Video Gamers Podcast - Knockout City, Far Cry 6 and Valvendo Gabe Boy - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: June 3, 2021

Gaming hosts Josh and Paul are back with another video game news filled episode of This Week in Gaming. Playstation State of Play brought us gaming news on Far Cry 6, Horizon Forbidden West and more. Knockout City is the new hotness, or is it not? All that plus news of Valve’s new handheld gaming console. What more could you ask for?! Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey everyone, thank you for listening to the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. We are happy to have you here with us as we talk about gaming in a family-friendly format. If you like the podcast, please make sure to subscribe, rate us five stars, and leave a review. You can also help support the show directly by going to MultiplayerSquad.com, where you can sign up for some great perks and help fund this podcast, which is brought by listeners like you. Since today is Thursday, we are going to be talking about This Week in Gaming. We will be covering what we've been playing lately, along with some relevant gaming news. I am your host, Paul, and with me... Oh, oh wait. That's too loud. I'm whispering because he just saw A Quiet Place Part 2, and I don't want to alert the monsters. It's my co-host, Josh.

Yes! I would... Paul, do you realize if I had to live in that world, I would have died long ago. You would literally be victim one. I would. Like, you would be... He would have been like, oh, there's that loud guy over there. He's gone. A quiet place would be my absolute nightmare. Having to just not talk ever,

I think, would just be terrible. You would not even have the patience, I feel like, to learn the sign language or anything. You would just, you would die the first hour. I'd take my chances. I would. I'd be like, I can just duck and dodge these things flying at me. And, you know, I did see it. It was super good. Honestly, that's such a good series. My kids love it. Like they went to go see it with me. Funny story. We were getting our popcorn and our drinks and I don't generally drink a lot of soda, so I just got a giant water that they give you, and then promptly fumbled the handoff between me and the guy and spilled a large 32-ounce water everywhere. Waterfall cascaded over both sides of the counter. It was great. My kids were so embarrassed.

It was the best thing ever, honestly. And it was just water, so it's not like it really made that big of a mess. All right, so this won't mean anything for our listeners anywhere else, but is this at the Harkins up on Bell Road? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. So that was my first job, working at that movie theater. And I remember the first year I worked there, we were selling these Randy Johnson combos with a large popcorn and two 44 ounce sodas. And this one guy ordered it and I was working concession. And when you work in the concession stand, you just get covered in popcorn oil. It just, it covers everything. It's slippery, you fall a lot, you know. And i went to pick up this 44 ounce drink

and i totally fumbled the hand off i drop it and it goes completely all over the customer i was so mortified it's like the worst thing you could possibly do to this poor guy just coming to the movie theater about to go sit down for two hours soaking wet. I felt so bad. It was the worst thing in the world. Oh my goodness, man. Yeah, it was a little... I don't get embarrassed, really. It takes an awful lot to embarrass me. I tend to just go with the flow and kind of laugh about the fact that there was Niagara Falls worth of water everywhere.

My kids, on the other hand, were just mortified. And then what's really funny is you would think a big movie theater like that would have a way to deal with spills. But as we're walking off, this lady just comes out with some dishrags. And she winds up plopping 10 different dishrags down on this puddle of water. And I was just like, there's got to be a better way. Oh, man. Yeah yeah i remember when i worked there we'd always sprinkle the absorbent stuff and then you'd sweep it up yeah yeah who knows so but highly recommend it it's a great movie continues this series really well please

don't ever make me have to be quiet i did love the first one i'll have to check out the second one here soon enough all right so josh this in gaming, what have you been up to? What have you been playing? What's up? Dude, I've been playing Hades again. Oh, have you? Yes, I was like, we've been playing Knockout City. I'm going to be honest, spoiler, I don't think I'm a huge fan of Knockout City.

