The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King | Middle-earth’s Hidden Gem
A game based on a movie? On a handheld??
This week Chard and Jake sit down and talk about two recent PC releases that are full of sandy grit. Crimson Desert and Death Stranding 2: Onto The Beach.
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00:00 --> 00:32 Don't, don't curse to me about the Jays. My Mariners haven't have yet to win a game and they've lost by one run the last like five games they've played. They are not good. I'm getting things that are like how the Mariners offense is just going to get worse articles. I'm like, dude, it's the first 10 games of baseball. Stop it. This happens every goddamn year in this city. Every year this happens. They suck now, they get hot later. And that's what matters because everybody else is hot right now.
00:32 --> 00:41 Yeah, that's My mother in law says the same thing. She's like, even last year the Jays were like really shitty in the beginning, but then they did really, really great. But still seeing them lose 15 to
00:41 --> 00:47 2, I get it. It's pretty, pretty much welcome to baseball, my friend. Welcome to baseball.
00:47 --> 00:49 Welcome to baseball. Today on.
01:12 --> 01:18 It's that word. I was like, we haven't started, have we? Haven't even seen it yet. I know you're rusty, man, but come on.
01:19 --> 01:50 Well, welcome everybody to another episode of Press me to cancel your favorite retro gaming podcast, at least for part time Retro. This week, Chart and I, it's just us. We're holding down the fort and we're going to talk about a couple games, a couple PC releases that came out this year that kind of. We've fallen head over heels in love with maybe unexpectedly so. So we're just going to chat about two games? That's right. We're going to go through the crimson desert and onto the beach of Death Strain 2. Those are two games we've both been playing. But before we get into that chart, how you doing this week?
01:51 --> 02:05 Fantastic. I did not know we were live. I thought you were still messing with me. So don't, don't feign ignorance over the intro. I literally thought, I was like, he's still going. Why is he still going? Because we're live, that's why. So awesome. I feel bad.
02:05 --> 02:05 It's 905.
02:06 --> 02:07 It is. I see that.
02:08 --> 02:09 The people are waiting.
02:09 --> 02:13 I'm with you. The people want what they want.
02:15 --> 03:17 I I Before we get started, I'm going to quickly shout out tomorrow on this channel whether you're watching live on Twitch TV, Pressby to cancel or on YouTube presbyter cancel tomorrow. Saturday, April 11th. I had to look at the date. That's what kind of week I had. April 11th at 8pm Eastern right here live. I will be doing a special stream. I almost never stream as of the podcast, but I'm doing A charity stream. I'm joining a few folks from the giant bomb community, and they're doing a community endurance run. So all this weekend over on Jonathan.com, they're hosting streams of folks doing charity raising money for Pencils for Promise or Pencils of Promise, which is a charity that raises funds for school supplies, teachers, and schools for developing countries. It's a very nice charity, especially with the state of things going on globally right now. In the economy, we're all hurting, but charities are really hurting. So this is a good way to raise money. So if you're interested, I'll be doing a Mario Shuffler. I'll be pulling out what's left of my hair and playing the Mario Shuffler and trying to raise money for a good cause. So if you're into that kind of thing, check us out.
03:18 --> 03:22 Is it a damage shuffler like you sent me for Mega man, or is it different?
03:22 --> 03:28 I'm not nuts. Can you imagine doing it every time you take one hit in Mario, you. You have to shuffle.
03:28 --> 03:48 A game would drive me freaking you die. And you'd shuffle into three. Oh, my God, that'd be insanity. Fun fact. Jake and I. Jake and I met doing charity together. That's. That's how, yeah, prespy kind of came into my life here. So, yeah, that's. I haven't done charity. I miss doing it. I love doing charity, man.
03:48 --> 03:54 Well, like, I figure, like, I'm looking for reasons to stream anyway, so if you're going to stream, might as well raise money for a decent cause.
03:54 --> 03:57 Hell yeah, Absolutely. Do it for a good cause.
03:57 --> 04:34 And I've been meaning to go check them out. Yeah, I've been meaning to do some Mario stuff in a shuffler on. On video at some point anyway, so it's a good way to do it. So, yeah, please check me out. Saturday, April 11th. The. The fundraiser goes the entire weekend. So if you're watching this late, donation link will be there as well on the video or up on the social media. So if you can't donate, that's cool. Just repost, tell your friend that kind of thing. You know, amplifying or even just watching if you're able to, is always. Is always a benefit as well. There are many ways to help causes like this, so check that out. But very important, I've got a real bad case of the fomo and Char suffers from this as well.
