Summer Showcase Smackdown (ft. Nave of Gaming Together)

[00:00:02] Welcome everybody 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 and only Will.

[00:01:32] What's going on everybody? He's back. He's more than ever and he's energized after what we just witnessed today. And speaking of what we just witnessed today, we're joined by another fantastic returning guest and great friend to the show, Naive, the one and only Naive from Gaming Together.

[00:01:49] Welcome back Naive. Hello CEO of Xbox. I'm back on top. CEO of Xbox. I'm not hiding anymore. I'm back. I'm outside. Phil Spencer has been deposed. Phil Spencer is out. Tyler from the Switch It Up podcast is out. Naive is stepping in for CEO of Microsoft.

[00:02:07] He takes a respond into a hole like in 300. Dude, I've been taking a beating. It's like in Rocky. What is it? Muhammad Ali, Rope-A-Dope. I'm coming back. I'm swinging now. I got all the energy. So he's just saying, right?

[00:02:21] He just takes a beating and he comes back stronger. It's stronger every time. Every time he gets stronger. Yeah, it's not broken. Speaking of getting stronger, thank you so much to our incredible patrons for watching and thank you so much to our incredible patrons for their support.

[00:02:35] Shout out to Lady Blake Plox, Y.A. Pierberg, Dave Jackson, the Intergalactic Pinecone, Fabulous Brianna, Chris Ware, Eric Guess, Rick Firestone, Chris of the Novel Console, David C. and JD. Thank you all so much for your wonderful support. You're keeping the show running. You're keeping the lights on.

[00:02:48] Zencaster wants to kill us for some reason, but we won't let it happen. We're going to fight back against all odds. They can't stop us. But with that, we're going to go ahead and jump into our gaming updates for the week.

[00:02:59] This is episode 55 of the Friday Night Gamecast. We're keeping it going. I'm not numbering the episodes. This is just a little housekeeping for listeners. We're in gaming updates for the week. Nave, you're the returning guest for the show.

[00:03:11] You know, we've been talking a lot in our own Discord server, talking about what you've been playing for the year. You have a ranking that, you know, making the rounds on Twitter, a tier list that you've been playing on.

[00:03:23] Can you share with us what you've been playing lately and what the rankings look like now for 2024? The tier list is getting very populated. And I see a lot of people making tweet threads of like the games they're playing and doing slight reviews, but I'm lazy.

[00:03:38] I don't want to do reviews for each game I play, so I don't want to type. That sounds like a lot of work. So now I've just been slotting them into a tier list, which is actually more work because I have to go find the box art,

[00:03:48] save it, go to tierlist.gov and do all this shit. It's so much work. Yeah, it's a lot more work than I expected. But actually I'm having fun doing it and I'm like seeing this thing fill out.

[00:03:56] It's like being it's kind of like driving me to continue playing games, actually completing them because I just like updating everyone. I like going, guess what? I've been playing. I've been playing Golden Sun and everyone's like, holy shit, they've been playing gold.

[00:04:09] You know, I just love the reaction I keep getting. So it's very fun in your machine too. Like you have completed. What is that? How does the total count of games that you feed it finish so far this year? I think I'm on 31 now.

[00:04:21] 31 is crazy in one year. And of course, some of them are bigger than others. We're halfway through the year. You burned Unicorn Overlord. And from all, from what I've heard from people, that's a long game. That's a long game. How many weeks did that take you?

[00:04:35] It took me a few months because I bought it on release, but I've been, I was slowly chipping away at it. So it's like whenever I, so I played, I was playing games like Red Dead Redemption, like the one that I played in the first game.

[00:04:46] And then I was just like, okay, I need to relax in the middle of like a really intense storyline. I'm like, okay, I'm done with that. Let's just go play some more Unicorn Overlord. Cause that's an amazing podcast game.

[00:04:55] I have no idea what the story is in that game. I don't know what happened. Oh really? You didn't play anything that happened. Okay. That's fair. Yeah. Well, the thing is that I have ADHD and there's like, it's like Suikoden where there's like a hundred characters.

[00:05:07] And so I'm just like, I can't keep track of that. I can't keep track of that. I can't keep track of that. I can't keep track of that. I can't keep track of that. I can't keep track of that. I know that there's like a hundred characters.

[00:05:15] And so I'm just like, I can't keep track of any of these people. I know the sexy witch and I know my character. I know a couple more and that's it. I don't know anyone else. Okay. Perfect. Perfect. That's really awesome.

[00:05:26] And what was the last thing that you played or the last couple of that you beat, you said? The last game I beat was actually a game that you guys recommended to me, which was Gris, Gris, I don't know. Nobody knows how to pronounce it,

[00:05:37] but it's that game with the girl on the cover. Yeah. Very good. It was really good. Before I played that, I played a game called Bramble the Mountain King. Shit, I always forget to mute my phone. No worries, no worries. So that game, I actually was like,

[00:05:52] this is like an A tier game and then the ending made me so frustrated that I dropped it down to B. The final boss, right? The final boss. The final boss is wonky. It's almost like they ran out of time in budget

[00:06:04] because all of the other bosses were pretty seamless. They were pretty, they didn't have much friction but the final boss, I died many, many times trying to get through that part. I was like, I know how to do it. I don't know why I keep dying.

[00:06:16] Like for some reason, I was like, I'll go to shoot and then like I'll just get hit by something. And I'm like what? Like cause that's a one hit kill game but it isn't really, it was a great game.

[00:06:24] I put it in B which is still really, really good. That means I liked it a lot. But that was weird cause that game is very similar in style to Gris and that game, I was like this is a solid B for the whole game

[00:06:36] and then the closer I got to the end, I was like, wait a minute, is this an A tier game? And then I cried at the end and I was like, oh fuck, well it's gotta be at least A tier

[00:06:44] cause I don't know what happened but it made me cry. So gosh. God, that's amazing. Yeah, no, I love Bramble the Mountain King and that was like a really meaningful story and it's just like, it's been the year of Indies.

[00:06:56] That's what I've said before and I feel vindicated. I feel like I hope I haven't said this on content before but I feel vindicated that 2024 has been like a very strong resurgence for Indies. You know, you kind of see it at the showcases

[00:07:09] that we're gonna get into here later in the show, how they really went out of their way to represent the people and kind of stand up for folks especially with Among Us people at Summer Games Fest creating their platform and opening it up

[00:07:21] to other Indie developers and all that stuff. But yeah, I'm really glad that you got that and I have something, another game from your list that you played, Nave Crow Country, that's on my backlog and I am gonna be playing

[00:07:32] that very, very shortly as soon as I'm done with my stuff. Yeah, man. I'm so happy to be an evangelical evangelist. Evangelist, evangelist, yeah. I got there eventually. Evangelist for these low-fi horror games. I just love them so much. And Crow Country is the most recent one.

[00:07:51] Of course, I gotta plug Signolus. Please God, everyone play that game because that's the best one. It looks like it has a ton of Signolus DNA in it. Is it quite at that level or maybe not as high? It's got a lot of quirks to it.

[00:08:06] It's awesome in a different way. I don't think it ever reaches the heights, especially emotionally of Signolus. Signolus is just, it's like Gris' ending but for four hours. Signolus is just gripping you for a long time. Kind of like the game me and Nick

[00:08:21] are gonna be talking about on our show. But the thing about Crow Country is it is just concentrated, cute camp. It's so adorable, but it's also very disturbing. So there's this cool juxtaposition. But it's like if Mega Man Legends or Mega Man 64,

[00:08:39] whichever one you guys played, had a horror level. That is what Crow Country is like. Or Final Fantasy VII, kind of. Absolutely, yeah, no, that's incredible. But yeah, so that's awesome. You've had a lot of stuff going on this year, Nave,

[00:08:55] and let everybody go check out gaming together. I forget your Twitter handle, but yeah, just search up gaming together podcast and you can find Nave regularly updates the rankings for his charts there so you can go check out his tier maker list for his 2024 32 games. Absolutely, absolute machine.

[00:09:14] And crush it. Go in there and yell at me. If you yell at me hard enough, I might change the rank of the game you want me to change, maybe. You're wrong. Don't tell me, asterisk your. Oh man, well Will, we've talked about

[00:09:26] some of this stuff, but share with us. What are some updates on your end? So I finished Jedi Survivors, one of the games I was talking about the last time we were together. So very solid ending. All in all, great game across the board.

[00:09:38] So it's pretty much right up my alley as far as video games go. You got the thousand on it too, which is like. Full platy in there. It was a thousand yet because I played on Xbox. But it was good. It was a good time.

[00:09:48] Ending was nice and like I talked about before, the big part for me is the combat was fun, but the story was just actually really engaging. So it felt good to play through the story even when I took my little side excursions

[00:09:59] to go get a bunch of flowers or kill 16 bounties, which is way too much. Like they stuffed that. There were quite a few things that they kind of overstuffed to make it just pad out, which I was like, didn't need that much. Didn't need that much for sure.

[00:10:13] I would have been good with like eight bounties and that would have got the point across. But all in all, a great time there. I wanted to really quick. What was the achievement list like? Like sounds like you beat it. You got it on one playthrough.

[00:10:22] Yeah, all one playthrough. So it wasn't bad. Nothing's based on difficulty. I just played on normal. So it was fine. But no, it's really straightforward. The hardest thing is probably- Was it the drama tokens? The tokens that you have to give to drama in the city.

[00:10:38] Oh yeah, but I mean, kind of like what I talked about before when we talked last time, you get far enough in the game and they give you a map that says, here are all the treasures. So then you just follow the map. It's very short.

[00:10:49] It's not difficult. It's just time consuming. Everything about that game for the most part is time consuming. I think there was like one thing that was hard to do, which depending on how you are with the combat, beating all the legendary creatures.

[00:10:59] But once again, it's not difficulty based. So if you're really struggling, just put it down to story and call it a day. Same thing for the bounties. So there's nothing that really bars you from playing it. There's nothing that you can't do in one playthrough.

[00:11:10] I'm pretty sure you can go back and beat everything even if you beat the main game. Yeah, the bounties were really fun. At least I didn't do a lot. I did all of them, but I did a lot of them. And from what I saw,

[00:11:20] like all of the different bounty hunters that you fight have different play styles. So it's a kind of cool 3D combat chest that you have to play with them over there. So I was excited. I need to go back and collect them all

[00:11:31] and do the platinum for that one over on PlayStation. But Naeva, I know you are not... We're very far down on Fallen Order. I loved Fallen Order and I love Survivor also more. If you were thinking- That's another game where right at the end,

[00:11:45] it just pissed me off again. I was riding high the whole time. And then I got to... It's not the last fight. I won't spoil it, I guess. But the last two fights, I was like, I can't do it. And I'm playing the hardest difficulty

[00:11:57] and slamming through it. But then I get to the end and I'm just like, oh my God, I can't do it. I can't do it. Yeah. Yeah, but if you do feel like getting into Jedi Survivor, I would say that something

[00:12:10] that I would say to all anybody who's gonna play it is that you don't have to get New Game Plus to complete the trophies or do any of the side missions because it'll just put you back right before the last mission

[00:12:20] and then you can go to all of the different worlds. But the way that they have the Metroidvania stuff kind of laid out, I got hung up trying to get progression in that game by finding all the secrets in each area as I was progressing.

[00:12:32] And it was artificially bloating my play time even though I couldn't figure out when I could access certain areas because each level... It's a Metroidvania, so each level, they give you whatever item or upgrade that'll allow you to scale to the different parts

[00:12:46] of the various maps that they have in there. So really the best bet is just blow through the game and then come back. Yeah, that's what it's really good to do. Unicorn Overlord is like that. I really appreciate games that let you clean up

[00:12:57] after you complete the story, like just to go back through and do stuff. And to the next point there with the Metroidvania aspect for Survivor, they try to make it a little bit easier for you by if you pull up your map,

[00:13:07] you'll see things that you can't interact with yet are red and then once you get the specific move that turns green. So that way you're not like, can I move this thing yet? No. Can I move this thing yet?

[00:13:19] No, you check it on your map and it's green. You're like, all right, cool. I now have the necessary force power to move it around. Yeah, it's like the Resident Evil 2 map stuff, but just 3D. So it's perfect. So it was good there.

[00:13:30] I went back and beat Spider-Man New Game Plus because I was bored. So I was like, I'll knock out 10 hours of my life and just skip every cut scene. Oh man. I mean, it was still fun. It was, I played it.

[00:13:43] I beat the first time on hard that was available and then they added since then Ultimate, which I'm like, I have no intention of playing through that game on the hardest difficulty because I remember the last part of the game when you're fighting all the symbiotes

[00:13:55] and it's like, oh, they hit you very hard for no fucking reason. So I'm trying not to die every 10 seconds. So I played through on normal, just beasted straight through it. And it's so crazy, the difference between hard and normal in that game.

[00:14:07] Cause I remember on hard having to pay attention and semi struggling and playing through normal, maybe it was because I had the new game plus stuff and because I'd already gotten like locked into how the flows, but I was decimating bosses.

[00:14:18] Like I was stun locking the shit out of people. I would sit there and do a move to Craven and then he would jump at me and I would immediately just a web him down. I think I got hit five times by each boss.

[00:14:29] So it was just, it was dumb. I actually, I felt like Spider-Man playing through a new game plus. So I was really happy. But the new game plus was fine. Easy peasy, nothing too extreme crazy. And now I officially have it 100% again

[00:14:42] on my ex PlayStation list so I can delete it and wait for the DLC that will never come out for the other character. I guess I won't spoil it since it's like a side issue. My question is that like we're gonna get into it later

[00:14:53] but why the heck did they not have a Spider-Man 2 DLC reveal at this last state of play? Fantastic question. People were saying like when 2018 came out before the end of the year, they had two DLCs drop for Spider-Man 2018. And I was like, yeah,

[00:15:08] got nothing for Spider-Man 2 so far. I'm just like, oh, well, you know, that's just Sony right now. Sony being Sony. Cut this out or put it at the end somewhere but I'm texting Rachel and she was like, what'd they show? And I was like, dude, Gears of War,

[00:15:23] go watch that trailer. And she was, cause she likes Gears of War and she's like, oh, there's Gears of War, that's cool. And then she came back and she's like, I'm literally crying right now. I think I might share my time. Got him. I'm like, got him.

[00:15:34] Brother, yes. They were all shedding manly tears during that one so now I'm sorry to get into that too. So yeah, aside from Spider-Man, I have a lot of other things that we're gonna talk about on your side too, like Panic, Hellblade.

[00:15:48] But the big thing I was playing that I think Nave played a little bit too, if I'm not mistaken, I think y'all did episode on it, was the X Defiant that dropped recently. So I've been playing a little bit of that with Peace, good old Peace.

[00:15:58] Shout out to the boy. That's been our cod fill in waiting for Six to drop, for Black Ops Six to drop but it's actually surprisingly fun. Like, Ubisoft made a competent shooter. Interesting. Is it still my cup of tea? No, like I'm sitting here struggling,

[00:16:12] going negative almost every match unless I start playing like a cheap bastard because people are jumping around, people are bunny hopping, it's just the usual multiplayer fare. Oh, fucking bunny hopping, we were bitching about that in our episode. It's the absolute worst.

[00:16:25] I was like, oh this is great, I'm glad somebody with an SMG is jumping up and down and lighting me the hell up and I can't hit them for whatever reason. Like I'm glad everyone on the interview team is Dante from Devil May Cry. Honestly.

[00:16:37] I was like, holy shit. Why is this happening to me? But all in all, very fun. Every character class has their own little unique moves which is pretty neat and keeps things fairly fresh. It is also frustrating whenever you have a nice flow

[00:16:49] with your weapons and you're like, okay I'm using this AK-47. I know for mid-range it takes about six shots to the chest to kill somebody. That's consistent. And then you come across one of the phantoms who has 20 points more health than everyone else. So I'm just like, shit.

