Video Gamers Podcast - Resident Evil 4 Remake Rocks, Atlas Fallen and Last of Us - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: March 23, 2023

Gaming news is coming in with the headliner that the new RE:4 Remake is really, really good. Atlas Fallen appears to be gaming's next take at Forspoken, but could this one be fun? Redfall has a new trailer that looks meh, and we chat the Last of Us, (Josh never knew the ending!)All your gaming news served up hot and fresh each and every week! Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: Toro, Scrump, Gaius, Remi, MarbleMadness, Dr. Catatonic, Blackstar (DQ), Glapsuidir, Phelps, Michele B, Redletter, Nevo, Waynerman, TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Gaming 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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Rise to rewards with the BMO Eclipse Rise Visa Card. Terms and conditions apply. Happy Thursday to all of our listeners out there, and welcome to the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. We are three dads who love video games, and we are here today to break down recent gaming news over the last week. I am your host, Paul, and joining me, his eyes are filled with sand, his pockets are full of sand, his underwear is full of sand. It's pretty much Anakin's nightmare over here because everything is sand apparently. It's Josh. Nobody likes sand in places it shouldn't be it's rough and irritating it gets everywhere there it is and joining me and josh he is an executive at avum therapeutics in search for pharmaceuticals to bring immortality to humans unfortunately it's backfired spectacularly it's michael i mean

you know i'm the best intentions right my intentions were good i was trying to save people you know but now we got to deal with a new problem and at least people have something to do talk about your all-time backfires all right so the biggest news of the week is clearly the fact that the diablo 4 beta had released for last weekend. We're not going to be talking about that on this episode because we did a special bonus round preview. So if you want to hear all of our thoughts on Diablo 4, just go back to our episode from Monday where we got to talk about all things Diablo. For this episode here, we're going to start off by talking about Atlas Fallen. That name might sound familiar because we did bring it up all the way back in August. This is the game that is all about sand. You have a gauntlet that speaks to you,

which by the way, guys, why is this the trope of the year? This is in every video game. But in Atlas Fallen, you have a gauntlet that speaks to you and it gives you the ability to command sand and you gain power until you fight the sun god back then when we first heard about it it was kind of described as like a faster paced monster hunter game this week we got an insider look from developer deck 13 who i have to say might have the greatest content manager because this guy phil was cracking me up the entire time did you guys find that guy as entertaining as i did yeah he was pretty good on the youtube video where they were previewing this game and kind of showing off some of the stuff like the transitions he'd swipe the screen and stuff and yeah he's doing his own screen wipes

with his arm yeah oh it was so great it was really refreshing because it wasn't like a finely tuned script he was just kind of like a character just talking about this game that he loves. He was excited about the game too. He brought excitement to me, whereas I wasn't that excited. I'm like, I'm excited about this now. Yeah, which is what you should get from the people who work for the company. So now that we got a little bit more of a deep dive look, we got to see more additional gameplay, we got to hear them break down the combat, the open world, all that kind kind of stuff are there any games that you would kind of compare this to for our listeners oh no that might help them understand what it looks like the same thing aren't we dude why

why are those vibes oh my goodness man i got so many forespoken vibes from this video but then i was like like were they co-developing these games together but then most people out there know how we feel about forespoken but i'll be honest i am actually more hyped for atlas fallen than i was for forespoken i see a lot of similarities there but i'm i'm very optimistic that whereas Forspoken missed the mark completely, that Atlas Fallen seems to have hit the mark in a few ways. What about you, Michael? What did it remind you of? I want this to be the version of Forspoken that we thought we were going to get, where it's actually good, right?

I know that I made love to that game because it had some good combat and some good things. We all have regrets, Michael. Well, yeah. Maybe I am. Maybe this is a recency bias is wearing off and I'm like, no, the game was terrible. No, but I think it's interesting. And I'll just speak real fast to this. In movies, the way movies work is somebody has an idea, brings it to a studio.