04:34 --> 04:35 Yes, we do.
04:35 --> 04:48 While I've relented, Chart had to to cave in and he had to buy about that new hot, new critically not acclaimed game Crimson Desert that came out from Pearl Abyss. Was it last month that it come out or two months ago?
04:48 --> 04:59 I think so, yeah. No, I think it was. It was either last month or, like, early April. Yeah. I've been keeping an eye on it. Honestly. I had this game picked for my. My fantasy critic last year.
05:00 --> 05:00 Yeah.
05:00 --> 06:49 And it never came out. Like, it never dropped, so. Because it was one of those, you know, slated to come out 2025, and. And I've been reading about it and what they wanted to do with it. And then I watched earlier this year, I watched some. Some YouTubers that, you know, got to play it for free and embargoes and all that stuff, and they talked about it incessantly, about how it's not what you think it is and how much fun it was. And there's definitely some. Some room for improvement to start, which a lot of people complained about. Upon the first thing first week or so, I. I had it on my wish list. I was. I was gonna first day buy it, but then, of course, Resident Evil 9 came out, and I was totally enthralled with Resident Evil 9, so I was sucked up into that. And I fought the FOMO for a long time until. Until I didn't. And a good friend of mine, my. My best bud was like. He was playing it. So I asked him, I was like, hey, man, is this thing worth it right now? And it had been like two or three weeks since its release, so there had been some patches, some things had already gone through, and he was like, I think so. He did the same thing that I basically tell Jake everybody every time. I'm like, you should pick this up. I think there's. There's been very few people that are like, it's okay. It's either this game is freaking awesome, or it's absolute garbage. There's. There's been no in between that I've heard from anybody. Polarizing. And I could. And I could see why. It's very polarizing. And I. And I could see why. And I wasn't there for the first iteration, so I didn't catch any of the bad stuff that. People talking about the. The inventory problems and some of the. It's like saber cyberpunk stuff, right? Like the same. Like, some of the graphics weren't great. Some of the things weren't responding right. And this, that and the other. And they cleaned it up, but they cleaned it up faster than CD Red Project did, if I do remember right. And, man, this game is great. I. I absolutely Adore it. I think it's looking.
06:49 --> 06:56 Just looking at open critic real quick. So the lowest score I see is. Is IGN who gave it a 6 out of 10, which is weird.
06:56 --> 06:57 There's a whole thing about that.
06:57 --> 07:27 Yeah. Euro gamer create a five, but then you have like a game spot in game form. 7 out of 10, which is. 7 is totally fine. But then you have like PC gamer 80 out of 100, which is, which is really solid. And then there's other. Some, some folks like four out of five from the gamer. Like there's a lot of great reviews like you said, and then there's a few that are really low and it kind of averages out. I saw one critic just damning it on Blue sky and then right after another post saying this game is fantastic. It's. It's 100 hours. It goes places easily.
07:27 --> 07:41 Like which is it easily? I think somebody, somebody platinumed it on PS5. I believe. 305 hours is what I've been. That's the game and that's platinum. That's. That's a lot of all the cheevos and stuff.
07:41 --> 07:53 Yeah. So I think, I do wonder for the folks who are bouncing off it. I think part of the issue is last year, I think it was last year we had Black Myth Wukong, which. Not a bad game at all. Just not bad game.
07:53 --> 07:54 Great game.
07:54 --> 08:01 But it's. But it's not like it's not, it's not Elden Ring. It's not, you know, Dark Souls, but it's got that kind of combat and it's more of like a boss.
08:01 --> 08:04 But it is a Souls esque type game. Yes.
08:04 --> 08:46 But it's not, it's not like it's not a bad game. It's. But it's maybe not game of the year for most people. Right. Kingdom Come, Deliverance 2. Great game. Not necessarily game of the year for a lot of people or at least not for, for a lot of media. And it's fine. It's fine to have games that are like 8 and nines out of 10 and not 10 out of 10. So I, I wonder if like some folks are just looking at Crimson Desert and just latching onto this. Like if it's not 9 out of 10, then it's trash mentality and they have to fight tooth and nail for it, which is like unnecessary. Right. Like games can be good. You don't need to fight like it's your wife. Right. Like take a step back and relax. But this game does look good. Like when I first saw the, The Previews. The first thing I said was like, damn, it's pretty. Like, the graphics are ridiculously nice in this. So this, this.