[00:17:04] I was gonna ask where your character was. That's me, I'm phantom. Yeah, there you go. Specifically because you have no clue how many fights I went with one HP and I'm like, woo! I'm like, there we go. Good thing I had the extra. See, I played phantom sometimes

[00:17:15] because not just for the extra XP but I like to walk into a room and put up my shield and be like, yeah you're trapped in here with me now and just start bashing people in the chin with the riot shield. Phillip will love that

[00:17:26] because we bullied him because he thinks the riot shield is better than the teammate shield. So yeah. Like they definitely both have their options but no, if I'm just trying to be trolly, it's the riot shield all day because I'm running into a room

[00:17:37] and I'm just straight boxing people. Like I've gotten a triple kill with like the riot shield because they're just like freaking out and I was like, all right, cool. Have you, what weapon are you using? Because if you're moving around on weapons, you're never gonna get one

[00:17:50] like leveled up really good. So like, because whenever I played it, I strictly used the marksman rifle only and I had that thing leveled up all the way and that thing is a laser beam with the correct attachments to it.

[00:18:02] So like what you said, you're using the AK. Yeah, I'm using the AK right now. I was using the starting assault rifle just because I think there was currently a like mission up, a little challenge to do like 4,000 points of damage with a assault rifle.

[00:18:14] So like, cool, let me go ahead and rock that out. I unlocked the AK because just like you're saying how you level up the weapons by using them, at least to my knowledge, you unlock the weapons in like that same family tree by using those kinds of weapons.

[00:18:25] So like I used the normal rifle and I unlocked the AK and I was like, oh, this is better. So now I switched over to the AK and I can rock it at the longest time but I'm enjoying the AK a lot. So at the AK,

[00:18:35] the standard pistol has been fine for me so far. I haven't unlocked the magnum or the deagle, but I'm sure when I get it, that's probably what I'll be using the most just because it's fancy. Yeah, I love the cowboy guns too.

[00:18:43] And honestly, I switch back and forth as far as my characters but if I'm not playing the Phantom, then I'm playing the Libertad characters. Libertad, yeah. The ones that have like a bit of a healing because just like that, I like to hop into a fight,

[00:18:55] throw down my healing and kind of like how you said you ending a fight with one health. I'm like, if I'm being healed while I'm being shot, the odds of me winning increase exponentially compared to us just shooting each other like raw. So it's been nice. Awesome.

[00:19:10] That's sick. Yeah, I was listening to the gaming together X Defiant episode and I didn't, I like started it but I hadn't made it through the Nave, Philip and Aaron shenanigans yet. So I hadn't gotten to like the review section of the show, but yeah,

[00:19:21] I'm gonna circle back around to it. That's gonna be like a Monday morning, driving to work type episode for me. So it'd be fun. It's good stuff. Speaking of, I'll do a humble plug real quick because me and Nick are about to go back to back.

[00:19:34] We're gonna record this episode and we're gonna record on Hellblade 2. So if you guys wanna keep hearing about Xbox, you wanna hear us. I mean, Will, you're invited to, I'm not sure if you're gonna still be around. I am super early into Hellblade.

[00:19:45] So I'm gonna let y'all do that one. He's not invited. He's not invited. I've been excommunicado. You can come, you can show up and then as soon as we get past chapter one, you gotta go. Exactly, like the audacity. I put this man onto Hellblade

[00:19:58] and now look at me, I'm not invited. You're gonna take forever to play it, man. I have no, I can't put you down. It's only five hours. I could probably play it in the time it takes us to finish the podcast. Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure. I'm sure.

[00:20:08] I'm sure. Let's play it while we record. We will be going back to back recording, but the episode's released back to back because we also like to party on Friday nights. That's right. That's right. Yeah, it's Friday night every night. But speaking of, yeah, of course,

[00:20:21] Nave was talking about Hellblade. I'm very excited to jump into the deep dive in gaming together with that. I'm also very curious to where Philip is gonna land with it. It seems like he's gonna be like, oh, indie trash, but I don't know.

[00:20:34] You never know where Philip is gonna go with stuff like this. It's gonna be interesting to see where he generally lands. He just likes to send me into blinding rage. I don't know what his opinions about anything are because he just lies. Yeah, he just lies.

[00:20:48] Yeah, I'll try to pull the truth out of him as much as I can, but we'll see how that goes. Yeah, Hellblade 2, incredible game. I don't think that it really... I feel like Xbox kind of did the game a little bit dirty.

[00:21:02] They had no marketing buildup for it. I was expecting to see Senua on a bag of Doritos or at least on a Monster Energy drink or something like that. I don't know. I understand that, but it would make me feel sad.

[00:21:15] It was all a bag of Doritos and Senua. I understand. This is definitely a high art game and you would imagine... Because I just wish that they marketed it the same way that they would have chosen to market Starfield. Again, two completely different experiences,

[00:21:30] but I feel like they would have drawn garnered more interest for the experience period if they had treated it with the level of like, we want 30 second, 15 second spots on cable or on streaming platforms, whatever it may be, a Spotify advertisement, whatever, but it was nothing. No...

[00:21:49] Again, this is not really... It's just the marketing behind the game. The game itself is really, really good. I just kind of think about the reception of it and a lot of people are coming out less than satisfied with the experience. I can't really...

[00:22:02] I don't share those sentiments particularly. I think I'm very, very high on this game for what it is. I'm acknowledging it for what it is, flaws and all, but yeah. Won't get too deep into it until I do record with Niamh

[00:22:14] because I want to save some of the sauce for gaming together. But yeah, really, really enjoyed it. It is a must play though. I think if anybody like A owns an Xbox and B has Xbox Game Pass, you have to play this game. There's not really a question.

[00:22:26] It's so quick in terms of just getting through it. And I think it's an important story. I do agree with you that the marketing is very unbalanced because there was a time if everyone remembers that everyone was getting sick of seeing Hellblade. And I specifically remember,

[00:22:41] cause I just stopped every time it would come on, I go, okay, I'm not watching this. Cause you're spoiling the whole game. Like every time it's a different cut scene. And then they just went radio silent for like the...

[00:22:52] It's like, if they would have just spread it out more, it probably would have been in more of the public, like not the domain, but whatever. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah. The kind of the mind share of Hellblade

[00:23:05] and like what it was, it would have been there. I feel like if they just saved two of the trailers that they released in 2023 for it, just at the beginning or at least the beginning and middle of this year and then came out with it,

[00:23:14] it would have been different. But regardless, we got what we got and I'm very happy with it. And so it is a recommended must play from Nick. The other games that I've been playing really, I rolled credits recently on Animal Well,

[00:23:25] which is a new game as an indie title, pixel art, a Metroidvania platformer. Really, really fun. It comes from the famous YouTuber, Dunky and his publishing title, I think his new studio that he made called Big Mode. And it's really, really fun. It's an incredibly fun game.

[00:23:45] I actually played this through, if I'm not mistaken, I played it through PlayStation Plus catalog. So that's why I was able to download it and play for free there. That's their game pass competitor that Sony has right now. And it is just fun.

[00:23:57] It's got incredible vibes in terms of just like this very ambient kind of spooky music that they have. And then just the sound design overall, every room that you enter in, you're learning how as you traverse through different areas of this game,

[00:24:11] they're kind of color coded on the map. And it's a kind of a puzzle to figure out how do I expand? How do I open up the map? And how do I get to different places? And it just really, really encourages exploration.

[00:24:21] And it's one of those things where it's like, if you get stuck, you never have to really feel bad about like just going in opposite direction because there's always somewhere else to go, something else to explore, hidden rooms or secrets to find, more eggs to find somewhere.

[00:24:33] So it's very, very well done. And again, this is one of those, the last boss is kind of crazy, but I was able to just like, slam my head against the wall a couple of times and I got through it. So it was a great, great time.

[00:24:46] It is again, a very, very high recommend on the indie tier list. I would just make sure that if you have the chance or if you are a big indie fan, go play Animal Well. It's worth your time. Shout out to Billy Basso, soul developer on there.

[00:24:59] Yeah, Billy Basso is that guy. And it was actually the guy, Dan Kirkman. I think that's his name, but Dan something. We met him at PAX East and he was really, really nice, really friendly. And I saw his name pop up a few different times.

[00:25:15] It's like a play tester, an executive producer, publishing. Yeah, he's working over there and doing work big time. So it would be fun to kind of reach out to them and say, hey, what's up? How's it going? But yeah, we'll see where that goes.

[00:25:29] Last game I wanna talk about before we head into the main topic of the show is Tales of Kinsera. This is a show that we actually have queued up or game rather that we have queued up for the show that we wanna do a review.

[00:25:41] We're very excited to jump into that. We have a good friend also from PAX East, CG Danny B. He's gonna come on. He's gonna talk about Tales of Kinsera. This is also a new indie title. It's from this actor slash director.

[00:25:55] This is his very first game, Abu Bakar Saleem, if I'm not mistaken. That is he's like the show runner and he's the director for Tales of Kinsera. Really, really fun. Another Metroidvania. This has a lot, a lot of similar energy to everything that I've seen and played

[00:26:11] of Prince of Persia, The Lost Crown. And I think that it's one of those where you have two different battle types. You have one where it's like he's got the gauntlets and he can shoot people at range and then he can switch stances

[00:26:25] and then he has two awesome spears and a new different mask and he can kind of get in people's faces into like melee and he can throw spears really far and do some heavy damage. Really, really good dodging that's involved. The Metroidvania mechanics, it is,

[00:26:40] in terms, it seems like it's very much linear in terms of the path that you're guided down. It's very much a journey that you're kind of going along the ride with him in the other NPCs that are talking to him as he's going down it. So it's interesting.

[00:26:54] I'd be very curious. I'm not as far as I wanna be. I'm almost done with act one, but it's not a super long game. So it's bound to be there. But I will say this. I said this to Will before the show.

[00:27:05] Tales of Kinsera like legitimately has some of the best voice acting that I've heard this year. Specifically just like the vocal direction in the like the, I guess just the performance from the voice actors in this game. Obviously the director had a hand in voice acting this game.

[00:27:21] This is like kind of his brainchild is directly inspired by the passing of his father and just all of the different Nigerian culture that he's able to instill in there. So, but yeah, like within minutes of booting up the game, I was already like getting like misty eyed.

[00:27:35] I was like, this is really, really deep. So very, very impactful emotional storytelling in this one too. Really good game. Strongly recommend. But with that, we're gonna go ahead and finish gaming updates and move into our main topic of the show, which is gonna be the roundup

[00:27:51] of all three summer showcases from Summer Games Fest, Sony State of Play and the Xbox showcase. So stay tuned. We'll take a break and we'll be right back. ["Sommergamesfest"] ["Sommergamesfest"] And welcome back everybody. We're here talking about the summer showcases that have just recently happened for 2024.

[00:29:09] There've been three primary ones and a few, you know, handful of other ones that have come up that are, you know, generally less important. There was Day of the Devs. I'm sure there's been the PC game showcase, but we're not worried about those

[00:29:18] because we're worried about console warring. What happened with Sony and Xbox? So we're gonna be talking about these games. We're gonna be talking about our feelings, about how the showcase is presented and just more than anything else, just focusing on the excitement

[00:29:32] and the hype that we have for the rest of 2024 and 2025 to come. So I would like to save, you know, the best for last, but let's start with Sony. Let's start with the State of Play that recently came out. We have our list here.

[00:29:45] I'm gonna run down the games really quick just to remind everybody what was shown there, but then we'll kind of circle back and talk about the highlights. So of course we had Concord that came out. It was like a, you know, eight minute showcase.

[00:29:58] There was the eight minute cinematic trailer of Concord, really fun. There was God of War Ragnarok. That's coming to PC specifically. There's Dynasty Warriors Origins, Infinity Nikki, Ballad of Antara, Behemoth for the PSVR2 and Alien Rogue Incursion for PSVR2. They're still making alien games. Let's fucking go.

[00:30:18] Marvel Rivals, Where Winds Met, Path of Exile 2, Silent Hill 2, Monster Hunter Wilds in Astro Bot. Okay, gentlemen, let's talk about it. How do we feel about this showcase? What are we most hyped for on this list? Where are we thinking? Where are we at with it?

[00:30:34] Astro Bot by a Country Mile. 100%. Oh okay so I'll- Monster Hunter Wilds looks great too, but Astro Bot was like the banger. They actually ended it well because otherwise that would have been a tough watch. Yeah, 100%. I'll be the contrarian and say

[00:30:48] that Dynasty Warriors Origins was my highlight. It's its go-to. I was looking at that like oh man. I was like this is some kind of muso. This is something literally it's just Dynasty Warriors and I was like they're still making those games? Koei Tecmo.

[00:31:02] Shout out to Koei Tecmo, man. They're still doing the damn thing. Morons like me will pay $60 to play the same fucking game over and over again. They got us locked down. They add more characters on the screen. That's all I care about, right? Yeah.

[00:31:16] I can slam a thousand people in one go. No. Dude, nothing feels better than it though. No, I'm not gonna lie. I'm not gonna lie. I'm probably not gonna play Infinity Nikki, but out of everything we've seen here it probably had the most beautiful graphics

[00:31:30] I have ever seen in a game. Like did you guys remember that when it was the dress up one where it looked like a Hoyoverse type thing and you're like an anime girl running around making up friends in different worlds and you choose different outfits and stuff

[00:31:46] and it's definitely not on the horny factor five that Stellar Blade is. And I don't think it really is at all, but it's more here towards that Sanrio Hello Kitty audience I think. Yeah, it looks pretty cool. Yeah, no, but anyway, I thought it was worth mentioning.

[00:32:02] It was definitely cool. I am not excited about Concord. I am not excited about Marvel Rivals. The 5v5 genre, Blizzard kind of ran into the ground with Overwatch. They kind of burn people on Overwatch I feel like, and I generally don't feel like

[00:32:18] from all of the communities that I'm a part of, there are that many people that I know of that are asking for, yeah, let's get more multiplayer 5v5 shooters. What do you guys think? Like is it in my face? I was genuinely shocked that they have Concord,

[00:32:31] the game that they are funding and then they also put Marvel Rivals in there. Like I have to say, I'm like, wow. Okay, I mean, they really, really value that Marvel. They want to slap Marvel. They want to slather it all over the PlayStation 5 marketing.

[00:32:45] They want Marvel everywhere. Unless they're trying to get exclusive deal with Disney and Rivals isn't gonna come to Xbox or PC or wherever, but that would be very surprising if they didn't because it seems very much like a type of game Disney would just wanna put out

[00:33:01] everywhere they possibly can. It is coming to Xbox. It is? Okay, which is interesting. There you go. That was one of the issues with where Enix's Marvel Avengers games is that they had Spider-Man added into that game. Yeah, and it was Sony exclusive. Yeah.

[00:33:16] Because they had that locked in already. So yeah, it's interesting. Nobody played that game anyway. You get Spider-Man on Xbox. Will, you were like one of five people I know that played that game. That is correct. That is very correct. But I mean, you know,

[00:33:26] I'm not hating for the people that enjoyed it, but no, for sure. I don't necessarily know. I don't necessarily know. Stand on business. I am hating. I'm a hater. I'm a hater at heart, honestly. I'm the biggest hater. I hate the way that you walk.

[00:33:37] We're gonna need to get a lot of quotes in for this episode, definitely. Will, you are the Overwatch guy out of the two of us. Did Concord do anything for you whatsoever? I'm not gonna lie. When I first saw it,

[00:33:49] I was just like, oh, Jesus Christ, here we go. And then I saw some of the gameplay and I was like, oh, I mean, it doesn't look terrible. It looks interesting. The characters are interacting well. I do wanna see more

[00:33:58] and I wanna check out whatever beta that they have because I think that there is a potential here, especially if they actually push it and they support it and they do well with it. This can be a fun game. It's just like you were saying, Nick,

[00:34:11] there have been a lot of these hero shooters, these five V5s that kind of come and go. They're on the same train of your battle royale games where everyone knows Fortnite and then there's been a dozen Fortnite clones

[00:34:25] or people trying to eat that same slice of the pie and they've come and gone. So you have to really do something special. You have to bring some quality to the table and at the end of the day, something different for people to actually wanna play it.