So I was like, I need something that I can play. Let me look through my library. You know, let me find a game that I really like that I didn't finish, which is 99% of the something that I can play. Let me look through my library. Let me find a game that I really liked that I didn't finish, which is 99% of the games that I own. And I reinstalled Hades, picked it right back up. It's such a good game. I'm having a blast with it yet once again. I feel like I'm the kind of guy that gets hit on the head, loses his memory, and then is able to play a game again it's fresh because it's like it seems brand new and it's fun again uh yeah so that's what i've been playing a pretty good bit of

like i said we did play some knockout city um i don't know okay so let's provide a little bit of context there we were discussing possible games to cover on our Deep Dive episodes, which come out every other Monday. And Knockout City is kind of like the new hotness right now, and it was available for free on Steam. We picked it up, a bunch of our friends picked it up. I was actually enjoying it quite a bit. What is it about Knockout City that you're not a fan of? How many games have you played, Paul? I'd wager 30 to 35 matches, somewhere in that range. You've played more than me.

Never mind. I was waiting for you to say, I don't know, like 5, 10, and I was going to be like, when you get to the 15 mark, it gets stale. Well, you and I played a decent amount one night where we would always have a random third, and we did okay. And then I played probably about 12 matches straight a day or two ago and it was just with all random people. And the matches that are competitive, I think are incredibly fun. I was kind of looking forward to doing it for the show,

but I'm glad that you decided to bow out when you did because neither of us have paid for it. I think that's part of the problem is I'm stuck at this crossroads now where if this game stayed free, I think I'd be willing to try to stick with it a little bit. I have played more than you with a full team of three. It was real fun at first, but it got really stale really quick. I don't know if maybe I just was the victim of bad matchmaking, but we came up against some super coordinated, like really good teams. And it just was like,

not fun, man. You know, it's kind of like hood outlaws and legends that we just reviewed where the matches are so lopsided that it's just like, I think we had one good match that was like, it went like nine to 10 and 10 to nine. And that was pretty fun.

If it could be like that more often than not, I think I'd be in, but now I'm stuck with like, do I pay $30 for this game? Yeah. I feel like I'm going to get tired of really quickly. Or do I just say, Hey,

I enjoyed the five free days. Thanks. But no, thanks. Yeah. Quit while you're ahead, kind of in that sense. Yeah, I totally get it. We also had another community night on our Discord server. So if anyone's not aware,

we have a completely free Discord server open to the public. You can follow a link in the podcast description or you can go to multiplayerpodcast.com and there's a link to our Discord. And this time around, we did some Among Us. I have not played Among Us since... It's probably been six months, I think. Probably at least. I feel like... I mean, the last time that we played together was probably the last time that we played Among Us. And it was a lot of fun, man. It was really cool to be able to play this with the listeners of the show and the people that have been our Discord server.

We joke around about how I'm always the evil one and nobody trusts me, and I would like to say, for the record, that I was the imposter twice. You sure were. And both times, I completely won the entire game as the imposter now i had you sniffed out in the one but i could not swing the group because i know one of your tells josh when you're the imposter you just start wildly accusing me out of nowhere for no reason whatsoever and i tell the group guys josh is wildly accusing me i've done nothing i'm a crewmate it's josh and then that's not enough to convince people and then you try to

turn them on me i try to turn them on you next thing we know you're able to kill everyone and uh yeah you got the imposter twice i did not get to play as the imposter which was a bummer but maybe next time i was convinced one round that you were and i'm pretty sure that i went after you really hard that round and then i felt bad because once you were ejected and you know there's always that moment when you're playing where if you are the imposter once you are voted out that it's like okay you guys got me before it actually reveals it yeah but that's when i was convinced it was you and then as you started to like float into space, I was like, we got you, Paul. And you're like, it's not me. And then I was like, oh, no.