08:46 --> 08:52 I, I still think Red Dead has better, better looking, like, area in general. Like.
08:52 --> 08:53 Okay, okay.
08:53 --> 11:17 The water, the water in Red Dead, I think is a lot cleaner. But I think where Red Dead has, you know, it's a locationary story in, you know, there's not a lot of variance. You're. You're in the Midwest, everything kind of looks similar. You can, you can change some things and put yourself in the bayou, but it's still relatively the same thing. You've got, you've got, you know, green, lush forests. You've got crimson red deserts in the name. You've got marshes, you've got ocean, you've got crags, you've got snowy mountains. You've got so many different locations. This game is filled, freaking enormous. It is so big. Like, when you open up the map, it's not like Elden Ring's map was deceiving. Right. When you first played Elden Ring and you. Yeah, go, yeah, I pop that in. I, I actually have a, I do a cool panning inside the, the map so you can kind of see it. See how sprawling this thing is. It's. I mean, you start out, you. The, the whole, the whole. The biggest thing that I think is a problem with this game is a lot of people did not care for the story. The story is kind of meh. Even, even the voice actors have gone on record saying, I don't know what's going on really, but that's not what they're trying to aim at. And Pearl Abus has also been like, you know, I kind of wish we'd flesh this out a little bit more. That's understandable. But this is a sandbox game. This is, this is Red Dead. This is gta. This is a sandbox game where there's a story that's inside of it. But the point of the game is not to, to get to the next spot in the story. It's to explore this giant thriving world of all kinds of stuff going on. You've got, you've got bounties to go find people and arrest them and bring them to jail. You've got lords that are looking for their children that got kidnapped. You've got fortresses that have been taken over and you have to chase away all the bandits and retake it over again. And, and then boss fights that are snuck within there. And there's this, this area that you see here that's like kind of a weed craggy area. So really cool boss fight in here where you're fighting like a, like a shinobi type boss where he's, you know, disappearing and reappearing behind you and he's got a samurai sword and when you cut the grass, it floats through the air and it does the whole cinematic thing and it's just there's. The story is not its strongest point. The world itself is a living, breathing thing and.
11:17 --> 12:26 And that's okay. The story is not the central piece to the game. There's lots of games that we like that the story is nothing like. I love Breath of the Wild and Twilight and Tears of the Kingdom are two Zelda games that are critically acclaimed. I love those games. Story sucks, right? Like even putting aside the whole idea of like, oh, Link and Ganon's involved and rescuing Zelda, like all the same tropes and stuff, it's fine, right? But the story is just boring in that game. And I play it because it is a sandbox because the map is freaking huge. Skyrim's the same thing. The Skyrim lore is very cool. But the main story to Skyrim is not that interesting really. It's the sandbox I played those games for. And that's when I saw this. I looked at it and said, I want to try it. I'm all for like an open world sandbox I can get lost in. But I've been burned in the past with games like Dragon's Dogma 2, which was from Capcom, as much as Capcom has been doing really good lately. That game was awful, right? Just like the world was pretty and the combat was really fun, but it became very repetitive and I found there wasn't enough environments to like things to find in the environment to explore. Like, I'm wondering what you explore in Crimson Desert. Like are there dungeons? Are there caves and ruins? Like how, how much variety is there?
12:28 --> 13:30 So when, when I think of caves, I don't think of like Legend of Zelda, like temples. Right? Like, right. A lot of it is surface fighting, but as you could see in the video, there's like groups that you take on. And as I said and I've told you guys in numerous podcasts and in games like that make me feel like a badass and I'm doing an RKO slam to a dude and it's knocking everybody around me away. And you're doing all kinds of cool slashes and stabs and you can switch between unarmed and two armed and single handed combat. Like in the middle of the game, okay, it makes for some cool. But as for the, as for the environment itself, it's, it's very much more in my, in my perspective of a Red Dead Redemption kind of environment. There's, there's caves, there's hidden, hidden secrets and waterfalls and a ton of waterfalls. But you have to learn how to like get into them. You can't just walk into a waterfall because it's gallons of water falling on your head. It's going to knock you, knock you away. There's science.
