Game of the Year 2024

[00:00:00] But that's our Game of the Year 2020 Fuck! Fuck! So again, Will's number one for the year And then my number one for the year is Oh, it's attacking me now My body is sweating Yep, yep My body is sweating, my nervous system Outta whack Well folks, that's gonna be it for tonight

[00:00:54] Welcome everyone to another episode of the Friday Night Gamecast A dedicated video game podcast where two best friends Come together to celebrate games and bring you industry news Game impressions, reviews, and more I'm your host Nick and I'm joined as always by the one, the only The King Zozo Tai The Sultan of the Sunshine State Gas me up The man with the plan The fucking guy who has the platinum in Resident Evil 8 Gas me up, gas me up, gas me up How you doing man? Yeah, I'm feeling good, I'm feeling good

[00:01:24] You know, back on the pod, back on the pod Look, it's been a couple episodes It was just a little bit, just a few episodes But listen, you know I had to come back And talk with Sir Nicholas here He took a break Young Nikolai himself He took a small break He took a small break Yeah But we had to link back up to do this one Because you know, if I'm gonna hang out with anybody Who is the king of games himself The also platinum holder for Well, close to be I should say Not quite No spoilers, no spoilers Holy smokes

[00:01:51] But he destroyed the village in shadow That's right That's right I did the thing I'm excited I'm very excited to be here today Chatting with you about some more games Man, I'm so happy to be here This is our Okay, so this is great The timing is opportune The stars have aligned Sure have It's almost like this is like our podcast What do they call it? Eclipse? Where all the planets in the solar system are aligned in a row Not quite a clip, I know what you're talking about though It's one of those things

[00:02:20] It's one of those things Where everything is just lined up perfectly Because this is our last episode of season 3 And it's episode 69 What could be better than that? Come on Might as well stop it here We might as well just end it Might as well lock it up We might as well end it We said what we needed to say But yeah, man I'm so happy to be back And this is gonna be our game of the year episode And 2024 was an insane year for gaming For sure I was a fool at the end of 2023 To be like, yeah, 2024 Gonna be the game of the backlog and game of indies I mean, none of us knew

[00:02:50] Who had known? 2023 was a great year Yeah 2023 was a great year Yeah So we were like, oh, 2024 It's time to, like you said, backlog Reflect, save some money And then all of a sudden As early as February It was like, nah We got you to choke hold And it's gonna be like that Through the rest of the year Japan was holding me down And forcing the controller in my hand Play these games now Yeah, it's like Mr. Milchick Telling me to sit back down in my chair And do the games I'm set So I wanna take a quick moment

[00:03:20] To call out all of our patrons For support That go ahead Over on the Friday Night Gamecast Slash Patreon.com Slash Friday Night Gamecast Whatever the fuck it is We have a bunch of folks over there Who have supported us Since some of them Since The Exception And then some of them A little bit more recently But everyone over there Who is currently supporting us Is incredible And we are so thankful For everything they've done So a big thank you Big shout out to Lady Blake Plox Wyatt Pierberg Dave Jackson The Intergalactic Pinecone Fabulous Brianna Chris Ware Eric Guest Rick Firestone

[00:03:49] Chris of a Novel Consul David C JD Clainey's And Diamond The list keeps getting longer And I love to hear it Get longer like that So it's And I'm just getting used to Reading off all those names I gotta cadence I gotta flow But again Thank you Thank you everyone so much We really appreciate Everything you've done Definitely So I wanna I wanna jump in With a little bit Of an icebreaker This is our game of the year 2024 episode To give listeners An understanding Of how we're gonna Have this episode play out We are gonna do it A little bit differently Last year Will and I

[00:04:19] We did our like Top five each And we We did a thing I was gonna do hot ones But with energy drinks We failed And we just got Completely just Blitzed off of Energy drinks We were sprinting Around the yard At like You know We were doing 40 yard dashes It was crazy Very But This time around We were gonna go ahead And do categories So similar to Jeff Keighley's game of the year He has all of his games Split up in categories But what Will and I Are gonna do Is we're gonna Pick one game In all the categories That we've chosen

[00:04:48] And then talk about What makes that The definitive game In that category Of 2024 And then after that Will and I Are gonna play A little guessing game We're gonna guess Our top five Ranking all of these Excellent games That we've played In 2024 I'm so scared And what we're gonna Do The game plan Is that If we get A game wrong When we guess Each other's top five We have to eat A chicken tender That has been Sauced By the other Co-host So we're gonna Pick sauces And we're gonna Sauce them

[00:05:18] We're gonna Heat up some Chicken tenders I got some Energy drinks To wash that Down with So it's You know We're leaning In to the Friday night Caffeine boys Yes You know So we're Doing it even More I have the Pepto-Bismol Ready It's gonna Be great Look I don't Need that Let me suffer Actually Will He doesn't Like my father Before me He's not He's not as Weak as I am I have an Inner weakness So I need The Omeprazole But anyway Will I wanted to Talk to you Really quickly So we're in We're talking About the best Of 2024 But I wanna

[00:05:48] Look forward Into 2025 And think about You know Now that we're Here What do we Think is gonna Be the most Hype games That we're gonna Be able to Play or the Most interesting Or the Best games The coolest Games that We're looking Forward to Playing in 2025 Outside of Course GTA 6 Well First off Extremely unfair That we say No GTA 6 Because we all Know that's gonna Be game of the Year It's already Locked in No guarantee It's coming out This year but It's already Game of the Year so it Doesn't matter Anymore Outside of That I mean

[00:06:17] There was a List of Things that we Saw a little Bit before The pod Came up Which I Was trying To scroll To see if I could Come across Again organically Which I Don't think I'm going To be able To but Honestly we Talked about 2024 how we Were kind of Blindsided and I think we Are sleeping a Little bit People haven't Already seen Towards the End of last Year in the Beginning of This year Like oh No 2025 Is looking Really good It again But I Feel like We're going To have Another great Year of Gaming in 2025 Look we Have games Coming out Like Monster Hunter Wilds

[00:06:47] We have The new Ghost You know Yote So I Think Honestly Between Ghost having A really Strong chance Of being Game of The year But I Think there's Going to be A lot Of surprises That come Out especially Some things Like Ninja Gaiden 4 Recently Announced on The excellent Excellent Xbox showcase They just Had the Other day So look It could be Anyone's Game of The year But if I Have to throw A little bit Of money On it And potentially Be like oh This one is Probably going To be the Straight up Game of The year

[00:07:16] I think Yote has A really Good chance Outside of GTA 6 GTA 6 Is my Number one I would say Maybe Yote Having a Really solid Chance of Being like Action game Of the year Something like That When it Comes to Like Yote Something I'm Curious about It's like I mean I trust Sucker Punch Because I Have no Reason not To I think Everybody Ubiquitously Like really Has enjoyed Or did Enjoy the Infamous games Like I don't Know if they've Ever had like A miss Like a miss In any way But I'm Curious about

[00:07:46] Like do you Think that Like Yote Is going to Be Integrally Like different From Ghost Of Tsushima In a way Like that Will Like you Don't think That that's Going to Rub you the Wrong way At all Do you No it Definitely Won't Just because I'll be The first Person to Say that Ghost of Tsushima Wasn't the Greatest Game of All time And that's Not giving It a slight It's just People were Really gassing It up Because the Fighting was Top notch Fighting is Probably Some of The best Blade work Action work In a game Of its Caliber That's been Put out Period

[00:08:16] You know You can Compare it To something Like Ninja Gaiden Which is Very similar Sorry It's very Different I should say As far as How the Gameplay Goes But just The weight Behind the Actual Katana Blows In Ghost Of Tsushima And when You're Fighting multiple Enemies How it Feels like You're Just directly In the Middle Of like An old Japanese Flick It felt Excellent And it Doesn't matter What difficulty You're playing On it Never really Felt janky Or anything If Ghost Of Yote Gives us That same Kind of Gameplay And then Just ups The stakes As far as Some of The actual Story

[00:08:46] And the Characters Interacting With each Other It's gonna Be like An easy You know A plus 90 Metacritic Etc Etc Another Kind of Classic Sony First party Just doing Well as far As their Single player First party Story things And I know We had talked About this Beforehand To Ghost Of Tsushima Has a Slept on Co-op You know The For legends Was awesome That was one Of my Favorite Multiplayer Experiences Of What I think 2020 Is when The Original Ghost Came Out Yeah So If they Do Something Even

[00:09:15] Similar To that For Yote Or maybe Give it Like an Extra Little Bump Up Maybe To give Us Two Of The Raids That they Ended up Doing At the End Of

[00:09:46] Little Bit More Robust And I Feel Like They've Had A Good Amount Of Time I Don't Even Remember When Tsushima Came Out If it Was 2020 Or 2020 I

[00:10:16] like are proposing especially because they pivoted they pivoted away and like we were expecting more of a story about jin sakai jintu yeah and and the thing is is that like ghost of tsushima fundamentally at a gameplay level i think is one of the most proficient like third person open world adventures i have ever played like all the boxes like it checks every single box out there but when i think about like the narrative of ghost of tsushima he's just batman like i think like they they do lean pretty heavily on like the bushido code and samurai honor and like the legacy

[00:10:46] of jin and his relationship with his uncle everything that's involved there and a lot of that stuff is cool but i just i didn't connect with a lot of those characters in a way that i was expecting from like a sony first party property like it's just there was some there were some deficiencies in the writing that i think they were expecting you to make jumps and connect with characters that i just personally didn't connect with and that's fine that's just that's just my opinion but i i do think like it's going to be like it's going to be interesting for me to see whether or not they're

[00:11:14] going to make that next level whereas like this new you know erica ishi being the new protagonist in like whatever world that she's going to you know uncover and then you know yote like exploring this new mountain this new area is going to be really really interesting um so you said that one anything else but 2025 being stacked and i found my list so i'm glad we were able to talk through it until i found it but yeah lots of really good ones things that we've seen a good amount of gameplay for and some things that are still a little bit up in the air as far as things that we've seen some

[00:11:42] gameplay for and that i think have a really good chance of just not only narratively but gameplay wise putting them in like a game of the year category yeah look hideo kojima you can't mark mount can't ever say that the guy is out of the game so death stranding 2 as much as you may have disliked or called it a walking simulator when i played the first death stranding i enjoyed that game way way more than i am i don't even know if should have is the right word but initially thought i

[00:12:08] would for sure i started off like oh yeah i was like oh this is you know it's fine i'm gonna kind of get through this the bts kind of suck the stories you know garbage nonsense and then it's like by the time you get to the end of it it's like that frank um from what is it the oh geez what is that tv show the punisher no no no sorry the no the tv show with um oh philadelphia philadelphia yeah yeah yeah that's it's always sunny it's always sunny in philadelphia yeah we're just like oh i get it

[00:12:36] now it's like everything just kind of locks into place not saying that you know it's 100% followable because at the end of the day hideo kojima he'll throw some really high level crazy stuff at you yeah but i felt like by the end of the original death stranding so many of the pieces and the setups fell into place so very well and then the overall acting themselves which of course hideo he tends to get like actor actors which everyone's in game for the most part is a really strong actor but he gets high level like actor and he's able to pull those performances out which is

[00:13:05] the most important thing yeah you can take an actor and put them in a game and we've seen plenty of you know actors from like tv shows or movies and video games and then they just kind of phone it in because maybe they're not being directed well or they don't respect the medium whatever hideo kojima does to get these actors who don't traditionally do video games to respect the medium and to like bring their best into it it's clear he has juice between the directing and the engine

[00:13:29] accurately showing you you know leo sudo's character um norman regis's character um getting all them just really like well facial configured into the game and getting those emotions through um it was a blast it was a fantastic time to go through it didn't feel like a slog and i'm very much looking forward to death stranding too yeah death stranding too i mean so i mean i'm not gonna i don't know what his if he's like posted his schedule yet on the show but we do have plans to talk about death stranding

[00:13:57] one i'm not i'm not done with that game yet so i really i'm i would to the same extent that you were i was surprised at how locked i in i was at the very beginning of the game okay like to the extent like i get what you're saying about the story like and i agree with you deeply that i'm just like okay you know what was it uh kill hard man or something like die hard die hard man die hard man like you know it's like this it it's it's interesting because hideo has this fascinating

[00:14:23] way of being very silly with the things that he writes but also like deeply philosophical correct and like he he also was like known of like it's something that we've talked about for a long time i mean he predicted a lot of things that you know the way like socio-political things would play out in the metal gear franchise and then he obviously did this really apt thing um you know with death stranding right before kobe had happened and then kobe had happened in mirroring a lot of like what was happening in humanity in that game so it was interesting like what he was talking about and

[00:14:52] how that was reflected in our society but um but yeah i mean i and then even watching like the previews of death stranding 2 and seeing you know how much farther they're gonna take the character with like the you know with the guitar and like you know you have all of this crazy shit going on and like the difference in what's actually happening to the bbs and how that's gonna relate to norman aridus's character there's so many questions that i have that are unanswered by like where i'm at in the story that i'm curious to find out what happens at the end of that game and then see that progression

[00:15:21] i think it'll be really interesting for me to go from one to two so quickly and not have to like wait on that it would be it'd be a treat so i'm looking forward to that one as well i i would say something for me um we talked about yote uh and we've been talking about kojima i'm really interested in metal gears all the delta you know i don't think we have a date on snake eater yet or but i would be really interested to play it in a new graphical updated engine after playing silent hill 2 and everything

[00:15:49] konami did with bloober team to like make that game just sing and play like a dream i hope that they're investing in putting that same amount of effort into whoever is handling the remake of you know delta in like hopefully bringing it to new consoles in a way that's going to make it an absolute banger um so yeah i'm really excited for that one and then hopefully that will be a stepping stone for me to get completely into the metal gear franchise and i can go back and slog my way through one and then enjoy two because i always hear that people say two is one of the best ones that

[00:16:19] they did in the franchise yeah yeah you got to play through two for sure uh yeah and then like you know even beyond that uh like like that you were saying earlier the xbox underscore direct developer direct is that i think it was a developer direct developer direct uh expedition 33 clear obscure as soon as i saw this like okay we're doing a jrpg but it's not a jrpg and then to find out the developers after that direct came forward and they were like you know up front about the scope of

[00:16:48] that game they're looking at a 25 to 30 hour experience but with like that that jrpg lens like very menu heavy very like min max based and also it's uh charlie cox from daredevil is playing like one of the leading characters which i love that apparently they have a lot of other casts i haven't looked at the full i saw some of the cast i won't be able to name is there like a laura bailey in there there is some really good cast mates that they're bringing on to voice like some of the main characters

[00:17:12] and some of your party members interesting so yeah um but there's a lot that we still have left to play i mean there's just a whole slew go look at it like you know game releases of uh 2025 i am deeply interested in kingdom come deliverance 2 are you actually i am i am the boys over at the elder trills podcast have been hyping it up apparently they were big fans of the original and then i was listening to some reviews some previews of deliverance 2 and it's saying a lot of the things

[00:17:38] that i think are pretty interesting in terms of how immersive of a jrpg or not jrpg but just like a role-playing experience is going to be open world experience so you know there's some there's some cool stuff there um and man i gotta tell you i know that we you know everybody knows what an ubisoft game is at this point everybody who knows anything about ubisoft knows what their experiences are correct outlaws surprised me in a way that i didn't know they had the capacity to do and it was

[00:18:06] also like very much heavily lifted by the fact that like i'm a big star wars fan but like i'm interested to play shadows i'm gonna play shadows i'm gonna buy the game i'm gonna do it and sometimes you just want your your checklist experience sometimes you just want your open world seven out of ten game that you can just kick back and not care about and just play through and then looking at naoe and and uh uh the other character what's his name yasuke yeah you know seeing the their gameplay in motion and

[00:18:34] seeing a lot of the nor previews now that they have hands-on previews in like a lot of youtuber creators uh hands uh it's it's interesting to see where they're gonna go with that i'm very curious to to see but you know we're gonna we're gonna go there i don't know if i'm gonna get a ninja guide in though i don't know if i will well you got to play the first three and then you can play four and then i can play four not before not after right on ninja master one life got it got it copy