They bring it to all the studios and one of them says, we'll make that movie. And another studio says, you know what? We'll make that movie too. That's why you had things like Armageddon and Deep Impact at the same time in the late 90s. This is insane. She's got space dementia. Crimson Tide and Hunt for October came out at the same time. We're making submarine movies. I say again, I order you to replace the man under arrest on the charge of mutiny! Truman Show and EdTV.

In case I don't see ya. Good afternoon, good evening, and good night. Right, games don't work this way, so why is it even the game we just played, Atomic Heart, had like the talking, like, oh, I said, oh, Cuff. You know, Cuff is in all the games now? I don't know. But it's really interesting to see a game that legitimately looks just like, in so many ways, Forspoken. But how am I still excited about it? I don't get it.

Because the potential is there. That's why. I'm excited, too. And anybody that's listened to the show knows I cannot like I hate Forspoken. So why when a game looks like Forspoken, am I going like, oh, this looks like it might be good because there's so much potential. Forspoken just completely botched it. And maybe Alice Fallen is going to do the same thing. But I'm liking what I see in these previews so far. Do you think you can truly go into this game playing Josh with a completely unbiased perspective and give it a real shot?

Yeah, honestly, yes, because I'm hopeful. That's like I would actually go into Atlas Fall and hopeful that it is better versus like very jaded and skeptical that it's like it's just going to be Forspoken again. Instead of like... Like I said, there were some very, very neat ideas that Forspoken completely messed up. And if a game can hit on those ideas, I feel like that game could be amazing. I just... It was not with Forspoken specifically. Yeah.

Yeah. So one thing that I saw this game compared to a lot is Darksiders 2, which I was aware of when it came out, but I didn't play it. But I did go back and look at gameplay. And I will admit, it does look very similar. So I've seen a lot of people who got their hands on it say it plays more like that. This is less RPG, and it's more adventure.

The one thing that I kept running across, because we got to see the insider from the developer, but I was also reading other articles and things like that. Everyone kind of agrees that the game is a little more casual, especially in regards to combat. So even though you see a lot of big bad enemies that look like Monster Hunter, I don't think any of them are going to be long, hardcore fights. It's going to be a little bit more mowing down enemies. But they did say what they wanted to build this game around is the concept of agility and movement. So there's a lot of air dashing, you get to surf on your feet on top of the sand where it's almost like you're on ice skates. And that stuff actually looked very neat. I think the thing that confuses me the most is that

everyone calls the game open world-ish, but in all of the content, it looks like a straight up open world game. Do you guys have a sense of that? Because it sure looks open world to me. Yeah. The world looks very, very large. I just don't know. Maybe from the story standpoint, it's not really open world. You have to go from town A to town B. And then there's just this big, massive open space in between. I did get the open world impression, but I think maybe people equate open world to Ubisoft games, where it's just this monstrous map with a thousand points of interest, and you can go just check out anything versus a very large area,

but you're going from point A to point B in there. Yeah. A lot of the footage that I saw that I, that I thought open world was really just skating on the sand to wherever they're going. It didn't really seem skating on the sand and finding a random encounter or a villager that needed help. So it's interesting to see if open world ish means there's going to be things

in the open world, or if it's going to be just like, Oh, you can go collect this viewpoint if you want. But really, you need to go to this town and continue. Yeah, it didn't seem like the most fleshed out open world. It does seem like a lot of dunes and a lot of sand in between. So one thing that I thought did get me pretty excited is that there are elements of platforming in here. They also said it's almost a little Metroidvania-ish insofar as you can get an ability that will get you access

to other areas of the map you could not access before. So I think in the beginning, you're more so stuck to the ground skating, and then maybe you're going to get an ability that lets you jump high in the air or maybe do like a double dash and now you can go back and revisit old areas because they did say there's fast travel so you can go back to those places and it's going to let you access new areas which are then going to let you unlock new abilities so as soon as i heard that that piqued my interest a little bit more because i love the idea where you can see a little bit of a structure under the sand and then you use the power of your gauntlet and you can almost like uh luke bringing the x-wing out of the swamp and dagobah you can pull this structure out of the sand and now you can get

