something like that where like you don't have everything right away. But the stuff you might be familiar with from the first game, it'll give you pretty quickly. That's the key I think is the things, like if it's a sequel, you have to have new shit that people are going to unlock slowly that's exciting. And if you're just getting all kind of the same stuff that you had in the first game,

it won't be as exciting. We're in Ori too. It's like very much, you're like get a lot of the stuff you had in the first game pretty quickly. And then you're like unlocking these cool new weapons and like cool new things that really feel different. And that's kind of the meat of the progression system, which feels a lot better. And yeah, I hope Horizon 2 is that way too. But I will say there is something exciting about like playing a Metroid game or a Zelda game and being like, okay, like I can recognize that I'm about to get the morph ball, I'm about to get the bombs,

about to get the arrows. Like sometimes it's like, oh my God, like how many friggin times am I going to have to go collect the boomerang in the dungeon and like figure out that that I can use it on the vine or whatever. But like there's also something, I don't know, there's something fun in the, it's almost like, I mean, like the previous question, it's like chicken soup, it's like a comforting feeling to be like, okay, this is an ability I'm familiar with, I want to see how they, and then sometimes they'll put new twist on it. Like sometimes Sammas' Morfball will be able to do new things. Or like, in one of the Zelda games, which is really cool.

I think it's Skyward Sword or maybe the Twilight Princess. I don't remember. But you can get two hookshots instead of just one. So like in one dungeon, you'll get the hook shot, which lets you like zoom across gaps and stuff. And in a second dungeon, later dungeon, you'll get a second one. And you'll be able to like boom, boom, boom, boom, like zip from place to place with two of them. And that is super cool.

So, yeah, their game designers have come up with clever solutions to this problem. over the years, I think. Yeah, I think there's the fuck you, now you don't have any abilities thing. I actually haven't seen that in a game in a little while where you start with everything and they take it away. I'm sure it has been, but most of the games I play, they haven't done that. Yeah, because it's a bad feeling. And I think people have kind of figured out that players just don't really like that.

Yeah, I wonder if they'll do that in Metroid Prime 4. Like, that would be the next game that I'm like, well, won't they have to? Like, I wonder if it's going to feel really bad and weird to play a Metroid game according to modern gaming sensibilities. I wonder so many things about it. Metroid Prime 4. I do too. I'm sort of dreading it.

Sometimes people ask me if I'm excited about it. And I'm like, honestly, I'm not anymore because it feels kind of weird and doomed. And I don't, Metroid Prime 3 like was an okay place to end. It's going to be good. No, it's going to be. It's going to be awesome. Man, retro makes good games. It's going to be good.

I totally get how you feel though. And I'm glad they took extra time. To clarify, I'm glad they delayed it. That's not what it's about at all. I think that's great and I'm glad they're taking more time on it. And I'm fine with not seeing a trailer. Just like a very smart reader wrote in to this week's episode. I would be fine with never seeing a trailer for Metroid Prime before and just getting the

video game. That would be cool with me. But yeah, I do wonder how a modern audience would react to the classic conventions of Metroid and how hard a lot of those games are if you go back and play them. Like, luckily for you guys, we're not going back and playing Metroid Prime. It holds up, but it also has some parts that kind of suck ass. So we're not playing it this year, so it doesn't matter. But I have been thinking about it anyway.

When they re-release it, I'm playing it again. I like that game more than I played it. You know, whenever they re-release it, it'll be easier to play, I'm sure. They'll read you the controls. You're going to win your bet organically. Have you guys, so I don't know if you guys have played any old JRPGs that start off at the final boss battle and then like flashback? Yeah, the enmedias-res thing. Yeah, well, but like not just immediate stress like like all the way like literally the final boss battle and then it'll be like here's how we got there like something like that or like the characters will die.

I mean that's immediate res but yeah. Well, yeah, I guess so. But I think of immediate as res as like Final Fantasy 10 where it's like literally in the middle of the story. I guess you're right. It's applies for any point. It doesn't matter. Yeah. But like yeah, those those can be super frustrating too.

It's like a few old school JRPGs used to do that where it's like here's the final. and you're totally overwhelmed and you have no idea what you're doing and then you die or something and then you get well i hate when tv shows do that like when alias would do that on every episode like i hate when it starts with the person a gun goes off and then it's like two days earlier i'm like fuck you like i just start the story at the beginning exactly yeah it's like a very funny thing to be bad at sometimes it works sometimes it works of course of course of course no it's always bad um okay cool when we take a break and then we will talk about some one more things Welcome back to Fireside Chat on KMAX.