[00:19:01] that but yeah man with one life do people do that in those games they do of course people play elden ring with their feet you got to play one life and you guys i don't like that also andy circus is gonna be in claire yeah you know what's crazy you know what's a a deep cut and your boy ben star that i know you're not gonna play this game i'm interested in civ 7 have you ever played a civ game i don't really do real-time strategy games like rts's yeah that's fair that's fair nothing against them it's just not my cup like i i got it all out of my system when i was younger

[00:19:31] when i played like the original warcraft and yeah stuff like that so like even when i try to play like mixes of it i'm like oh you know for example i can't do like gears of war tactics i know that was more turn-based i think yeah but i'm like the closest i've gotten i'll talk about this maybe in a little bit if we get around to it like midnight suns is fun but that's like the furthest i can really how much that game did you play did you beat it i'm like three hours into it i haven't beat it yet but it's fun though it's cool it's like x-com marvel it's x-com with cards yeah so it's

[00:19:58] neat it's very simplified like you don't have to use as much brain power oh because you don't have to be like oh i have to go to this place and then shoot and then have a percentage of missing it's like you play a thing it does a thing it moves your character automatically you just kind of have to like know where your positioning is after everything's all said and done so it's fun interesting yeah and i think uh i think uh obsidian is gonna have a big year this year i'm really hopeful for avowed i don't i mean i don't know if it's gonna hit for people or not i'm interested in playing it i think it's

[00:20:25] gonna be really cool based on um you know early previews early access previews and i also just believe even oblivion as like a developer yeah um and i'm also i'm i'm in the party where it's like and i've been talking to um to courtney a lot about because she's been looking for a fix for like a narrative rpg fix outside of dragon age and i was like you got to give the outer the outer outer worlds a chance you gotta give the outer worlds a chance because they're coming out with two this year so you can go

[00:20:52] from one to the next so i feel like if both of those hit could be a big year for them too i agree i agree cool let's go ahead and move on to our game updates stuff that we've been working on stuff that we've been playing uh stuff that who knows whether or not it's going to make it into our game of the year categories um i'm interested in hearing what you have to say about some of the things that you have listed here um but i just want to come out and say for folks who haven't been paying attention

[00:21:19] to my twitch streams which it's totally fine i'm glad that you haven't because i got absolutely obliterated uh but i've been playing resident evil village you talked about it in our spooktober episode which is the very last like fngc podcast episode outside of our reviews that we did before this episode man and i i'm gonna be honest with you i edited that episode i was present for the recording i don't fucking remember anything he said he doesn't listen to me y'all ladies and gentlemen

[00:21:48] he doesn't listen he doesn't care i remember i remember something about something something about that's it that's that's it that's where i begin and end but no i've been playing this game and man i'm having such good time what that's crazy and it was but like the thing is is that i was very much expecting this to be a typical resident evil experience because i love the resident evil games i really enjoyed my time with seven seven was like really intense and creepy um and then i like

[00:22:15] did like a really solid run of seven and i had a really good time with that i didn't crank up the difficulty on that one because that one's real scary so i was like you know let's i got i rolled credits i was like i'm good i'm good but i i beat resident evil 2 all the way i didn't platinum resident evil 2 or 3 but loved both of those games like a lot and you know it's so so coming in and playing eight this is the first resident evil game where i've played through it and everything is kind

[00:22:42] of to the it's it's so interesting because all of the areas all of the characters just the gameplay motions of going through this game and completing it are so interesting to me and that every texture has just made me want to be like all right i'm gonna get the platinum it's earned it's earned that place in my mind there you go and it's really fascinating too because i've listened to other people's after i beat the game i was like well we don't really have a review scheduled for this game and i don't really feel like doing one unless you're like super adamant about doing it but um i was like

[00:23:12] i was curious to see what other people thought about this game and a lot of people criticized for all of the areas being too different from each other people criticized it for trying to be resident evil 4 even though it's not resident evil 4 really living up to the hype although that's not a really fair comparison in my mind because like resident evil 4 is like a revolutionary game it made third person action shooters like you like you can't you it's like comparing i don't know apples to oranges or something like fruit by the way yeah both fruit and you're gonna eat them both but it's also

[00:23:42] like fruit yep yeah but exactly and it's one of those things where it's like you're comparing one thing to like one of the pinnacle of its thing exactly and it's like i there's not really i mean it is what it is and it's so resident evil 8 in its own right i thought was very integrative like i'm i keep thinking about it in like all the areas are distinct but every single area whether it's like morose laboratory or you know the castle or you know the factory even like they make sense in the

[00:24:09] setting correct and it's not like it's not even as stark as for example you're in resident evil 2 and you go from rpd to the sewers to the you know to the laboratories and those are those are very cool transitions to go from those different areas but realistically they don't make sense yeah they wouldn't be oh they're completely less connected to the sewer yeah exactly exactly but like in resident evil 8 like this village and like knowing that umbrella has some type of tie to this place and it's

[00:24:35] romania right so it's like very much disconnected from you know you what you would think of modern civilization although i'm sure romanians sure are tapped into shout out to modern cultures yeah if you're out there listening to the podcast right now big ups to you big ups stay away from the castle stay away from the castle just don't go in there just it's not worth it it's not worth going in there that gosh but yeah like even the castle like and i'm thinking about it this game came out in 2021 because i was looking up and i was like how long game this how long ago did this game come out

[00:25:03] and i was surprised at how long ago it was because it just looks especially playing i i know i'm a sony shell yeah yes i'll admit it yes but especially playing on the ps5 pro the visualizations and especially because it's optimized for the pro the silky smooth like nature is like i was streaming it and it just was looking like fucking trash on my stream because of my computer lag and latency issues and all of the other stuff that's going on but then going from that to playing it on the pro i was

[00:25:30] like oh my god it's like night and day if i say night it's like night and day so if anybody out there re engine baby yeah re engine does its thing yeah it's it's incredible so it's just it's just really beautiful and so for the platinum i don't have the platinum yet you had mentioned that earlier on in the show but i have my speed run to do and i can do my frugal father achievement alongside the speed run because i'm just not going to spend anything i'm just going to go don't buying stuff yeah you knock a couple of those out the one go it's like yeah don't use it's not boxes it's like what don't

[00:25:58] spend any money at the store do a speed run you already did your knife run yeah i did my knife run did you do your speed run in your knife run at the same time i i want to say i did but i don't think i did because i know when you're playing through with the knife like it makes so many fights like twice as long as they need to be that last fight with the guy who was like i guess what is he uh the guy with the mace yes at the end your eyes his brother yeah yeah fucking took forever

[00:26:25] literally forever to kill him on casual with a knife actually no now i know i did do the speed run with the knife run because i remember like i was doing really really well and everyone was saying if you merge those two runs together like you have to hit that one like perfectly because he only has one part of his leg like his kneecap yeah it actually takes damage and you can't use like the laser arm or anything so i was trying to hit him i was trying to hit him from like behind like on his ankles behind but like the ankle wasn't really doing it and then i was just getting up

[00:26:52] and his facing crouching and then slashing it like dodging out of the way when he does like chris why do i have to be such a bitch playing as chris exactly yeah those achievements the achievements make you go out of character yeah no it's uh it was intense but yeah and then and then doing my uh village of shadows run man the vod is up on twitch right now y'all there's a clip out there did shady send you that clip you did of me yeah the first the first uh enemy killing you like twice in a

[00:27:19] row first enemy first enemy village of shadows and the thing is is that okay so our friend shady he has like relentlessly made fun of me and i have history with this because i'm bad at aiming apparently apparently and i was okay so resident evil 4 remake is similar to the original resident evil 4 has a mini game where you like go see the merchant and then you go in this underground area

[00:27:47] and you basically play in a shooting gallery and i have videos of me literally like moving the cursor just like wall wall air wall wall and it was so bad it was so bad and then i get into resident evil 8 the first fucking like it i'm like i panic i panic of course i panic of course i panic he moves so fast

[00:28:10] they're very quick he moves so fast well there's so it's so fast oh my god it was bad it was really it was really bad but i made it through once i figured out what the fuck i was doing and once i figured out how much damage these things could take i've played that game that so the village of shadow runs was my fourth run and then my fifth run is going to be my speed run um and hopefully i can knock everything out and then other than that it's mercenaries and then you we talked about mercenaries offline then you gotta do the dlc the rose dlc yeah i'm interested in it i'm interested

[00:28:40] because i'm interested in rose's character and to see if like she's gonna be somebody that they're gonna bring on into the future probably not but still she's cool though that was a fun that was a really fun dlc i liked it a lot so anyway that's what i've been playing outside the pod what have you been up to so i talked a little bit about midnight suns i'm not gonna go too too crazy into it i mean i explained the premise it's x-con with cards so very fun if you like marvel it's really cool you get to do your in-between time where you're talking to people at the abbey and you

[00:29:06] like chit chat with spider-man and blade spider-man captain marvel you get to go play cards and don't you stare at the stars isn't it like a relationship sim there's a relationship like a meter it seems like there may be some kind of like sim to where like you can potentially like get a romance with them maybe that's just the way they're talking and i'm like reading into it but yeah is a lot of lock in the game stop that that uh that's later on when we talk about the uh 2024

[00:29:35] you know g-word game so let's uh let's let's hold off on your horses there sir g-word what you talking about that the thing that you were trying to oh yeah yeah yeah i don't want to spoil it for the people for the people for the people uh so midnight suns it's cool if you like card games if you like x-com then give it a shot i picked that and i think already ate up at the same time like last year for like 20 bucks each and that's cool both both great prices so awesome um game that i think we're going to talk about a little bit later so i don't want to spend too too too much time on

[00:30:04] it but indiana jones yes that game we have a segment reserved is high quality it's so that's a high quality game i'm not going to bury the lead that game is good i hope they made millions of dollars off of that game they didn't because it's on game pass but it's a great game it's coming to ps5 is coming to be is official like next year oh yeah that's already happening i think it's supposed to be coming like this month or next month oh sweet so hopefully they do some really good sales

[00:30:31] there because look this game is fantastic if you have not already checked it out on xbox or if you only have a playstation and you're looking forward to it later on in like january february please play indiana jones it came out in 2024 it was like december 9th so it missed the cutoff for the game awards so it's going to unfortunately be shoved in 2025 with all the other like heavy hitters and people are going to forget about it because it's going to be 12 months later well it's going to be february but they say early 2025 is what they're doing so i'm hoping this month or next month so if

[00:30:59] they get their hands on but no indiana jones is awesome like it's so good i felt like it's not only is it probably the best in not introduction but like the best indiana jones-esque entertainment you know movies tv shows uh games stuff like that that we've had in like the better part of 10 years absolutely but it made me want to go back and watch the trash indiana jones that's how good it is did you i was like did you go back and watch the good ones though no no no well i didn't watch the good ones because i know the good ones are good and i i like i like those i'm fine i was like you

[00:31:28] know what this is making me want to like catch up on the stuff i missed on yeah so like let me go watch kingdom of the crystal skull garbagio garbagio so bad i i i feel like i owe it to myself like i feel like this is included in our the room our uh like morbius i've actually seen morbius i've seen morbius i feel like i should include because there is another one gonna add crazy

[00:31:52] phoebe waller bridges was in yes dial of destiny i started that one to be fair so far i'm like better than i'm like 30 minutes in i don't hate it yeah but i i guarantee it gets bad he's just like because i heard nothing about it after it came out he just he's not the the problem is that harrison ford is indiana jones correct he's no correct he's he's just not indiana jones anymore exactly and the

[00:32:18] problem is is that because they it i mean this is an interesting conversation to have when we talk about like properties and ip and everything but like because they refuse to recast him like the the franchise is going to suffer the franchise is going to languish and because like and it's not necessarily like his fault like they could make an indiana jones like a maturator jones about him being like an elder like wiser person and surrounded by younger you know prototypes and we've had movies

[00:32:43] like that that are have pulled that off to like greater or lesser degrees but um yeah they just they can't he's just not him anymore correct and i hate that i hate that they tried to do like a little bit of a pass the torch moment too with uh kingdom of the crystal skull with the hat blowing towards shia labeouf and the door's opening and it's like oh my god is shia gonna be the new indian absolutely not he's too toxic they're like no they said get him out of here no thank you he and me and

[00:33:06] goff deserve each other they said well i'm moving on from that one anyway sorry no no no shia labeouf listening right now yeah right um let's talk about the real 2024 game of the year oh my god marvel rivals is the greatest game to come out in the last 10 years of video games it is the highest quality 10 years is crazy this is a crazy statement i take it back i take it back i take it back uh but it's it's really good i enjoy it a lot

[00:33:36] honestly my like kind of fever for this game has very much rivaled like when hell divers 2 first came out and when 2016 overwatch came out um which for me i was thinking about this earlier today that's a really big pat on the back for overwatch considering they were all new characters they didn't have the marvel license so the fact that i liked the characters and like the game back then that much was awesome but marvel rivals it just hits everything well they did the fantastic you know thing that most good

[00:34:05] games in 2024 have done like hell divers and space marines where it's like organically the community just loves this game so much they're making art they're making memes they're saying that jeff the land shark is king vaughn and he's a demon in the flesh we're we're getting all these really cool alternate costumes that people are cosplaying as like it's it's just fun to be a part of the community

[00:34:30] and even though it is a hero shooter with a competitive mode which means that people will get toxic it's like you can play the quick match and you can just enjoy being a part of it without being you know a complete asshole and i think that's the best part about these kind of multiplayer pvp games is if you can hop in and have fun with a character you like oh i want to play as the hulk oh i want to play as you know moon knight i want to be this i want to be that and then get people introduced to characters that they maybe haven't really played before they weren't interested in you know psylocke

[00:35:00] obviously has been hot forever but people didn't care about psylocke the last six years until this game came out the last time you saw psylocke it was during the um x-men apocalypse movie yeah with olivia with olivia and everyone was like she looks the part and everything else sucks so it's like psylocke had no clout in 2025 or isaac ollie what was his name isaac isaac uh guy from i didn't show him up he's also moon knight oh yeah so he's good he's fine he's fine he's good he's good but yeah

[00:35:29] rivals it's a great game honestly if you haven't checked it out it's free so give it a shot if you liked overwatch before it became not great then this is the perfect game for you um if you didn't like overwatch because it was a first person shooter then this is a great game because it's a third person brawler action game yeah only reason you won't like is if you don't like pvp hero shooters and that's perfectly fine because they have their issues yeah well so it's interesting though because

[00:35:53] you talked about overwatch in 2016 now knowing that uncharted 4 titanfall 2 inside you know assassin's creed etio collection batman return to arkham i don't even know crazy year wasn't you know crazy crazy year call of duty modern warfare but like no seriously but like ratchet and clank 2016 came out the witcher the witcher 3 came out i think shortly before that maybe tail end 2015 which

[00:36:20] came out about tail end 2015 like knowing that above all of those games titanfall 2 namely was overwatch your game of the year in 2016 oh that's scary too like i was gonna say yes and then you said titanfall 2 and i was like i forgot that that was one of my favorite games of all time yeah um will i say it was game of the year what was the first three in there again was the first thing that list i mean just looking at uncharted 4 overwatch and titanfall 2 and it's funny too

[00:36:46] because i didn't play uncharted 4 i was also the year 2016 and the last guardian and inside last guardian was good definitely was gonna be game of the year 2016 was really really cool and the revitalization um but i wouldn't put it over overwatch i'm sure people would shoot me for that but that's just me um however uncharted 4 i didn't play in 2016 i played it afterwards but that would probably be a better game for me over overwatch slightly because the kind of time and energy i put

[00:37:16] into overwatch 2016 through like 2018 like i yeah it's ridiculous yeah i look back and then i'm like that that's a lot of hours that's a lot of lifetime uh in the same deal you know people were out there organically just drawing more crowds into it like you you couldn't go around without here oh let's break it down like it was just memes on memes on memes jokes songs music you know cosplays were going