on top of that and leap and dash somewhere else so if there's open world stuff like that i'm going to be far more interested because in the very beginning, I was like, holy crap, this is just forespoken. It just looks a little more grounded in reality as opposed to being otherworldly. So I don't know. I don't know that we'll end up deep diving this one, but at least we're going to keep our eye on it. I will say there's a couple of other things that really caught my interest in this. The combat system for a brief minute in this in this preview they showed the combat like system and tree almost and in Forspoken where you were kind of you had to select your school of magic this one looks like it you just get access to everything

at once maybe you don't you know you can't activate everything but I think you have more than like three clickable skills at a time and when they were showing that off that really piqued my interest because it looks like you have much more options in regards to the different skills that you can use in combat without being locked out from the other ones as well and i really like that aspect to where i can play combat kind of how i want to play it and so i i think they're doing some things right in this. I hope that they get them right because there is a lot about what I saw that intrigued me, but I am also a little scarred from Forspoken and there are definitely some similarities between these two games. Yeah. Now, one nice thing is Atlas Fallen will only be $50. So it's not going to be $70,

like far spoken. And this one is set for release in the middle of May. So May 16th, you can go take a look and see if you're maybe interested in Fallen Atlas. All right. Now, before we hit our next game here, Josh, can you take a second and tell our people a little bit about our Patreon page? Ooh, I sure can. So if you are listening to the show or you've been listening for a little while and you like what you hear, if you think, man, you know, I listen to these guys every morning on my way to work or maybe after a long day at work, maybe late at night, you know, you're trying to wind down, you need to catch up on your gaming news. You know, number one, thank you for tuning

in. But number two, hey, you know what? If you like what you hear, think about maybe throwing a little tip, you know, buying us a coffee, something like that to just say, hey, I love the content, guys. I appreciate what you do. We love putting it out there for you, but we would really, really appreciate the support as well. And if you would like to support the show, we do have ways of saying thanks also. We give you two bonus episodes every single month called the Squadcast that only people that subscribe to the show get. A lot of times we go further in depth on some of the games that we talk about.

Sometimes we talk about funny things and some nonsense, lots of different topics that we cover there. The other nice thing is, hey, you know what? Tired of hearing ads on some of the shows? Wish you could just not have those. You get ad-free episodes. The other thing you get is, I don't want to wait till Mondayay and thursday to listen to the show you get early access on top of all of

that you can support the show for as little as five dollars a month that is nothing in today's day and age but it really does help us out you get a ton of perks for it and you can do that over at multiplayer squad.com that's where you sign up. Hey, if you have commitment issues, totally understand that too. You can cancel at any time. No guilt. Guilt free. You've helped support the show. We appreciate you.

You don't have to marry the podcast. You can just make love and get out. That's fine. All right. Moving on to our next story of the week. We want to talk a little bit about Resident Evil 4. Now, we did talk about the demo last week this week we wanted to bring it up because they have been absolutely crushing it in regards to critical reviews guys i know josh ran across this first and shared it

with us but on metacritic it is currently boasting a 93 on ps5 that's crazy It is a 92% on PC, which makes it the highest rated game on PS5 and PC so far this year. It is above Hi-Fi Rush, Dead Space, Returnal, and Hogwarts Legacy. IGN has already given it a perfect 10 out of 10, labeling it a masterpiece. Wow. It's set for release tomorrow, March 24th, the day this episode comes out. Tomorrow, you can get Resident Evil 4. You guys already know Resident Evil 4 is one of my all-time favorite games. I can't wait to get my hands on it. How do you guys feel about the prospects of this one? So I read a few articles and I'm going to reference a few things that Oscar Gonzalez does and mentions in a CNET article that really kind of break down what made this game so good as a remake versus the

original. The biggest thing is that previously Capcom has focused other remakes on controls, presentation, and mechanics, bringing their old games into a modern gaming world. Well, because Resident Evil 4 is a more recent game, they didn't focus as much on that. This time, they focused a little bit more on fleshing out the characters. They have more of a backstory, but what they've really focused on is the mood of the game a lot of people say that resident evil is where resident evil 4 is where the franchise kind of falls off of the horror and goes into more of just an action type of game yes supposedly from the reviewers they fix this in the remake and it's a horror game and it's much more scary uh they also fix something called the ashley problem where in a quest the