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Judge John Hodgman is available on Maximumfund.org and wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back. Kirk Maddie, it is time for one more thing. Maddie, I'm going to save you for the last because I have a feeling we'll talk the longest about your entry. Kirk, what are you going to go first? I'm up. My one more thing is a combination tabletop game and video game that is really amazing that I'm excited to tell people about. So as listeners know, I have a tabletop group. We have not been meeting IRL thanks to the pandemic and instead have been playing.

games mostly via tabletop simulator, which is a game you can get on Steam that then has a whole bunch of community-made mods that allow you to load up on a table, any of pretty much any tabletop game ever, and you all just stand around the table and there's a whole interface for moving pieces, and you just play the game together. It's incredible, and I think it's really well-known, and I've talked about it in the past, but it does rule, and we played a whole bunch of different games, played a lot of splendor recently, we played a lot of root, just a bunch of cool games we were having fun. We finally started playing Gloomhaven, which I am really excited about, because we just started playing it last night. This game clearly rules. And I want to tell

people a little bit about Gloom Haven and also a little bit about this tabletop simulator version, which is incredible. So Gloom Haven is a, it's typically intended for four players. It's a cooperative, dungeon crawling, role-playing game that we're playing a modded version for five, which exists. The people have made a sort of, they've modded the rule. rules to make it work with five people, which is great because there's five people in our group. You play different character classes. It's very similar to something like, you know, a lighter version of this would be Hero Quest, or we played Imperial Assault, though there's nobody controlling the bad guys. They just act according to AI, or, you know, just rules, and you control your party. It's kind of mixed between

mostly dungeon crawling, where you walk into a room and there's a bunch of enemies, you know, on a sort of Hex grid and then you array your characters and then you take turns and you attack them and they attack you and you try to clear out the dungeon and that's sort of that chapter. There's like wrapping around that with storytelling. You make decisions as you go so you can like a road event will maybe like we fell into a hole and the question was, is this a trap or is this just an old, you know, tomb where we might find something. Do you want to explore or do you climb out immediately? And we explored and we found something and we don't know what it was, but we like put a card in our city deck, which means maybe later on that thing we found will be.

be useful. So you make decisions as a group, which is cool. And then a kind of smaller part of the game is this broader story where the city of Gloomhaven is where you're mercenaries. And you start out there just going on this little quest for bandits. But I think it unfolds over this huge amount of time. It's like a legacy game. And like everything changes and the city changes and there's this whole saga that unfolds. Like it's a really big thing. The box for this game, one of our guys has a physical copy of this and we've never played it because the box is the size of like a sarcophagus. It has so much shit in it. It's nuts.

I've never seen a board game box this big or with this many pieces. And that brings me the tabletop simulator version of this game. The whole pain about this game is that setup is bonkers. There's so many pieces. There's so many moving parts. Everything is card-based. You don't roll dice. So it's like you draw cards and then like your modifiers take place out of a shuffled deck.

Everything is cards, which is actually really cool and makes combat very straightforward. There's no random rolling. You just kind of lay your cards out and move. But because of that, the setup is just a huge pain. And we only have, like, two, three hours to play games once a week. You know, we're all, like, adults. A lot of guys have families, and they're busy. Like, we're all busy.

And on Tabletop Simulator, so this has been made by, I believe, two guys who spent, like, a ton of time on it. It's completely scripted. So you just press buttons, and the whole game sets up. You pick your characters. Like, you just drag the little box with all your character sheet and your, you know, your little, like figure and all your tokens and stuff, you just drop it on your character spot and boom, it sets your entire, everything up for you.

Wow. You can save the game. So once the game's all set up, our host just hit save and then we just can come back. So we played a little bit. It took us like two hours to get to where we were like doing our first encounter because we had to learn the rules and take so long. But then we're like, okay, well, we'll just save it.

We'll come back next week and pick it up exactly where we left off, which is amazing. And, I mean, this version of the game, this tabletop simulator version of the game, It goes beyond that. Like, they've created interface stuff. There's, like, hit point bars that float above enemy figures. There's little interactive pluses and minuses on the figures that you hit to lower or raise their health.