[00:34:35] I think Marvel's rivals, from what I understand and people actually enjoy playing it, it has brought a little something different while yes, it 100% fucking rips Overwatch. Like you can see some of the special moves. I think it's, shit, what's that character's name

[00:34:49] with from the Guardians of the Galaxy? Peter Quill, he does the Death Blossom. Star Lord. Yeah, Star Lord. He does the Death Blossom that Reaper does. It's the same exact move. Over, almost call him Overman. Iron Man's flying around like Farah shooting down stuff from the top.

[00:35:08] So there are some direct rips. I think Scarlet Witch is damn near a one-to-one rip of Moira, but the Marvel is gonna carry. There was a sniper in Concord that had cybernetic legs that looked like one-for-one directly ripped from Overwatch.

[00:35:21] I don't know if Farah or if it's a different, there's a black female sniper, the person that's a tactical shooter in Overwatch. You're talking about a homegirl with a rail gun that's like an ass, I can't remember her name. Yeah, but yeah, she doesn't quite have

[00:35:33] a sniper rifle, but I get what you're saying. Anyway, it looked just like it. So exactly, so iterative. You're gonna draw the voices. It's 100% gonna happen. You have your guy off Concord. He has his pistol. Everyone's gonna look at him and say, almost call him McCree,

[00:35:46] but that's his, trying not to dead name. What's the new name for that character? I think it's, do they just call him? John Smith. You're not talking about Ronan, right? Yeah. No. No. It's the McCree, but he's got a new name. Can't remember his name, damn it.

[00:36:00] John Smith is fine. Oh yeah, yeah, at the end of that. John Marston. They have John Marston over at Overwatch. John Marston. But yeah, so the second you see somebody with a revolver, I'm like, oh shit, there he is. There's the Overwatch man.

[00:36:13] So you have to really bring something new and unique. I think Marvel has enough of a footprint on their own that they're going to deflect a lot of those criticisms and people are just gonna say, hey look, new Marvel game and they're gonna hop on it.

[00:36:25] And we'll see what Concord does to really kind of push themselves out of it. I genuinely, dude, I know, okay, I'm the biggest hater, but I think Concord is dead on arrival, man. I wouldn't be surprised. Unfortunately, it's going,

[00:36:37] because I think it's just on PC and PlayStation, right? Because it's Sony funded. I hope it's on PC. God, I hope it's on PC. Just for the dev scene. It's gonna be tough. But with the Marvels game, like you were saying, slam dunk with the brand recognition.

[00:36:51] People are going to see Marvel and Concord next to each other and they're gonna go, oh, I want the one with Spidey Man. I want a Spidey Man around. I wanna play Doctor Strange. But Marvel is also gonna be on Xbox

[00:37:00] and you know what else is gonna be on Xbox and everything else. A game that I don't think is on the notes anywhere, but Valorant got announced in the Summer Games Fest to be on console. And oh my, that's just, what is Concord gonna do?

[00:37:13] All of this is happening all like at the relatively same time. Like I have no idea. Like Sony just picked the worst possible time to fund one of these games. I feel like the streamer community is probably gonna be the only people

[00:37:27] that will jump into Concord until the hotness boils over. And like I feel like what Sony is trying to do with Concord to set it apart from these 5v5 shooters is have those opening cinematics that are gonna every time you open the game, you're gonna get more story.

[00:37:40] You're gonna get more context, the lore and the world and the characters. You're gonna get that kind of display to you in a very high quality level. But the problem is that if nobody plays this game and it doesn't hit, they're gonna stop making those cinematics

[00:37:54] which is gonna stop really the man draw that's gonna differentiate it from these other games. It's very, very risky bet that they're trying to make here. I'm hoping for the developers, Firewalk Studios that it hits, probably not gonna happen. Well, for one, it's like a multiplayer shooter.

[00:38:09] So this is Sony. So this is probably not gonna happen just from their track record. It's a new studio. But the thing that I think is the most important also is they're gonna look at Concord. They're gonna look at Marvel Rivals. They're gonna look at Valorant.

[00:38:19] They're gonna look at X-Defiant. They're going to look at Overwatch. They're gonna look at... Do you see the common thread amongst all of these that Concord's conveniently left out of? Concord, you have to pay money to get into. Yeah, everything else is free to play.

[00:38:32] And I mean, it worked for Helldivers, to be fair. It worked for Helldivers too. Yeah, well, I would say Helldivers too is a different beast though. That's a cooperative shooter rather than... Yeah, it's really helpful. A 5v5. Yeah, it's completely different experience. Yeah, there's less toxicity.

[00:38:47] You're playing on teams. There's not really squad comms to that extent. And it's very friendly. It's player-focused. So they have an uphill battle right now. So it remains to be seen. I think what's a really interesting aspect of this showcase, and we're kind of lingering along on Sony

[00:39:06] since it's like kind of a very much mid. I don't know if you all have gathered this by now, but we're not impressed by what we've seen from Sony besides maybe potentially the last three games that were shown there. But the fact that the Sony reinvested

[00:39:21] probably a ton of money in creating a PSVR2 console, and we saw two games at the show kid, the most recent showcase they came out with the state of play for 2024. I don't think we're ever gonna get a Sony showcase where they show a PSVR2 game.

[00:39:37] I feel like... And I'm sorry to say this because we have personal friends in our group chats that are huge PSVR2 fans, but I just don't think they're gonna continue to support that console, that space. I just don't think that the money is in it.

[00:39:51] They're probably desperate for money as it is. And it's just superfluous and there's not enough people buying. It's more expensive than buying a PS5 now. It's literally the Xbox connect all over again. And the more that they dump into, the more money they dump into this, unfortunately,

[00:40:04] the less returns they're going to see. And you can see whenever, if you were watching this live and having the live chat up, which I always do, and it always makes me so mad, but sometimes you get insights into what people are feeling.

[00:40:16] And every single time a PSVR2 game came up, no one was having fun. Even the people who were like the diehards on the, were like, yeah, Sony Ws. I'm paying attention to the pictures I'm seeing. I know who's saying what. And but I remember it because I don't,

[00:40:29] I think there was a Batman game. Was there not a Batman VR game? Yes, there is. And when that got revealed, everyone, Batman W, Batman W, Sony's back. And then as soon as it became obvious, oh, was it? I'm pretty sure it was.

[00:40:41] I don't remember. I don't remember. I don't see it. But you're right. As soon as you see it's a VR title, everyone's like, wow, why? Yeah, I think it was one of those things where, this was something that Jason Schreier tweeted because he was at SGF personally.

[00:40:54] And he was like, when they showed the Batman game and they announced it was for VR, there was an audible aw in the audience. Like major bummer. It was the same thing last year with the Metro game. Like I was shitting and pissing.

[00:41:06] And then suddenly I was like, oh no, I saw the stupid gloves. And I was like, no, no. It dries the Saharan desert. I will say that as a huge alien fan, I'm glad that they're continuing to make alien games. Like I have not played,

[00:41:24] there's been like two alien games that popped up. And I was like, yeah, let's go. And I never played, I never played Fireteam Elite. I know you played it. And I think you guys did an episode on Fireteam Elite. He's shaking his head.

[00:41:33] No, didn't like that one at all. I'm still willing to just check it out and see what kind of trash it is. But then they had another one that was like a, it seemed like an RTS type shooter. I can't remember what the title of that one was,

[00:41:46] but it was interesting top-down isometric alien game. Now they're coming out with rogue incursion. So I mean, if they take enough notes from alien isolation, but to put that into VR, I'm sure that's gonna be super scary experience if they nail it right.

[00:42:00] But honestly, yeah, that was the most impressive thing. Like I think that alien is perfect for VR because alien isolation was harrowing. So scary. Yeah. Yeah, and you know, kind of continuing down the list where the winds met another, I was complaining about this to Will earlier,

[00:42:15] another Japanese Soulsborne wannabe game. In a dark Japan or China setting, East Asian setting and you're fighting Soulsborne bosses. It looks very kind of generic at this point. Not really impressed. And then the until bone. There was a tweet that somebody put out that was like, hold on,

[00:42:36] because I said something to him, but it was like the Japanese developers are carrying this generation. What's your favorite Japanese game? And they posted six games, like six videos, and they all looked exactly the same. And I'm like, they were all third person in feudal Japan fighting,

[00:42:53] except for Stellar Blade, so it was in there, but it's also just another third person, like hack and slide. I'm like, why didn't you put like a dragon in there? Or anything else? Like there's so many Japanese games. Why are you only thinking these exact same color

[00:43:06] copy games over and over again? It's strange honestly. And I don't necessarily, I mean, I get where it's going. It's like, I keep telling Will, I was like, everybody's trying to just chase, they're trying to chase like the greatness that FromSoft has hit both with Dark Souls

[00:43:22] as well as like Sekiro. That's what I was thinking of. Like people are just trying to be Sekiro in many different ways. And I told him like, woo, woo long, Fallen Dynasty, mid as fuck, like not the greatest of games. I know people enjoyed it.

[00:43:36] People had fun with it, but like- Better than Lies of P. Damn, that's a really hot take. That's a hot take, because people really like Lies of P. I don't understand it, because dude. I think it's because that's the closest that people are gonna get to Bloodborne and-

[00:43:51] Besides Astrobot's little fucking skin. Exactly, exactly. I feel so bad for Bloodborne fans, dude. I'm like, that must be painful. It's still alive, it's still alive. If Sony is putting that in Astrobot, it's still alive, it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen. But yeah, continuing down,

[00:44:07] there is a Until Dawn remake, which is like, I understand like maybe the company, the development team, I can't remember if they're super massive or super giant, whatever the fuck. The development studio, super massive studios in the Dark Pictures anthology team,

[00:44:23] maybe they just wanna recoup on their cash so they can try and generate the next game. I really enjoyed what I experienced from the Quarry. Played it over at Will's house or just kind of watched it, the playthrough over at Will's house. And that was a good time.

[00:44:37] And I loved Until Dawn when it first came out, but it's like, who's asking for an Until Dawn remake? I don't really know. Sony is, only Sony, not the fans, just Sony. It's not even being made by super massive, it's being developed by Ballistic Moon. Yeah.

[00:44:52] Yeah, it's very weird. Well so I think maybe they just wanted it on PC and they just want an excuse for people on PlayStation 5 to buy it. Is it not on PC? Is it Sony exclusive? I don't know why, is it?

[00:45:03] Until Dawn is only on PS4 for sure. It never came to Xbox? No. That's so strange to me. That's so strange. Because super massive is like a third party studio, so it doesn't really make sense. Yeah, well I mean they were licensed out

[00:45:16] for second party for a lot of stuff. Like, cause they made, didn't they make Heavy Rain and stuff? Or am I getting people confused now? No, that's the David Cage team that did Heavy Rain in Detroit. But yeah, I see where you're going with that.

[00:45:31] Yeah, Path of Exile 2, don't know anybody that care. We saw Path of Exile 2 at PAX and we both like looked at it several times past that booth every time. We were like, nah, don't really need to play it. And it doesn't really move the needle for me.

[00:45:44] I didn't realize how Diablo coded it was until this exact showcase trailer that they put out for it. But it's literally just Diablo not Diablo. Yeah, free Diablo was what it was. The first one, I mean, I don't know if this one's paid or not.

[00:45:59] I want you guys to give me your take on this. But every time I see Silent Hill 2, it gets worse and worse and worse. Yeah, exactly what I was gonna say. I am scared. I enjoyed, so I never played the Blair Witch Project. I've heard good things,

[00:46:18] tentative good things about the Blair Witch Project. I actually kind of enjoyed the medium. It was a rough game, but the energy and the spirit was there for the medium. I enjoyed that experience overall. It's like a solid seven out of 10 game for me personally.

[00:46:33] But I'm looking at Silent Hill 2 and I'm like, this is a beloved game. This is a beloved Konami IP and y'all are really doing this. What was the thing that set you off? Was it the nurse mantling a fucking chest high wall like it was Gears of War?

[00:46:48] Yes, that was one of it. And then it was just the wife who looked like she ate a blueberry at Willy Wonka's Charlie Factory. Yeah, on flatter angles. What is going on here? I'm not really sure, but yeah, it just wasn't. The frame rate doesn't really look,

[00:47:09] it looks like Silent Hill visually, but every time I see gameplay, every time I see him fighting, I'm like, this doesn't seem scary to me. And that's a game where it's very much lent into the atmosphere and the horror that was instilled in the atmosphere.

[00:47:24] And I just like, I really, really hope that it's gonna play better than it looks at a trip. I'm praying for you guys, you fans that are still holding out, but I've been from day one ringing that bell that I'm like, I don't get your hopes up

[00:47:36] for this one guys. Whenever Konami's involved, it's always like, heckles are up, which we'll talk about that later on the episode too when we have another beloved Konami game coming out that I'm just like, I mean, it looks great, but oh. Yeah, every Bloober team game,

[00:47:51] all the best Bloober team games, if you group them up, you see the common denominator is they don't have combat in them and you can't die. So like, I'm curious as to how far this is gonna go. Monster Hunter Wilds will, and on a fantastic 10 out of 10.

[00:48:08] It looks great. Don't get me wrong, I think Astrobot's still like the beast of that show, but while I did say by foreign wide country mile, et cetera, at the very end of that mile, Monster Hunter Wilds is right there. It's just like, hey, I'm here.

[00:48:21] So I'm excited, I'm a Capcom shill, right? If it has Capcom on it, I'm gonna say it's a 10 out of 10, no matter what. But it looks real good. And just the specifics on the fighting, I love that they have this system

[00:48:34] that they're talking about where you have the scratches so you can make your own weak points on the enemies is what it looks like. And then as you're fighting, you saw that one section at the end of the cut scene that they showed where he's like blocking

[00:48:45] the creature's mouth with the great sword and like wrestling against him. Like you're doing a beam struggle in Dragon Ball Z. I was like, this is gonna be sick. Like I'm just excited to sit there and make these cinematic moments happen in game. Yeah.

[00:48:58] Hot Dragon Ball Z, oh, we'll talk about it. Yes, Sparking Zero, yes, yes. We're gonna get to it, we're gonna get to it. Sparking Zero actually wasn't at this one, but yeah, no, so it was Monster Hunter Wilds which looks consistently cool to me.

[00:49:09] They showed it at both the state of play and at Summer Games Fest. And in both cases, I mean, it's just Monster Hunter. So it's got that quality, it's got that fan base. I say that in a joke, like I say that and it's assumed

[00:49:21] that it's gonna put some respect on that bad boy. You have Eric walk up in here. I know, I know. I'll get several people mad at me if I smack talk Monster Hunter the way I do Dragon's Dogma. But yeah, Astro Bot, I'm gonna be day one

[00:49:32] with Astro, young Astro. I don't know if I'm gonna buy the Bloodborne Ultra Edition Deluxe Ultra $80 DLC. You gotta show them that there's love for Bloodborne. But they also said all of the outfits were just, you just get them later in game.

[00:49:50] Whereas if you buy it, it instant unlocks if you pay for the upgraded Deluxe editions on there. So yeah, it's cool. I think I'm like looking, oh man. I'm looking at the beginning and the end, the bookends of the Sony state of play.

[00:50:06] And then just looking at the bookends for Xbox's showcase. And I'm just like, oh my fucking God. It's kind of crazy. It is dire. I mean, you throw that word around a lot, but I'm looking at Sony and I'm like, they need to pivot

[00:50:21] and they need to pivot to something like quickly. I know it's gonna take time for them to bounce back from this slate that they're in. They're in a very much a dry patch, I think for 2024. They got some stuff that maybe we're hoping

[00:50:31] they're cooking up behind the scenes coming out soon. But yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing what they can come out with first party that's gonna get people excited. But yeah, Astrobot jumping in there day one. Let's move on to Summer Games Fest.

[00:50:43] This was, I put even in the dock, whole lot of garbage. A whole lot of garbage. They just showcase. I promise. I was saying this because I was down on it as well. I was low C on PlayStation, hot D. Maybe close to F on the.