[00:37:42] crazy um they really capitalized on it with the overwatch league so making a competitive scene out of it which is slowly dying but still kind of going like it's impressive to do all of that with a brand new ip like doing that with a new ip is just was stunning so so you know it's really interesting um i played overwatch a couple of times it just wasn't my thing yeah just straight up wasn't my thing i think part of it was is the fact that i didn't get in early and so i never had that reference point of

[00:38:09] like how to play that game when everybody was still new to it and people weren't sweaty so i only played that game years after the fact oh after people had thousands of hours to get the most sweatiest unemployed cells exactly you know in overwatch playing rivals at launch sweatiest yeah like it's it's it was a it was a really good experience it was a really positive experience playing with you playing with the boys it's it was a it was a good time and i will say that like

[00:38:34] the game makes me unnecessarily angry at times but i but i can't like fault it for that and the thing is is about it is you know obviously you know i default to playing you know easy mode uh with scarlet witch little scarlet witch but it's really interesting because this game has completely turned me into turned me on to a completely new style of gameplay doing support healer class and i never knew how much fun playing a support healer class in the different varieties that you could be a healer like

[00:39:03] playing jeff like i'm not the best at jeff but i still enjoy playing him uh playing like i honestly playing as uh uh cloak and dagger yep was a way like a like eye-opening experience the mechanics of like switching in between them there's a lot of like strategy that is consistently ongoing in that game and like understanding where all your where all your teammates are understanding what to do if everybody around you is dead and where to fucking go like how to manage your team how to manage like

[00:39:30] the environment like it's just there's a lot of skills that it asks of you that i'm not personally good at which is the reason why i don't connect with rivals as much but then at the same time like i am not going to fault that game for the quality that is all that to be said you know we're talking about best of this episode yep do you think rivals has taken the crown away from overwatch oh for like a year in the process of doing most definitely really most definitely okay like

[00:39:57] don't be wrong overwatch is not dead so people can't say that yet is it dying of course it is it's been dying since two came out because that was not real like blizzard was goofy um but no as far as yes like market share people's attention and we talked about this a little bit when we were like last year going into like oh is uh concord gonna you know be good or not which spoiler alert it wasn't it wasn't good and then we were talking about other games like that like oh you know rivals

[00:40:26] is similar it's coming out and i was like you know it has a good chance the big thing going for it is that marvel's um you know name to it right so that's immediately gonna be you know that and i think they had already announced it was gonna be free at that point too so i'm like that's another big plus so at the end of the day people are gonna try it out and even if it's bad it'll probably still like look on paper initially better than like you know concord or overwatch or whatever um and little did i know because i think that was before i actually played like the beta when i was like oh this game

[00:40:54] is actually very fun and really good and i was like holy smokes it's gonna be crazy and then it came out and sure enough it um you know it's been hitting crazy records on twitch people have been pumping money and money i think it like made 25 mil like its first month or something like that being out this is why we can't buying all the skins like it's it's nuts and that's the thing it's one of those free games so they kind of keep you on by doing like daily challenges and missions and all that it's a paid battle pass so they hit you with a lot of those trappings that we don't necessarily

[00:41:22] love but i mean it's at least it's free so you can kind of justify it in your mind a little bit how much money do you spend in this game so far i think at least at least 30 let's get at least 30 because i got both the battle passes and then i got a skin so i think at least been at least 30 did you get that zoostorm skin no not yet yet but it's coming it's coming do i keep that in chat

[00:41:52] i can't remember what other skin i bought i bought some other skin um but no but it's yeah the skins all look good they're pulling from like legitimate comic lore which is great um a lot of the characters are just so fun to play and like the only bad character i would say off the top of my head is like black widow everyone else to some level is viable um the tanks are all great which i love playing tank so people are good at playing as widow too sometimes sometimes sometimes look if you're a

[00:42:20] good widow you might as well just play hawkeye and be 20 times better so yeah that's fair that's how it goes but it's fun because there's like 30 something characters in to the most part well not to the most part for the most part most of them are viable yeah um it's interesting though like the times that i've played with you in the boys yeah learning how quickly like the metas that people fall into like there are characters that people just don't play as correct and characters that you can guarantee are going to be in every single match like a hulk like a thor like a scarlet witch yeah you like a

[00:42:49] moon knight yeah for sure yeah so i don't even see jeff as a meta which is really interesting he's not meta yeah and when we say meta a lot of the times it's like higher up you'll see jeff everywhere but if you're talking you know grandmaster eternity all the the sweatiest of the sweaties you know the the people that either have no lives or their lives are streaming and playing video games you know that you know they're not playing jeff um they're not playing you know captain america for the most part

[00:43:16] you're seeing some of these characters kind of fall off but not that they're bad it's just it's easier to play other ones so why go out of your way why make life harder for yourself yeah i hear that i hear that well those are the game updates that we have for you so far this is what we've been playing that's what we've been messing around with uh let's go ahead and transition into our 2024 game

[00:43:36] of the year to talk about our categories all right so i'm gonna i'm just gonna let everybody know what

[00:44:05] categories we're looking at first and then going from there and then we're just gonna go down and then ultimately enter into our top five discussion to talk about what are you know how we would rank our games of 2024 okay so the categories that we have are best action game best indie best multiplayer best fps which means first person shooter or first person game that you've played this year best rpg

[00:44:31] best non-2024 game best family gunner game of the year best horror best set of an out of 10 game and then uh best card best card game of 2024 i got add out there for a second um so those are all the the categories that we have this year let's start it off the top best action game will best action games got to be hell divers 2 if i think action i think hell divers 2 i feel that literally

[00:44:58] diving across a battlefield uh pulling the trigger on a big old machine gun and your character starts screaming at the top of their lungs and laughing yeah like it's it's built to be you know we we talked about it saying oh it's um starship troopers the video game um you know it's terminator the video game because you have the robots now they added the illuminate so they've continued to keep it alive as well um and there's you know space bad guys the video games you know we're killing bugs uh it's not

[00:45:26] bugs but um like these more zombie creatures that then also pop up with like big old spikes and try to punch you in the mouth so it's just it's an action oriented high octane crazy good time um and hell divers 2 is another one of those games from 24 not on my radar at all came out punched me in the mouth the community just ran away with it with all the different like jokes and memes and videos and

[00:45:51] you know being able to tell people that like yeah i you know landed on x planet and there were a bunch of bugs and they were chopping off my limbs and my arms my friends were blowing each other up i got punted by a a big old armored bug 30 feet away while flying my flamethrower in the air and i clipped it and i sent it to some friends so it's it's just a time and a half i feel like anytime you hop into a match you come out of it you get to share a story and then that kind of goes into just like

[00:46:17] the history books of hell divers if anything too i think i saw online at one point the ceo who is an awesome guy by the way like it's super funny all the stuff he kind of talks about and brings up he mentioned like oh anything that happens during a match of like a hell divers group it's um it's canon like everything that happens to people is canon in like the overall history of hell divers lore which is great being able to like have what you're doing personally be kind of recorded as far

[00:46:45] like oh this is legitimately what happened in this universe feels like it matters yeah it's awesome yeah no i i love that take i love that pull hell divers too beautiful game uh an entry into sony's i think at this point we can easily say now failure in terms of their live service pivot push but it's it but it is the best example of that failure it's like the best case scenario of what sony could have asked for or wanted and they still tried to kill it and they still try to kill it they still try to they can't get out of their own way they can't get out of their own way

[00:47:15] and it's really interesting um yeah i think that like from a from an action perspective hell divers 2 is really really fun and it just gets you interested it gets you going there's enough like i just wish there was a little bit more like built-in lore to the world like i wish there was a little bit more stuff that we could learn about super earth um and the society and everything i guess you could i guess you could go play the first one i'm not gonna do that though i'm not gonna

[00:47:40] you know i i love hell divers 2 is the take however i don't think the emperor would love hell divers 2 is the best action game of 2024 which means that space marine 2 warhammer 40k space marine 2 is my personal best action game of 2024 we talk about like co-op games action games playing with your friends playing just like fucking face ripping awesome balls to the wall chain sword action games

[00:48:09] slaying xenos for honor and glory and for the emperor this is the fucking game dude this is the game like i haven't had it as like i'm gonna say this right now i like playing marvel rivals with you because you hard carry me i have not had more fun playing a game with you than space marine 2 like that playing together you know having you take clips of us like just absolutely ripping and tearing into xenos at the same time it's just like some of the most hype hype it's the hypest moments that

[00:48:37] we've had and it's also just like it fulfills the action power fantasy in my mind not to mention that it's a beautiful game gorgeous and it's like a thing it's like the game that has gotten me more into like warhammer 40k lore i don't know if it's enough for me to go back there and play dark tide i might give bolt gun a shot i downloaded dark tide though i did see because i was on game pass and i was like yeah i'm gonna go ahead and download this yeah i mean it's enough it's enough for you to get interested in the world like i've even thought about buying audiobooks which i still might

[00:49:05] because like you know i like listening i listen to a clip of sister celestine and i'm like i have to find out who this character is now that i have like the base foundation of like warhammer 40k and space marine 2 like that's where that is also special honorable mention quick shout out to the secret levels episode the space marine 2 episode that was awesome arguably the best episode of the secret levels like series that they have on amazon prime prime video rather and uh yeah really if you've

[00:49:33] enjoyed space marine 2 playing it this year and you're listening to this episode you owe it to yourself to go check out that secret levels episode if you have not experienced that but yeah go give jeff bezos some money go give him some money man just a little bit so yeah space marine 2 please please please go play it you won't regret it let's go ahead and jump into indies best indie game of the year um will what was your best indie game best indie game first of all before you answer that question before you how many indies did you play this year i think one stop i was i was racking my

[00:50:02] brain to be like we got indies and i was like oh i i should have played more because there were some really good ones out there yeah i just did not look between i don't want to hear about time i don't want to hear nothing about time because these indies out here are like two to three hours max but i put so much time into dragon's dogma 2 i put like 140 hours into that game okay we're gonna talk about that game later i can't fucking believe you got the platinum in that game why not i've looked at the plat that's a hard platinum no it's not it's easy when you love it oh my god it's easy when you

[00:50:30] love it but for the indies let's talking about indies here i think i've really played one and to be fair i can't say i played the best one because i haven't played them all and i know people love their their blotcher they love their animal well etc etc however i played one that for me was very impactful talk about a game for impact which it was like up for the category yeah in the game awards i don't think it won it but this is definitely a very impactful game for me but tales of kenzerah zao yes i had a blast with that game i love a metroidvania first off so it was already kind of like in my

[00:51:00] wheelhouse but being able to actually have that kind of african influence which we don't see a lot in video games in general and then being able to tie that all together with that more very personal story of like a son and their father and expectations and love and grief and being able to wrap all of that together in a very fun game it's i'm not saying it's easy because making art and doing a

[00:51:23] good story in general is not easy but being able to take a good story and then also make it a fun to play video game i feel like a lot of the times is a very big ask um the team that did tales um excellent excellent job um and i know some people may yes some people may knock me because they're like oh it's not indie because it was published by ea it's ea originals which is for their it's under their indie titles exactly so calm down we had this conversation i think last year too with like

[00:51:52] dave the diver and some of those other games were like what's really an indie what's not an indie you know we're going to start splitting the the pot here you know when you see it yeah you know what do they say it's is it is it porno this is like porn you know it when you see it i was like well you know i feel like it's a strong indie title because we're not going to get a lot of this you know kind of like nuance and feeling and passion inside your more traditional triple a game yeah

[00:52:18] overall not always but overall so tales it's an easy pick for me for my best indie that i played one because it's the only one that i played yeah i was very happy by the end of my time with it i had a blast yeah yeah i uh i really enjoyed tales tales was a i think it was a really fun game for a lot of different reasons but i think that it's interesting thinking back and playing the game because it's like are there better examples of what tales turned into yes but i think it's also one of those games

[00:52:45] that you could feel the heart and the passion of the create the creators the writers the developers and the voice acting the voice acting abu bakar salim fucking knocked out of the park and then every other voice actor that he got in the studio to play these different characters incredible work especially for a debut title from this team it absolutely deserves to be on your list and it deserves to be called that as like one of the best cities of last year um quick shout out to you though i was reading in the news somewhere that surgeon studios got approved by one of those like

[00:53:15] third-party publishers and they're working on like a stealth horror oh that's fantastic yeah because i know the last thing i heard about them i think was like they're kind of they were shutting down they were scaling back yeah which was really sad to hear after you put out a really quality game in 2024 while a great year for games competitive year unfortunately not a great year for a lot of people who make games and we saw too many layoffs um and i know they were unfortunately kind of falling

[00:53:42] into that group so glad to hear that that they're you know getting a second chance yeah and doing some more work in the future so i'll be sure to support that when i get a shot yeah you have to in thinking about debut titles the first game for a studio to put out this year my personal pick for best indie of 2024 is animal well um and i say that because i haven't played enough indies this last year um this

[00:54:06] was in my opinion a category i had every intention of playing a thousand times just in time for this episode didn't get to it really wanted to i did however play mouthwashing um okay before you finish it or i did okay it's a quick game okay it's very short game though it's an excellent game awesome it's an excellent game i have trouble rating mouthwashing okay because it's a like the story

[00:54:29] in the context in the um themes that they deal with are really really heavy and it's such a short tight small experience low poly horror right um not to say that there wasn't a lot of work put into mouthwashing but i feel like this was in for for my personal experience of playing games in 2024 this was mouthwashing's category to lose um especially since i didn't play a thousand times

[00:54:56] although i'm sure that would have been an easy lock in my book if i were so just knowing everything what everyone has said of that game uh but what i will say is that mouthwashing i feel like it struggles in terms of what it wants to say and what it wants to say clearly um and i think that the interesting thing about mouthwashing is kind of something that dave said about metaphor re fantasia is that sometimes you get more out of a game in the conversation of talking about the game as

[00:55:24] opposed to like what you experienced in real time i get that and mouthwashing is one of those games where they deal with such heavy dark subject matter and it's also a very um it's a very depressing and a very like nihilistic view on humanity and what like humanity means to the universe around it that like for me it's like i love the work that they put into that game but i just don't agree with the philosophy

[00:55:50] i don't agree with the sentiment and it also was very much a personal game of of this year it was very much personal game to like the creator and it's interesting that people were able to resonate with it and it like connected with so many folks and it kind of got all of the accolades and made its rounds in the games media category but i think it's interesting and the reason that's the reason i say all those things as kind of like explaining what it is but the reason why animal well is here is

[00:56:16] because like again this is a studio big mode their first game that they ever made people know who donkey is i joke about him all the time but people know who he is he's very popular youtube content creator really basso out here putting out work but i didn't but i don't think anybody expected you any him to put out a metroidvania a puzzle metroidvania in the way that they expected here animal well excels on all fronts when you talk about like what it is on a technical level it's incredible playing

[00:56:44] that little potato and running around on the screen and like figuring out how it moves in the world is really good it's a tight experience and not only is it a tight experience but like visually and auditorily like it is an exceptional like like work of art on a technical front because it's just the sound design too is haunting it's eerie um the world that you're in it's like it like crosses the border into between being like okay there are these moments of the game that are really cozy i love this

[00:57:13] area i love the vibes of this area and then i'm scared out of my mind and i never thought i would be scared of my mind about a little circle like a little pac-man yeah that i don't think so it's like it's really interesting how they were able to like immerse you in this world and and do that animal well also excels at like uncovering secrets okay it's one of those games that kind of does the thing that breath of the wild did in terms of one of the experiences of breath of the wild is going

[00:57:39] throughout that world and learning where you were and learning the different parts it was a brand new hyrule that we had never been to before a version of hyrule that we had never been to before and the same thing here with animal wells like unlocking the map and zooming out and looking at each of the different sectors and how like one sector can lead into the another and then you see this little pixel and you're like what i can get in there and you go there and you find an egg that goes back to the

[00:58:04] peacock very very cool stuff finding weapons in that game that you didn't think were ever in that game incredible experience so everybody the the end of this is just go play animal well it's a really really good game and i think really they need support so they can make another one and like continue to improve because i know with animal well the first time we really got a chance to check that out was at last year's pax east yes so i know that was a really cool experience being able to go in general but then seeing some of these games like you know animal well that we would later see come out to