president's daughter gets in your way a whole bunch and you can say go stand farther behind me but i think really the remake because we've talked about like what makes a remake good they built it from the ground up built it differently and said let's just really take a look at this all-star game and make it even better and it worked according to reviews yeah i i famously was not interested in this remake much much to Paul's dismay. He kept saying, Josh, you're crazy. He's got space dementia. And I kind of went, dude, I'm just not excited for Resident Evil 4. It was just one of those things. There's other games I'd rather play, guys. I don't know that I want to deep dive this game. I don't know that I want to play this game.

I don't remember playing Resident Evil 4. Turns out I didn't. I like the Resident Evil series, but there was nothing. I had nothing. And then we played the demo, and now I'm super hyped. And then on top of this really amazing demo that came out, I'm seeing the almost universal hype for this game and everybody talking about how well done it is. And it's a masterpiece. It's been brought to 2023. They fixed a lot of quality of life issues, that kind of thing. And I'm realizing that this has been crafted to be a true remake in a modern game. And everything about it says this game is incredible. And now I'm very, very excited to play it. Number one, it's going to be new for me.

Having not played Resident Evil 4, I'm jumping into this as a newbie. So how does this game stand up to somebody that's never played it in 2023 as a AAA title? I'm very interested to see if my opinion is the same as all of the other critics opinions out there or is it flawed and this is getting the kind of like the oh well we can't slander this game because it was the favorite in a franchise treatment too i don't think that's the case i'm very excited about it but we are going to be deep diving it as well yeah so that's what i was going to mention we did have to move around our schedule a little bit because we've just had so many good games in the first half of this year it does unfortunately mean we have to pivot away from meet your maker

so that one we will not be able to cover we will be deep diving resident evil 4 however that episode will not release until late april so you're all gonna have to wait about a month to hear that information from us i can't wait to play it i think you're absolutely gonna love it josh the resident evil 2 remake was nominated game of the year i guarantee you this one will be as well i i can't wait to play it it's gonna be fantastic all right well we are going to take a short break here and we will be right back with some news regarding redfall and the last of us after these messages we'll be right back remember that there we go michael's michael's jingle for the show okay we are back redfall is set for release on may 2nd and while we have brought

it up on the show a couple of times we've all kind of felt like at least our gaming community has been pretty cool on it. In our Discord, no one's talking about Redfall. No offense, Jake, you're the only one. He's posted about it three times, and then it's crickets in response. And we did spend a lot of time in our latest Squadcast episode. So if you want to know a lot of our thoughts on Redfall, if you sign up on Patreon, you can go get access to that immediately. That one just came out last Tuesday. So we're not going to rehash any of that information. Ironically, one of the things I said for why I think people might not be as excited is that we just don't know a whole lot about the story. We don't understand the villains and what they're trying

to do. We just see scary vampires. Maybe if we had more story, we would have a little bit more hype. And then ironically, the very next day, they dropped a story trailer for Redfall. So it's about three and a half minutes. I know we've all watched it. Did this trailer do very much for you in regards to maybe changing that hype? Hold on, Paul. I got to jump in. We talked about Redfall so much. And we talked about spicing up the show yeah i think i think what we should i i think next time like you have a redfall story we should maybe just throw a twist on it and say announce it like you're a nightline a night nbc news correspondent i'll give an example sure we're getting reports tonight from the town of redfall is being overrun by vampires of all things we've carefully added some footage from bethesda studios we to warn you, what you're about to see may be disturbing for younger viewers. There you go.

There you go. Why is Michael so old in that news trailer? Tom Brokaw. That's Tom Brokaw, yeah. That just reminds me of the Dana Carvey sketch on SNL. That's exactly where I think I was going. Oh, is that what you were going for? Yeah.