13:31 --> 13:33 You have to look a magical power to get through some water.
13:34 --> 14:59 You just have to like, you have to like lunge and you can swim, but you have stamina. So the best, I think the best way to describe Crimson Desert all in all is if Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption and Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild had a baby together. Because it has all kinds of different mechanics from all three of those games mashed into this thing. And it's just, it's just fun. This game. This is a game. You know, I love my horror games. I talk about them all the time, I absolutely adore them. But there's been very few games in the world where I'm at home going, oh, I wonder what I can make with all these things that I'm crafting or I'm at work going, I want to go home and make things or I want to go home and search this area. Because every area you go into you find new weapons, new armor, unique stuff. But you just got to go look like there's, it's just about exploring the world and checking it out and finding there are hidden doors in temples, in crags, in all kinds of stuff that if you just hit it the right way with your power blade, you get a power blast like spell that you use. It'll flip open and you can go in there and there's some secret ass double handed spear or some like heading out in there. There's. There's so much cool stuff and it's just go look, go look and see what's out there. It's just there.
14:59 --> 15:26 You could eat. You could miss it. You can, you could probably play this game a second time if you had the time and just, and just find new stuff. That's, that's why I liked Elder Ring. Honestly. It's just like the number amount of cool shit I found in Elder Ring just by randomly hitting the wall the wrong way or the right way or stumbling into a grave somewhere and I found something cool like neat that's Right. That I dig a lot. I like that a lot. So there's less dungeons in this, right? It's more, but it's more open world. Open world. Okay.
15:26 --> 17:05 It's a lot more towns, it's a lot more forts, It's a lot more fields of fighting things, of fighting large groups of enemies and then fighting your way to some boss. What. One of the things that I'm still kind of getting used to and it could be a turn off to some people is like if you're going to go. If someone asks you, hey, we need to reclaim this fort back from this bandit group, you go in there and there's a ton of them and you're just. And I die numerous times. But you, you can resurrect with certain items that you find. You can get like 30% health resurrection in the same spot or 100% health, depending on what items you have with you. And those have been pretty easy to. I have like six or seven of them. So you can either hold on to them and just respawn at a wave point. But if you kill, you kill stuff, it doesn't respawn. Like if you reawaken what have you, what you've taken out should be gone. However, in some of these fort battles, this game doesn't hold your hand overall. So that's a pretty big explanation for this. There's. You gotta fig, you gotta feel it out, figure it out, how it goes. So I'm fighting in a quarry and I'm just fighting things left and right. I'm tossing them off of my back, I'm stabbing them, I'm throwing bombs at him. I'm doing all kinds of right. And there's a little thing that says like this much percentage of, like you have retained this much percentage of the quarry. Right? So I'm like, cool. I just have to get it to zero and everything will go away. No, it unlocks the bot. Oh, okay. But I don't know where the. I don't know where the boss is. So I'm still getting bum rushed by waves and waves of enemies. But I don't know where to go. Like I'm literally. Where do I freaking go? So I finally just. You can fly in this game. It's a. It's more of a glide than a fly.
17:05 --> 17:06 Like breath of the wild. Gliding.
17:06 --> 17:51 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you. I. I just got to the highest point that I could in the. In the quarry and. And GL glided, glid, glowed, whatever. Whatever the past tense of gliding is. And until I found A location that I was like, okay. And sometimes the map will tell you and sometimes it won't. So it's. It's a lot of. It's a lot of feeling. It's a lot of blind feeling, like just feeling around where things are. And then you get in and then you've got this boss fight and it turns into like a cinematic thing. And sometimes you got to take out minions and sometimes you don't. They're really cool. Some of the bosses I've seen, like just previewing this game are epic looking and some of them are not. So there's. Some of them are meh. And some of them are like cheap shot. This is stupid, but.
17:51 --> 17:52 Right.