Things automatically play out. You, like, hit an execute script for combat, and it flips all the cards and puts everybody in initiative order. It's almost a CRPG. Like, it's not because you're in control and you can do things physically. You move things around the board. It's so impressive. I'm, like, blown away by how cool it is and how it's making us possible. it possible for us to play this game, both in COVID and also in this really easy way.

And it's an amazing game, too. The one last thing I want to say about it that I think is so clever is there's a lot of role playing in this game, and you're all playing different characters. And the one rule, or like the kind of guideline for this game, is when you're playing, you're not ever supposed to say numbers to one another or like specific ability names or cards. And the idea is that way, when you're about to plan out, like, your attack or whatever, your parties attack, you're not going to be saying to your teammates, okay, well, I've got like the Firebolt, which has an initiative of 76, and I know your initiative is 39, so I'll be going

after you. And I can do 14 damage with that. So like, I'm going to attack this guy. So if you don't attack him and attack this guy, like I'll kill it. You're like doing all that super intense stats of which my group does a lot. Like they're all extremely smart. Like they're way better at that stuff than I am. And it makes us like really min-max stuff. But you're not supposed to do that. Instead, you're just supposed to be like, I'm going to attack, I'll probably go a little later, and I'm going to attack a bunch of dudes. And that's all you say. So it kind of like eases you out of stat stuff and specific stuff and into broader communication that's more role-play-ish. And I think that's so clever and it's already been really cool. So I'm super

into the game, super into the tabletop simulator version. I recommend it to anyone with a tabletop group. Learn the rules. Watch some videos. It's very complicated, but it seems like it's going to be very, very cool. Oh, man. I'm sold. I want to play this too. Okay, cool. Let me do mine and then I'll throw it to you, Maddie. So I have an NFL playoff story. It is time. Once again, it's back, baby. I hope you guys are excited. We are in the thick of it. We're in the middle of the NFL playoffs. Four teams are remaining. The conference championships are this Sunday, and then the Super Bowl is two weeks from then. So we are like really in the thick of it. So I'm going to tell you guys a story. Have you guys, do you guys know off the top of your head who the best player in the

NFL right now is? No. No. Okay. Have you guys heard, have you guys heard the name Patrick Mahomes? Of course, from you. Okay. So Patrick Mahomes is the best player in the NFL. He is a quarterback. He won the Super Bowl for the Chiefs last year. That's an impressive to be the best player. I mean, in the NFL. He signed, he recently signed a deal worth $500 million. That's not an exaggeration. So Patrick Mahomes sees this transcendent player. There was recently an article in The Ringer that's pretty great making a case about how we're watching the greatest of all time, the Michael Jordan of football. He's amazing as a quarterback. And he carried the chiefs.

The chiefs are like really set up for this dynasty. They won the Super Bowl last year. He carried them to a record of 14 and 2 this year. But even that isn't real because their last game, he sat because it didn't mean anything. So it should have been 15 and 1. So they're incredible, right? So cut to last Sunday, or was it Saturday? Last weekend, the Chiefs are playing the Cleveland Browns.

The Cleveland Browns are kind of this sad sack team. They hadn't, until now, they hadn't gotten to the playoffs, won the playoffs in many years. They're kind of like a joke of a team. But this year they were actually pretty good. But everyone knew, like Kansas City was favored by like 10 points. This was on Sunday afternoon, I believe. So Kansas City comes out, Mahomes comes out, they're playing really well, get up to, 163 lead by half time 193 lead it's the middle of the third quarter um the chase have third and one

they have to get a down one one one one one yard to get a first down patrick holmes does a play where he kind of like runs um for the first which he does a lot and he runs into the middle of some guys suddenly he's on the ground suddenly he looks woozy he's like has trouble getting off um we see him like shaking and it's like holy shit patrick mohombs is hurt he might have a concussion and so they take him off the field and they take him to concussion protocol, which means that basically he can't come back. And then people on Twitter are like Patrick Mulhams is out. Suddenly, the Browns might beat the Chiefs, which would be insane.

Enter Chad Henney. Oh, here we go. Let me tell you the legend of Chad Henney, the backup quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs. Chad Henney is like mediocrity personified. Like if you looked up mediocre in the definition, it would include Chad Henney. He has like this journeyman quarterback.