[00:50:58] But if Summer Games Fest was just cut up, just make the trailers shorter, have less trailers, no commercials, what the fuck was that about? And then seeing Halo Infinite's pop up and it's a Dolby digital ad, I almost put up this to my TV. I was like, what?

[00:51:16] What is this? And then it's nothing? Oh my God. That was a question that I had, I was really excited. I was like, oh my gosh. X or Xbox or whoever is coming through and working with Jeff Keighley and they're advertising Halo Infinite. Let's shout out to Halo.

[00:51:29] Halo is back. It's the wrong. And then it was like, it's Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision. I know what Dolby Atmos is. I don't know what the fuck Dolby Vision is. What even is Dolby Vision? Do you guys have any clue? Is it like. Yeah.

[00:51:40] Something to do with Halo. Some Corpo speak. Some ridiculous branding for some TV, I'm sure. But yeah, absolutely ridiculous. There is a handful of stuff in here that was cool. I appreciate it. I will say this. I appreciated that Jeff Keighley

[00:51:55] came out of the top of the show and said, hey, sorry that all of the people that I work with laid off half of their workforce this year. It's been a rough couple of years for the gaming industry. And I mean, it's another reason why

[00:52:07] I appreciate when you characterize things as being dire because it really is out here for a lot of people. People are losing their jobs left and right. Developers who are super talented over at Arcane Austin. People at Bungie have been laid off. Tango Gameworks does not exist anymore.

[00:52:24] These are incredible developers that have made Class A games and it's just they're not making games anymore and hopefully they'll find a job soon. But yeah, he came out and he acknowledged that at the top of the show, which is something that he chose not to do before,

[00:52:38] especially at the end of last year, which was just like layoff after layoff last year, which is very weird for him not to acknowledge. One thing that went so, for one thing that was happening during the Xbox showcase, we saw the Starfield DLC.

[00:52:50] The whole time I was watching it, I was thinking about Arcane Austin and how much this game kind of looked like Prey. Prey has just been on my mind for the past two days. Like man, I really took the Tango and the Arcane Austin hard.

[00:53:05] I can't believe that. Yeah, I'm really sad because it was like, from all intents and purposes, what we knew, we've talked about this ad nauseum at this point, but everything we knew from the Arcane Austin team is that they didn't really wanna make Redfall.

[00:53:19] It was a mandate that came down from ZeniMax and it was like, live service, live service. We need shooters and all of that stuff. The remnants of the death of Bethesda. Yeah, same thing happened to the Arkham studio over in London. Rocksteady, same thing happened to them.

[00:53:37] And apparently the craziest thing about Rocksteady, I come to find out when I was reading Jason Schreier's most recent article, was that they were hiring people before Suicide Squad killed the Justice League without telling them what game they were developing.

[00:53:50] It was like, they said that it was in the DC universe. They did not say anything else. They didn't say it was a live service shooter. They didn't say anything. They just hired people and people were expecting to jump on this team doing great things.

[00:54:00] And then the middle of development, WB Games fires the studio leads who like headed all of the Batman Arkham games and they spun off and did their own shit. Well, all of the other developers were just promoted from within left holding the bat at the back. It's crazy.

[00:54:15] Anyway, that was a little bit of insider baseball. Did you have something you wanted to add to that, Nath? I don't remember. I'm just thinking about that now. That sucks. That is a bummer. Yeah, no, super big bummer. But yeah, everybody go read that article. It's quite informative.

[00:54:31] But looking at Summer Games Fest, I tried to put out the highlights. I can't believe that I forgot to include Dragon Ball Sparking Zero in here. They're getting a limited run games, collectors edition, physical release. It looks fucking amazing. It looks incredible. I hate limited run.

[00:54:46] And then they just keep putting out shit that I'm like, man, I kind of want that. Wait, why do we hate limited run? What's wrong with limited run? They just, everything's late all the time. There is this Twitter account that I'm following that didn't get their fucking edition.

[00:55:01] They got some kind of super special edition of a game that limited run printed out and they didn't get it for like 183 days. And they're like, finally, here it is. Like I got my game. I'm in like everyone else got their fucking edition. Baldur's Gate 3 finally.

[00:55:16] Yeah, I don't know. They just, hopefully they're better now. I mean, they have so much extra money. There's no excuse for how fucking sloppy they are all the time. But they keep putting out some cool looking editions to games, that's for sure. Yeah.

[00:55:29] I don't even remember what Battle Crush is but we can continue to move on. There was Mecha Break, which had a better trailer on the Xbox showcase that we'll talk about here soon. But they had like a 30 second trailer that was there.

[00:55:41] I was like, oh cool Mecha game. I would like to play the Gundam Wing game, not Gundam Wing. Blumhouse games had a whole slate of different weird horror games that they had lined up to the showcase, which looked really interesting.

[00:55:54] It was like, they had a lot of different styles of horror, very, very like weird surreal experiences that were there. I can't really justly describe it to you on the show. So go look up the Blumhouse games, Summer Games Fest trailer

[00:56:06] and you'll kind of see what they're trying to debut there. They also announced that they're working on the Five Nights at Freddy's 2 movie. So shout out to the FNAF squad out there. Something that I- Whenever I watched it, I had no idea what I was looking at.

[00:56:20] So I thought it was just a game that changed aesthetics over and over again. When I was looking at it, it was like 12 different games. But I thought it was one game. I was like, what the fuck is this? Right. Yeah, no, it's insane.

[00:56:32] They had so many games in here. So again, just kind of running down the list. Something that I think Will really, really enjoy Will really enjoyed the Shredder's Revenge, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game. Of course, yeah. So that Power Rangers one looks right up my alley. It's awesome.

[00:56:45] Exactly. That's where I was going with it. Yeah, so I popped off for that because I'm a huge- I grew up with Power Rangers. I feel like we all did. Yeah, Power Rangers game looks great. The Shredder's Revenge was last year's game of the year for us.

[00:56:56] The co-op game of the year. Really? I think so. That's awesome. I don't know. To listen to you, you have to listen to it. Like, I don't know. I don't remember. You guys didn't play Baldur's Gate 3. So yeah, no, the Shredder's Revenge makes sense.

[00:57:07] But then they had Deliverance too. Shout out to the Elder Scrolls gaming podcast. They're huge Deliverance fans. Killer Bean, which looks like the Matrix- Killer Bean's fire. In Roblox game of the year. Game of the year. So- So when he shot the bullet off of the casing

[00:57:20] and hit that guy in the spine, I was like, we're done here. Dude, when he did the fucking- He grabbed, they threw a grenade at him. He jumped in the air, grabbed it, put it through his legs behind the back and then threw it.

[00:57:30] I'm like, what the fuck is going on here, dude? Killer Bean is nuts. It's absolutely insane. They had Karen, which looked like a climbing simulator the same way Jusant did, but Jusant was incredible. So I don't know how it can match up to that.

[00:57:42] They had Sonic Shadow Generations that Jeff Keighley was like, I don't give a fuck about this game even though there's so many Sonic fans out there. Like he was like, I'm gonna give you 30 seconds of Sonic Shadow Generations and I'm never gonna speak about this again.

[00:57:56] And they didn't let Shadow say fuck. So, you know, what the hell? What's going on, Keighley? Hongkai Star Real Garbage, Kinitsu Gami. Kinitsu Gami looks like a, it looks like an old Capcom game, doesn't it? I feel like it looks like a... What was this?

[00:58:13] It's like a high fantasy, kind of like a Wu Long where it's got the ultra stylized Chinese mythology of creatures. This game was on Xbox's showcase last year. It was. It's like a hybrid real time strategy thing. Is that what you just said?

[00:58:28] It's Capcom so it's obviously the best game It's S tier. Automatic. I definitely wanna play it. I definitely wanna play this shit out of this game. It's coming out soon, soon. Yeah. Hyper Light Breaker. There is a ton of Hyper Light Drifter fans out there.

[00:58:42] I've been very excited. Hyper Light Drifter is on my Steam wishlist for quite some time. I'm very excited for the people who are excited for that game. So super looking forward to that. And then there was the skate trailer which also featured the M Corp trailer from...

[00:58:58] I don't know. Do you know this guy? I don't know his name. Who does the... It's like, I think you should leave. Yeah, I think you should leave. Anyways, I love- The main actor from that. It's one of those shows where I've seen a million

[00:59:08] clips but I've never actually watched the show. It looks awesome. The whole thing was it was very meta because at this point there was three ad breaks. And so I didn't know what I was watching the whole time. I'm like, what the fuck is this?

[00:59:20] This is a long ad. Yeah, it was strange. And then when it stops and then it comes back and I'm like, what the fuck? This guy's back? Who is this guy? And then it starts playing skate. And I'm like, oh, okay, that's fair.

[00:59:31] You can do whatever you want if you're announcing skate. You're good. And to close out the show with a wet fart, Jeff Keely decided to feature a Powell World update which is, shout out to Powell World. Powell World was fun.

[00:59:44] That was a time of our lives at the beginning of 2024. He said, wet fart, shout out to Powell World. Shout out to Powell World. I do like the... They're updating the shit out of it with all the money they made. I'm happy for them.

[00:59:54] And there's a whole new island. That sounds so cool. Oh my gosh. Incredible. And then Monster Hunter Wilds again, still looks good. And then they closed the show with Phantom Blade Zero. Probably the best thing that I saw at this showcase besides Killer Bean of course.

[01:00:08] The weird thing is, is that I'm pretty sure this trailer was playing at the beginning of the showcase before it started. Yeah, because I saw this and I'm like, oh, the showcase is over. And then everyone's like, whoa, this looks great.

[01:00:18] And I'm like, wait, we were just fucking watching this. I swear there was like, that this game was showing or something. It was like the buildup to it. They were playing like the cinematic trailer because they came out with the cinematic trailer

[01:00:29] a year ago. That might've been it. And that might've been it, but then it came back and this looks like, it looks really cool. The combat looks very interesting. It kind of gave me more of the updated Assassin's Creed style combat, but just with more fluidity,

[01:00:41] more like fast paced action gameplay that you would expect from a Soulsborne title. The boss enemies look very, very dynamic. I just love the fact that I can't tell when a kid, like an input action starts and ends in that game. So that seems very cool.

[01:00:56] I'm very, very curious to see how you're gonna be able to string together cool combos where he's whipping the sword around super fast. The thing I don't understand is why the fuck was this here and not in the PlayStation showcase?

[01:01:08] Yeah, because it was at the different Sony state of play. I think last year was when it was first debuted. The first time they showed it, right? Yeah, because it's not coming to Xbox. Yeah. So I'm like, why did- Obviously we're too stacked. Maybe Jeff Keely.

[01:01:22] Yeah, we have Astrobot. We can't overshadow Astrobot. Exactly, exactly. Cool, so that's Summer Games Fest. Absolutely just, it was two hours of my life that won't really get back, but that's okay because there were a few nuggets of goodness that were in there and then shout out for,

[01:01:42] again to Jeff Keely for giving the people a platform to come out and say, hey, we're gonna help out indie developers, especially in a year that's been the hardest on game development in a long time. But let's go to the hypeness. The last but certainly not least,

[01:01:59] the most recent showcase that we all just watched earlier this morning that we've been referencing nonstop in the show, which was the Xbox showcase for 2024, really, really awesome. They started it strong, they finished it strong and then there were a ton of games

[01:02:15] in the middle of this showcase that I was not expecting to see that I was very excited to see. I'm just gonna call it out right now. Perfect Dark looks fucking incredible and I'm so glad that it's an actual game. I'm like, the gameplay, I've been so worried,

[01:02:29] everyone in the whole industry is so fucking worried about this game. And they showed gameplay and it looks good, like surprisingly good. Really good. Like there were all these cool little things that they showed off, like taking somebody's, like somebody's on a fucking radio call,

[01:02:44] they steal their voice and then play it through their earpiece and they go, oh okay, it's like go check that screen. Oh yeah, okay, I'll go do that. They walk over there. I'm like, that's interesting. What an interesting play on the futuristic spy.

[01:03:01] So cool and it was seeing that, so it was like they're perfectly combining that first person stealth melee combat with the actual running and gunning that she's able to do. So I am super, super hyped to kind of see how that turns into a legitimate game.

[01:03:17] Did we see a date? Do you remember seeing a date on it or was it just like 2025? I don't think there was a date. Yeah, there was a lot in here that was questionable. There was a lot of 2025 dates and Will was like,

[01:03:25] why are you trying to compete with Grand Theft Auto 6? You're putting yourself in a target. I know you're not big on Grand Theft Auto so that's perfectly fine. If they have to pad out 2025, people aren't gonna have to, they're not gonna have nothing else to play

[01:03:39] because they're gonna beat GTA in like five hours and put it down and never go back to it again. You're gonna have other- Just like what you're saying, you're definitely putting it down but as long as you don't come around around that quarter, I think you'll be fine.

[01:03:51] But there's gonna be plenty of people that come out that is like, hey, we have to come out within a week or two of Grand Theft Auto and it's just, if you have normal people that say, hey, I buy three games a year and your game comes out

[01:04:02] around the same time as Grand Theft Auto, sorry. You're getting bought on sale next year. Damn, that's crazy. Speaking of things coming out next to each other, a lot of these felt like they were coming out in October of this year.

[01:04:15] I kept seeing October pop up and I was like, whoa. Every time it popped up, I went again? Another one, what the fuck? Because Dragon Ball Z's coming out in October. But, ah man, it's gonna be a lot. It's gonna be a lot.

[01:04:30] I feel like 2024 is gonna be back-loaded. I have the suspicion that there are gonna be a ton of great games at the end of this year or at January, February, the very beginning of next year because people are gonna try to shore up their

[01:04:41] financial spreadsheets and stuff for the investors, for the shareholders. But yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see what the rest of this year looks like. Nave, I want to get the Xbox Insider's look. Where are you at with Black Ops 6? How are you feeling about Call of Duty?

[01:04:59] Did this do anything for you? So this is gonna be made by Raven and Treyarch. Raven is by far my favorite campaign maker. I really actually enjoyed Cold War. I thought the back campaign was really cool. So if they're gonna do something cool and interesting,

[01:05:16] they're bringing back characters from Black Ops. So it's like they brought back, fuck his name was just in my head, I forgot it already, Woods? Frank Woods, there you go. Haha, Woods, yeah, Frank West is in this game. From Capcom, hell yeah baby.

[01:05:28] Hell yeah, best game of the year. I've covered Wars, you know. Yeah, that's how the word covered. How sick would that be? Yeah, so the gameplay of course looked pretty crisp and the game looks like they're putting a lot more effort into the campaign than Modern Warfare 3 was.

[01:05:45] Modern Warfare 3 I think was just a horrendous victim of the acquisition. So I'm hoping that that's the case. Even though it looks like Black Ops 6's achievements are going to be DLC for like, I don't remember where I saw this.

[01:05:56] It was like DLC for the launcher of Call of Duty rather than like the Warzone launcher rather than being like its own full-fledged list. So I don't know how that's going to work out but it looks like they're putting effort in for this one at least.

[01:06:09] Yeah, it definitely does and it looks like, I mean the gameplay combat where they were talking about you're able to like run and gun. We were watching a very little bit of the direct that they were doing after it

[01:06:18] just seeing like the slide and you can slide anywhere. They're like reducing button inputs where you can kind of like slide and then jump and then turn backwards as you're jumping and do cool acrobatic stuff like that. So it's going to be a hellscape on the multiplayer front

[01:06:31] but very exciting. 100% gods. Yeah, very, very exciting in terms of just playing in the campaign and rooting and tooting and shooting. So very excited on that. Obviously, Doom. Day one game pass. Day one game pass. Exactly, and that's what I was curious about

[01:06:45] is that like this, they said this is the first Call of Duty game ever to come day and date to game pass. Yeah. When do you think the rest are going to come? Like do you, is that going to happen right after

[01:06:56] or do you think they're going to give it some space? I think they want to drip feed. Definitely, I think they learned from Bethesda like releasing almost everything very, very close to after they acquired them. But I think what they're doing with Call of Duty,

[01:07:09] I imagine they want to get the other games, the backwards compatible ones running. Like I think they want to get backwards compatibility like working for a lot of the Activision things before they start drip feeding us back like more of these games. I think because-

[01:07:24] I want my fucking Spyro. Where is my Spyro? That's all I care about. Yeah, we definitely, and then RIP, what is it? What is it? Toys for Bob. They're not in Xbox anymore. They're working with Xbox. So I mean, maybe they're just,

[01:07:36] I don't know what's going on with Xbox. Did Xbox divest from Toys for Bob? Cause I thought that they were acquired at one point. A Toys for Bob was part of Activision and then after the acquisition, they bought themselves out, I think. So now they're an independent company

[01:07:50] but their first game is an Xbox property. So I think that they did that as like an olive branch. Like we'll make a game for you so that you know. Oh, well that's exciting. So all three of us are Doom fans. The Dark Ages looks pretty sick.