Sorry, Paul. Yep. I was the collateral damage there for one or two games. But yeah, it was a ton of fun. So for those of you who might be interested in gaming and playing with us, we've done Jackbox games. We've done Among Us. We'll take a look at some of the other ones. We try to pick games that are either free or ones that are very low cost to

join. So we want that available to as many people as possible. We have a ton of news stories, so we don't need to spend too much time on what I've been playing. I did finish Mass Effect 1, so I did beat it. I'm going to be jumping back into 2. I did save the Council, but I wasn't super excited about it. But, you know, I had to be a good guy and go with the Paragon route there. And then I'm going to start Mass Effect 2 either tonight or tomorrow. So I'm really excited to get into that one. You know, Mass Effect 1 is my favorite of the bunch, but I think we all know 2 is the best game. So I'm really excited to be able to play that is it weird that i'm pulling for you to lose the paragon aspect like i like

in my head i keep waiting for like halfway through two where you're just like you know what man forget it i went evil i got tired of being the good guy you know what's funny is in mass effect 2 i remember they added a new mechanic where sometimes you're in the middle of a cut scene and it would flash a button and if you pulled that trigger then shepherd would jump in and do an action and i didn't realize in the very beginning that like one of the triggers was paragon and the other was renegade and so shepherd starts talking to this dude and the guy gives him some flack and i just see a button flash like a quick time event and so i just immediately hit it and then my shepherd electrocutes the guy and kicks him out a window into space i was like oh no this is not my shepherd my shepherd would have

never done this uh but yeah renegade is always good at least the second time around but you know we've talked about that we we like to go good on the first playthroughs. Yeah. All right. So lots of news this week. We did have the PlayStation State of Play event. We got lots of announcements from that. I know that there are a couple of stories here

that are rather interesting. I think the one that I'm most excited about is that we got a little bit more footage from Far Cry 6. And this is slated for release on October 7th. What are your impressions at this point? So I'm going to be, I'm going to come in hot on this one, Paul. Okay. I have zero desire for Far Cry 6.

What? Is that not crazy? You're crazy. That is crazy. zero desire for Far Cry 6. What? Is that not crazy? That is crazy. I watched. I was excited. What was it? Four or five months ago,

they had the little snippet with Giancarlo Esposito as the bad guy, who I absolutely love, man. That dude is such a good bad guy. So when they revealed that, and he's holding the shoulders to his son, I was like, ooh, yes, a good villain again. Because I think it was Far Cry 3 or 4. What's the one where you're in Nepal? I think that's 4.

Is that 4? The one that most people like the most. Yeah, that one, hands down, best of the series. I was not a huge fan of 5. It's a fine game, but it's more of the same. The villain in that one is an interesting concept, but he doesn't pull it off nearly as well. I think we were talking before the show, and I think my problem is that while they showed Giancarlo Esposito as the bad guy, Anton, I forget the guy's name, the in-game name. You have the new protagonist that's Donnie or something like that.

The main thing that they showed off was the crazy weapons that you can do. Because this is not... You're not military in this one. It's down in South America. So you're a guerrilla fighter. So you kind of have to piece together these weapons. You're not highly funded and just have like, you know, machine guns and stuff.

So they had these back mounted rocket launcher things that were like homemade and put together. You have a CD player that blares the Macarena while it shoots out like CDs of people and stuff. And while that is a neat aspect and I like the crazy weaponry in games, I can't help but think that this is just going to be 100% reskin of every other Far Cry game that's come out. It's going to be the clear the fortresses and the bases. It's going to be go to this point over here, go to that point over there, go blow up two trucks, go fetch this for me, climb up to the top of this radio tower. And I just couldn't get excited, man.

All right, Josh, I got a couple of words for you. You ready? Okay. Boats, revenge, horses, dictators, terrorists. Those are the words that I wrote down while watching this recent trailer. I mean, what more can you want? I think you liked Far Cry 5 more than you remember. We, come on, Cheeseburger, The Bear with Diabetes. I mean, Cheeseburger was hilarious. If you want to pull out the funny parts of Far Cry games, but this one looks like it's going to be all serious. They did have the one part where the girl is given this rousing speech to this guy, how she's going to take down the bad guy.

And the guy just kind of looks at her and goes like, okay. It's just like, okay, that made me chuckle. I'm numb, man. I'm numb to the Ubisoft formula at this point. Honestly, I wanted to play Assassin's Creed Valhalla. People that started playing it and love that series, they were talking about Valhalla. I love Viking lore and all that stuff. It's right up my alley. But I know 100% what I'm going to get. And it's literally like Ubisoft hit this formula and they have never changed it since then across

the last eight video games that they've made. And I'm having a hard time with that. I want to like these games. They're AAA games, but they just get super old super fast for me. It's definitely a formula. And for me, I love the Far Cry storylines. So I can't wait to find out more about this one.