By the way, triple click listener. He's listening to this right now. So hi, Chad. Yeah, yeah, hi, Chad. I don't think you're mediocre. I think you're a really skilled athlete. I think he would agree with this. I have no opinion.

I'm Switzerland on this. He's listening like, yeah, I'm pretty mediocre. I'm pretty mediocre. He's been a journeyman quarterback. He's like, like, he's been a backup on the chiefs. Before that, he was on the Jaguars and the dolphins. And like, if you ask any NFL plan, like, do you remember anything about Chad, honey? They would probably just say no.

Like, he's so unmemorable, like, forgettable, blah, blah, blah. everyone's like, oh my God. The people, those of us out there who had any sort of gambling money on the Chiefs, which includes a lot of people, parleyes and teases and a lot of stakes on the Chiefs in this game because there were pretty heavy favorites. Some people on this show, maybe. I can't, I could not possibly know. So the rest of the game carries on.

Chiefs don't score. Browns wind up scoring. Eventually it gets to 2217. And so it's a one-score game. The Browns could win it with a touchdown. The Chiefs have the ball. It is, the Chiefs are driving, and they have Chad Henney, a quarterback, so they're running the ball a lot.

They're trying not to put it in his hands because on a previous drive, he, like, threw this awful interception that went straight in the hands of defender, and he's just a, he's Chad Henny, he's Chad, fucking Enny. You don't want the game in the hands of Patrick Mahomes. Because Patrick Mahomes is going to win the game for you. So it eventually gets to the point where the Chiefs have a choice. It's fourth and one. So they need one yard to get a first down, and they would win the game because the clock would run out.

So it's like about a minute and a half left. So they can either go for it, try to get the yard. And then if they lose it, the Browns get amazing field position and could probably score on their next drive. If they win it, they win the game. Or they can punt the ball and just give it immediately back to the offense and let them try to drive the whole field to try to get a touchdown. So here's what they do. Their lineup, as if they're going to go for it, the end. announcer is like, looks like they're just trying to draw him off sides,

because that's like a tactic you can do, try to get a penalty. Chad Henney is standing in shotgun. Usually when you're going on a fourth and one, you want to get as close to the line of scrimmage as possible. Shotgun means you're standing behind the offensive line. With about six seconds left in the play clock, catching everybody off guard, they snap the ball to Chad Henney. The announcers are like, what is happening?

oh my God, he throws the ball to another receiver who just came out and the receiver catches it and like gets down and they they immediately get the first down and win the game. They put the ball in the hands of Chad Henny, Chad fucking Henny. And he won the game for that. He did it. Congrats to Chad Henney. Wow. Chad Henny did it. This is very helpful. I feel like it's finally helping me put together like a series of increasingly desperate tweets that I saw on my timeline during this time period that I, I didn't understand and it's uh it's letting me understand those tweets and i appreciate you jason i appreciate you illuminating this for me that's what those stories are for if you if you saw anyone who had money on this game i should mention that before that happened chad henny had like run for 13 yards

which is another ridiculous play he basically he like it was it was hard to imagine it was like unbelievable what happened um and now patrick mohomes has a concussion and probably should not play this weekend but almost certainly will play this weekend because these patrick prohams and they're not going to start chat any for another game. Because the NFL is a very ethical institution. It is bad. Very, very. They make good decisions and it's fine. And it's all safe. Speaking of impossible scenarios, Maddie, what's your one more thing? It's actually easier than the NFL, in my book. I am still playing Dark Souls. And I beat the Bell Gargoyles this past week. And I know that readers have been wondering if I was going to continue playing Dark Souls.

all I want to do is play Dark Souls. It's all I want to play. I'm sad that I have to play Final Fantasy 6. I will do it, Jason. I will do what I've been told. I will play it. But I'm not interested in any other video games at the time. Maddie, I mean, if you want, I could tell you where to get,

you could go into the depths in Dark Souls and get cursed, and then you'll be like, I don't want to play Dark Souls again. I could. I'm still waiting to hit a wall. I feel like I'm having, I'm having a very strange experience with Dark Souls where I'm just top to bottom enjoying every minute of it, which is not the way that anyone describes this game. I don't know if it's because I already feel like everything that's happening in the world is so meaningless that I've just achieved some type of meditative state when I play