[01:08:07] It was nice. I screamed like the fucking Highlander whenever I saw this shit. I was like- I'm strapped up a shield and I was like, oh hell yeah. And then blades popped out of the shield. I felt like that fucking meme of Vince McMahon

[01:08:22] where he just gets more and more excited. Yeah. So I was like, holy shit. Yeah. Oh my gosh. It looks so good. It looks good. And I was saying this to Will. I don't know if you picked up on it.

[01:08:35] I was like, I know that Mick Gordon was disgusted and they treated him horribly during the development of Doom Eternal. So there's no way he came back but the soundtrack sounds like it's still very much like on par with what we heard in Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal.

[01:08:49] It was something in the back of my mind. It's like, man, I bet the soundtrack was so different without Gordon's influence that they're like, we need to change the whole aesthetic of the game so that everything changes so that it's not as jarring. Yeah, for sure.

[01:09:05] Yeah, completely different direction, completely different team to come at it, but it's id so we know that they're gonna nail that quality on there. They can't do any wrong. Exactly. They can't. They can't. State of K3 popped up. Don't care about that. Don't know many people that do.

[01:09:20] Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. You got the Xbox guy here. Let me slow down. Hold on. This is a gaming, we were saying this is a gaming together lock. Yeah, like this is a lock for gaming together. So they gotta show some love to State of Decay.

[01:09:32] Yeah, State of Decay is gonna be a co-op game. It's less of like a zombie survival game and more of like a crafting and resource management game. So if you're into like that kind of resource management, but also having the third person shooting in there

[01:09:44] as well, it's really good. The second game is still out. They're still updating it, which was something that everyone was nervous about because it's like, why are they doing so much work on two when they should be working on three?

[01:09:56] But it's like, State of Decay 2 is at the best state. It could possibly be in to play it. So if you want to experience what it kind of is going to be like, just imagine when you're playing State of Decay 2 that there's just gonna be more shit.

[01:10:08] And I think because they made an emphasis, there was a character who had a trinket and they were like walking around with it and then they die in the trailer, I mean, and a character picks it up off of them and then they have that trinket.

[01:10:20] I think that that might be showcasing. I'm just throwing it out there that your characters, cause there's permadeath, you have multiple characters in a thing that you can switch between characters and they all have different stats and abilities and like perks.

[01:10:32] And then if they die, they die, you lost them. And so I think what that is, is that maybe there will be perks that you can take off of characters that have died and inherit them into different characters or something like that.

[01:10:44] Because that would be an interesting way to take the game because the problem is, is that whenever you play that game, State of Decay 2, you specialize. And so like you'll have one guy who's like the best zombie fighter and then one guy who's like really good at healing,

[01:10:56] one guy that's really good at building and then like when they die, it's fucking devastating. It's like an XCOM. Like you lose your best- Just about to say XCOM, yep. And so if you're able to like move things around, like have a character,

[01:11:07] like have like an apprentice and like have them inherit, dude, that's gonna be really cool. That would be really sick. I would be mildly interested in that. We'll play Co-op with you. So phony. We'll play Co-op with you. That's the thing is like again,

[01:11:23] I expect fully that State of Decay 3 is gonna come on day and day on Game Pass. So if Nave is hanging in the Discord and he's like, let's jump in boys. We're doing the State of Decay server for gaming together. I'll jump in there.

[01:11:35] I'll jump in there if I got the time. I know Will is a confirmed bio-ware hater. Yes, 100%. He's a hater. Dragon Age Veil Guard, this is the first look we've gotten at it. This is the very first look. Holy hell, what was the last thing they did good?

[01:11:51] Was it three? Was it Mass Effect 3? Inquisition. Inquisition. No. Inquisition. I've heard Inquisition was a great game. You've heard? Oh man, you've heard. I bet you've heard. So wait, Nave, where are you at in the Dragon Age discourse? I know Origins is like beloved.

[01:12:11] People are very divided on two. Where are you standing with it? I'm the biggest hater. Let's go, let's go. Oh no. Origins is the only good one they made and then everything else is trash. Wow, holy smokes. Okay, okay.

[01:12:26] But Veil Guard, we saw Veil Guard here at the showcase. I need gameplay. It looked really cool. We saw some gameplay. We saw some gameplay. I trust no trailer. Was there gameplay? It looked like they were doing the thing where it was like a little bit of gameplay

[01:12:39] with somebody shooting a bow or shooting a spell in between introducing the different characters. That's what I remember. I thought that that was a cinematic. That's a little like a cinematic. It could be. They're introducing the characters. It could be. Until I get 10 minutes of gameplay right now.

[01:12:52] No, I need straight gameplay. But it said fall 2024, I think. So we should be getting it soon. And you're gonna wait until next Tuesday. Yeah, which is very scary considering we haven't seen anything yet. Yeah, well we're gonna see gameplay next Tuesday is what EA confirmed.

[01:13:07] The Dragon Age is having a confirmed showcase on YouTube so everybody go check that out. I will save my complete shit talk. I'm gonna shit talk a little bit just because it's Dragon Age. I was really worried about, not worried because I don't really care.

[01:13:21] But it's like, if it's good, I'll play it but if it's like mid, I'm probably not even gonna bother. But the aesthetic of it is very different from like the other games. It looks like it's kind of Fortnite-ified a little bit. Like everything's softer and more cartoony

[01:13:36] than it used to be. I'm like, okay. It's like they're pushing it back to two because that's like two had a very, more cartoonish feel. It seems like it's got a lot of Marvel quippy nature to it in terms of the dialogue.

[01:13:48] I'm okay with games doing their own thing but like I've been like desperately holding out that Dragon Age Origins comes back in some meaningful way. But I honestly, that's what I want. A remake of Origins. I would take a remake of Origins, holy hell.

[01:14:01] I would take that right now. Yeah, okay. Interesting. Yeah, I'm looking at it right now. So yeah, you're right. This is all cinematic but it looks pretty cool and I'm excited that a lot of fan favorites coming out and I'm very, very happy

[01:14:13] for all of the Dragon Age stands that are out there. I'm very much looking forward to this. The only thing I'll say, I've said many things actually. I don't know why I keep saying that but the people who liked Dragon Age Inquisition

[01:14:24] are probably going to really like this game. So like this game is made for that group of people which is good. They should be catering to the audience that is expecting like what they've been making. What were your critiques of Inquisition? It was long.

[01:14:38] It was way too long and bloated. It forced you to do side quests and stuff. It implemented this online thing so that I think it was like for micro transactions but I don't remember if that actually came it through with that because it was a really bad,

[01:14:50] a lot of those things were getting wiped away like during development from different games that were trying stuff like that. Yeah. It was, I don't know. And then I didn't really like the characters. It was better than two. Like two was just Dynasty Warriors with a dialogue system

[01:15:03] which sounds like something I would like but I was expecting Dragon Age Origins too and not Dynasty Warriors. Right, right. Yeah, interesting. Okay, moving on. They had the Starfield Shatter Space Expansion. Which looked pretty cool. I didn't really get anything out of this trailer

[01:15:21] other than the fact that, oh cool, they're still supporting Starfield which I was really high on. Eight out of 10 video game. Loved it. I thought it was like one of the most artistic games that came out last year. It was like by far and away

[01:15:34] the game that did new game plus the best in the most meaningful way to do new game. Plus I think that Bethesda figured that out. And I had- In a meta way. Yeah. Yeah, in a very, very meta way. I just had a ton of fun with it.

[01:15:48] Yeah, what's that? He said eight out of 10. Put that on everything. 100%, it is a great game. Put it on everything. It's a great game. I really enjoyed it. And only to know that jumping into Shattered Space if it has cool stuff in there.

[01:16:01] There were a lot of cool side quests that were kind of attached to peripherally main quests that I got from like the imagery that we saw in Shattered Space but didn't really get much more beyond that there. I'm really happy that it looks like

[01:16:14] there's going to be more stuff that you're going to be able to go out and explore with. And then I think- We're gonna get surface maps too, which is great. Yeah, thank God. I unfortunately got used to not having them. So I just- That's what I said.

[01:16:25] I was like, you almost don't necessarily need them once you put a hundred hours into it, but that's fine. I'm really happy that it's about House Varun because that was probably one of the most interesting factions in Starfield that never really got any kind of spotlight. Yeah.

[01:16:38] And so you just see, they're very mysterious and you just see little bits of them. Like this crazy weird cult, like a religious cult. I want more about this, but you don't ever see other than like they're bad and they attack you every time you see them.

[01:16:50] So it's like, and the planet that they kept showing off looked really, really interesting. I'm hoping that there's an overhaul on a lot of planets where they're adding a bunch of this cool shit like that kind of diversifies the exploration

[01:17:02] even though the game is not really built for exploration. But I'm just glad that they're supporting it a little bit more. In fact, I think you were gonna say before I interrupted you, that they literally today as of us recording dropped more shit.

[01:17:15] So they added the creation kit. So there's mod tools in the game now. I think that's gonna be all paid and stuff, unfortunately. But I mean, like if you wanna support modders then I mean, like that's an interesting way to do those kinds of things. It really is.

[01:17:26] And I think that this game, I think Starfield probably could be massively improved by really cool mods. And I mean, of course, like the Bethesda games are defined by the mods too. There was like some of the best story lines

[01:17:39] that you could even possibly play were fan made in Skyrim. Like I played like an ice elf like thing and I delved deep into like the earth of Tamriel. It was really, really cool. There's there's tons of stuff to go check that out.

[01:17:51] So excited to see what the community is gonna do with Starfield continuing forward. Fallout 76, not even gonna cover it. Don't care about that game. But happy for people. That's what I'm saying. That was so cool. I did see that. Yeah, I didn't see that.

[01:18:05] I saw 76 and I said ignored. Well, it was like right at the end. It was like, oh, and by the way, you can play as a cool now. Bye bye. And I'm like, wait, that was the coolest part. Yeah, cool. We got Claire Obscur.

[01:18:19] Is that really what it is? I think Claire Obscur. Claire Obscur Expedition 33. Brother, that's really cool. It's persona. It's a persona, American persona game that just looks like metaphor refantasio but looks really good. Looks really good. We're eating, brother. We're eating. We are eating so hard right now.

[01:18:39] I was looking at it. I was like damn, this game is pretty. And then I saw the gameplay. I was like, whoa. Yo, that was the exact same thing because I was like, oh cool, this is cool. It'll be a cool, like a third person, whatever.

[01:18:48] And then I saw the fucking turn base and I was like, whoa, wait a minute. Are you joking? Yeah. I'm being pumped right now. They caught off with this one. This and several more that were like kind of later on down the list.

[01:19:00] I was like, this looks amazing. I wanna play this right now. So I am so excited to see when that comes out. That looked like it had a 2025 date. So looking forward to that. South of midnight came out and I was really interested

[01:19:14] to see what this game is gonna do. And it looks fun. It looks really cool from the gameplay. Because yeah, last time we only really saw like a small clip it is as far as like what kind of like story visuals CGI.

[01:19:24] But yeah, the gameplay I thought looks really nice. I was expecting it to be a 2D game. I don't know why it just seemed like that. I can see why. Because of the artistic direction on it for sure. They have that really weird.

[01:19:35] It's kind of like this stuttery. It's the 2D art. It's like an artistic. Exactly. It's like very. It's the spider verse. The adventure, the spider verse. Yeah, exactly. Exactly like that. It's perfectly. The thing was, okay, so this is one of those moments

[01:19:47] where I was getting pissed off looking at the live chat but everyone's like, this is awful. Why is it running at 10 frames per second? Why would they show this? I'm like, you fucking moron. It's an artistic. Like literally everything around it is moving at 60 frames.

[01:19:59] Do you not see that? Like do you not realize that that's what's going on? Oh, it makes me so mad. People are so dumb. Yeah. I mean, if you don't like it, that's fine. I don't care if you don't like it

[01:20:09] but it's not running at 10 frames a second. It's like running out supposed to run. It was interesting too because of the camera angle. It looked a little bit farther panned back in terms of the top down isometric nature of the gameplay style.

[01:20:21] And I never played Hog Leg, Hogwarts Legacy but it looked kind of like a similar format in terms of the way that they had that third person action design. As well as yeah, a little bit farther back

[01:20:35] and it kind of remind me a little bit of the newer again, Assassin's Creed style camera system in terms of the third person action combat. So looking forward to see where that goes. It kind of gave me vibes of Beyond Good and Evil. I don't know why

[01:20:48] but at the whole time I was kind of like the dialogue and like how it's just playing out. For sure. No, it's got a lot of that energy to it. And it was also for spoken kind of like the unsung game of 2023. Did it come out last year?

[01:21:03] Did it come out this year? Don't remember. Is it doesn't really matter? It's like a question. It wasn't this year. For spoken, like the PlayStation. For spoken or like forgotten. Yeah, I think for spoken. Yeah, but yeah, definitely kind of that similar combat system there.

[01:21:16] They showed Will's favorite game of all time World of Warcraft, The War Within which William, what was this again? Like do you know what this was? Is it an expansion? Is it just another, a new expansion that they had? Cause they had like a compilation

[01:21:29] of all of the WoW trailers kind of throughout history through the annals of time dating back to the old ages in the early 2000s. But yeah, we moved on and then they showed gameplay from Metal Gear Solid Delta which looked surprisingly good. I don't know.

[01:21:46] What did you guys think? It's Konami. I will keep my opinions until the game comes out because they can't be trusted. But it looks really good and they showed Big Boss and I was like, awesome. So good. Yeah. I didn't know that Big Boss was a woman.

[01:22:00] Yeah, she looks so good. I don't know why I didn't assume it was just a woman. I'm not sure, you know, the patriarchy and all that but no, it looked really cool. And I told Will, I was like, straight up like if this is ass,

[01:22:12] I'm never playing a Metal Gear Solid game but if this is good, I'm playing this and I'm playing all of the old ones. That's a hell of a pressure to put on a Kojima less Metal Gear Solid game. I understand if you went to any of those ones

[01:22:25] that he had in the ending. They don't have to create a new one. You know? I mean, Silent Hill 2. That's what I'm saying, Silent Hill 2 is right there. It's right there. Yeah. But yeah, it looked really cool. And this is the first Metal Gear I ever played.

[01:22:40] I've never been a Metal Gear guy. They're too hard. They're too hard. But 5 is fun. But like all the other ones, I'm like, I had to hold left trigger and then slowly push in the right trigger and then hold square and the dude, what am I fucking doing?

[01:22:52] I just wanna shoot my gun. Let me shoot my gun game. But I always thought they were really, really cool. So I'm really looking forward to this. And now that I'm an adult, I'm a big boy. Hopefully they'll have modernized controls

[01:23:04] so that I don't have to think hard when I'm playing it. Meanwhile, I'm over here going, oh, tank controls aren't that bad for Resident Evil. You just gotta get used to it. I'm a hypocrite, but I'm really excited for it. No, for sure. We had Snake Eater.