Richard Nixon died tonight. He was mauled by a pack of wolves at the senseless age of 75. Oh, there you go. I love that sketch so much. Gerald Ford isn't going to be eaten by wolves. Tapped was. All right. All right, all right.

Tragedy today as former president Geralderald ford was eaten by wolves he was delicious yeah so you know i i watched this trailer guys i feel like they didn't tell us a lot of story they kind of just said it all started because some greedy people running a pharmaceutical company tried to solve immortality and it just sort of led to vampires and that's kind of all they said i i didn't get a whole lot of story out of this trailer yeah they need to fire their trailer department is that a department games have hey you're in the trailer department um i you know they keep giving us these little snippets

uh they don't do anything for me, man. And I think I'm more excited for Redfall than the two of you are. I've said before, I think Redfall might wind up being a really great game. They are just doing such a terrible job at trying to build hype for this. This trailer was all about talking about the big bad bosses, right? Like that was the big thing is like, hey, there's these vampire gods that we've mentioned before. And so this trailer showed them off for the first time. And the problem is out of a three minute trailer, it was like 10 seconds.

And all it was was mentioning like they show the vampire gods for a second or two and then let you know that they have names and the names are like it's the hollow man bloody tom miss whisper and the black sun and you know you'd get a little snippet of each character one sentence from each one and that was it and it's like dude i okay cool but but what about them you know and so I feel like they just keep missing on these trailers over and over and over again. Maybe we're going to get a Redfall Direct where they actually spend 10 to 15 minutes really diving into the game

and showing some of this stuff, but I haven't seen it yet. And I just get more and more blasé as they show us more stuff and none of it resonates with me yeah the game informer article is titled new redfall story trailer induces introduces some of the vampire big bads and i watched it i was like they did i mean they did kind of i was more excited about some of the gameplay that was just kind of like put in there

like when the two guys are walking in play yeah and i'm like i'm like i'm just good nothing new and i'm still pretty excited about it but like yeah maybe they're saving it for that bethesda direct thing that's going to happen in june when they're going to talk about skyfall or something but this game comes out way before that doesn't it comes out in five weeks yeah so i i don't know i don't know right well we'll play it sure may second it's it's like right around the corner. I feel like maybe this game more than many others, they've just given us so many little snippets that show nothing that you hit a point of fatigue. And I don't want to see any more unless you're actually going to show me something. I feel like they've given us such little morsels over the last eight months and then with delays and everything else uh i'm not feeling very much hype maybe it'll release and be great i haven't seen

that in the trailers though the trailers have not done very much to make me think it's going to be good but if word of mouth is good maybe we'll check it out down the road but right now we don't have any plans to deep dive redfall even though we are fans of arcane here's what it is paul it's yeah i'll compare it to a wedding when you go to a wedding and the ceremony's over and now you're at the fun part right and you're waiting to eat your dinner and they have these hors d'oeuvres that come out but for some reason the bride and groom are taking four hours to take their photos and you're like okay i'll have some hors d'oeuvres but i'm hungry i just then you keep eating the hors d'oeuvres and you're like when's's the meal coming? When do I get something? I want that. That's what I feel

like. And the hors d'oeuvres are moldy and not very good. Yeah. At one point, the clams have been sitting out for a few hours and you're like, I'm not trusting this anymore. Yeah. Michael Scott's potato salad that's been out since morning. I don't know if you guys felt the same way as me, but the weapons also seemed really dinky. They all sound like airsoft guns. None of them pack a punch thank you yeah because i i what's weird is if you go back a trailer or two they actually showed some gunplay and they felt really punchy and meaty and i remember thinking like oh the weapons sound kind of neat in this game like and then this trailer yeah like you said i felt like i was shooting airsoft at vampires or something like i

don't know they just can't seem to land any of these trailers that's why i say i feel like knowing arcane and knowing bethesda i feel like this game is going to be way better than what they have shown but what they have shown has not been good and it's making me kind of frustrated because i want to think that this game's going to be good but I've seen nothing to show that it's going to be. Yeah. I don't want to keep being negative, but it's hard to keep being excited about this, even though everything in my body says I'm excited. Sometimes it's like, why? Why am I excited?