I love that it takes place in a Caribbean island. So it's kind of like Cuba. They have all this older vehicles, older music, older technology, but you're out in the jungles. I think one thing that Far Cry has always done so well is giving you a real sense of culture, even if it's completely fictional. You will have groups of people who talk away, and they act away, and the architecture looks a certain way, and you totally just get it. You know how these people live. And I think it's a lot of fun. And I feel like they've always played on that really well. I'll definitely buy this one the day it comes out. I'm a huge Far Cry fan. And we'll see how it runs. Giancarlo Esposito, I think he'll

be great. Like you mentioned, it's very similar to comic book movies. They're usually only as good as the villain. I can't help but think this will be a good one. But we'll still have to wait a couple months because this one doesn't come out for about four and a half months.

Is it October? Yeah, October. Yeah, I get it. I'm probably in the minority in that one. I just, I watched this footage and I could not, it was almost like I felt like flicking myself to be like, are you feeling anything here, buddy? You know, and I was just like, Stab yourself in the legs. I'm just numb, man.

I'm just numb to this formula, I think. So we'll see. Oh, okay. All right. Well, I can't believe, but it's already time for a break, Josh. So let's take a brief moment here. Time flies when you're having fun, Paul.

When you're trashing Paul's favorite gaming series. All right, let's take a quick break and hear from one of our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by the Blizzard Gear Store by Fanatics. You can now get your favorite Blizzard merchandise for men, women, and kids. They offer a wide variety of products from all of your favorite Blizzard games, including Overwatch, World of Warcraft,

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Josh, okay, you know what? I'm gonna pay this back to you because you were awfully lukewarm on Far Cry 6. Don't do it to Aloy! I'm sorry, Aloy. But yeah, so let's talk a little bit about Horizon Forbidden West, which is hopefully coming out later this year, but we don't yet have a release date. Yeah, which is good. We really shouldn't mention release dates on this show anymore either. We're already catching flack from our listeners for the curse of the podcast there. Now, this game does interest me. I was a huge fan of Horizon

Zero Dawn. I didn't get to play it until it came out on PC. There were some issues with the PC port. I think overall, it ran fairly well once I could get past the crash to desktops and stuff like that. Um, but I was really, cause I didn't have a PlayStation at the time. And so this was my first time playing like the horizon zero dawn series. And it blew me away. The characters in the, I remember talking to you and being like, I don't think I've ever been so invested in some characters within like the

first 20 minutes of a video game as I was with zero dawn. Right. Um, I probably played that game for a solid 25 hours. My game ADD kicked in. I never finished it. It's just that I have a really hard time with these really open world, epic games. I play them a lot, but then I just get busy doing other stuff. And then I'm kind of get out of that world or whatever. And then it's really hard for me to get back in. So I did not ever finish Zero Dawn, but that has nothing to do with the game. I thought the game was amazing, but they did release a lot, man. They had like a 20 minute video for the gameplay for Forbidden

West and some of the new things that they had added um some of the things that stood out to me on that were the bad guys can now ride the the dinosaurs i'm just going to call them dinosaurs i know they're robots but they're robot dinosaurs yeah so like the bad guys can now ride the the dinosaurs there's underwater like and stuff, which they showed a beautiful area. Now, my understanding is that this takes place on the West Coast, thus Horizon Forbidden West. And I think it's Los Angeles or somewhere. Man, it's been a little bit. I've been reading too many news articles, but I'm pretty sure that's the setting because people were actually comparing it to the real world to see like, oh, that's that building and stuff like that too, which was kind of neat.

It's a lot of the things that are familiar with some neat add-ons. They had a thing where you can have a scanner to where it will highlight handholds so that you can climb things a little bit easier. Like it'll actually show you these pillars that you can climb and where you can jump to and stuff like that. They showed her with a grappling hook that she can like shoot out and swing from, which is cool.