17:52 --> 18:37 I had a problem mashing a lot of button mashing with this because there's combos and combos and combos and the controls can be really daunting at first, but once you've. Once you figure it out and realize. And it's not like Elden Ring, it's not like Dark Souls. There's dodge rolling, there's stamina, but you just feel like if in Dark Souls, if you get bum rushed by more than two things, you're dead, you're done. You're not going to deal with it. Yeah. In this, if you get bum rushed by like 20 people, you got a chance. You just got to figure out where the timing is. And the game allows you to unlock certain skills and blocks and parries and dodges and all kinds of stuff that you can open up that makes it easier for you to work with the. The customization.
18:37 --> 18:45 I'm just watching the video and you're in the video, you're swimming through some water and that's some damn pretty water. This game is nice looking.
18:45 --> 19:15 I'm sorry. The. The waterfalls in Red Dead are second to no one. They're gorgeous. This one still equally as good, but I like. I like going on top of like there's a big snowy mountain and this is one of those games like Elden Ring where it says if you can see it, chances are you can get to it. If it's. If you can see it in the distance, you can go to it and find it. So. And I found a. There's a huge tower you see when you start. And I climb that way. Too early?
19:15 --> 19:59 Yeah. I saw the boundaries of the map. If you go in there was like the. The land mass is surrounded by water and if you sail out far enough in the water, you. You get eaten. And that's the boundary, which is cool. It's not just an invisible wall that kills you. It warns you several times and then you get eaten by there be dragons. Right. So it is definitely a massive looking world. I'm just watching the combat and it's. Yeah, it's not. And that's the other problem. When people look at games like this and I think they see the anime aesthetic. They think, okay, really nice graphics. They think, oh, it's Asian developer. It's got to be a souls like well, no, they're not all freaking souls likes. There's room for other things in other genres. This is definitely combat. I want to say it's similar to Witcher, but it's more action Witcher, which is surprising. I wasn't expecting to be how much action there was.
20:00 --> 20:01 As I see your character, there's a ton.
20:02 --> 20:04 Mounting a guy and just punch him in the face.
20:04 --> 21:00 And this, in this, what you can do is if you are, if you are in a group and you're fighting a group of bandits or thieves or whatever, you can catch one of them that is trying to run away and literally beat information out of them to find out like where they're hiding, where their boss is. And it unlocks another, another mission to go and look, look for these guys if you want to. There's so much to this. I like. I cannot stress that. It's, it's. It's. It's walking around and looking at stuff. But at the same time you're getting sucked into this beautiful world and this fantastic environment. I don't even care what the story is. You're. You're a bunch of like Vikings that got beat up and almost killed. Then you go to some other world and they resurrect you and there's this thing called the Abyss which is basically what's the second Zelda game? Not Breath of the Wild, but the
21:00 --> 21:03 other Tears of the Kingdom where you have the islands. Yeah.
21:03 --> 21:41 Yes. You are now like in a Tears of the Kingdom Xs like puzzle location. And you unlock those puzzles and you get Abyss artifacts which allow you to unlock new skills and stuff. So if there are dungeons, the Abyss, which is, it's above. I don't know why the Abyss is above you, but that's what they call it. The Abyss is, is the dungeons of the game where you have to figure out how to traverse these huge spans of open space. And if you fall, you fall all the way to the earth. And you can see, you can see from the abyss the map up there. Okay, really cool.
21:41 --> 21:48 That's very Tears of the Kingdom inspired Right. And, like, you. You can glide, so you can survive a fall from the upper rounds. Yeah, okay, that's. That's really.
21:48 --> 22:33 There's actually a. A power you get that's called, like, dive bomb the earth or some. And you do, like, a power blast from, like, a certain height. It's like a meteor attack. And it just. Just. It just hits everything around you or whatever. It's like the. The best skill you can get in the game or something like that. But, you know, your guy's falling, and he's got, like, fire and stuff, like, friction while he's falling from the abyss. Once he. Once he crosses the abyss to the normal land or whatever. And then you. Then you land, you float down, you land, and then you go about your business, and all you do is open the map. If you're like, I want to go back up there because I missed something, you just open the map, switch to the abyss map, and fast travel up there. You don't have to. Yeah, you don't have to climb anything. You don't have to go look for it. It's all readily available to you.
22:33 --> 22:52 Like, this is. This is the kind of game where, like, I do like the. I do like the ability to fast travel when I want to, but I usually like to do it on foot, especially if there's mounts in this game. If there's, like, horses and whatnot, I just like to travel by mount you get. That comes down to the. You dragon, you just want to. You just want to get lost in an open world. And I love doing games that are like that. I just want done.