[00:58:33] acclaim in 2024 do you remember when you were playing it i think it was what march last year yeah yeah do you remember playing it okay yeah this is something special i definitely have to play this or did you get more as the game came out later and people were hyping it up is that what kind of drew you to it no it was playing it it was playing for the first time i didn't even listen because the thing is it came out in a really weird period i don't know if it was busy i don't even i don't have a release date in front of me when it came out but it came out like sometimes the early to the middle of last year

[00:59:01] i don't think it was summertime but i think it was like right around spring it came out and it was like a weird period of like what releases had launched or what was currently playing or like the meta of what people were playing last year um so it was interesting and when i was at pax i played it and i was like the thing about the audio design was the first thing that stood out to me is the audio design in like the tactility of playing that that character and jumping from the spot to spot or like

[00:59:29] the way that you could brush the ps5 dual sense touchpad and then like you can move the little like vines that are hanging at the top of the screen like it was stuff like that with these little touches in a game that's like not super they're not trying to do a lot but what they are doing is so just exact and really really engaging that it was that point that i realized this is something special but i didn't think much about it when we were at pax it was only until i got like you know elbow deep

[00:59:57] into the game this year while i was playing through it where i was like this is really good this is

[01:00:01] awesome so that was that was our indie game of the year now we're we're in the category that

[01:00:34] you're ready for like that you're ready for take us take us away best multiplayer take us away 2024 i initially was looking at what you were gonna talk about so i'll let you get to that okay however because it came out at the tail end of the year and it got so much hype from like the entirety of december you have your recency bias i'm giving it to marvel rivals i'm giving it i'm giving it it's it's such a fun multiplayer experience you get your your six on six and you know your your

[01:01:03] 30 characters that you can kind of mix and match so realistically well you see a lot of the same characters of course because people are strong and they're fun and they're this and they're that but i still love when i'm like oh look you know there's a character i haven't seen someone's playing adam orlock right so that's a character that's not super common yeah but when you do see them and then hopefully they're good it can turn on a whole you know group of people to be like oh let me give that character a shot next time i got magic for me yep so yeah playing magic that's the same

[01:01:30] thing that happened to me too i saw a good magic and i was like oh that character's kind of legit let me go try out and then i was like oh i suck with this character yeah but that also reminds me that is the skin i bought i did buy her snowboard skin wow because it has a chain sword that's cool shout out to warhammer that's actually really sick but yeah it was awesome when i saw that because she normally has just a big sword but her actual snow outfit is a chain sword and i was like i i need this yeah my life so i went ahead and got that but i mean i've already glazed it enough at the beginning of the

[01:02:00] the time here talking about it marvel rivals excellent multiplayer game is my favorite one of 2024 but you have my number two favorite game of 2024 yeah um so hell divers 2 you already talked about it um and i mean we're we can kind of like run through this but best in terms i'm not a multiplayer gamer but playing this game it rode that line in between like okay we're giving you the

[01:02:24] difficulty we're giving you this cinematic action we're giving you this strategy like thing like you know like the way that you taught me how to play the game you got to run around the map within the time limit and then you got to extract and like the the things that they do in this game are stuff that i haven't experienced since like gears and i didn't think that you could incorporate it into a live service multiplayer game it was like the things that the way that you know like running out of the thing when you call running out of like one of the enemy bases while you call down a hell bomb

[01:02:54] and seeing you just full flow dive out of like a out of like a you know cockpit or something like that you know while we're going out it's just like yeah like a little pill box and and just seeing that sort of thing happen and all those moments just get repeated over and over and over again like getting rescued by my teammates when i'm surrounded by the term by the terminated scum uh you know just doing that and then also how cheeky they're leaning into like this the starship

[01:03:22] troopers aesthetic you know doing starship troopers in a video game better than the starship troopers has ever been able to do in a video game because the starship troopers game came out in 2024 and no one no one talked about it no one talked about it it's crazy um yeah hell divers 2 deserves to be in in my you know game of the year contention for like best multiplayer just because of how technically proficient how beautiful it is i think it is the best example of how you do even though sony tried to

[01:03:49] killed it before they tried to kill it you know it is the best example of how you get new players in and how to adequately like scope and price your games like 40 seems like to capture the perfect amount of value for the quality that i got in hell divers 2 and it's like if they were smart about it they would have they would have made concord free they would have like tried to do a variability instead of saying oh it's sony so it has to be premium no it's sony so it should be better than it is right yeah so it's

[01:04:17] it's one of those things where um hell divers is a great example of how to do that and i hope lessons have been learned it seems like the way that they've been shutting down studios and shuttering games and it's very sad to see people lose their jobs because of that but it seems that a result is that they're starting to learn okay live service we have to do it differently if we are going to do it but doing this massive push is not the way and that's ultimately good for gamers it's good for us and it's tough to see though because it's the kind of thing with the games taking on such a long dev time

[01:04:46] which is it's ultimately good we don't want to crunch anybody into making one of these crazy giant games in like two years yeah but it also just means that we're not really going to see the ramifications of what sony slash playstation wants to do with this shift until pretty much the ps6 like we're going to see what the ps6 like life cycle because what you get like another four to five years out of it which is really i expect ps6 games to be fucking awesome they should be because

[01:05:11] this is arguably been the weakest sony has ever been in a modern console but it's funny it says that but then people are going to look back and they're going to be like oh look at all this crazy stuff that came out during the ps5 i like ps4 is really good when we talk about first party games yeah first party games for sure you think so yeah i think people are going to talk about first party games of ps5 especially as we get like towards the late back end people got to remember it's the back end of the life cycle that's when you get like your last of us twos and all your other crazy stuff that's true so that's true give the next three years you know yote could be insane

[01:05:38] and then we have other what they're probably going to do some uncharted 5 that we're not even aware of so it's crazy to think that we're more than halfway through this console's life cycle yes and we're in 2025 because they talked about it being five to six years didn't they i think so i know seven was like a lot of the last kind of like averages yeah um but that's also taking into account things like what the playstation 2 being like 11 years or something like that which is nuts yeah um and then something like

[01:06:05] the switch was i can't remember when the first switch came out was that like 2018 the first switch is was it 2016 was early 2017 i think that's when because that's when breath of the wild dropped yeah and then now you know we just had the switch 2 announcement which i imagine is coming out in 25 right yeah it has to it has to so i think it's gonna be may is what i predict because they're gonna have the nintendo direct about it in april so i think they're just gonna put it a month after that so that was what eight years for the switch which is which is crazy yeah pretty nuts considering you have people like oh it's all week it's all this all that

[01:06:34] they may work for eight years so we'll see power nintendo man i want to talk about this next topic

[01:07:11] that we have because it is the rare mind link it's it's the rare sync up with the boys here you know look we both got things in common obviously but the good thing about us is that we worry we got the yin and yang you know we got the peanut butter and the jelly we complement each other with our differences exactly but this time we came together we have the exact same opinion on best fps which let's go ahead and get this out of the way we really call this fps or is this just a first person

[01:07:37] game it's a first person game it's not i mean technically is it a first person shooter yes do you do first person shooting in it yes i didn't know what category to put down like action yeah like that for me at first but then i was like oh no but there's hell divers there's this there's that i can't put best immersive sim because we haven't played any other immersive sim in 2024 besides indie so for the listeners that aren't reading yeah it's indiana jones in the great circle is the best fps for

[01:08:03] both nick and myself and let me say before i let you go off because i want you to talk to him about it before we go off this was black ops 6 category to lose yeah that's that and obviously the multiplayer category and black ops 6 incredible game had a blast with that game awesome awesome game however indy is just so fucking good that's exactly what it was i was i had black ops 6 in here at first because i think you have at this point now beaten or if not like you're at the end of the single

[01:08:31] player for black ops 6 yeah and then i never beat the single player but i knew it was good i played like halfway through it and i was like cool i'm i get what i needed out of it this is perfectly no you gotta beat it you gotta finish it it's like it's like five hours so what do you what do you have to do you have to play more marvel rivals correct now that you mention it marvel rivals look at the time well it's a little late but indiana jones in the great circle is just an

[01:08:57] all-around excellent game like it we talked about this a little bit too in like our little group chat the sound design on this game for me is nuts yeah between the actual music and having those true indiana jones stings which like makes your heart heart swell if you've watched the movies you're just like oh like oh it hits me right there like you feel that yeah um to the opening which you know it's literally the first five minutes so i'm gonna i guess low-key spoil it if you care

[01:09:23] five four three two it's just straight up raiders of the lost ark like the very beginning oh it's oh and i was so good it literally okay i played indie and i played that opening to the raider section and then i played a little bit more once you got to the vatican and i turned it off and i got my dvd box set it's i think it's somewhere i don't know you watched all where it is it's right there it's and i and i put in raiders of the lost ark and i watched the whole thing i

[01:09:50] fell asleep through because i've seen that movie so many times but god damn the quality and like the dedication to who any who indiana jones is in those stories and how he lives and operates in that world i didn't think it would work for me i was a big naysayer going in this game this is another example where nick gets proven wrong in 2024 i see indiana jones and i'm like why didn't they put it in third person like i i want to see indy i want to play as him i want to be nathan drake

[01:10:17] you know but indy and like i i respect machine games so much for dedicating themselves to the first person thing because it made you feel like indy so much it really was going through doing the side quests going getting the field notes uh capturing the documents for a while there i thought i was going to get the thousand and then i got to the third area and i just fucking gave up on it i got it he got he got it he literally he suffered through it to get the thousand i really suffered

[01:10:44] um he had to replay this shit he's a little buddy um but no and it was one of those things where i i was like everything here is exactly what i wanted it from the side peripheral content or if you just wanted to like mainline it and go through the main story everything is perfect i think troy baker did an excellent job popped off he really really good he is excellent harrison ford person i don't think he missed excellent and that's the funny thing you say that and i i i appreciate that i

[01:11:11] don't even think he's trying to do harrison you just think he's trying to do indy i think he's trying to do and i can see that i think he's trying to do indy and i think his interpretation of indy is excellent yeah and i would be really curious to see i mean i hope that they make more games like this i hope that like this becomes a franchise and you know i i just i don't know about the profitability of it i don't know what xbox is doing i hope xbox really starts like making the money agreed their third party publishing on and i'm assuming with the nintendo switch to the power

[01:11:40] that's coming to that all of these awesome games that we've gotten through game pass are going to be you know available to everyone who owns a switch or who gets a switch to and then all of a sudden can play these awesome xbox games and phil spencer has even come forward and said we're excited to support nintendo it's cool 2025 so interesting thing to see what happened but yeah indy is so good you have to play it you have everybody have to play it really got to give it a shot especially too because it's coming we said february playstation right uh it says early 2025 they haven't put a date on it but

[01:12:08] i would hope in that anywhere between now and march so yeah definitely because we got to get ahead of they got to get ahead of gta 6 look if you don't get out of the way of gta 6 right now your game's getting run over yeah no i mean i hate to admit it and i hate to be on plaza side here but i hate to be it's true it's true because i mean here's the thing the closer we get to gta 6 the more interested i am in what that game is good and then with the interested i am to see what that

[01:12:35] experience is do you think they're gonna do co-op do you think they're gonna let you like squad up with a with the party in multiplayer i'm sure in an online in a multiplayer form and like the gta online i don't know if they're gonna continue that's a good question too i don't know if they're gonna do a new gta online or if they're just going to be like all right we're gonna incorporate six like warzone 2.0 yeah i mean i would imagine they'd have to make a new one because this is gonna be on the same yeah not even a new but just unreal engine no no no it's um the

[01:13:00] rage yeah so because gta because gta from why because like i know you don't like rdr2 for whatever sick reason you have in your head but that game's engine slow game and the graphics are incredible it's a pretty game it's a pretty game gorgeous it's a pretty game i just i think i have the i think i have grand theft of all five stuck in my brain and that game like if you go

[01:13:26] back and play it now it's just like it's gta people still playing it they still play it online

[01:13:30] that's true but talk to me about some rpgs man okay so rpg this has been this has been a year of

[01:14:36] rpgs this has been a year that is correct good rpgs um you know i would say that like i've played it my fair share of rpgs and i'm like and i hate to say this because like this this sounds bad but like i might low-key be a little bit over jrpgs for a while here um but metaphor rephant asio is the best um rpg that i played in 2024 and it's arguably one of the best exactly i'll throw it in

[01:15:05] here i still got i still got the music on my assets oh do you actually yeah yes that's awesome

[01:15:31] but uh it's it's one of these games where uh it's just they they relentlessly they relentlessly poured care and love into crafting this world into building a narrative that touched me emotionally it it's so relevant it's over we talked about this on the on our metaphor episode for people who haven't listened to that yet um it's so relevant to 2024 and i know that like we have this very myopic lens as americans living in the west we think everything is about us and of course it's

[01:15:59] metaphor isn't really about america or americans but you know it is it is interesting to see because like you know everything that we're facing with the populist movement over here the nationalist movement over here this has been reverberating through the world right like europe has seen that happen to them korea has seen side effects of that as well um and it's like you know there's a lot of similarities to what we can take away from what's going on in metaphor and then what's happening in

[01:16:27] the real world i think one of the best things though is that i've played the persona games and i have every intention to finish persona 3 because persona 3 reload is excellent and i can't wait to see what happens at the end of that game but this game just is structurally so fun to play playing in the turn-based games and of course like i loved everybody knows that i love yakuza 7 like a dragon so it's one of those things it's like this has very similar identity in terms of how you choose the

[01:16:54] characters you play as and how you modify those characters and it has even more even more than yakuza 7 it has more customization of how you align your characters to tackle the challenges that the game throws at you but is there karaoke no there's not i can't i can't sing baka mitai in metaphor i can't i'm sorry i'm sorry but no it's it's just so so good in in a narrative that is evocative a narrative

[01:17:22] that has made me cry multiple times over the course of the game it's something that you want from something that is so sweet and touching uh surprise characters that i didn't think i would love as much as i ended up loving it just it checks every single box from an rpg for me and i think it i i think everybody should at least try to play it um while they can i mean i know of course you know it's 70 dollars it's a premium it's a premium price tag but you know you get money worth out of it you get

[01:17:48] if you know anything about atlas and you know anything about you know the developers over there studio zero you get every single ounce of your money's worth if you play games through completely because i'm sure you talked about it on the episode but would you get like 100 were you 100 hours in or was it less go ahead go ahead speak to the people so my my official play clock was 175 hours why metaphoric fantasia whoa whoa now understand i left the game open let me tell you

[01:18:14] something i left the game open and walked away and just let the music play off in the background a lot i sat and paused menus and then like opened up my phone and scrolled on blue sky or scrolled on youtube like a lot so i would say that the closer actual like play clock will just showed up he showed me his phone and it says 175 hours is equivalent to 7.2 days yes

[01:18:39] imagine sitting in your house for a week straight just playing this no sleep no sleep just playing metaphoric fantasia i think that's very healthy thing to do um no i and i forget where i was going with this but uh yeah i mean it's it's just metaphor and it's something that is is really interesting and you're gonna get your money's worth out of it you have to play the game i think everybody owes it the archetypes are fun the gameplay is fun if you like turn-based uh turn-based uh

[01:19:08] not strategy but turn-based combat yep if you like pokemon you're gonna like metaphor there you go i like the comparison that's perfect now tell me why did you put an action game in the rpg category well actually rpg stands for role-playing game where i play a role as a character one that i often get to create so like literally any game literally any game i often get to create myself where i choose not only their looks and their aptitude but also the type of character they are whether it be a thief or a

[01:19:36] mage or a hunter or a warrior so in this case that aptly describes what was the best rpg of 2024 dragon's dogma 2 cue the music hit the music i'm putting it in

[01:19:49] i think the music is really good in this music is great music is awesome but no i love dragon's