Dark Souls where I feel as though nothing matters. And so I am simultaneously brave and also in a flow state that allows me to just fully be in the moment. It could be that. It could just be that. It could just be purely mindset, or it could be that this just so happens to be the Soulsborn game that really allows me to play in the way that I want to play a game of any kind, which is mostly blocking and very carefully and very fighting gamey. I talked last week about using the kick a lot to interrupt attacks. I think it's very effective. I don't really see people talk about the kick in Dark Souls that much. I'm using it a lot, and I think it's really good. Right now, I am entirely two-handed. an axe. I've moved away from the shield entirely. I'm just full two handing it. And I got past

the bell gargoyles without too much trouble because I basically just leveled up the axe a lot with the, I don't know what his name is, but he's the guy who you pay money to to level up the weapons. That guy. Wait, hold on, Maddie. Maddie, you have to give everybody, tell us about your reaction when you're fighting the bell gargoyle and then the other one pops up. Oh, that's, it's a great moment. moment, you know, it's a very like this may as well happen, which I feel like is how Dark Souls operates. It's a funny game where just stupid things happen. And you're like, okay, that makes sense. Like, I don't know. There's, there are moments where you walk into a room and it turns out a guy was hiding in the corner. And you're just like, oh, I guess that's how I'm going to die

today. There was just a guy there that I could never have seen and I needed to just already know that. Well, you could see a mark on the ground. I mean, often, times players will warn you. Like it'll say left or something. You got to, you got to pay attention to what people say. But yeah, the second gargles showing up, I was like, yeah, okay, sure. There are a lot of gargoyles on that roof, though, and it did seem pretty ominous. They give you a real ominous cutscene where that gargoyle is like powering up and you're kind of like, huh. So I was like, maybe all these gargoyles are going to attack me. Like it did occur to me distantly that that could happen. Like in Hollow Night with the Watcher Nights. Oh, yeah, the Watcher Nights. Sure. I don't know if I

ever made it that far. Anyway, after I beat Dark Souls, I guess maybe I'll go back and beat Hollow Night. I don't know. I don't know what I'm going to do next, but I'm really liking it. And I don't, I don't know how long that's going to last, but I'll keep everybody updated. I think it's a cool video game. There's some cool stuff. You're like, if you're doing Dark Group Garden, there's a really cool boss in there. That's where I am now. It's the, it's the woodsy area. Capra demon is tough. Oh, really? I found the Copper demon pretty easy actually. Oh, well, the beginning part is stuff. That's what I mean. Well, it's so different. It's so different. The friends I'm playing with, one of them was like, oh, you know, the belligergoals for me were the hardest ones in the game. And I'm like, I didn't think they were that hard. So I feel like it'll, it'll just depend on what's hard for me and what's hard for my play style and so on, which is part of why the conversations about difficulty and Souls games are so frustrating to me because it's like, people are so different and people are good at different things and people have such wildly different. play styles and different games reward different play styles. And I think the mindset is the same, that meditative mindset, that patience that you need to have to be good at these kinds of games and not rushing in without having a plan is probably the thing that unites all Souls born games. But

you can play them all in a very different way and they feel really different. So I don't know, I don't think it's just about getting good or whatever, you know, 2010-0 way people used to describe Souls games, which I do think has fallen out of fashion in more recent years. I feel like they're having sort of a resurgence now. I've seen a lot more people playing Dark Souls, maybe just because it's a 10-year anniversary or I don't know why. And it came out on Switch. Yeah, and it was on a steam sale recently as well. And I don't know, it could be any number of things. It's always, always good to play Soulsboarding games. Yeah, it's true. There's always a few people playing Dark Souls. There's always people out there, yeah. I don't know. We'll get into this in a few weeks when we talk

more about Soul stuff. But the game I think you would love most. is Sekiro, because that's the most, like, a fighting game of any of them. Could be, yeah. I mean, but it's, I guess it's all parrying, right? I don't feel very good at parrying in Dark Souls yet. I've been trying to get better at it. I'm mostly blocking and strafing around. I'm not very good at parrying yet, but I think I will be.

Maybe by next week I'll tell you guys. It's a very different kind of parrying. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The reposts encounters of, like, Dark Souls and Bloodbarn. But anyway, we'll save that for another time. I think that is it for this week's episode. Kirk, Maddie. See you both next time.

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

Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider some supporting us by becoming a member at maximum fun.org slash join. Find us on Twitter at triple clickpodd, 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. Comedy and culture.

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