22:54 --> 23:57 And in a Valheim sense, it's not as constructible as Valheim. I know how much you love procedural stuff in the. In the construction, but you. You get a camp, and you can do missions within the camp to expand that camp to a point to where you have farm animals, you're raising that you have orchards of trees of fruits and plants that you're growing and raising. You've got chefs that teach you how to cook all kinds of different meals that give you buffs and stamina and all kinds of stuff like that. You can create your own abysmal weapons, which are like the super weapons that you can. You can make them in your camp. Once you get to a high enough level, right, you go out and go mining, you go out and knock down trees, you go down and hammer down posts. You do all kinds of, like, other stuff that's not just bebop around the world and solve people's problems. But it's like red dead in the sense that you could be walking and someone will be asking you for help. I saw a drunk stuck in a barrel yesterday, and I pulled his ass out as you do, and I completed the mission. That's all I did was pull his ass out of a barrel. And they're like, mission complete. And I went, okay, cool.
23:57 --> 23:57 Yeah.
23:57 --> 24:09 Which will mean it'll come back to me at some point or something similar to that. So, yeah, it's. It's really deep. Like, it's really like. Like, forget the story, forget the narrative. I don't care. The land is where it's at.
24:09 --> 24:09 The.
24:09 --> 24:15 The walking around, the exploring and seeing what's going on. That's where. That's where the bread and butter is in this one.
24:16 --> 25:47 Yeah. Where I saw the complaints. Like, I've watched a few people stream it that. That didn't care for it. Nobody said it was. Nobody I watched. It was bad, like, at all. But there's definitely a lot of folks saying it wasn't a game for them. And I got the impression it's folks who don't like the. There's no drive to finish the game. It's just kind of like, take it at your own pace and just explore. But that exploration is lacking in a lot of games these days. Right. Like, I go back to the retro. We are retro podcast. But the original Legend of Zelda, the original Metroid, it's all exploration, trial and error, and finding things. Right. You kind of naturally. It's the emerging gameplay as you're exploring the world. And there's not many games these days that do that. There's very few. Like Elden Ring was that for me. But I know for a lot of people, Elden Ring was their game of the year because it was souls combat. And the boss fights. The boss fights were the least. My least favorite part of Elden Ring. My only goal was to find ways to cheese the boss fights because there's the exploration and the finding discovery of the huge map. That's what was. That's what I liked in that game. It was never the boss fight. So I think I felt. I played Elden Ring and I liked it for different reasons than most people. I like the getting immersed in the world again. Like, I. I play Skyrim that way. The only. The other reason I backed off was the controls looked kind of clunky. There's one particular thing I saw people doing. There's a jump. You can jump in the game, but there's also like a targeted jump and it looked very clunky to do precision jumping at the aim, and then that looked unnecessarily clunky. And I didn't know if I would like that. How often do you have to do that kind of thing?
25:47 --> 28:43 I don't use it that often. I use normal jump. But you get this really cool, like, you get double jump that you can unlock pretty early if you want to in your skill tree. Like, your skill tree allows you to unlock pretty much anything that's on there. There's a few things that are like, it requires three into this to get you like, this really cool, super thing. But a lot of the basic you can get pretty early on a double jump comes recommended by most crimson desert streamers, including myself and you. You can do a double jump and you're like, but the double jump's kind of lame. But then you get this power that allows you to use your force push three times in the air so you can get mad height. And it is super easy to use. It is absolutely super easy. So you get mad height and then you float and then you do the glide and you find somewhere else you need to go. I find myself using that thousands of times a playthrough without having. You can climb, you know, you can climb literally anything. If it's a surface, you can climb it and you have enough. If you have enough stamina, you can scale all the way up. Best thing to do is, though, is to do the quadruple jump that we. We use, then grab somewhere in the middle and finish the way up, you know, because when you start out, your stamina is not great. You can prove about that as you level up. But, I mean, aside from the world being beautiful, there's dynamic weather in this. There is like, Breath of the Wild. If you're in a cold area, you're cold, your character gets cold. It affects your stamina. If you're in a hot area, you got to dress for the part, right? You got to, like, wear warm clothes or wear hot clothes or whatever to, like, to deal with how the environment is treating you. That's something I loved about Breath of the Wild. I thought that was one of the gimmicks that I thought was really, really cool. And you could wake up and it's a beautiful, sunshiny day, and you can see the clouds roll in, and then it just start hammering rain on you. And then it's windy and the leaves are blowing everywhere and shit's flying all over the place. Actually affects how you glide a little bit from point A to point B. There's blizzards up in the mountain, there's dust storms down in the desert. I mean I, I cannot stress like how really in depth this game has. It really is like, it is, it is what I thought it was. I was hoping it was going to be and then some. So paying full price for this was absolutely worth every penny that I put into this. I'm. I'm on the, I'm on the vein of this was worth everything because I am getting my money's worth out of this game. It's a hundred hour game which I may not have time for, but as you said, it's something I could piece mail together, I can come in from work, I want to decompress. I'm just going to walk around, explore and see what I find. When I'm done, I shut it down and I go to bed and then I think about it and I, and I'll pull up YouTube videos and I go, I wonder what's in this area. But I don't want to spoil it for me because I, I want to find it, you know, I want to be the guy that finds it. God damn, Jake. I'm telling you right now, there's. I ain't gonna find. I'm not patient enough to look at every wall in every goddamn temple to find the door.