[01:20:19] dogma 2 it's had its issues we did a whole episode with matt stormageddon about it uh fantastic fantastic that's a really good episode i really enjoyed that to me is like she is very beautiful to me but i mean i love dragon's dogma look you did 175 hours in metaphor that's crazy but it's also as we know high quality game game of the year contender all that i did like 140 something in dragon's dogma so i'm right there with you as far as rpgs yeah taking a considerable amount of my life for chunk of

[01:20:47] time i get that and they don't have to take that long i think you got the platinum yep um i got like 75 of the achievements in metaphor nice um i i wasn't platinum running but i did every single quest every single side quest every single optional area i did everything i did everything optional i did as much exploring as possible because for me another big thing of dragon's dogma 2 which was the same for one was that i just loved walking around the world itself fighting the creatures exploring you know

[01:21:16] they gave you things like ox carts to do fast travel which towards the back half of the game i would take advantage of if i needed to go from place to place and run and do errands but the game gave me a chance to walk from a to z and pull like hey you got to take the ring to mount doom i'm like i got you let me go ahead and just get to stepping between random griffins coming down and attacking caravans that i had the chance to you know they never stayed when they realized they were gonna die or you're

[01:21:43] sitting there you go around a corner you see this really big cool waterfall and then as you're like exploring and looking around maybe like taking a little photo for your your um your what's called like your back home your your homies your pawns oh let me let me show you this photograph of this game of drag dogma you pan down and you see a big old dragon down there and i'm just like yeah this is gonna be badass let me go fight this thing so i just love being able to do that and getting those like two distinct areas of the map you know you have your kind of green verdant more

[01:22:12] like medieval type of area and then you go down to like this more kind of like middle eastern yeah uh sandy ish you know red clay yeah but tall was like the main city i think it was the main city or was that the entire area i can't remember yeah but it's it's just gorgeous biomes that you're working in even when you go to like the super foggy scary misty area which you know there's always gonna be like a this is the spookiest place in the poison swamp yeah it's always a blight town right so

[01:22:38] i i just enjoyed being able to do that i loved being able to change around my character as much as possible i'm never pigeonholed into being just a warrior or just a mage or just a thief whenever i go to back to the main town and drop off my stuff i can change around to whatever i want and the game rewards you for doing so yeah by saying okay if you made yourself super strong as a soldier and then you get a little thing that lets you increase your health you can take that and add it onto your mage and then just gives you a little bit more variety when it comes to playing those characters so

[01:23:07] i just love dragon's dogma if you want to hear me gush about it more please go back and listen to that episode that we did with matt storm again because it was a great episode we did not sway nicholas and change his mind as far as saying that dragon's dogma 2 was a good game but i think we put out a really good reason as far as why you should not only play through it if you do kind of care about a little bit more of the story but definitely go past the end of the normal game into the unmoor world

[01:23:34] and then continue to do that kind of like optional secondary area of the game which is great yeah no it's also uh dragon's dogma 2 was one of our better performing episodes of this past year nice um so people really like that review of the game it's one of our best performing reviews period of last year um and i will say that like you know when it comes to i was i was down on it when we did the recording i think i had a lot of frustrations that remain to be true today it's really interesting

[01:24:02] though like marinating on that game and sitting and thinking about playing dragon's dogma 2 away like way after i played it thinking about like what i would have done if i played it differently like what if i started a new run like what if i did something differently and started a new class everybody's stopping me everybody's holding me back from doing that but no it's um it's really interesting i think they handle tackling big monsters in that game really really well of course

[01:24:28] and i don't think any game has really done that in a way that dragon's dogma maybe monster hunter and again you know capcom cap gods you know they just know what they're doing over there yes sir ski i think i think uh it's you know was the was the director who actually made that game and then he left capcom immediately after and then he's doing his another new project i don't know when that's expected to come out but it's kind of out soon and he brought a lot of dragon's dogma 2

[01:24:55] people with him i'll be there to do that game um but yeah and he was also the same director who did dmc5 which of course you're known to love i'll be there but it's uh it's it's interesting thinking about dragon's dogma 2 because like i think there's such cool stuff and honestly will i've listened to that episode a lot and i'm like really really envious about what you said the way the game made you feel about the end and how they do the pawns and a lot of the spoiler related stuff that's

[01:25:21] connected to the unmoored world and i think the concept of the unmoored world is really really cool it's very cool but i had rolled credits at that point and i was so checked out that i was like i'm done i'm done but no dragon's dogma 2 interesting game if you are a capcom fan if you enjoy dragon's dogma 1 you owe it to yourself to play that game this is a really good category that we're going to move on into and this is going to be our best non-2024 game of that we played in

[01:25:45] 2024 you have a game that i'm going to go start this one off because you have a game that we have talked about but i'm curious to see more of your thoughts on that game um but something that i want to start with is i i literally just changed this last minute because i remembered that i played this game um and it affected me so much um i originally had little nightmares 2 in my best non-2024 game of the year i think it deserves an honorable mention because the little nightmare series

[01:26:14] is freaking fantastic and i can't wait to find out what the dark pictures anthology people super giant super massive super giant are going to do with little nightmares 3 under bandai namco i think it's going to be interesting i just don't know if it's going to be the same i'm going to keep my i'm going to keep my hope expectations low so i can be surprised um but little nightmares 2 was

[01:26:38] fantastic however i played a game in 2024 called citizen sleeper a game that i've heard from good friend of the show dave jackson uh from other good friends of the show you know matt stormageddon other people on discord have talked about citizen sleeper and it is a game that i had tried before and it's been on the game pass for a long time and i always seen it there and i knew it was quality and it's one of those games that have sat on my hard drive because i'm like i'm gonna play that game

[01:27:06] and then sometimes you know i find myself noodling around like i played i've played a bunch of game pass games like i played star trucker recently cool little indie simulator thing i played uh i played another trucking game snow runner snow runner i think snow runner 2 earlier this year there's a fucking banger right there snow runner 2 don't forget about snow runner 2 everybody don't forget about snow runner 2 um but then of course i played citizen sleeper and i think the reason why

[01:27:33] i initially bounced off because i didn't expect how much of a reading intensive game this is this game is for lack of a better word a visual novel it's a visual novel dice roll simulator so anybody who has played baldur's gate 3 understands that when you do things in baldur's gate 3 you roll in a dnd fashion you roll dice to check your actions they do the same thing in citizen sleeper where you basically have this world that you're exploring it's it's a station you're on a space station

[01:28:01] and you are an individual who's on the space station you're not sure why you're there or who you are or what you're doing classic amnesia and the game slowly unfolds and you slowly build relationships with people and you slowly find more areas to access and more things that you can choose to do um and it's a it's a game that's like a battle against time because you your character has something wrong with them and your health is slowly depleting and you have to figure out what you're going to do

[01:28:30] in order to survive if you can do anything to survive and if you can't figure out how to make the most use of your time while you still have it and it is a game that is deeply emotional it touches on so many real world um ideas about you know philosophy and about the way that we live our lives and the way that we dedicate our lives to the people around us and how we continue to try and push forward as a

[01:28:55] community and as a society and it is just it's such an important game and i loved it so much at the end of it i realized that citizen sleeper 2 was coming out january 31st this year um it i think this episode is going to go live before then but i reached out to fellow travelers the developers of citizen sleeper and i was like hey can i get a code for the second one because i love this first game and they were like sure i got you they literally next day responded to me sent me a code for citizen

[01:29:21] sleeper 2 so i have that in the pipeline so that is it is a it's an indie it's a not otherwise it would have been in my indie game of the year it would have be animal well but it's not a 2024 game it is a little bit older than that um so i'm really curious to see i started citizen sleeper 2 i like what i've seen so far but i don't have any real opinions because i'm not done with it yet um but yeah i really encourage you will because i know you said you had you downloaded it because

[01:29:48] you were curious about i'm ready to hop into that i carry i you gotta play it look i'm gonna i'm gonna do through i expect to get through that within if not before the end of february um but no i i no expectation to definitely not have it before like the end of february so yeah by end of february middle of february because it's a short game it's not long right i beat it in like two days yeah so that's no i should be able to knock that out before february is over so now i'm excited for

[01:30:12] that one but so for the best non 2024 for myself and before i get too started uh it was super

[01:30:57] massive games i'm a fraud ah yeah super giant super giant super giant haiti super massive dark pictures exactly that's what i was thinking i was like oh no i know super massive does dark pictures but wasn't thinking they're also uh little nightmares so i'm fake i'm a phony but going into that best non 2024 game is resident evil village for me i as you talked about me getting the platinum i just had a blast with this game yeah getting into this very start one i love seven um very very spooky

[01:31:25] very scary like yourself i beat it i think i maybe beat it twice i can't remember if i beat it more than once but like i didn't go do like madhouse i didn't go do the craziness fuck that because things like the house with the bug mom i was like this is this is too spooky for me like i'm not gonna and then all the mold like just in the house i was like oh this is this guy lucky and gross mold monster it's like and this is it definitely leaned more two than three as far as this is a survival

[01:31:50] horror game and not a kind of survival like action horror game yeah um so you know you can't run out bullets you can do that i was like i i don't like this uh if it here comes there's an evil eight they're like you want to shoot some things i'm like i sure do so here's here's my question though i know you are a horror fan you love horror games yep you love horror movies what did you think about their pivot away from more traditional like survival horror to more of like you know survival horror light with more

[01:32:18] you know i love it anytime you give me a gun in a horror game i like it okay i like horror games i don't really like horror games where you don't get the chance to like fight back like outlast i don't like outlast uh i could never finish outlast just because you're sitting there running and hiding in hoarders and all that not a fan um amnesia is kind of the same way i think amnesia is a little bit cooler yeah alien isolation like you know get to fight back a little bit so that's why i like that one a little bit more did you play that game i played a little bit but i've beaten it

[01:32:46] but it's the same kind of thing it was like i want to be able to fight back and protect myself but then be stealthy and you know escape the monster when i can yeah um so i love you know re4 for that reason i love re3 remake for that reason and i like re8 a lot like i went in had a good time you still can't go crazy and just shoot every single thing no you have to be tactical yeah but as long as you're being smart about especially on the higher difficulties as long as you're being smart aiming well picking fights when you can and more often than not just

[01:33:14] running by things when you don't have to fight uh you can still have a great time with it which is exactly what i did we talked earlier at the top as far as the different biomes um the castle of course is like the number one people know of the most as the first place you go to and it is gorgeous it's excellent weaving and bobbing in and out of the different areas of the castle is super smooth yeah and as you were talking about it before i was just like closing my eyes and thinking and i was like i can still see the layout and like in my head boom the level design is

[01:33:44] right perfect in the castle it's perfect um it starts to slip a little bit as you get into places like with um the factory for example like it's a little bit more like on top of itself it's kind of a samey yeah oh this corridor looks like that corridor but that's when also like the scariness kind of ratchets up you still have your guns if anything you have stronger and more guns but they give you these enemies that one can take more punishment yeah and then two you know they really use

[01:34:10] the actual oh we're gonna cut all the lights off in in the factory and have you running through the dark you know you have your crappy little like i hate that shit your chest flashlight that's like barely lighting up anything and then off in the corner of the room you see a red light go on and someone start like like ah yeah and the funny thing about the flashlight too is that half the time it's like aiming at your feet it's like aimed at the ground it's not like illuminating your your pov

[01:34:36] like it's it's down to walk up on something yeah it's crazy but our re village excellent game i am very much excited not only for the inevitable re5 remake that they pretty much have to do at this point yeah but i want to see what the next iteration because based on everything that happened in village like re9 yeah based on what happened in village we realistically will not get another ethan winters game if anything we may get another winters game not necessarily ethan um but no matter

[01:35:05] where they go i just want to see what the next step is are they going to continue this first person are they going to pivot back to third person because of the success of the remakes like i'm i'm excited to see where the resident evil franchise goes because historically i'm not the biggest resident evil guy but between like seven and village and the remakes i'm on board for whatever capcom wants to do next same here same here i can't wait till we get our depressed alcoholic leon give me it we need him we need a

[01:35:32] moody edgy leon as if he wasn't moody and edgy enough and it's just john wick the video game i wanted to ask you really quick before we move on to best family who was your favorite like enemy slash lord of resident evil village out of out of the four of them do i have to say come on we all know who it is is it is it is the lady is it really lady dimitresk of course it is really okay you

[01:35:57] heisenberg grew on me so much heisenberg's cool he's really cool character but i just like one um the acting done by lady d's va so good was so incredible you know margo something yeah she's she did a great job yeah um you can feel as you're going through the castle and doing things and you know she's trying to chase you down but then eventually of course can't get a hold of you the rage that's building up um you see that kind of cool calm demeanor that she initially shows start to like

[01:36:27] crack and fall away which is just i love that whenever a villain or whoever that thinks they're too cool for school starts to just like rage out yeah like the the classic scene of her throwing her vanity across oh it's so good i love that it's so good it's uh also maggie robertson there you go maggie robertson she's she's really really good so i like her i really enjoy the fact that it's just like honestly a super tall scary because you know we have what um mr x and nemesis so a tall you know

[01:36:55] bow is not out of the question for the resident evil series but having another one of these that kind of hunt you down the really long wolverine claws is a really nice touch um i do understand from anyone else's point of view that are comparing like mr x and nemesis and them she's not as effective as like especially like mr x from the r2 remake yeah people have already talked about how nemesis is like a nerfed version of himself from like the original three yeah um but i still whenever you hear

[01:37:23] like the click clack click coming down the hall is like you know which she's freaking you out and you're in first person so it's even worse when like you pop around a corner you see her like going up the stairs of the mansion you're just like oh the castle and you're just like oh let me sneak by yeah slowly but surely yeah no it's she's such a charismatic character because like even in the very like the first time that you see her which is not in the castle which is when ethan gets kidnapped and you have the four lords and mother miranda and there's all this lore that's baked into it these

[01:37:52] are mild mild spoilers but i would say that like the coolest part about it with her is that she kind of is disdainful of all of these other people that are around her like them at all especially heisenberg especially they fucking hate each other but he has some choice choice uh words for her later on in the game but no she's like she's such a charismatic character too because like you see this like intense um kind of like familial bond between her and the daughters the three daughters

[01:38:21] that you have to face which are like the first kind of like mini bosses of re8 and it again it's just like she is in a situation or a position where she doesn't she's smart enough and she's retained all of her you even could pick it up a note later in the game she's one of the few lords that have retained all of her intelligence after she was implanted with a bioweapon kado i think is what they called it the kado um which is which is really interesting but yeah really good i i will say this though is that

[01:38:51] i think capcom knew that everybody was looking for an eight foot tall dummy mommy of course and they marketed the fuck out of her to be like the character or the enemy of re8 first boss and it's just it's such a shame that she's the first boss she should i really think she should be heisenberg and i understand functionally because they always go through the the last levels the technical level you know before you get to the final boss and i understand why they did it that way but i just feel

[01:39:17] like she's such an important character that she could have at least been like a third boss or she should have been included in some way where like you think you kill her but she's not really dead because they do that all the time resident evil as it is anyway this is one of those things where you know you have all the hype like you said majority of the marketing was about her you get out of the way she's the first boss so then everything past that is like an unknown which is nice which is really cool also special shout out to the dollhouse which is one of the scariest

[01:39:43] things is then the rose is then the roses expansion well it is also there but specifically that's where that baby is which is that the doll i thought that was just called the benavido house well it's the benavido house but that's where the you know the doll is like yeah you're right what's her face i can't remember what the actual donna donna donna and angie there you go yep angie yep so yeah the dolls so it's like this dollhouse but you're at the end and you're getting chased around by them but yeah that baby scene sucked a lot and i had to do it you know three times and i was not a fan i was

[01:40:12] not a fan at all so scared it's it has less effect the more you play it the more you play i'm just gonna keep my head down and just do it first playthrough though i was like what the fuck is that like the first time it peeks its ugly little head out oh my god oh my god yeah it's just disgusting so um very scary and yeah it is in the rose dlc and it's low-key worse because spoilers mannequins so yeah it sucks i already played little nightmares too exactly this again exactly that and i was like