Like who doesn't like being Spider-Man, right? Like any game that adds the ability to swing from things, it instantly gets a leg up in my book. But I thought it was beautiful. There's a ton of stuff going on. There wasn't anything that I saw that was completely groundbreaking, but I don't think you need to completely reinvent that formula, because unlike Far Cry, I don't think that formula is completely burned out yet. Yeah, in watching the full 20-minute video, there was a lot to like,

and I did like Horizon Zero Dawn. Similarly, I didn't finish it. I had no problems with it. I just feel, I guess, somewhat lukewarm, only because I didn't love the first one as much as most people. I will say that I thought it was funny to highlight underwater levels

almost right off the bat. It was like minute three. What's the overall gamer thought on underwater levels? What's the worst level? What are the worst levels in Mario or in any game? It's always the water. Like, people don't like water levels. If it's something like Subnautica, fine.

The whole game is underwater. I haven't played Subnautica in forever i don't remember but i don't want to have to worry about my o2 meter and going back to the surface every 30 seconds it did look beautiful but that was the wrong way to try to grab me back into this series is guess what we got underwater levels what is it about game developers as gamers nobody likes underwater levels. It's a meme at this point, right? Like nobody likes underwater levels.

Quit putting them in games. The controls suck. They're just, they break up the gameplay. Like nobody likes these things. And yet developers keep going. You know what we're going to do guys? We're going to have an underwater level. And then you can just hear like the collective groan of everybody going like and then the developers being like no no we're the ones that are finally gonna get it right

no no everyone deludes themselves into thinking it'll work for them but it might work for us i just don't that's literally the attitude i mean i, I don't know. It looked fine. It was beautiful. It had lots of fish and coral reefs and stuff, but it's like, I don't know how it's going to feel. But if history tells us anything, it's not going to feel good. Yeah, you know, this is one that I'll probably end up playing. At some point, I do want to go back to Zero Dawn and finish it. I'm definitely a sucker for games that combine combat and stealth more of an open world setting i think it's funny that you think it's so dissimilar to far cry because i do think that there's a lot of overlap similar i was yeah they're open world games that are basically the same in in formula but whatever um but i will say that the travel in this game i

think will be fun. You get a little bit of like a Breath of the Wild kind of glider and the robot dinosaurs. You can, I don't know, stick your stick next to them and then you can ride them after. I don't know what terms they use in this game. The one thing I will say, yeah, maybe the phrasing wasn't so great, but, you know, I will say, I don't know what it is. There's something that I don't like about society being reset after some kind of apocalypse, but there's still a lot of advanced technology. There's just something in my brain that I just don't like. It's because it implies that humans got stupid and we don't know how to like decipher technology at that point? Or that we wouldn't just move right back to it?

Yeah. Like if there was some, I don't know, like EMP pulse that knocked out the internet and all electronics, fast forward a couple years, that's all going to be rebuilt. We're all going to be living in cities again. It's not going to turn into these overgrown ruins that people are living in tribes at. So I don know maybe that's what it is i always thought it was kind of odd but the gameplay is fun and that's really all that matters it's a great game i i'm like you i probably need to go back and actually like beat zero dawn before i try to play forbidden west uh so that'll give me incentive to do that. And there's no release date right now for Forbidden West either. You got time. Yeah, exactly. It's one of those, I'll have to convince myself. I think I still have my save game and I feel like that's a game

that's fairly easy to pick up too. You know, you don't have to be intimately familiar with what part of the story you were at at that point. Yeah. All right. Well, the next story here is one that definitely interested me a lot. I don't know what you think about this, Josh, because we have not talked about it at all. But we do now know that Valve is definitely developing a handheld gaming PC. It's going to be very similar to the Switch. It is a portable unit with a screen that you can play on the go. You will be able to dock it to connect it to a monitor back at home. Essentially, this is going to be like a Switch,

but using your Steam library and playing the games that are going to be compatible with it. Josh, famously, you do not do any mobile gaming ever. Would a device like this from Valve, where you can now play Steam games, is this something that would strike your fancy? Or does this not interest you at all? Take my money and then let me get that refund, buddy. No, I was reading this article. You know, I joke around.