I feel like I should be excited, but I'm not. Like, there's a lot of hype, but it's not from the people. I feel like it's just from the publisher. It's just from Bethesda's side. All right. Well, we would like to ask everyone out there to make sure to hit the follow button on our podcast app so that way you're aware of everything we are releasing, especially because as we are testing out some new things, we might be shaking up the format a little bit.

We want to make sure nothing slips past you. We'd also love to have you all join our free Discord server. There's a link in the episode description. And you can also follow us on socials everywhere at MultiplayerPod. All right, we're going to move on to our last story of the week. The Last of Us series on HBO has now wrapped up. We also got some news regarding what's going to happen in season two. Everyone's had a little bit of time to finish the series.

Although with all that being said, we are going to share some of our thoughts on the finale. So since this is the last story, if you want to keep that spoiler free, no hard feelings if you shut off the episode now, but we are going to get into it a little bit. First, before jumping into spoilers,

just on a scale of one to 10, what rating would you guys give the overall show? Eight and a half. Oh, I will give it the, uh, maximum warp of the enterprise D 9.9, seven,

five. Sorry. That's the enterprise E that's the enterprise E. Sorry. The D was nine. I can't believe you confused E and D Michael. Oh, man.

Sorry guys. We apologize to believe you confused E and D, Michael. How embarrassing. Oh, man, Galaxy versus 7. I'm sorry, guys. We apologize to everybody out there for Michael's complete lack of Enterprise knowledge. 9.975. I loved it. I thought it was really good. I was thinking 9. It's not perfect, but I thought it was a really, really good show.

I thought it ended on a really high note. I would say 9 out of 10. Yeah. We did receive word this week that season two is not going to cover everything in the second game, which means we're going to end up with three seasons, if not more. We're just going to get more content. Even though they said there's only going to be two seasons and that's it, guys. 30 million viewers for a series kind of changes things. This is HBO looking at their subscriber count and looking at the viewers and going,

wait a minute. We said only two seasons. We're going to put that boot back in our mouth and we're going to go four, five. Doesn't matter how many we have to go as long as we keep seeing 30 million people watching our show. Yeah, they're going to go at least three. We're going to have to wait and see. They might decide to go beyond the second game if they have good ideas for it. So let's talk a little bit about the finale here. Let's get into some spoilers. I know for me, when I first played through The Last of Us, I loved the game. I thought the story was good. It's nothing all that novel. We've had a lot of zombie stories where someone has special blood and they might be the cure. But I think what really cemented

the story of this one is how the finale ends when Joel is basically presented with this option of, do I allow Ellie to be used and she's going to die without her consent, but might save mankind? Or do I go John Wick, kill a whole bunch of doctors and people in this hospital facility, and save my adoptive daughter? And I was curious to get your guys' thoughts, especially yours, Josh, since you did not play the first game all the way through to the end. I have a confession, because I have told everybody that I have not played The Last of Us for more than about six hours. I played it as you're escaping the initial city part.

And no lie, guys. I thought that the big twist with The Last of Us the entire time was the fact that she's immune to this infection. But they kind of point that out. But the entire series series i'm like

well that's going to be the twist maybe it's how they present it like maybe she's immune but they need her blood or maybe she's not immune and there's some other thing i had no idea i had zero zero clue that the twist is that joel does not let her save the world and lies to her so when i'm watching this and i'm thinking like okay well i know it's about you know she's gonna save humanity with her blood and then this happened i literally was caught so off guard where i was like oh and then what's crazy is my wife looks over at me right and i'm because i'm sitting there just flabbergasted going what and she goes well would you let one of our daughters die to save the world that's the question and then and then i'm sitting there and i'm kind

of like i don't want to answer that question now because there's no right answer if i say yes it's like well you just let your daughter die and answer if i say yes it's like well you just let your daughter die and if i say no then it's like well you're selfish you know so but i was completely blown away i freaking loved the ending of the series dude as somebody that had zero clue what was about to happen it was so good i i think story-wise marlene was so stupid if she would have just asked she ellie would have done it oh yeah she's risking the world and joel would have had no way because ellie would have talked him into it but like marlene like just don't just go and do it and if you do the first thing you