[01:40:39] this is not fun and they killed me so many times and i said i gotta keep looking away from the screen because it's too spooky it's too bad it's too scary speaking of spooky let's go ahead and go into our family game our best family game of 2024 look we synced up again you know we did it for indiana jones best first person shooter best immersive sim we synced it again let lay it on as well look we gotta sync up because best family game of 2024 according to the game cast boys aka

[01:41:06] the caffeine boys aka the realest ones on the net astro i am astrobot here we'll plug in the music

[01:41:15] there it is we'll plug in the music we'll plug in the music oh it's good such a good game i mean we we had an entire episode about it so please first go back and listen to that because that's

[01:41:44] a great episode yeah really fun episode jacob mccourt on that one did an excellent job fantastic fantastic come on here and talking about a little bit of astro with the boys but this game is just phenomenal it fires on all cylinders there's a reason why it's the game awards game of the year i know people are gonna knock it because it's the game awards and jeff keely's fantastic circus but sometimes even even a clock is right twice twice a broken clock is right twice

[01:42:10] a day right twice say yep so no astrobot's a fantastic game uh best family game i would say just best game in general for a lot of people yeah go play the thing it doesn't matter if you're a 30 year old bachelor or if you are an eight year old you know getting into video games for the first time you're gonna find some enjoyment you're gonna find some fun and it's just the kind of thing that when you play it you have a big smile plaster to your face until your achievement hunting in which

[01:42:36] case it gets annoying exactly exactly no even in the achieve even the platinum in this game wasn't bad but it was annoying when you had to do the master level and i'm sitting here that was i enjoyed that grinding through that's the funny thing is that okay so you asked me all right so we have we had a mild competition between will and i when they when they dropped the speed runs he was like all right i got i got you big dog like and then he played through it and he got really good speed

[01:43:03] runs and i was like fuck i guess i have to play this now and i played it and we competed and you know i you know i came out on top you know it's okay you sure did it's it's it's fun i mean but this is a family game right it's not like i'm playing marvel rivals i don't think i've ever beaten you in a match that we've had once i mean i i'll go 31 and in six but somehow you still get svp as like the hulk or something so regardless uh yeah no astrobat is a really really good game

[01:43:28] it's a tactile masterpiece sensation i talked about the tactility of of animal well this is like the like animal well on steroids in terms of how um team asobi understands the dual sense controller and the way that it is able to display sound um playing this game not only just with the dual sense controller but then with your 3d audio headset on as well like it's just it's all running

[01:43:53] on all cylinders and again this is a game as you said for all ages um my girlfriend's son picked this game up and loved it you know played the hard levels that she couldn't get past or that she didn't really want to bother you know grinding on to to move forward with uh it's just it's so good and it's so fun and it it reminds you what it feels like to be a kid again and it reminds you of like the history of how incredible playstation has been over 30 years this is the 30th year anniversary of

[01:44:22] playstation or we're in 2025 now but like 2024 was that and i think astrobot was a perfect way to kind of like honor that and recognize how incredible how many incredible pieces of ip they have ip that they need to return to that they can return to to get this company where it needs to be but it's just it is it's it's an incredible game and it's just so fun and whimsical and every single backpack that he has

[01:44:49] every single power every the gimmick of every level that you're in it's just like they keep throwing new stuff at you that you just love every time it almost always hits like yeah there's every time very few times it's been like oh this isn't really like that good most of the time it's like oh this is fantastic like the luigi's mansion level with the ghosts like come on slowing down time and jumping on like the knives and everything yeah so good yeah and there's a million like that but i think another level i mean we talked about all this in the episode too another quick call out was the one

[01:45:16] where he turns into a sponge and it's at a japanese like bathhouse like an outdoor onsen and he like soaks up the water and then you squish him to put it all out it's it's great it's so good excellent all right let's jump into an arguably very unfamily friendly category of 2024 this is for all the gooners out there for all the gooners of the friday night game if you're a bad guy and you're working for a mob boss or you're working for a super villain this goes out to you for all the goons

[01:45:45] you know exactly for all the all the thugs the henchmen that wear their paper boy hats paper boy you know that uh that drive the what are those cars where they have the little thin window slats and they have to drive it like this while they're looking at it you know what i'm talking about and they have the really long engines in the front uh i feel like there's just some form of like ford i guess you're right something to that i don't know they have another door i don't know i'm not

[01:46:10] unfortunately however fallen aces yes sir a lot of goons in that game tax east look it's on pc so i didn't get a chance to play the full game yet but yeah there's plenty of goons you beat up hella goons you shoot hella goons yeah so shout out to the team over there new blood yeah for making the ultimate gooner game of 2024 ultimate gooner game now ultimate we're talking about the sick degenerate perverts i guess i gotta pick zoneless zen what is that zoneless zone zero

[01:46:39] i hate that game is that even goonie yes is it he's picking up the computer he's picking up the computer oh my god yeah yeah it's disgusting it's absolutely disgusting yeah i don't know i don't know i mean i don't i don't even i mean you're your best multiplayer game of the year though like come on more more than that more than marvel rivals what this is this is definitely more

[01:47:07] goonie than marvel rivals you think so yes just because malice has a slightly risque skin and then psylocke has a risque skin no one else we're not out here showing bruce banner bush psylocke what's going on that's what i said psylocke did you say so she said malice yeah malice was the invisible woman skin that i went crazy over yeah invisible woman and then there's psylocke and that's like really i mean there's squirrel girl there's black widow she's wearing shorts what's

[01:47:34] wrong with squirrel girl i didn't know you were referring my boy there's luna snow that's ridiculous that's ridiculous is it is it ridiculous she's also wearing shorts the hard the hard line defense the denial the denial is crazy because you have the true game on your side you want to go ahead and hop into that we talk about goons in video games there aren't much more there there aren't much more goons than there are in final fantasy 7 rebirth right

[01:48:04] you think about you think about shinra you think about all of those fucking loser ass shoulders soldiers with their stupid ass helmets and the three little dots on the helmets idiots it's like they're asking they're asking you get decapitated by a buster sword you know what i mean they're just they're just asking for punishment and you know not only then you know you have i don't there's like a there's like a scientist in there and he has like a bunch of little henchmen that are running around and trying to help him out to you know stop the party from doing what

[01:48:32] they're doing yep all that to say final fantasy 7 rebirth is an incredibly horny game like i was taken aback by how much of a like okay here's the thing about final fantasy you get to the beach area yeah i'm just like here we go i'm not i i feel like i'm gonna get trouble doing this category but here's the thing about final fantasy 7 rebirth is that like the game is like about being with the squad it's about being with the fam it's a going on a road trip with the boys and by the boys i mean

[01:49:00] tifa and eric and and you know red 13 and barrett and it's just like a dog boys being boys you know and and here's the thing it is so fun learning the dynamics and feeling the dynamics and the energy and it's one of the most interesting things of final fantasy 7 rebirth and something that has made this game and the final fantasy 7 world like one of my all-time favorites that i connect so much with it

[01:49:25] has that that pinnacle like star-studded experience that you would get in a in a star wars or in a marvel movie but it's like this it has that level of prestige in the world building that they've created not to mention they have an incredible antagonist in sephiroth or any of the other antagonists that are in that game it a lot of it is a lot of you know the you know kingdom hearts bullshit that they'll pull with like this you know pseudo cerebral you know philosophy that they'll throw in here and there

[01:49:54] but i think that the heart of this game the character telling in this game is is really really good but then you get to costa del sol and then you have to pick out the uh bathing suits that you're gonna put tifa and erath in and then you're just like what are we doing here what are we doing what are we doing square enix oh we have a filler episode what are we doing what are we doing hamaguchi where where were we thinking about this yeah it was it had its beach episode it literally had its

[01:50:17] beach episode it's that's what it was so anyway yeah it was it was crazy horny also i'm not mad that the end of the game i ended up getting erith as like my date as like cloud's date at the end because whoever you have the most like connection to who the most affinity with who i think it's based on who you talk to the most throughout the game like you get them in your final date and i've heard some people say that every single one is good including the barrett and the red 13 dates and i've heard

[01:50:44] the barrett one is especially good but yeah i was uh yeah anyway all right now tell the class what your real gooner game was before you switched it you coward coward what did i what did i put in there originally did it start with as an end with b yeah it did stellar blade i never i never uh never beat stellar blade so i don't i don't know how you beat stellar blade all right sir i'm marking explicit on

[01:51:10] this episode publishing okay so we're at the point in the episode where we're talking about the best

[01:51:40] horror category best horror game of 2024 uh well i think i ended with rebirth so i'm gonna let you take it away with this one so best horror game just like with the indies i honestly have not played i don't think any horror games i'm pretty sure i went back through my 2024 list there were a couple good ones but i have not played to my knowledge a single one so the one that i did play the most a little bit under two hours of i believe maybe right around two hours was stalker 2 on game pass so

[01:52:10] pretty interesting game can't say it's fun because the time i had with it was fairly buggy and ultimately i don't really like those survival games to where you have to like eat food or die so i was like it's not really for me um got a couple people that we talked to that are really big fans so i might end up going back and checking it out especially because it's on game pass so maybe i'll give it a little a bit more time the old game pass try yeah but honestly as far as horror games it is very scary

[01:52:40] even when you're very early into the game part of the game is that you're in this post-apocalyptic um you know chernobyl kind of area um you know over in like ukraine the russian area and there's like these paranormal monsters that can attack you so there's like poltergeists so they're putting you in a ship where you can get attacked by this poltergeist that throws stuff and is pretty good job of killing you if you're not paying attention um and then just the monsters themselves aside of the normal people of course in every post-apocalyptic kind of world the people

[01:53:09] are the real monsters but no there are disgusting horrible mutated creatures out there sweet that will attack you in the middle of the night and destroy you in the middle of the night of course yeah no because they got to catch you when you should be sleeping and eating and pissing in games like this because you have to is it really that immersive okay okay like you know your bladder gets full and you lose stamina that's not that bad but no it is a very spooky game so if you do go into stalker 2 just understand not only are you going to be playing a lot more of an immersive game than you may

[01:53:38] realize but you very much will be um scared out of your mind in quite a few areas yeah that's fair that's fair i i'm i'm interested in it i just i don't know i i think i've heard so much about the difficulty being just kind of insane it is there for sure um and that's just like i it seems cool but with the new game and with all of like the technical issues that are present in the game as of right now it's just like i don't know if i'm if you take your time and they object myself patch it up and everything it'll be a lot better later on that's how i feel like two or three years down

[01:54:08] the road then i might be able to exactly check it out so it's not off the list but still kind of pushed down the backlog my best horror game is silent hill 2 um i think i've been very vocal about that i believe that i talked about it on our spooktober episode yep you did um it's just it's an incredible game i never expected i never expected bloober team to do what they did with that title i never expected it to resonate with me as much as it did um just all of the philosophy and all of the

[01:54:37] psychology that is baked into the core experience understanding who james sunderland is as a person and as a husband um and the way that silent hill 2 changes people and the way that silent hill 2 is this idea of like a world of punishment it's it's an it's absolutely fascinating um game to like dig into because it's so heavy on the philosophy and so heavily on the side it's it's just it's a lot of

[01:55:05] like a lot of the writing and a lot of the um voice acting is it's just so intense and i think that it's one of the games that it's it's up there for me and i mean it's up there a hundred percent ten percent in contention for like what my you know you know what i consider some of the best games to have come out this year i think that it because you know like i said i was really really rooting for luke roberts to try and get you know the best actor of the year if it wasn't him i wish

[01:55:30] it was um it was the actor who played barrett john i can't remember his name i know you're talking about that but the actor who played barrett they both did an incredible job um i don't even remember who got it this year i think is melina jurgens for for senua um and i think it's interesting because like hellblade 2 is kind of horror adjacent it's not a really a traditional horror it's more of like a thriller than anything i think it would be a psychological thriller for sure i think for sure

[01:55:55] um but i mean it could have easily landed in this category if they had leaned more into the horror maybe if it was a little bit longer and they had more horror centric experience you know something they could have done but again we got what we got but silent hill 2 itself every single area in the game every the way that it progresses the way that the game is literally about going downwards like you never until the very end of that game go up and it's just like it affects you psychologically the section with the prison do you know about the prison do you

[01:56:24] know about that area expressly man i'm not i don't i mean i don't even want to tell you i don't even like because the audience for those of you played you know what i'm talking about but like it is so freaking terrifying that you will love it you will you will get to that point you'll be like this is masterpiece uh moment and i think it's it's interesting um one of the things that i think you specifically will would like about silent hill 2 is the fact that like james lunderland

[01:56:49] is kind of powerful he's kind of a powerful character even though like maybe he shouldn't be it's a little bit of a ludonarrative dissonance when you think about it at the end of the day there because it's like he's a very broken man he's a very he his character is very weak but when you're playing as him it's like he kind of he's got he's got he's got a gun he's got a he's got a rifle he's got a bat he's ready to rock and roll he's ready to rock and roll nail in it you know you gotta put

[01:57:15] him against the xenomorph it's a toss of whom i win you know what i mean so it's it's a definitely good and i think that it's a very serviceable and technically proficient game which is not something we expected from bloober team so it is um but just just like the cerebralness and the narrative in the journey that james takes something that this is similar in the same vein to bioware me going years not knowing what happened in bio not bioware bio uh bioshock yes bioshock is what i'm

[01:57:43] thinking of i'll let that out but yeah not knowing what happened in bioshock but and then like me in the same vein not knowing what happens at silent hill 2 i was very lucky not to get spoiled as to what happened because i was constantly guessing i was like is this a game about adultery is this a game about murder like what is happening here so it's really really fascinating game

[01:58:38] let's jump into one of our favorite categories our favorite categories to talk about in general and that is the best seven out of ten game the best middle of the road game you could have played in 2024 will what you got for me so i have talked about this game during the last year and i still feel like it's a really fun one to go check out especially on game pass because it is free that's the best thing about some of these seven out of ten games is that they have some second lives on you know game pass for example and it allows people to get a chance to check it out and really just

[01:59:08] try for yourself how much you may or may not like it but flintlock siege of dawn is a really fun game that i had a great time playing through yeah especially with it having quite a few fingers in the overall kind of pie of a souls like game very similar with the leveling up when you die you respawn at the last place you touched things like that so traditionally i haven't really liked souls games but the way they switch up some of the fighting and the platforming the characters themselves

[01:59:35] actually interacting while nowhere near perfect um did connect to me on quite a few levels between your kind of little sidekick fox god character as well as the other groups that you're kind of interacting with overall within like your little warrior clique yeah and then ultimately the combat has such a cool concept with the combo system also playing into a bit of a gambling when it comes to your

[02:00:01] actual experience like all right you've fought five enemies you've been perfect the whole time you haven't taken a single hit so you have 20 experience saved up with a five times multiplier like are you going to go ahead and cash that in or will you continue to fight knowing that if you want that multiplier to go up you're going to have to do different moves that you may not be accustomed to doing which could potentially leave you open to taking damage and at any time that you take damage

[02:00:27] it cashes out what your current experience gain is but no multiplier so it's a really interesting dance of as you get better at the game it allows you to take your time and build that meter up but no matter how good you are you know a random person hitting you in the back or shooting you from far off or something like that yeah can completely blow what you may assume be a really nice pull of experience

[02:00:53] so it's like are you going to take that game blow are you going to cash it in and another part of that plays into some of the weapons actually do increase their damage as your multiplier increases so even if you want to take the xp do you then want to take the hit to the damage that you dish out the enemies so very very interesting a lot of cool concepts that dance around there and don't quite hit exactly where they need to be but that's like the hallmark of a set of have seven out of ten game where you have a lot of cool concepts a lot of cool things that don't quite all click

[02:01:23] but you can see the vision and you hope that the team maybe gets a chance to improve upon that with either a sequel or the next game that they work on that's awesome man i i love that and it's such an intriguing game to me especially with that difficulty and like it being similar but not close to that souls-like style experience i think that it is uh it is it is absolutely in contention for something that is on my backlog is on my list to play i would definitely give it a shot i feel like you