I don't do much mobile gaming. I have, for the record, and I've been bragging about this. I have been playing Mario cart eight and, uh, smash bros ultimate on our switch with my wife and kids lately, like over the past week or two. And it's, it's fine.

You know, welcome to 2018. It's fine. It's, it's great. You know, my kid, I talk a lot of trash and then my kid beats me at smash bros. It's, I don't know what it is. It's,. I talk a lot of trash, and then my kid beats me at Smash Bros. I don't know what it is. It's superiorly frustrating. We go to sudden death more often than not, and then she, 95% of the time, gets the first hit in and then wins sudden death to the point now where she'll start talking trash if we go to sudden death before it even lets us fight.

She's learned from the best it gets in my head man and then when i lose again she just is like yeah oh but i you know number one valve is super late to the game on this like the playstation what was it the vita what was the portable playstation yeah the psp the ps vita what was the last one though was it? The Vita? What was the portable PlayStation? Yeah, the PSP, the PS Vita. What was the last one, though? Was it the Vita? The Vita. Yeah, I mean, that's not popular, guys. Well, this is totally different, though, because you can dock it at home and do your gaming on the monitor or take it on the go.

This has always boggled my mind that you would rather just browse Reddit in the bathroom. 100%. And we've talked about before, I love laying down in bed and just playing a casual game for 20 minutes, like Stardew Valley, before I go to bed. Vacations, appointments, you just don't care. I don't. And to me, this is exactly what I would love to do. I would love to knock out some gaming while on the go, and it would be access to the PC games,

not just the Nintendo library. I would love this. I see that it could work. If you gave me access to my Steam library, at that point, that's a huge library, right? I've only got a few Switch games that I play. If you could give me access to my Steam library, great. But does it have to have Wi-Fi?

How good are these games going to run? Now, they're talking about the controllers and everything is built into this. So you have everything you need right at your fingertips right there. It's just what's the performance going to be like? Does it have to have online connectivity all the time? What's the storage capacity? There's a lot that we don't know yet. And when you talk about PC gaming, that's a much higher demand on any kind of hardware than something like the Switch is, because Nintendo does a phenomenal job with making their games pretty, but their graphics are not super demanding. So it's like, if you're making a portable handheld PC

to play PC games, man, you better get the hardware right. Because if not, it's just going to be a lot of issues with that. Believe it or not, we are out of time for today. We don't have any time to talk about Destruction All-Stars adding bots in order to fill their lobbies. Destruction All-Stars adding bots in order to fill their lobbies. Destruction All-Stars. Oof. Bad sign for that game.

Uncharted 4. Seems like it's coming to PC. Josh, if you don't play Uncharted 4, I'm going to be very disappointed in you. I'm going to play it. And Paul, I'll tell you this. It's so good. I'm going to play it. I'm going to get 15 hours into it.

I'm going to set it down, and I'm never going to pick it up again. It's like a 14-hour game. I think you'll be okay. They're pretty short. The Uncharted's are great. And we may or may not end up with a Portal movie with J.J. Abrams. We'll have to wait and see. I'm a little dubious. I'm

not sure how you even make a movie on Portal, but apparently they're writing a script. I'll go see it. I love Portal. Me too. Alright, well, make sure to head on over to MultiplayerSquad.com they're writing a script. I'll go see it. I love portal. Me too. All right. Well, make sure to head on over to multiplayer squad.com where you can help support the show.

Also remember to join our free discord server using the link in the podcast episode description. And then also you can come hit us up on social media at multiplayer pod. We would love to hear from you guys. Let us know if you have any suggestions for the show, any games to cover, anything that you want us to be aware of. We would love to hear from you guys let us know if you have any suggestions for the show any games to cover anything that you want us to be aware of we would love to hear from you and then we will be back with a bonus round episode on monday and we will see you guys then see you everybody