gotta do is like get joel a thousand miles away before he finds out like why is he just there in the house anyways i'm not nitpicking because it's brilliant and for storytelling purposes you have to do things like that that like you know like okay that's kind of dumb decision but then what would it be like if joel was a thousand miles away they just kill ellie and the series is over i just i think that having played the game all the way through this series is the most true to source by adding sorry most true to the story, the feeling. I was watching the creators talk about it and say, why would we remake this? Why would we remake a game that millions of people have played?

It's because they want to tell this great story to an audience that doesn't play video games. And they got it so freaking right that this will now be a tentpole on how other creators make video games. I think it has done so much for video games transitioning to film and to TV that it is absolutely flawless, and I think that's why I gotta give it a 9.975, the warp

scale for actually the USS Voyager Intrepid class. I got that wrong too. But it's just, it's so impressive how they got the feeling, and they went farther. class. I got that wrong too. But it's just, it's so impressive how they got the feeling and they went farther. Like I got mad at the end at Joel. Is Joel a villain now? Or is Marlene the villain by trying to save everyone but kill people? It's just such a tough pill to swallow. And what a great conundrum at the end of the story and then to just leave us hanging. That's what's so great about it is the moral dilemma and arguing through some of those gray issues. Even the fact that Joel is never all

the way a good guy. He even says throughout the series, you know, I've killed people and he's not all that great. And you even see how Ellie is kind of turning into Joel and you see the rage and the way she kills. I don't remember the guy's name, David, was it? The leader of the cult. And so you see all those things coming out of her because Joel's taking care of Ellie and Ellie's getting sucked down the same path Joel was on. And I just think it's so interesting to see because there's no right or wrong answers at the end of the story. It's just really interesting to think through. Now, is it fair that Joel shot and killed the surgeon at the end and stuff like that? No. Joel is a villain in a lot of those scenes. But at the same time, he's also unquestionably the protagonist. I will say, when I first played the game, I did not understand why Joel would choose

to let humanity die off. That didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I didn't have any children or really a family growing yet. It was me and my wife. And I felt like it was kind of dumb. But over the course of time and understanding Joel's character, there's a period where you just suffer so much loss that you just say, I can't do this again. I don't care who else gets hurt. I am in survival mode. I can't have that happen or I will break as a person. And so anyone else in the way is going to get taken down. And I kind of get it. I can make an argument either way now, which is what makes it such a great ending. Well, and he totally... For one second,

you kind of understand when he says to Marlene, we'll find another way. And she says, there is no other way. And then he says, we'll find someone else. That is when you truly get that selfishness of, I am done with loss. I'm not losing another daughter. And I'm not doing this. And it's just, it's incredible the way it does.

Last comment, though, that I have. The episode before this, did you guys know the guy that she cleaves with the meat cleaver in the neck that's troy baker who is the actual voice actor for joel in the video games and the voice actor of ellie was the mom who gives birth that's right yeah so you had both the original voice actors playing relatively major roles at the end of the season that's so many people involving you know the so many people that were involved in the game are involved in this it's just really well done yeah and i love that sales of the last of us 2 skyrocketed after the end of the series what happens now i'm gonna play it i will say i know nothing about the last of us 2 and i now i am very curious to you know

to know as well but i'll just wait for this the next season on HBO. I'm going to play it. I'm going to absolutely play it before it airs. 100%. Alright, well we do want to say thank you to everyone out there for listening. We hope that you'll all come back for our quick take on Saturday, and then on Monday we will be releasing a deep dive episode of Steel Rising.

That one comes courtesy of legendary supporter Scrump, and we hope that life's going well for all the rest of you. We know it's going better for us than in the last of us. So I guess that's a plus no matter what. And we hope that you guys have some amazing games that you're playing right now. And until next time, happy gaming.

Thanks for listening. Cheers. All right. See everybody.