[02:01:50] at least appreciate maybe the first hour or two of it yeah and i feel like it only gets better as you play as most things should be but sometimes things kind of fall off yeah but as you improve and get better they have a really good job of introducing slightly stronger enemies um the weapons themselves are a little goofy like sometimes they give you something really strong off the bat if you explore so then everything you get past that is kind of unnecessary yeah but you get the ability to level up

[02:02:18] things your own so if you like an axe versus a sword or a heavy club versus you know uh something else you can kind of pick and choose what your actual gameplay style is which once again plays into that whole gambling system find something you're comfortable that you can build a combo with and then see how that works out for you yeah that is that is 100 something that is intriguing and and kind of just that versatility and gameplay really

[02:02:43] inspires me to try and want to do do that and like see what it has to say and again you said it's like narratively it touches some of the notes it like it the character is very strong and you like the interactions that they have with their little animal sidekick but it's not like something that's going to be as extensive it's not blowing your mind it's not a horizon exactly you should not cry after this game is over right it's not pulling on your heartstrings or anything like that

[02:03:08] but nor herself is a fun character i think she does not um annoy the player and she doesn't overstay her welcome when it comes to like how she interacts with people sometimes you have a character in games like this where it's like they're very one note in there either annoying or they're aggressive and they stay that way the whole game there's not a whole lot of nuance while nor doesn't have the most nuance i've ever seen in a character she definitely does have an arc that you can tell from the beginning of the game to the end of the game that hits just about

[02:03:38] every kind of those like it's almost like a um hero's journey type of situation you get your classic you call to action refusal all that jazz um yeah so she's hitting a lot of that and then enki who's the little side character that she works with um his actual like story i think you have to do a little bit of side to find it out more so really okay turn people off if you miss it um but you actually got a god isn't he yeah he's a god that's like in kind of like his current like

[02:04:05] corporeal uh mortal ish form of a fox got it um but very very cool and he has a very strong story that i think is a little bit stronger than nor's in general interesting okay but they they work in parallel together very well so cool that's awesome that's awesome the one that i put on my list i think is the expected one i think there may be a few other games that have kind of gone in here before i get into mind were there any like honorable mentions that you thought you could slot in here seven out of ten so the one that you chose was definitely one so that's very much up there

[02:04:35] i feel like as i was looking through i had another item on my list that i was like okay this is not you know the the greatest thing um but something i could potentially put on the seven to ten list i'm blanking now so i don't want to rant too much so i'll let you do your thing but i'll look it up maybe i'll like bring it up yeah get some honorable mentions later on there the game that i chose not to bury the lead listeners but are my best seven out of ten game in 2024 is star wars outlaws

[02:04:59] i i actually in my personal so i keep a spreadsheet with all of my completed games and it's actually been very helpful for me to think about games and meridate on them and look back at what i've played in what order i've played it but yes playing star wars outlaws i have it at a 7.5 so it's even better than like a seven out of ten five yeah and it's one of those games that just like they have done so much they did so much good and so much right in here and i said it before i said it again we've said that

[02:05:26] about half the games that we've listed so far we've done episodes on and those are great episodes we strongly recommend that you go and listen to the one that we did with the elder trolls we dig into that game a lot and that's like a multi-hour episode and we really really kind of fleshed out what makes it work and what makes it awesome but i think that like really the selling core components of it is the fact that k-ves ends up being a very strong believable likable character shout out to

[02:05:51] berly gonzalez who is apparently on that new star war star trek section 31 show okay for section 30 run show yeah she jumped ship she went to the yeah she went to the ops for sure but uh no very very strong character really incredible voice acting on her part and then of course her little buddy nix everybody loves nix anybody who's played the game can appreciate how nice it is but then again you know the open world exploration like aspect of star wars outlaws which is so fun

[02:06:19] and learning about the other planets in this universe in this other you know in this galaxy that we're a part of um it's it's interesting because this game has given us more new content in the universe than a lot of the disney plus shows gave us which is like a super big you know of course we went back to tatooine like we always do in this one but you know it was it was because of like it actually made sense for us to be on tatooine like there were there were reasons of course a heavy

[02:06:46] focus on the syndicate and the hut cartel being a huge contributing factor to it but yeah i just think like everything that's baked into it from the space battles once i figured out how to do space battles correctly um you know just like open like wandering around the cities and kind of doing that virtual tourism it's it's an it's a good game it's a good game there are technical flaws and it suffers from the disconnection of the ubisoft um the ubisoft kind of development cycle that they they try for

[02:07:15] and it you know it shows it seems for sure but there's enough goodness that's baked in there that if that team got a crack at another thing if you know i can't remember i think it's i think it's massive and entertainment the same people who did um the division you know so so they if they got another crack at a similar title like this they could do an excellent job yeah yeah but no it's definitely up there we talked about like you mentioned in the episode but it surprised me how much i actually enjoyed it yeah i remember when you were first playing it and you were kind of hyping it up and i was

[02:07:45] like i don't know nick's the star wars shill anything with star wars on it he might kind of give it a pass but no um although it is an ubisoft you know classic schlock so you're gonna get your ubisoft isms in there um i you're gonna get your checklist yeah you get your checklist but i thoroughly enjoyed my overall time with it i think the golden path is much stronger than a lot of the side content which is unfortunate in a game that's that big because they're like oh they kind of ask you to do a lot of the side stuff um some of the sides of hits some of it does like like you telling me

[02:08:15] about the sarlacc pit when you go get to the turret for the for the speedrunner highlander whatever the fuck it's called so you're working on that yeah and you have to like the jawas they need something out of there so they need a pearl they need the the cryat pearl yeah um the inside of the sarlacc so so going in there was cool like a lot of the the actual areas themselves like oh visiting most nicely in tatooine or going to um shoot what is that one city akiva yes going to like akiva

[02:08:42] like the snow city right yes yes yeah so seeing a lot of those the actual environments they feel very star wars you're in there eating snacks with nicks oh yeah your little qte favorite favorite mini game of 2024 feels very very star wars which is great so as yourself being a super fan and me being a fan but more just appreciating them trying to stay true to as much of the the movies tv shows etc as much as possible um that hit a lot for me so and again like i think it's a credit to the game

[02:09:11] that like going into it they were they were an uphill battle because they didn't because i mean you're competing you're you're literally competing in a universe in a world with with uh respawn entertainments you know jedi series fallen order and jedi survivors who which are both like you know nine out of ten games in my opinion i mean jedi fallen order had a lot of issues so it's like that brings it down so like but like yeah but still like this they had a lot of uphill work they had to do to make this a

[02:09:37] viable experience and i was amazed at how much i didn't care that i wasn't a jedi like how much like it was fun going through the motions and invading the stormtrooper bases and you know going and finding the collectibles or unlocking the chests and getting the three keys and going back so it's just the the actions and i was saying this to you earlier sometimes it just feels good to have those checklists and turn your brain off and just enjoy some some mindless content and it's not like this

[02:10:04] whole game was mindless but it had enough of that kind of like leisurely open world experience that it really it hit the pocket for me agreed agreed so did you have yourself any honorable mentions that were staying in that category yes seven out of ten yeah so the thing is is that like the still wakes the deep could have easily been slotted in there because it is a seven for me still wakes the deep was really fun and i mean of course it could have i mean there weren't many horror games this year again that i played but i it just it had no chance of really being like horror

[02:10:33] game of the year um in my book in my personal opinion uh there was a couple of other ones that you know i played i mean animal well wasn't even really that high it was a it was a solid 7.5 for me on my personal ranking scales and stuff like that but again uh you know it's i i played a lot of good games and i liked a lot of the games that i did this year i ultimately gave asura's wrath a seven out of ten yes sir that's yeah that's more of a like a non-2024 game of the year but asura's wrath

[02:10:59] is fucking awesome great you know fire emblem conquest a 7.5 for me again non-2024 game of the year but you know we're thinking about games we played this year really was between you know outlaws it also you know dragon age the veil guard just there there was there was issues with the veil guard that brought it down even outside of that seven out of ten category for me where it was like even though i went and got the platinum in the game it was really close to that seven out of ten mark for

[02:11:26] me and i think courtney of course would argue that it was more of an eight out of ten in her opinion but in my opinion and what i've played and everything that i've experienced in my breadth of games and my taste um it was a little bit below that marker there so kind of occupying that middle of the road star wars outlaws kind of knocked it out of the park

[02:12:19] let's go ahead and jump into the best our our final category in games of the year 2024 best card game there you go 2024 obviously it's bellatro not neither of us played bellatro it's so funny i play bellatro but you beat bellatro well can you even beat that game so i got past all of the antis oh so so so much one i won i won the game but the game is kind of about collecting all of the jokers and to collect all of the jokers you have to like play harder versions of the game and you're like no

[02:12:48] thank you yeah and i was like i was like i want i beat the final anti-boss or whatever level and i figured out how to do the run i didn't even use guys for it shout out to me shout out to you shout out to me i didn't even use a guy i figured it out but um yeah blotcher was good but it's like it's so interesting how people are like it's a roguelike but it's poker and it's like i get why people are like yeah it's a good game and yeah it's technically a really interesting game very proficient and one guy local funk made it and one guy made it but it's just like it's it's just a i

[02:13:18] mean it's hard to say that it's just a card game because it is a lot deeper than that but it's like it's not doing something that's like revolutionary the way that hades revolutionized roguelites it's not like creating a new genre like a vampire survivors did for that area you know for a for a survival based game like it's it's an interesting game and it is fun to play but roguelites existed before bellachro and poker also existed before bellachro so it's i mean it's fun and they they kind of took

[02:13:47] what it was already existing and they revolutionized and they packaged it in a different way but it's not like it doesn't have like the sauce to make me think like in my opinion bellachro should be like a like a two dollar game like you shouldn't have to spend 25 30 dollars on a bellachro which i don't know how much it is it's not an expense it's certainly not expensive it should be more it is 10 but like it's not like a the thing is you get fucking spider solitaire for free when you buy a

[02:14:14] windows pc and i agree with a lot a lot of people say is that bellachro should be a pre-installed game on windows devices i 100 agree with that sweet um that would be pretty cool for not only the genre but also the creator yeah 15 dollars is like i i think i mean it's it's a new game so like the value like he's trying to get money out of the value and i respect the hustle right but it's like it's not something that i mean it's the same argument people make for tetris is tetris being a

[02:14:40] perfect game tetris is tetris bellachro is bellachro right like if this is not they're not like moving the needle here but you know what did move the needle fucking queen's blood queen's blood and final fantasy 7 rebirth let me talk about it real quick because i never thought i would appreciate a card game in a game more than i did gwent because gwent just absolutely blew my freaking brain about how cool it was traveling throughout that open world as geralt of ribia collecting cards getting in a gwent

[02:15:09] tournament in gaming winning more cards that way and then you know finding the npcs in various towns that play that you could go to a local tavern with a bar wench and then like the man who's her husband is sitting at the table to the side and you can play him in a round of gwent like it was so cool they do that same thing here in final fantasy 7 rebirth but it's on fucking crack not only is it on crack like there is a narrative and there is a story behind what queen's blood is and what it means

[02:15:36] to the overall final fantasy 7 universe and it's fucking cool man like there's this whole like subplot in queen's blood that talks about like the creator of queen's blood being trapped in the game because of the power of the queen that he created and it's like literally you and like not only that i'm not going to spoil it for people because people probably haven't finished it this year's very 120 hour jrpg that felt pretty heavy with the whole creator thing i was like if there's not only

[02:16:02] that but you see surprise characters that people knew that they were going to see in rebirth but there are surprise characters that show up that you play in queen's blood that are cool because their play style is related to like their character sora announced yeah exactly correct correct yeah don't don't you joke about that but he could literally fucking do that in the next one he could literally he literally could do it don't play we're fucking with universes in this remake now so

[02:16:29] who's to say what could happen but like it's the same thing when i was playing this game is like my favorite thing to do whenever i was going to a new area whether it was mount corral costa del sol or if even was uh some of the later levels the first thing i did is i found whoever played queen's blood and i played them and i had so much fun and we even when i got to the golden saucer and that's where they started opening up and ramping up the difficulty of queen's blood i never i never backed

[02:16:55] off from a challenge from it i was like let me let me figure it out let me figure it out i i ran to that and i was like this is the first thing that i want to do and then i did all the other side content there but man it's so good and it's so fun and you can do it's so versatile you can do so many different things you can build so many different types of decks in that game and it's just it's incredible awesome yeah well i know you had a chance to talk about queen's blood i'm sure

[02:17:20] it's a great great card game but it's time to put down the little kitty kid cards kitty kids put the kid you can get their literal gods in the cards there are little final fantasy summons in the cards oh my god it's time for a real real man's not even a man's game because let's let's be real this is an adult game this is for real game for everybody it's a game for adults grown-ups

[02:17:45] grown grown ass big kids grown-ass aliens yes correct i'm talking about sabacc it's expressly the one played in star wars outlaws because ain't nothing like a little bit of space 21 baby ain't nothing like it talk to him look look tell me about it it's easy peasy you get your two cards you have your deck of cards you have a couple of coins depending on the level of difficulty you're

[02:18:11] playing on shift tokens no no you get your actual oh yeah your coins yeah yeah your aunties and then from there you have your also shift tokens we're gonna get into shift tokens later that's that's a extra that's that's another layer of the onion right there my boy that's another one but here you have your coins you have your cards you have your decks it's time to place a bach comes around to you you have your two cards you need to make those cards match if you have a three and a four trash garbage you got garbage if you have a four and a four that's a sabacc that's a sabacc

[02:18:41] that's a low sabacc now now is it a good sabacc it's not a good spot it's not a good spot you need to throw one of those bad boys in the trash you need to give yourself a new card out of the deck right you're shooting for twos ones or psylob sabacc let's talk to have you ever have yes i have got a have you ever gotten a psylob sabacc out of just drawing the cards and not stealing it from someone else yes i think i have it's happened to me before and it was like the rush the euphoria

[02:19:08] the euphoric sensation of play you know playing star wars outlaws and getting a psylob sabacc i'm like these these motherfuckers don't know what's about to happen and then somebody plays exhausted and then they make you they make you discard your hand and i'm like i will kill everybody at this table reload save reload save i'm cave s i will stand up in the laser every single person at this table right now that's why i couldn't be in the star wars universe i'd lose a game of cards and i'd

[02:19:33] be like everybody's gonna die there's i think one of the coolest parts but there are two of the things that really sells the box for me it's the the the droid that's in the middle that deals the cards his animations are so cool so so just interesting and unique but then like the cheats the different cheats that you have you have three different cheats the cheats themselves right yeah three overall yeah you have you have nicks who can look over the shoulder and tell what your opponents have

[02:19:58] tell you what cards they have you have a magnetic wristband that you can use to like what you roll weighted die that will allow you to pick whichever one that you want like whichever thing that you actually want to roll and then what's the third one i'm trying to remember do you remember when you pull an extra card yeah yeah that's awesome the two cards have you ever have you ever like gotten fully caught cheating no like oh like priest meter i did it was pretty funny it's pretty funny they

[02:20:27] kick you off the table yeah they were like they were like get the fuck out of here she's like hey you know you can't blame me you know i tried it's so good it's so good it's so good but it's good so yeah you're playing your sabacc effectively you're just supposed to get your two of the matching cards yeah um if you win that round your opponents lose whatever coins they put into the bank the whole point is once everyone else is out of coins you win you want to keep your coins keep your coins by winning sabaccs or not being as far away as the winning sabacc so if the winning sabacc is like a

[02:20:53] one and a one if you have like a two and a one you don't lose as many coins versus somebody who has like a four and a five like you're screwed at that point um you have your cheats that nick mentioned you also have shift tokens shift tokens allow you to change the game around i mentioned one called exhausted you get three that you get to use in the entirety of each game of sabacc that you play you play exhausted for example you choose a person they have to discard their hand that goes very well hand in hand with the cheats that nick mentioned earlier nix looks over your shoulder