[01:23:18] So very, very hyped for that. Shout out to all of the Metal Gear fans out there. Looking forward to it. We had a Sea of Thieves. Shout out to Daniel. Looks like they had a new update. Big for that community. We also had Flintlock, The Siege of Dawn,

[01:23:31] which looked incredible. Another one that was third person action game. You thought it was Greedfall 2 and you were getting pissed at it. I was like, what is this Greedfall trash? And then the trailer slowly expanded out and I was like, wait, this shit looks good as hell.

[01:23:46] We're so back. It's a completely new IP. Don't even know who's making this game, but it's called Flintlock, Siege of Dawn. It looks like a third person action combat female protagonist, really, really cool. They are doing the thing where they're combining magic with swordplay. It looks neat.

[01:24:02] Did this do anything for you guys? A gun. Oh, it's a gun. It was a gun. I hope there's a gun. Okay, yeah, yeah. Flintlock, so yeah. You would only hope. So yeah. Spoilers, there will be guns. Yeah. The Siege. Let me, I'm looking it up right now

[01:24:16] just to put a trailer in the background. It look good. Is it July 18th? This year. Holy smokes. That's incredible. Yep, they even say in the trailer, which I don't know how I like people. I understand when the community kind of coins games a certain way.

[01:24:31] I don't know how I feel when these developers coin something as like a soul's light or a soul's like, because I'm just like, let us make that distinction maybe. I don't know. It seems a little, it's not necessarily pretentious. That's not the right word.

[01:24:43] I don't want it to sound like that's what I'm thinking of, but it just seems like a, like you're trying to label it when you, it'd be better off if you kind of let the community be like, oh, this is similar to this kind of game

[01:24:52] or that kind of game when they're explaining it. But it still looks good regardless. So I think between that and this character that you're playing as has like an animal companion that they also use when they're doing their platforming, which looks really fun. Yeah.

[01:25:06] You gotta have your Star Wars cute thing next to you whenever you're doing your stuff. I just want you guys to know. You know you missed that Star Wars game, right Nick? When we talked about Summer Games Fest, your favorite outlaws, you completely over with them.

[01:25:19] Which also, didn't it also have a cute thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It has a little, like it looks like a little axolotl friend-o that's gonna follow you around. Yeah, it's really cute. I'm, my girlfriend's gonna buy that game and so I'm gonna mooch off of her

[01:25:32] and see if it's good or not. So I'm not giving Ubisoft my money, but. If I win the lottery. If it hits, it hits. If I win the lottery, I'm going to make a game studio and I'm taking all the cute companion sidekicks

[01:25:42] in all of these different franchises and just making a Smash Brothers game with just these guys. Incredible. That's a 10 out of 10 idea. I want you guys to know also and you'll appreciate this specifically, Nave, but when I was looking at the Flintlock Siege of Dawn trailer,

[01:25:56] there was a Days of Play Sony advertisement listing the PS5s at $400 which is the lowest we have ever seen PS5s. They saw the showcase and they were like, oh, we gotta get them back. We gotta get them back boys. Dude, the whole show,

[01:26:13] and like people were on the side going, dude, I'm selling my PlayStation. Why do I even have a PlayStation? I'm like, wait a minute, hold on. These games are coming to PlayStation as well. Don't worry, Xbox is third party, remember? Exactly, remember,

[01:26:24] remember Xbox is going third party publisher now. So yeah, no, it's very, very funny. Moving on here, we got another really cool RTS, the Age of Mythology retold. I was talking to Will about this. I was like, this is definitely Civ 7. This is Civ 7, right?

[01:26:41] And I was like, oh cool, you get to play as gods in there, but no, it's Age of Mythology. Are you a big RTS fan, Nave? Yeah, this game is fucking awesome. This game is, it's just like how they remade Age of Empires 2.

[01:26:51] They're gonna do that to this game. Age of Mythology is a game that existed already. It was like the first two seconds. I'm like, is this Age of Mythology? No way, nevermind. And then it kept going. So the thing is like when you see Zeus,

[01:27:03] or what is his name? I think it's Zeus. And like, I don't remember, Thunder Boy. Yeah, Thunder Man. Yeah, so when I saw him, I'm like, oh, this is Age of, because that's what he looks like in the game. So I mean, fuck. So cool. I like this.

[01:27:15] Yeah, it's just gonna be Age of Empires 2, but you get to have Minotaurs and shit. So it's even better. I was telling Will earlier, I was like, I am such, I am a slut for Command and Conquer. I am a Command and Conquer shill.

[01:27:28] I will put out for Command and Conquer. And we haven't gotten those games in a while. I don't know if we ever will again, but like I was telling him, I need to play Civilization because I have never really properly dove into a Civilization game.

[01:27:40] But this also looks like right up my alley where you very quickly build up a base. You create an empire. You fight against other gods and stuff is so cool. Yeah, Civ isn't really like that. It's more, it's turn-based, but you skipped it also in Summer Game Sets.

[01:27:53] There was a Civ 6 announcement. There's Civ 7, I mean. Yeah, Civ 7. I did skip that. Yeah, I should have included that there. It was literally just like, hey, we're making this. Don't worry. And then they left. I don't know. Oh, okay.

[01:28:03] But yeah, so these games are Age of Empires and Age of Mythology are way closer to Command and Conquer than they're basically brother and sister, like those franchises. Oh, interesting. Cause I think this game's coming out soon, but if you want to play,

[01:28:16] you can download these on Xbox, Age of Empires 2 and their co-op. Yes. So. Hey, have you done a Civ episode? Age of Empires. We have done Civ 6, I think. And then we have done Age of Empires 2, but Age of Empires 2 was so long ago that fuck it.

[01:28:32] Our fucking first three years might as well get wiped off the map. I don't give a fuck about those episodes. Fair enough. We can do the redux, the two version 2.0. It's like us with the Dead Space episode. We just do whatever, man.

[01:28:44] But yeah, no, so we went on Perfect Dark, Joanna Dark, more like Joanna the Goat. Yeah, so very, very excited for that one as we had already popped off for. They had a Diablo 4 vessel of hatred. Will was very unimpressed by this

[01:28:59] and he was also mad at the character that he played in the game, which was also a main character. The whole thing she did in the main story. Nobody asked her to do that. Yeah, that's spoiling everything. But yeah, and now they're like,

[01:29:08] oh, you have to go now save her. I'm like, neat. I'm glad I have to go do this. The thing with Blizzard is that, man, their cinematics are cool looking. Yeah, they are. Like the World of Warcraft one too. I'm like, ooh.

[01:29:20] I already saw some great Twitter threads of people talking about, oh, and you have that little hangnail and you go to pull it and then it cuts to her fucking arm and it's like splitting that. Oh God, yeah, no, it's awful. Awful, yeah, no, it was like,

[01:29:33] I was like, she's cooked, right? She's apparently not. This is another one of the fucking chat going, woke main character games, sweet baby. I'm like, what the fuck? You make your own character Diablo. Do you not even know what the fuck you're talking about?

[01:29:47] They can't make a game without a black female prot- Oh, like shut up. Shut the fuck up. Bio rope, hangars. You can hit my hand. I don't care. I'm so over. I don't give a fuck about turns of service. Spotify suck my dick. I don't care.

[01:30:01] Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on, hold on. I'm trying to get my bag still. Hold on a minute. Okay, sorry. Will's not associated with us. Sign me. I'll believe it. Sign me, Spotify, sign me. Oh God. It's just gonna be Capcom after Capcom.

[01:30:14] That's all it's gonna be down there. Anyway, moving on. Vessel of Hatred, that's coming to Diablo for another expansion. Pop off, get your loot grind going. Fable looks freaking amazing. And I am so excited. Playground games. The Goat. You know, I loved Forza Horizon 4 and Forza Horizon 5.

[01:30:32] I loved arcade racers. I just love those kind of games and they were beautiful and I'm so happy that you see this quality in stills and fable. It looks like they're nailing the comedy. So I'm just hoping that the gameplay

[01:30:45] and the RPG and the combat that's like involved in here is also up to par for 2024, 25. Do we have a release date for this? I don't think we've seen a release date. I don't think no release date. Also, I don't even think there was gameplay in this either.

[01:30:59] So still a little worried. It looked like a little bit of gameplay. A little concerned. Sprinkled in there. Like cinematic gameplay. Like dev camera gameplay. Like when you're doing your finishers. Like a couple of the finishers look like they were happening as you were fighting somebody

[01:31:10] but then you would finish them off with your sword. Yeah, it wasn't like Perfect Dark, which is a game that I thought if we saw, it's like if you would have been like fables here and Perfect Dark, which one's gonna get gameplay?

[01:31:21] I'm like a million, a thousand dollars down on fable. And then they're like, no, Perfect Dark actually gets the gameplay. Like what? Are you insane? Which if you told me fable and Perfect Dark were gonna both appear, I would've been like, you're a fucking moron.

[01:31:35] But I don't believe you. We're gonna get Gears of War maybe if we're lucky. Do you guys have a favorite fable out of the three that have come out so far? The first one. The first one? Yeah, the first one. You think is best?

[01:31:47] Specifically the first one with DLC. Try to remember the Lost something. Lost chapters. There you go, the Lost chapters DLC. I remember. That's just different. I'm still chasing that high from that game. That game was so good. Yeah, but I never put down fable two and threes co-op.

[01:32:03] Dude, anything with co-op, it's just like, oh, this is just better for... I'm just having fun just yet you're here. I'm happy that we're having fun together now. I wasn't a fan of the leashed co-op. That's the only thing I don't like about them

[01:32:15] is they have you stuck together in a certain circle. You can't run off to one side of the map and someone else run off to another side of the map. So interesting. Moving on, we got Fragpunk, which looks like another 5v5 hero shooter

[01:32:28] that is implementing a card system. So y'all are eating this year. Y'all multiplayer fans. Y'all Twitch players out here. You are very much eating, so you have something to choose from. I still, I think that this, the design here is very much more impactful.

[01:32:43] I love what they're doing here. Much more than Concord. Very stylized. It's super stylized. And we talk about having more than Marvel rivals. A special unique thing. It's, this looks really unique where you introduce like hacks or like cheats.

[01:32:53] So it's like, oh, my enemies now have big head mode. So they're eating food. Dude, I saw big head mode. I was like, yo! Oh yeah, that's cool. That's cool. So I think that, you know, there's space for this.

[01:33:02] And that's why this, having them in this whole, you know, like, oh, there's this shooter. There's that shooter. There's this shooter. Isn't a big deal as long as they all have a unique pull. As long as they have a draw. Yes, they're kind of eating each other's,

[01:33:13] you know, lunch so to speak, right? You can only play so many shooters in a given time. But sometimes I'm like, hey, I want to hop on Marvel rivals. And then other times I want to go play around with frag punt.

[01:33:22] Like there should be times when I'm playing with certain people versus other people. So I'm excited. I'm excited to see what they bring to the table. Now am I going to get it day one? Probably not. But if it shows enough interest and I get enough FOMO,

[01:33:33] maybe I'll hop into it. Is it going to be paid? It's going to at least be on Game Pass if it is paid. But I feel like it's probably, it's Nettys. Ew. So it's gotta be free. Immediately. Ew. Absolutely. But yeah, so it is free to play.

[01:33:50] Yeah, confirmed. One of the most interesting games that I've seen this entire slate of summer showcases for 2024 we got is the next one that showed, which is Winter's Burrow. I was like, are we getting Redwall the video game? Cause fuck yes. This one is incredible.

[01:34:07] It is a Redwall is a kids, it's like a kid's fantasy novel series. It's kind of like, it's your pre Harry Potter essentially it's like, but yeah, like you play as like a little mouse and you have, he like is a little mouse kingdom

[01:34:20] and you go and you make friends with the rabbits. You fight against like the crows and the possums and that sort of thing. It's really, really cool. And it was one of my beloved like, you know, novels are just like fantasy universes that I loved as a kid.

[01:34:32] And so seeing this year, I was like, oh yeah. And it seems to have that kind of like 2D visual design. It looks like it's coming straight out of the page of an art book. You're going down, you're not really sure what's happening.

[01:34:42] It seems like you're traveling the land as this young mouse hero character. You got a little sword strapped to your back and you're just trying to make it. So it looks very, very interesting. And as I was watching this, I was like, where is Plucky Squire?

[01:34:54] Where is the little devil inside? I know little devil inside is going through a little bit of development hell right now. But yeah, so this looks great. I would love to see this. Don't know if it's got a date attached to it or not,

[01:35:07] but I'm very much interested to see like when that's gonna come out. So I'm just hoping Winterboro does not get a watershed down treatment where it just gets incredibly violent. Like out of love for you. Yeah. Well, you know what, whenever I was looking at it,

[01:35:24] I was thinking it looked a lot like the Don't Starve game. Like a lot of everything about it looked like Dark Starve. So I didn't know if it was like just the next game from that dev studio, because it's been a long time since that game came out.

[01:35:34] Yeah, super long time. Yeah, Nave, you posted something in the chat here from our favorite Twitter influencer, good old Rhino talking about Asian studios doing the only one delivering this generation. Very exciting. Yeah, where Winsmet lost. This is what I'm talking about. Everybody's just trying to be Sekiro.

[01:35:55] And it's like, you don't have to, except Phantom Blade. That wasn't where I said it. Yeah, those six games that look the same when you had a billion more games to choose from. Yeah. Is that not like, is... They look like one for one. It's like...

[01:36:08] Yeah, it's just like, you know, it's a dark fantasy feudalistic Japan or Chinese universe. Like it's, I don't know, take or leave it. If you love it, if you like it, you do, you don't, you don't. And then we had a whole slew of sweet baby ink games

[01:36:22] that come out to us. You know, Mixtape and Life is Strange, both Life is Strange double exposure. It looks like Max is returning from Life is Strange 1. So shout out to the fans from that game. I loved Life is Strange 1. I thought it was the best one.

[01:36:36] I started True Colors, haven't finished it, but I've heard good things about that one as well. Mixtape looks like, it looks like the greatest escape one that was the other Annapurna game where you play as like the Bob Dylan wannabe did not like that game at all.

[01:36:52] But I know there are people out there that do so, you know, shout out to Mixtape, but hopefully it does. There's an update for ESO in Microsoft Flight Simulator. Have you played Microsoft Flight Simulator at all, Nave? Is it any good?

[01:37:04] I liked it a lot, but there's not a lot to do whenever I first played it. It was, I played it when it first came out. So I flew around the Himalayas and shit like that. I flew around islands. I was like, man, this is cool.

[01:37:14] And then I deleted it cause it's 3000 gigabytes. It's a million gigs. That you can't play any other game. The most feel out of it playing on a beefy PC. Like even playing on the Series X, it's nowhere near as pretty as like the videos

[01:37:25] that they show online just because you know, you don't have the 3090, 100% spinning in the background. I've had the 27 core fucking. Yeah, fucking Mountain Dew cooled, ripper thread. So literally master chief blowing into the thing. Like he's just fucking. Fucking jacked into this shit like cyberpunk.

[01:37:45] I'm doing a brain dance playing a, God damn Microsoft Flight Sim. Dude, but this new version of Microsoft Flight Sim looks incredible because of all the, like I was saying, whenever we talked about this on the show, I don't remember if we did an episode on it.

[01:37:57] But like, I just, there was nothing to do but fly around. But now you can do all kinds of shit. It's actually kind of insane. Like you can like put out fires. You can deliver crates. Like it's fucking Saints Row.

[01:38:08] It's like, there's a whole bunch of random things that apparently you can just do. And you can fly around Taylor Swift on a private jet or something. You take VIPs back and forth and like Jesus. They're all giving me jobs. Yeah. But it's, it is crazy.

[01:38:24] That game is insane even though it's not for me. Like I love like looking at it. But it is hard to play. It is a difficult game. Absolutely. So moving on here, we got everybody's favorite, favorite Elder Scrolls, the Bethesda Experience, the Elder Scrolls Online Gold Road expansion

[01:38:43] looks real good. And this is all said with the extreme dripping sarcasm. If you can tell. This is awful. I don't understand why we're still supporting the game. I don't know. I feel like we don't have enough listeners out there that are into. Let the MMO rock.