28:44 --> 29:51 You don't want to find everything in one playthrough because this is the kind of game you probably pick up 20 years from now to play again, right? Like I know I play Zelda games all the time, right? Every few years I spin it back up again and I'd like to find stuff that's new. Like hell, I played Elden Ring through at least three times through and I find different stuff all the time. Different weapons, different dungeons, different bosses. I even missed like it just. I like what it's slightly different or I miss. I find new things in a playthrough. The worst thing with a game is that once I beat it, I never want to play it again. And there's been games like that and, and they're fine like, like, like Jedi Survivor and Fallen Order. Those are fantastic games with great story, but once you've beaten it, there's not, it's not. I don't have incentive to play it again unless I really want to play that through that story again. And I don't always have time to do that, right? Like Witcher 3. I'm going. I have, I'm set to play Witcher 3 again this year. I really want to go through it one more time. But that's also a game where the map is so huge and I really never had time to explore the last few areas. So I know I'll find stuff I never played. I never found my first playthrough. So I kind of like it when the world is almost too big and. And if that's the complaint folks have is a game is too big and there's just too many systems and stuff going on. I mean I don't find that to be negative. I find that's. That's a positive.
29:52 --> 29:56 There's two other characters you can play as too. It's not the one guy. Yeah.
29:56 --> 29:58 Have you found other characters yet?
29:58 --> 30:35 I've got one. You get. You get the girl pretty. Once you get the camp, you get her pretty quick. I have not played any of them. I'm actually not going to touch them until I decide to do a second playthrough and the other one you have to find. And I haven't, I haven't gotten the mission unloc to go and hunt him down yet. But I've heard people that are like I've been playing this for 150 hours and I still haven't unlocked his stuff yet. So you know, and I should probably do a quick check to see my status and if I am. I am a full on Crimson. Crimson gamer. I am at 36.9 hours of play time in this game since I bought it and I.
30:35 --> 30:37 You probably don't feel the ending.
30:37 --> 30:40 Yeah, nope, I'm still in.
30:40 --> 30:40 There's.
30:40 --> 31:29 There's all these memes from like the Hobbit where it's got the. The main character's head on. On like Samwise. And it says if I step any further it's the furthest I've been from Hanan which is the starting point that I will ever be. And it says every time I start Crimson Desert. It's the furthest I've ever been from Hanan since I started this thing. And that's the truth, man. There's a. There's. They get these little cubes and then I'll. I'll stop talking about it after this. But you'll get these cubes that are randomly throughout the area. You see me pick one up in the, in the video and it's a. It's a challenge that they give you that if you meet the challenge then you get an abyss cube which. Or an Abyss artifact which allows you to level a skill up. And one of them is ride from. Basically ride from the lowest point of the map to the highest point of the map across in 40 minutes.
31:31 --> 31:31 Okay.
31:31 --> 31:35 In 40 minutes. And apparently that's fast.
31:35 --> 31:38 So that must be a massive map.