[02:21:21] he sees that you have psylop sabacc i say play exhausted you get rid of your whole hand and then you're kind of screwed right so you can use those different shift tokens things like protecting yourself from anyone changing things um telling someone that they have to put two or three coins into the pot or making sure everyone at the table has to put an extra coin in to help you really get to the end of the rounds with as many coins of your own as possible yeah sabacc is super cool very very fun to play

[02:21:49] and there's like a dozen on every planet so at any point you can go run into somebody playing and win a little bit of money win a couple of items to sell but the coolest part is towards the end of the game yourself when you're sitting there and you pull up my man's got the cape my man's got the blue suit on he's absolutely him he's dripping he's absolutely him in sauce and i was like i cannot believe lando

[02:22:15] cal rizian lando cal motherfucking rizian about to play me in sabacc right now and i'm about to take his shirt because he can't handle this he can't handle the sauce so it's also fun being able to do that play against you know one of the most notorious card sharks in all of the star wars universe and um taking for everything his worth so it's awesome it's a very very fun time much better than queen's blood that's crazy that's a crazy thing to say to me in a game that you won't play

[02:22:42] ever correct i hate maybe you could try maybe you could try to beat it maybe in 2026 that's as long as we can get outside of the gta 6 window i might have my will back you might i might have my broski back maybe maybe we'll see maybe well uh dear listeners that is the end of the category is in us talking about all the amazing games that we played in 2024 and a couple of that we didn't that weren't released this year but that we did play in 2024 so you know if you have any thoughts

[02:23:10] about those games and about what we played or how we ranked them or how we chose those games feel free to shout us out on all the podcasting platforms leave a comment on spotify shout out to us on on uh blue sky again dear listeners we are at two hours and 18 minutes into this episode according to my current time uh but if if you're trying to reach out to me on x i'm probably not going to see it on twitter form now x whatever the fuck it's called i i don't i don't ascribe to

[02:23:36] the elon app anymore so i i bounced out of that that bitty and now we're on blue sky so holler at me there holler at will on instagram on our friday night gamecast account if you want to have any input or thoughts now let's jump into our discussion for top five rankings of 2024 ultimately giving both of us each of our games of the years to determine who are his nicks and will's respective

[02:24:02] games of the year in 2024 okay so the way this is going to work is that we're just going to trade places i'm going to pick your top five if i get any wrong on that list i got to take a bite of a chicken tendy and i have to drink a potion that you make for me out of any of these selected energy drinks that we have on the table i'm putting hot sauce in your drink okay don't put that's not

[02:24:27] eligible that's not it's not it's not i'm saying it now i'm saying it now i'm making the rules i'm making the rules no no you can't do that so and then the same thing for you right so so you pick mine and so for for any anyone that we get wrong or misplaced we have to pick it if we get like all five of our choices like even if they are the ones that are in your top five but every spot is wrong that's five then we have to take five bites of a sauced chicken tendy by the other player

[02:24:56] you ready to do this do i have to be do you want to go first you want me to go first i want you to go first all right i'm gonna go bottom to top okay so five to one five to one and i'm thinking that you know i'll say it first

[02:25:25] and i'm gonna explain why i think these things and then when i'm done you can tell me which ones i got wrong or if everyone is wrong whatever the case may be good so for your number five spot i think will you're gonna put hell divers 2 at number five okay hell divers 2 great game not your favorite multiplayer game of the year but it is a great game you sunk a ton of hours into it you got to a really high rank you talked about how much you loved it on this episode earlier and how freaking

[02:25:51] awesome and balls to the wall it is and i think there are four other games that you liked more than hell divers 2 but it's one of those games that has to be in your top five so i'm putting it at your number five okay now you're number four this is a game that i'm concerned about i'm nervous i think this is a little low for you because i'm just i'm just not sure i'm a little nervous but there are three other games that are really good so i am taking a gamble and i'm

[02:26:19] putting dragon's dogma 2 in your number four slot okay i think you're gonna pick dragon's dogma 2 i think you like it i think you loved dragon's dogma 2 you put 145 hours into it you got the platinum you played the absolute dog water out of that game and i think that it's up there but i think again there are still three other games that you just love so much this year this is a banger year for will it's a great not as much of a year for nick but great year for will i enjoyed so many

[02:26:46] games so many games this year but i think this is like there's so many games that speak to you number three for your number three spot i think you're gonna put indiana jones in the great circle at your number three a machine games masterpiece an immersive sim by the likes of which we have never seen before in the indiana jones franchise used to be they would shovel out indiana jones games like no other but this game is special and you you can't stop talking about how good this game is and so

[02:27:15] that's why i think it's like you love this game and it's another reason why you got the a thousand in this game similar to the getting the platinum dragons and dogma 2 which is why i think you're putting it at your number three spot i think that it is up there with greatness and it's 100 i'm very comfortable with it being in your number five or in your top five for your top five specifically but i think number three is the right spot i think for your second game of 2024

[02:27:41] this is a really big one i'm nervous i'm nervous about this guys i'm nervous about this listeners i think you put marvel rivals at your number two i think you put marvel rivals at number two i think you have not been able to stop playing this game no matter how much anybody says anything bad about it you this is a game that is going to live rent free in your head for years to come the same way overwatch did this is a game that has infinite replayability with amazing characters that you love

[02:28:08] being a hulk dive tank is literally like the game for you if they just had that in a video game you would play the hell out of it or marvel rivals is a technically proficient hero shooter live service it's great but it's not as great as your number one pick and this is a game that you have professed as being your game of the year multiple times throughout the show and something that you said on our review and that's astrobot i think your game of the year 2024 is astrobot

[02:28:39] yeah so at that that's my top five so so again to reiterate for the listeners number one astro number two marvel rivals number three indiana jones number four dragons dogma two number five hell divers too okay how did i do now here's the thing you hit all five oh shit oh no oh god but you only

[02:29:02] got one in the right place oh i got so did i get number one right i got astro right okay okay okay so for me listeners astro's number one okay hell divers number two oh shit really above rivals but why isn't it in your multiplayer game of the year because rivals has the regency bias the regency bias is crazy dragon's dogma two is number three okay okay indy is number four oh man

[02:29:29] i got those flip-flops and then marvel rivals is five damn i see my i was expecting indy to have that recency bias effect which is why it would drive it up i feel that but then i was remembering i was like i put 140 something hours in the dragon's dogma right and i was like i did indy in i think a grand total of 40 hours because i had the extra five off of the glitched achievement yeah yeah and i was like that's perfectly fine okay i guess i did everything for indy and i was like i don't think there's anything else i would need to do until they do a dlc but it's like i'm not gonna hop back in

[02:29:59] like run around the world and you know there's not so much to do once you've done all the missions yeah yeah yeah okay cool all right well i'm gonna go ahead and pause the episode and i'm gonna get you to sauce up my nugs whoa whoa all right dear listener so we took it we took a quick interlude while will is uh you know selecting the sauces to torture me with for the nugs for the four that i got wrong

[02:30:23] i can't believe i got four wrong so again your top five is astro bot uh hell divers 2 marvel rivals no no hell divers 2 dragon's dogma 2 indiana jones then marvel right correct i was at five five correct that's crazy i didn't want the regency bias to go too crazy that's crazy okay all right listener i'm gonna i'm gonna dive in i'm gonna i'm gonna ease into the one he put

[02:30:51] louisiana on the first one they're a little cold since we've air fried them a little while ago but he's making my potion now louisiana not too bad not too bad i can't i can't complain too much about it so the second one i think he put there's this there's this one called kakalaki pepper sauce

[02:31:17] funny name serious sauce i'm gonna regret this so hard tonight this is a sunday when we're recording by the way yeah it is work's gonna be rough oh that's spicy not too bad though in terms of spice

[02:31:36] levels it's not the worst all right i'm going in for the real um the scary one the uh okay so the one that i'm about to eat now is called it's the general's hot sauce danger close it's the the bottles in the shape of a grenade so i'm uh i'm uh i'm not looking forward to this good luck

[02:32:03] very peppery okay very peppery not terrible good glad it's not too bad oh that's a good little potion that's a good little potion did you put everything in mine you put everything away can you let the listeners know what we got all right what's the selection started off with a little bit

[02:32:30] of alani energy cosmic stardust so i got him on the cosmic gas oh my god the juice hit him afterwards with the red bull the red edition sugar-free watermelon i'm eating the peri peri sauce now then we come in strong with a heavy dose of monster ultra fantasy ruby red zero sugar because we're washing the weight around here that's right zero sugar and finally hit him with

[02:32:59] that c4 popsicle zero sugar this is probably the worst thing and it makes up 60 of the drink all right well i eat all my nugs and i i mean i'm just gonna sip on this i'm gonna sip on this yeah just a little shum shum but that was pretty good that peri peri sauce is good peri sauce is delicious what is it what brand is this what is this trader joe's trader shout out to trader joe's

[02:33:24] holy smokes i'm getting like ghost pepper stuff going on now so i'm starting to suffer there you go all right will go ahead hit me with it i'm not gonna have as many examples as to why something is in this certain spot i just i feel it in my heart that this is correct so okay starting off i'm gonna do one to five instead one to five okay okay so we both know it's astro so we're good

[02:33:50] there astro game of the year everybody's game of the year it's number one great game i think number two i was struggling a little bit because you have a couple of things that you really liked here but you've hyped this one up i said i'm not gonna have an intro and then here i am introing but you talked about a lot you had a really big episode about it i think metaphor i think metaphor hit number two for you yeah number three i'm gonna say just over the number four choice you have silent

[02:34:15] hill silent hill 2 okay okay number four it's going to be the classic final fantasy 7 rebirth with queen's blood specifically if it had no queen's blood it would be off the list and then finally the hardest one my number five yep i'm throwing it out there because i know i'm gonna eat a chicken tender no matter what space marines 2 oh interesting interesting okay all right

[02:34:43] that was a really good list i really like that list that's that's a solid list and i've debated but space marines 2 is not on my list for top five it's kind of what i thought so my list for for my top five games of 2024 number one is metaphor refantasio oh he got me metaphor refantasio is my game of the year 2024 it's suffering a little bit from recency bias but it's just this there is a

[02:35:09] scope to that game that is just incredible and it's it's astounding um i've never i've never seen anything like it before and i haven't and again i mean playing the persona games has been interesting but there's just a scope and breadth to metaphor and uh a narrative about idealism that i think is so important and it means so much to me personally um that astro is an incredible game astro is my number two pick i said i knew it i know if it's not one that's gotta be two they were they flippy

[02:35:37] they were flip-flopping all year long until i beat metaphor and i think metaphor just edged into the lead for me personally it just gets you every time but it just gets you every time ladies and gentlemen all right so number two astro bot incredible game incredible game everybody needs to play it's very it's what it's like is it 70 dollars i think it's still 70 but every every dollar is worth it you get so much euphoria playing that game it's a lot of juice out of that game for

[02:36:02] sure it's great number three was indiana jones in the great circle that's crazy i understand indiana being on there because i thought about putting india 5 for space marines 2 but that's crazy number three indiana jones it was one of my favorite games of this year i had so much fun playing in this game and it's similar you know i i guess i just like lucasfilm's properties right so it's like you know if you know if star wars outlaws had more of a solace it could have been closer to the top of

[02:36:26] the list but it's just not but yeah indiana jones in the great circle did so much for me and troy baker just like did such a lovingly dedicated himself to becoming indian that game and then just like the incredible nature of going through these levels intricately designed levels immersive sims stealth action game haven't played anything else like it in 2024 and it's just it's incredible it's great you got exactly right for final fantasy 7 rebirth being my number four slot thank goodness

[02:36:54] my number four slot so you got one out of five yep same you got one out of five so we're we're we're par for the course and then number five is my silent hill 2 okay so yeah indy threw me off because if i had to put indy on the list i probably still would have put it at five and would have screwed me yeah but it being three makes sense with silent hill being five okay okay yeah indy indy is like 110 up there for me and yeah it's just great it's great we did great so i'm surprised you like

[02:37:20] final fantasy more than silent hill though i guess i i would have put silent hill over final fantasy it's interesting because the longer that i thought about final fantasy final fantasy silent hill 2 is great but similar to the way that i think about these games and the way that i marinate on them over time and of course i played final fantasy 7 rebirth at the very beginning of this year so i had a long time to think about what that game was like i beat it in may so it's

[02:37:47] like a lot of marination a lot of thought it goes into uh what was um happening in that game but i think that the thing about rebirth is that it's such a big game and it's so intensive and they did so much to lovingly dedicate themselves to the world of final fantasy 7 that like it's just like it's hard for me to compare those two games again and apple's an orange

[02:38:11] conversation but it's just like there is a feeling of hopefulness but also a feeling of like mystery and wonder that i didn't get from silent hill 2 even though silent hill 2 is like a really masterful dedication to like what did they mean what how what did they mean when they wrote this character the way they did or like what is the psychology behind this character's action so yeah that's that's kind of like my justification all right professor sauce me up all right

[02:38:37] all right listeners we've got them all sauced up with the nugs he's got four nugs that he's got to do he's got one melinda's ghost pepper sauce creamy style ghost pepper sauce he's got one kakalaki this is a really cool one i think you actually like this sauce demons and then you got one uh dynamite sriracha mayo the thickest that's really thick this man put mayo on my wing and then i gave you the last stab mayo on the wing is very japanese thing you like it

[02:39:03] i like it all right i'm gonna eat these while he makes my poison don't say that he called don't say that your wife and my girlfriend are listening to this i'm not poisoning when i don't come back after this and he posted up anyways you know what happened to me sarah sarah i promise that we're we're being very responsible about how we're imbibing these things what'd you eat first get the melinda's i think oh the melinda's oh nice nice it's pretty good isn't it

[02:39:32] she tasty got a little bit of a kick but nothing crazy all right this is kakalaki sauce let me go ahead and get this over with yeah it's pretty good it's pretty good yeah it's actually very good it's got a it's got a kick to

[02:39:58] it it's got a kick to it yeah it's the mayo funny name series sauce they're not playing is that any good it's pf chang's pf chang's brand sriracha doesn't burn at all just tastes good oh really oh shit i'm actually i'm gonna try it got a good twang i'll try it time for this devilish last dab mom if you're listening i love you don't say that my mom listens to the show actually yeah i know she knows what you're doing to me

[02:40:28] shout out shout out to uh shout out to mrs adashia mrs kirkland mrs mrs kirkland sorry excuse me big facts sriracha mayo is pretty good you're right you're right is it really that bad touch the back of my throat is it really that bad yeah here i'll take the low burn it sucks a lot

[02:40:55] i'll take it i'll take a dab i'm not excited what did you all put in my drink while i'm about to slurp it down i uh i i did i i think i did the opposite i started with a monster i went to the red bull and then i went to the c4 pops popsicle brand and then i finished it off with this whatever the fuck this is what is this um alani alani yeah alani what is this from is this like a streamer

[02:41:18] or something i don't think so there's some he's wiping it off you sicko i'm i'm taking a last dab with you i feel bad i feel bad i'm dying i have to eat more japanese mayo to make up for this both of your listeners we're at the end oh i'm gonna i'm i'm oh wow yeah oh wow yeah exactly exactly

[02:41:44] that's a dab that's a dab right there gotta wash that down with a little uh energy energy drink potion but that's our game of the year 2020 fuck fuck so again will's number one for the year is astropot and then my number one for the year is metaphor re-fantastic oh it's attacking me now it's my body is sweating yep yep my body my nervous system out of whack well folks that's gonna be it for tonight

[02:42:15] we'll post it in the comments i want to give a big thank you to our listeners if you enjoy our content you want to support it's bad it's all bad it's not good if you want to support us further please leave us a rating review on your podcasting platform of choice perry perry apple podcast spot fire good oh my god it's bad uh will if people want to find you where can they catch you you can find me on twitter

[02:42:42] it'll be at real kings those are r-e-a-l-k-i-n-z-o-s-o-t-a-i and very soon i will have my blue sky so be on the lookout for that be on the lookout for his blue sky everybody with that everyone please keep gaming please keep gaming take it easy and again remember every friday night is your night so have a great friday night bye guys