[01:38:57] If you can survive next to World of Warfare for this long, then you know, you got a little sauce. You got something going on. Yeah. Next up. Yeah, that's true. Then finally we got more, it looks like cinematic slash gameplay footage of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

[01:39:12] And I'll tell you, as juxtaposed to, you know, fucking Sony's bullshit Silent Hill 2 game, every time I see this game, I get more and more hyped for it. Cause I am an indie guy. Yeah, dude. I am an indie stan. The people they got to win over

[01:39:26] are people who don't like Indiana Jones. Me. And so it's like, I watched this one. I audibly laughed whenever there was a part where there was something sliding down and the indie and the bad guy are fighting. And then they both look and they go,

[01:39:40] and they just let their friend get hit and then fly off to the side. And then they're both like, yeah, and then indie punches them and they're laughing like, woo, that was close. I'm like, look, it looks dumb. I like this. It makes me want to play Uncharted.

[01:39:54] Like I love Uncharted. I just want to play this game now. I really do. I had zero hype at the beginning when he got announced. And then like, I've just been slowly climbing and that's exactly what they need to do. And Machine Games has an established pedigree

[01:40:07] with the Wolfenstein games that they came out with like earlier at the tail end, the Xbox One generation, the beginning of the Xbox Series Gen. So I'm super excited for that to see how it pans out. I feel like if it's good,

[01:40:18] it has a contender for action game of the year conversation or first person shooter game of the year conversation. So definitely excited for that one. Again, we mentioned this earlier when we talked about it at Summer Games Festival, we saw Mecha Break.

[01:40:32] It looks like an incredible mech game. I was getting like, I was like shaking just watching it. It looks like such a twitchy ass fucking, it looks like Star Fox. It looks so good. Yeah, it looks like Star Fox combined with Armored Core.

[01:40:44] And it was like, you need to just stop playing and buy Armored Core 6 already and play that game. And I was like, oh, I really wish I had a good, was it Gundam Wing game? And I was like, Armored Core is right there. Yeah, it is right there.

[01:40:55] And you're 100% right, Will. I just need to buck up and play that game. You know kind of- Is it coming to Game Pass? Mecha Break? Mecha Break, that's a good question. May, it's definitely third party. So it's kind of up in the air,

[01:41:07] but the hope is the Xbox is gonna throw the bands on them, bands to make them dance onto Xbox Game Pass. I'll buy this game. And it looks like a lot of fucking fun. Next up is the Wu Chang Fallen Feathers or Wu Chang Fallen Feathers,

[01:41:22] which is another one of your Wu Long Fallen Dynasty, you know, Rise of Ronin styled, you know, your girl in dark fantasy, Japanese, Chinese, East Asian universe fighting demons. So definitely shout out to the Soulsborne fans out there, you got more food to eat

[01:41:41] after you beat Lords of the Fallen. She looks like a mixture between Taki from Soul Calibur and Kasumi from Dead or Alive. Like, I don't know if that's some, that hit for somebody listening. Somebody listening was like, oh my God. Oh my God, he fucking nailed it.

[01:41:54] He nailed it. She's got this cool arm flower thing. I don't know. Yeah, it's like a wing that she's got on her left arm or something. It looks really sick. And then we get to see more of a vowed. I was distracted during this trailer.

[01:42:05] Did this do anything for you guys? That was completely- Amazing. I'm so happy. Well, this is the thing, at this point, every time- Xbox is gonna do good at the end of this year. At this point, every single time Xbox Studios popped up,

[01:42:15] I was like, gears of war, gears of war, gears of war. And so when this came on, I was like, oh, what the fuck is this? This is bullshit. And then I was like, oh, it's a vowed. Okay, I guess I'm okay.

[01:42:25] But yeah, cause I was like, oh, God damn it, ESO. God damn it, flight simulator, where's gears? And then a vowed, I'm like, okay, no, I'll calm down. I just got all my attention. It looks really good. And so they didn't show a whole lot.

[01:42:39] It was mostly kind of like gameplay and stuff, which I'm glad for. I don't want to see anything more of this game. I'm like completely sold on it. I'm like a huge stan, like how Will is for Capcom. I'm a huge stan for whatever,

[01:42:50] whoever makes this game, which is not a good- Obsidian. Obsidian, that's it, yeah. I love them so much, I forgot their name. Did you enjoy the outer worlds? Do you like that game? Yeah, I loved it. I like it more than Starfield.

[01:43:04] I need to give that game a chance because I started it and never finished it, but definitely have heard decent things about that game. So I'm willing to give it a shot. It's like Hubworld, it's like Hubworld fallout. So it feels really good.

[01:43:16] So there's like one of the things I don't like is these huge open expansive places that I have to explore and shit, which is probably why I like Starfield because you don't really explore in that game. You kind of just fast travel everywhere,

[01:43:25] which is, I don't understand the- Nevermind, I'm going to go on a tangent. But like the- That's okay. I really like the Hubworld system that they've got going on there. It's nice and concise. Everything is kind of close together so you're never wandering aimlessly. Yeah, that's great.

[01:43:40] Because it's that central ship and then you can go to where you need to. And the game is charming. Like they have characters that have good interactions with the NPCs and stuff. So it's kind of like the old Bioware feel.

[01:43:55] I was going to say Jade Empire, but that's not right. I've got the wrong game in my head. I was about to say don't get me excited. Yeah. So the next game that we got was like kind of mind-breaking. I wasn't sure how to feel about it

[01:44:07] when we first saw it. I was like, what are we going to get? Is this a Doctor Who game? We're getting this like, you know, middle of England universe with mecha tanks but then we're getting like castles and then there's like fucking aliens

[01:44:22] and like test labs and a bow and arrow shooting and zombies and stuff. There's just all over the place. This game is called Atomfall. It looks really, really interesting. Another first person shooter, just you know, Xbox getting them shooters into the slate because they need them.

[01:44:37] It's this is this is being great survival game. So it's really interesting. I feel like they just slapped a lot of different genres and things together and they were like, let's see if it works. So yeah, threw it out of the wall. Let's see what stick

[01:44:48] but it's coming to game pass Xbox and PC. I was thinking of the whole time I was watching it. I was thinking of Atomic Heart. Same. That's what Will was talking about. He was, I was like, is this like an Atomic Heart? You know, DLC expansion.

[01:44:59] I was like, there's no way. It feels like a less closed. Maybe because the game didn't do very well but I was thinking it's like a less interesting looking Atomic Heart, but it looks like it's probably gonna play a lot better. Like maybe it looks more generic

[01:45:14] which means it's probably just kind of be like normal Call of Duty controls. You just running around doing stuff but I don't know, maybe it'll impress me. And I think this one is coming to game pass for sure. So yeah. All right boys, tell me

[01:45:27] are we jumping into Assassin's Creed shadows day one or not? I'm what do you guys think? They treat you guys. They trick me out of me. They trick the shit out of me too. Because I was watching it. It looks like Gosei Tsushima. It was crazy.

[01:45:39] No, you know what I thought it was? I thought Tenchu was coming back. Really? I was like, is this Tenchu? Like at first I was like, dude, I'm getting, I think I audibly said out loud I'm starting to miss World War II because like I'm so tired

[01:45:53] of these fucking Asian feudal Japan games. But then I was like, wait a minute, Tenchu? And then. He doesn't mean like that. He doesn't mean like that. Not like that. Tenchu were like, let's bring back World War II. Yeah, let's bomb Javit. Like, I'm Japanese everyone, it's okay.

[01:46:08] He named us Japanese. Spotify, please. It's fine. Please, I'm not affiliated to Spotify. I need some money. Okay, so in my mind, what it was is that there was a time in gaming where everything was about World War II and people were just tired of it.

[01:46:20] And then it became modern warfare and then yada, yada, yada. Now we're kind of in this area where everything is Sekiro, Gosei Tsushima. There's like in this entire last, this entire weekend, there was like maybe nine games set in this one setting.

[01:46:34] Like it's just really, really popular right now. And so whenever I saw this, I was fatigued immediately. Saw the ninja gameplay. It was like, ooh, she's got the kunai on the fucking rope thing. I like that. And then I saw the samurai, Yasuke.

[01:46:49] And I was like, oh, this is a Sasage Kure. They tricked me. How dare they? The traversal looks so good though. Like the parkour is back. The combat looks incredible. And it's like the stealth seems like it's super viable in this game.

[01:47:02] And it seems viable in a way that it's like, this is bringing back to one of my favorite, beloved pre RPG Assassin's Creed Syndicate. You get your grapple hooks. You're running around this cool setting. You have the two dual protagonists that you're playing as.

[01:47:18] So I feel like this is a return form for me. Of all of the Ubisoft games that we know about right now, I would be willing to pay money for this day one, assuming that it doesn't come to game pass. Or if it's not available through EA play.

[01:47:32] For me, I don't need to see gameplay, I can imagine. But I just want them to open the pause menu. I want them to open the pause menu, go to the map, go to the inventory. I wanna see what is going on. Because if I see the fucking,

[01:47:45] the katana of infinite anguish with plus three attack on it, I'm gonna go, ah, I'm out. You know exactly what you're gonna see. It's gonna be there. You're gonna be picking up different items and weapons and all that. Just like any kind of Ubisoft game,

[01:47:58] you're gonna have to go climb your towers and look at stuff. I was like, it's gonna be the same old, same old. That being said, it does look very nice. I did like the scenes with the Aske specifically with his fighting where he's kicking people into walls.

[01:48:09] And he's got the massive club. I was like, his combat looks really fun. Which I know combat isn't like the whole draw for the Assassin's Creed. At least in the old days and the modern days has been kind of 50-50. But I do like what I saw.

[01:48:21] I'm not gonna get a day one. But I do like what I saw. Yeah, I'm definitely waiting for reviews. But I'm wondering if you can play the whole game as the ninja or if you can play the whole game as- Like if you could do the same-

[01:48:32] You could do that in Syndicate. I think so. You could play the whole game as one protagonist or the other and then they'll show up on in certain cut scenes. But then it'll go back to whoever you want. Did you, but did it change gameplay?

[01:48:42] Like is it like Dishonored 2 where like if you're Corvo, you have like a completely different skill set than what's in- Yeah, you have a different skill set-ish. But you're doing similar things in Syndicate and then you're gonna end up in the same place in the story.

[01:48:54] Like it doesn't really make the main story. If I could play Assassin's Creed Japan, I don't know what it's called. If you could play the Japanese Assassin's Creed as just the ninja girl and just have a Tenchu experience, I'm like very interested.

[01:49:09] But if they force me to switch between, then I'm like, I'll see how people receive it. Because I'm not totally off of it. I'm so burnt out on Assassin's Creed. That's totally understandable and I get where you're coming from on that. I would say that if anything,

[01:49:23] in the tutorial sections, they'd probably teach you how to fight as both protagonists. But once it's opened up, you can just get to choose which one you wanna play as more. Is what I'm hoping for is what it seems like. But again, exactly as you said,

[01:49:35] we'll see what the reviews are gonna be like when it comes out. Cause that's a lot of replayability. If they're both in every mission and you just are like, she's always up high and starting stealth and he's always down low going through the front door

[01:49:47] and they're just, that's how each mission goes, then you can just replay the mission and then as Yosuke, if you decide that you really like the gameplay, then you're like, that's a good way to approach that. But we're talking about Ubisoft, so it's probably not.

[01:49:59] It's not gonna happen. Yeah, it's true. Let's move on and talk about Stalker 2 Heart of Chernobyl. You look good. Fucking go. You look good. Surprisingly good. I'm telling you right now, I think this might be one of the best shooters that are gonna come out this year.

[01:50:16] Shout out to the team getting it done too with everything going on. Especially with everything that's going on in Ukraine. I was like, let's not even talk about that. But no, yeah, definitely under the arduous circumstances of everything that's going on with the Ukrainian war

[01:50:29] with Russia right now, it's an incredible feat that we're gonna get this game and it's gonna come out and hopefully it's gonna go out to those developers and their families and help them out and make sure that they're safe and everything's good over there. But yeah, very excited.

[01:50:42] It looks really, really cool. I love this idea of, I never played the original Stalker, but this concept of running around the exclusion zone and fighting mutated creatures or other people in there, it looks very, very aesthetic and stylish.

[01:50:57] And so I'm excited to see where it plays as. What it plays like. It's just something about nuked Russia that I just love. And I don't know what that says about me. Yeah. Like just Russia seems so nuked. Like it seems like so appropriate nuked for some reason.

[01:51:12] Yeah, post-apocalyptic Russia, absolutely. And then we got the star of the show. And I think probably the thing that most people were waiting for or hoping for that popped off and what something, we got Gears of War E-Day, the emergence day of Gears of War.

[01:51:30] When it was coming out, Will and I were wondering what the name of this was gonna be. And he was like, is this gonna be the Pendulum Wars? Is this gonna happen pre the first one? Which obviously this is gonna be like immediately

[01:51:41] as of the locusts that come out. But where are you at with this name and where do you think this is gonna fit in and what do you think it's gonna do for the lore? I'm so fucking phenomenal. Like I literally, when it was,

[01:51:54] I was showing, I was like, oh my God, it's Gears, this is great. Now everyone who's listened to our show knows that I had a very tumultuous relationship with the ending of Gears of War V. I had no idea. And so I was just bitching constantly.

[01:52:05] How are they gonna come out? They have to have, I'm not gonna spoil it, but it's like there has to be, for the first time in all Gears of War, there's a choice that affects what happens in the story. And so it's like, well, what's canon?

[01:52:17] That means people are gonna be invalidated, yada, yada, yada, I'm complaining. Doesn't matter. They see that as well, because a lot of people complain about this ending. So it's like, they're like, you know what? Fuck Gears 6, let's go Gears the prequel. And oh my God.

[01:52:31] And so whenever I saw the beginning, like the fight at the beginning, I saw the locusts, I'm like, that's a locust. That's kind of weird. And I'm like, oh, it's Marcus. And then I looked and I'm like, that's not Marcus. Who is that?

[01:52:42] I was like, is that young Marcus? I was like, look to Will, I was like, this is Marcus before he was locked up, isn't it? I saw the bandana and I was like, yeah. And so, well, he didn't have a bandana on. That's the thing.

[01:52:51] He has a full head of hair. He barely has any facial hair. It's literally young Marcus. I thought I got knocked off under the bed. He's got his soul patch. That's the belly. No, no, what got knocked under the bed was his gun. He had a retro Lancer.

[01:53:00] And so the reason why is because at the end, Dom, like he kills the locust and then Dom shows up and gives him his bandana. Hell yeah. And then that's when I was like, I was like, because you don't know that it's Dom, but Mad World starts playing.

[01:53:16] Marcus grabs the bandana, puts it on, and then the camera turns around and it's young Dominique Santiago. And I fell to my knees in real life. Streaming down, yeah. I was kneeling at my TV like it was an altar. I was so shaken up.

[01:53:32] And as soon as I saw Dominique, I realized that actually is Marcus Fenix. And then there's a TV that's like, the war is over. Emergency Day ends, begins the pendulum wars. Oh my God, there's so much fucking cool shit

[01:53:42] going on in that trailer that I'm shaking right now. I'm so fucking hyped for this game. I can't imagine. I'm excited. I was speechless when I saw it. I mean, I'm a huge Gears of War fan. My relationship is weird because I loved the first three games.

[01:54:01] I wasn't as like, I feel like the narrative design or just kind of like the way that the story went for one, two and three, the two and three specifically was not necessarily the tone or the route that I was expecting after Gears 1

[01:54:14] and not to really get too deep in the weeds there. But I kind of do appreciate how they wrapped up all the character arcs by the end of three. And I was like, okay, this is a great way to just leave the game, leave the industry.

[01:54:24] And then we got the, what was the Damon Baird game that everybody needed? Judgment. Yeah, it was like- Made by a different team. Yeah, and it was a completely different team that came forward. And so that kind of started the rocky edge. And then four came out.

[01:54:36] I actually liked four. I'm not sure how people felt about that game generally. I know it was introduced a lot of JD and Kate and all of the new characters for the upgraded thing, but- The Gears of War 4 is, it's the same situation as Star Wars went through

[01:54:53] with the first sequel movie, where it was just extremely safe, basically like a beat by beat of like what has come before. Episode four. Yeah. Except they made the egregious error of making most of your enemies robots. Yeah. The whole point of the game was the beautiful gore.

[01:55:11] Giblets. Yeah, some same chunks. Where are my giblets? I need the giblets. Yeah, I was just like, great. Oil. And then here I am spilling oil in 2024. That's right. That's right. So the contrarian cap shell strikes again. So we're here. But no, yeah, Gears 4 was interesting,

[01:55:29] but it didn't really move the needle for me. And then Gears 5, I started playing it. And then I started playing it co-op and then put it down halfway through. There was like a moment where Kate like starts seeing through the eyes of the not locust in that game.

[01:55:44] And I like put it down and it never went back. I know it's a spoiler, but like, fuck it. We're at two hours in this show. So only the real fans are gonna make it to this mark anyway. But yeah, so I thought that Gears 5 was interesting,

[01:55:56] but I'm right on the level with you, Naive, where it's like if they do Gears 6, they have to do something radically different where they have to somehow bring the pieces together because they did a ton of retconning. Like the locusts don't exist anymore,

[01:56:10] but they mutated into a new thing that they're not calling the locusts, but it really is just virtually the locust again. Well, you actually quit. You gotta beat Gears 5. I gotta beat it. You actually quit something. You quit before a lot of like important stories. Important story beats?

[01:56:26] Before the lore does. Like reveal themselves. Oh shit. Ah man, what's with the lore exposition at the end of the game? Stuff starts to make sense, but like honestly you don't need to play it before Gears prequel obviously. My goal before the end of 2024,

[01:56:40] beat Halo Infinite campaign, beat Gears 5. How about that? I feel like that's fair. But no, I'm very excited for that. And of course getting a Gears of War Emergence Day is incredible. I actually love the Gears universe so much. I read like the Anvil Gate novel

[01:56:57] and I know that there are a couple of other like books out there in the Gears universe that I love. And I read a ton of Halo lore books too. So it's like, that's kind of like, I'm that audience that's drawn for it.

[01:57:07] But yeah, very excited for it. This is a great showcase. Great way to finish the showcase. One of the biggest like question marks in the Gears of War timeline as well. So like, it's gonna be great to be able to explore that. There's a lot of questions

[01:57:18] because if everyone remembers at the beginning of Gears of War 1, Marcus Fenix is locked up for things that he did on Emergence Day. And I just explored a little bit in Gears of War 3. But I think that having a full fledged story take place during this area,

[01:57:31] especially like being able to like see all these characters that are gone. Oh man, especially I'm just, everyone's just talking about Dominique and like Dominique Santiago, all the people who are perpetual player twos have a unique fucking like love for Dominique. Same way with like Luigi.

[01:57:48] Like there's so many people who just directly relate to Dominique. And like he has a huge character arc throughout the original trilogy. He does, he does. It's one of the most important characters of like the Xbox 360 generation. We really think about like,

[01:58:02] the IP and character branding that's a part of that. And the callback to the original fucking marketing with the mad world. Oh yeah, with the mad world. As you see Dominique and like you realize who that is and the music's playing and that's like music that's very important

[01:58:18] like in Gears of War 3. Like, oh man, that evokes just such a visceral emotional reaction from me. So good. Crazy. It's so good, yeah. One last question before we kind of close out the show here. Do you think they bring back the original voice actors

[01:58:33] from Gears 1 through 3 to play these characters? I think they have to. Luckily a lot of Gears 2 and 3 characters like aren't introduced for a while. So I think that there might be some characters sprinkled in. Like, I wouldn't put it past them

[01:58:47] to maybe run into fucking all the car mines at one place. You know what I mean? Like even though I think they all have the same voice actor. I wanna see slightly younger Bernie. That'd be awesome. Yeah, that'd be cool. Or who's that?

[01:59:01] What is that guy's name with Betty? The guy with the cowboy hat. Oh shit. Dizzy. Dizzy. Dizzy. Dizzy was my guy. Holy shit. You know, maybe we'll see This is for the twins. before he gets moved into. Yeah. So yeah, it would be cool

[01:59:18] to have some fan service-y stuff going on. Like Xbox really needs good PR and having this insane fan service game for one of their biggest IPs was such a brilliant move. And I understand why they've kept this so close to their chest for so long.

[01:59:32] Because if everyone just knew that this was coming and then Tango Gameworks gets shut down, everyone's still mad. You know what I mean? Exactly. And that's what I'm glad that you brought up is because it was like, they needed to come into this winning back the fan base

[01:59:44] cause they had disenfranchised us by doing what they said that they wouldn't do or doing what they said that their plan, their system was designed to come bad against which was just, you know, being able to allow creators to create

[01:59:56] while not having to worry about the monetization aspect. But that's still a reality in 2024. But I think that like they're giving fans enough of what they want here that it's still great. I still want them, still want Phil Spencer to come out and apologize for shutting it down

[02:00:10] but that's never gonna happen. So it's fine. But yeah, no, very, very pleased. I would say in order of, you know, what I've obviously Xbox one the year in terms of everyone the summer in terms of the showcases and getting us excited

[02:00:24] for the couple of years to come. Sony, you know, following behind like way down on the list and the summer games fest after that. But yeah, I felt like this was a great slate. I guess we all agree Xbox was the best. Yep, by far.

[02:00:38] Well, so it's not even just us. So whenever you go to Jeff Keighley's thing, like his Twitter. The rankings. Yeah, his ratings. He always goes, hey, how did you guys feel about the thing? And it's like A through D, right? And so whenever you do the PlayStation one,

[02:00:53] I can't find the PlayStation one. I think it was C. Oh yeah, it was C. I remember voting on that. Yeah. And whenever you look at the summer showcase, that was a hard D and then hard D. And then whenever you look at the Xbox one,

[02:01:07] it is like 80% A. Like it is unanimous. People really, really liked this one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm looking at it right now and it looks like with 99,000 votes, 66.7% people gave it an A rating. Well deserved. They did a great job. Super well deserved.

[02:01:25] They had to come out swinging for sure. All right, gentlemen, before we close out the show, is there anything else that you wanna call out here? Anything that you wanna say to the people to make sure that they get into or check out before we end the show?

[02:01:39] I would say to anybody who's still looking at this year, that's like, hey, 2024 is a dead year. This year's trash. One Xbox hopefully showed you that's incorrect because we have things either coming out this year as well as 2025 to look forward to. But I implore you,

[02:01:54] I'm sure people have posted it a million times and I'm gonna reiterate it here just in case you have not heard it yet. Please get out of your bubble of sports games. Get out of your bubble of racers. Get out of your bubble of shooters

[02:02:05] and go play something indie. Go play Tales of Kinsera. Go play Animal Well. There are so many different fun games that have come out 2023, 2024 and will be in 2025 that gaming's nowhere near dead. This is a multi-billion dollar entertainment sphere and it's not going anywhere anytime soon.

[02:02:23] So please go out there, play these games, go have fun and get yourself involved in more than one or two different things. That's right. There's some sales on right now. Go to PlayStation sales, go to Xbox sales. Go buy a $400 PS5. You know they need the money.

[02:02:37] They need the support over there. It's looking pretty rough for Sony. Oh, did you see the new Xbox with the two terabyte? Did you see that? I did see that. Did you see that? I did see that. That looks sick.

[02:02:48] I was just saying that my girlfriend needs a new Xbox and he was like, does she really? You're absolutely ridiculous. Dude, no shit. I'm like man, when Rachel moves in, she has a Series S so I'm like, oh I might buy this fucking Series X.

[02:03:02] Like just for the two terabytes. Cause I'm out here deleting games so I could play Microsoft Flight Simulator. I get a whole extra terabyte for that one game. Instead of buying a new game, why don't you just get a HHD? Yeah. Oh, I have one.

[02:03:15] I have the two terabyte one. Dude, I have a million. I can't know the games. You buy games all the time. You have a million games. Your backlog is crazy. And like Phillip said, you just got to organize it and you'll be able to plow through it.

[02:03:27] So you'll do some dents in there. I think I legit have like 1,400 games like purchased digitally. So it's like, oh, yeah, terrible. And I've only played like 300 of them. Only, only 300. About issues. That is going to be it for tonight. I'm going to give a big thank you

[02:03:46] to all of our listeners who've made it this far. Sorry for spoiling pieces of Gears of War 5, but thank you for being here nonetheless. If you've enjoyed our content and you want to support us further, please feel free to leave us a rating review

[02:03:58] on your platform of choice. We always appreciate any feedback. So I'm going to make sure to do my diligence and go check our Spotify reviews and go or Spotify stars in our Apple podcast reviews and make sure that on the next episode we're calling out anybody

[02:04:13] that wants to show us some love out there, but will. If people want to reach out to you and let you know that Stated Decay 3 is going to be the 2024 game of the year, where can they find you? Well, that is just their opinion, man.

[02:04:30] So you can find me easily on Twitter. That'll be at real King Zozo Tai. That's R-E-A-L-K-I-N-G-Z-O-S-O-T-A-I. Awesome. Dave, is there anything that you want to plug for gaming together? And if so, where can they find you? What's going on over there?

[02:04:47] We've been messing with our YouTube a lot more. So I'm starting to stream a whole lot simply to just get like little shorts and throw them up on our YouTube. I think that's very fun. You guys, why don't you guys have a YouTube? Do you have a YouTube?

[02:04:58] Because I can't find it anywhere. We do have a YouTube, but I need to figure out how to do it. So we're going to sit down and work on that together. Okay, literally. Okay, so just shout out to our show.

[02:05:07] We're going to have an episode on Hell of a Blade 2. I already talked about it, so go over there. So we're going to talk about this right after this episode. But I'll get you on there because you can do your RSS feed just straight to YouTube

[02:05:18] and you don't have to do anything. It literally just uploads straight RSS. So because I was trying to, I have a playlist of all the places I've gone to and a lot of podcasts just don't fuck with YouTube. And I'm just like,

[02:05:28] oh, I can't put you guys into my playlist of places I've guested on now. Okay, okay, gotcha. Good stuff. But yeah, make sure to go to gaming together podcast over on Spotify and all other podcasting platforms and you can go find them at gaming together pod.

[02:05:44] Nave runs that Twitter account. So if you want to yell at him about how Sony is the best, that is the place to go and do it. Please come over and yell at me about that. Oh, I thrive on that. I thrive on it. Yeah.

[02:05:57] Well with that, everybody please keep gaming, take it easy and we will see you next Friday night. Deuces. What's up man? How are you doing? Dude, I- He's on top of the world now after that showcase. I'm fucking revitalized. He feels vindicated. You're like, yes.

[02:06:40] The serotonin comes rushing into your body. I saw you in a fucking Twitter immediately, the ones you were posting in the group chat where you were just like that guy. Oh my God. He fucking, you're in your, and he was like, obviously spelled it right.

[02:06:51] I'm like this fucking troglodyte. This goddamn mouth breather. That snapped me out of it so fast. I'm like, oh my God, I'm arguing with the moron. Okay, I gotta stop. Why am I doing this? You really spelled it right. I'm like, you're non-reading comprehending. That's just so good.

[02:07:07] Oh, it was poetic. But man, dude, I can't describe to you guys the gaming depression I was in after the summer showcase and the PlayStation one. Like I was like, no shit. I don't even have words right now. Like it's so hard to make words,

[02:07:22] but like I was feeling the exact same feeling I felt before I quit buying Magic the Gathering cards. Yeah, I saw you post that in the group chat. Yep, yep. I was legit like, dude, I think I'm done with modern gaming.

[02:07:35] If Xbox's showcase is just like these two showcases, I'm done. Like I'm just gonna play old games and I'm just gonna be a retro YouTube, retro podcaster from now on. Which is nothing wrong with that. Like you had a hell of old games

[02:07:46] on your tier list you've been doing this year and they've all been pretty damn good. You had a stacked A tier, so it's not like you're playing mostly ass games. Yeah. Yeah, A for ass. There you go. Dude, I just started playing the Switch. I played Star Fox.

[02:07:59] And then I was halfway, I think I'm like two thirds of the way through Golden Sun on the Game Boy Advance. And the fucking Switch stopped working. Like the dock. So now I'm playing it in handheld mode, which is not that comfortable.

[02:08:13] I mean, like I have just one of those controllers. So I'm just playing with, I just like date business as usual for me. You just got the Joy-Cons? Yeah. Yeah, so now I'm playing with the Joy-Cons on the Switch thing and I'm just like,

[02:08:23] I wish this was on the TV. I was having fun with that. You know what you gotta do, Nave? You gotta get those, they're called Hokey, I think, or Hokey. They're basically just ergonomic, normal gameplay controllers with like rounded handles for like larger hands.

[02:08:39] And they're literally the best one out there. They don't have like the haptics that the Joy-Cons do, but that doesn't really matter for Nintendo stuff anyway. But that's how you play handheld really for the Switch. I think I got it, man. I'm just sad.

[02:08:52] I was, I just started playing the Switch. I didn't touch it for like nine months straight. And then suddenly I'm like, let's play the Switch and the dock wants to stop working. I'm like, are you joking right now? It rains, it pours in.

[02:09:05] And that was in the middle of my depression, but now I'm just like, I'm back. I'm like, oh, we can play anything. We're so back. In any fucking scenario, I don't care. All right. Cool. I don't know how much you're gonna keep of all that beginning stuff, so.

[02:09:17] I'm gonna keep it all. I'm gonna keep it all. Okay, got it. So I won't read any of that. To be for the patrons. Yeah, no, that's totally good. Oh, wait, I forgot about the breaks. Do you wanna hear something fucking crazy? What?

[02:09:30] So we talked about my tier list. So there's exactly 30 games in the tier list. Do you wanna know how many games were shown in the Xbox showcase? 30? Wow, guess. Yep, exactly 30. That's crazy. Damn, it's almost like I'm the new Phil Spencer. You are the new Phil Spencer.

[02:09:46] Here he goes. Phil Spencer. Yeah, I think this is the one. Is this the same one that's in? Yeah, this is the one that's at the bottom of the dock. Yeah, yeah, this looks nuts. Oh, he's got it at the bottom? Yeah, yeah.

[02:09:54] Because they normally do like this little photo with like all the squares and half the time you look at it, you're just like, okay, it's either stuff we already know or something's like coming out already, yada, yada. But this is one of the first times in a while

[02:10:04] where I see like this Xbox showcase kind of rectangle square set up and I'm just like damn, banger after banger after banger. We were watching the episode, I was just like fuck. I was like. So you guys were watching it together.

[02:10:16] Yeah, we were watching it together at the same place. I just had my dog. Like dude. I mean that's still good company for it. Like that's awesome. I'm sure that way you can have those full emotions. You'd be like fuck yeah. Wee.

[02:10:26] And she's just like oh this is normal. I was scared the shit out of her. When I saw Doom, you should see. She was like oh my god. That was the first game. Yeah, I was like oh my god. And she was like oh no what? What happened?

[02:10:40] Yeah we were sitting there checking it out and I was like okay Call of Duty, you know whatever it's called. It actually looks pretty good. It's gonna be a game pass, whatever. I'll check it out no matter what. And then I was sitting here and it's like okay.

[02:10:49] I was like oh what is this? It was some kind of like second you saw the green chest plate and like fuck Doom. Oh let's go. Yeah I was like, I was very confused as to like where it was. Cause it seemed like kind of in space.

[02:11:01] But then it was like castles and shit. And I was like what's going on? And it was like yep it's Doom. So sick. But we're gonna have to lock you in Naive. We're gonna have to jump in there immediately for the Gears of War E-Day whenever that drops.

[02:11:13] I need you to put that on the calendar for the Friday night game cast. That's right, that's right. Gears of War E-Day review with Naive. You're locked in already. We're scheduling out 2025 as we speak. I was fucking lost. I was lost in the sauce whenever that was playing.

[02:11:28] I was, I was. Really? Oh man.