31:38 --> 32:06 Yeah, it's huge. And it's from. It's, you know, from north. You know, north southeast to. Or southwest to northeast. Like, it's the diagonal of the entire map. And it's like, do it in 40 minutes and. And you'll get. You'll get an abuse cube out of that. And I'm like, 40 minutes. Holy. That's a long time. 40 minutes was like my game time that I could play as a kid. That was it. So all I could do is from one point. Yeah, point. And then I was done. I'd have to shut it down. That's insane.
32:06 --> 32:45 Screen time is done. Yeah, I do with my kids. You only get 10 minutes of geometry Dash. Let me turn it off. Yeah. This is one of those games. I was very close to picking it up. I just finished Death Strang 2, my game, the other week, and I have a bit of extra cash on me. I'm like, I want to pick up something. It was either Crimson Desert or Starfield, which I've dumped on Starfield a lot over the last bit because I played on Game Pass when it first came out. But they did do their Freelance Update. So I'm kind of like, I don't know. That Freelance Update might fix everything that was wrong with it. I did go with Starfield and I don't regret it. I'm actually digging Starfield, but I'm going to play Crimson Desert at some point. But it's probably. Probably one that goes on a sale.
32:46 --> 32:46 Yeah.
32:46 --> 33:46 The other part of it is I had heard that with the multiple characters, which is mind boggling to me. I didn't realize there was actually characters till just recently. That a game is this huge, this big, and there's multiple characters is pretty awesome. But I'd seen that leveling up. You kind of feel like you're better off focusing on the main character because most of the story involves him. You share your abyss power ups. Yeah. So like that. But that's something that there's already mods for this game. Mods will fix it, right? Or fix it right. It's the same thing. When I go to play, like Skyrim and even Starfield. Like, the first thing I do is look at the mods that everybody's using to make the quality of life better. I have no problem using mods for Crimson Desert on a first playthrough. If it fixes stuff like that. I just want to make myself just forget the story, just give me the world, make it easy for my leveling up my multiple characters and I'll use them and just give me more stuff to do there. I don't really care about the narrative at all. If the story is not front and forward as the selling point, I don't care about it then I just want to play the game. As long as the game is fun to play and this does seem to play.
33:46 --> 34:26 You and I are heavy lore people. We love our lore. Like we love the lore that comes from the Marios and from the Elden Rings and from the Fromsoft stuff and all that crap. But this game doesn't need it. I don't think it needed. I think it's a cool little dash of like, oh, if you're interested in the story, cool. But I don't know who any of these people are, nor do I care. All I know is that I'm in this really cool world with these really cool powers and I'm just doing whatever the hell I want. I mean, you could rob people. You can put a mask on and steal stuff from people. You can kill people in town. You get arrested for it, and you have to pay a hefty fine for it. You can play basically a bastard I version of poker. And for people that know
34:28 --> 34:30 the gambling mini games, I'm all about those.
34:30 --> 34:51 Arm wrestling. There's poker, there's dice. There's all kinds of crazy like out there to do. There's just no end to like, what you can do. You can cook food at any pot you see. You can make potions out of a cauldron. And it just. But the problem, the problem, the biggest issue that I have is it doesn't tell you you can do that. You just have to figure it out.
34:52 --> 35:00 Yeah, but there's no hand holding, which is, which is, if that's the style, that that is totally fine as long as the basics there to play the
35:00 --> 35:59 game were there, you know, I mean, there's. There's basic rudimentary how to get you from point A to point B. This is how you attack this, how you jump this, how you do this. But I mean, there's no mini games to make food. You just find a cauldron and you're like, put stuff in it. Oh, and he does this cool little animation like, like, you know, Zelda does. And then he's like, it's done. And then you eat it. You have food. You don't get the cool. You know, if you mix something you shouldn't, you don't get that cool little pixelated picture of something nasty on your plate like, they do. It's all about, right? I. I haven't found anything that's bad, but you can eat raw meat. I mean, when push comes to shove. I have a dog that's fully armored that I've got. You can get cats. There's this big fat cat that you can watch, and they walk around on your shoulder. I mean, there's mount. Like, there's mounts that you can ride. You get. You start off with a horse, like, pretty early on in the game, so you can ride everywhere. You could put armor on that. You get a dragon later. I don't know how far later, but I know I've seen pictures of some dude wreaking havoc on a fort on a dragon. Are you kidding me? It was like.
35:59 --> 36:03 Like a steampunk I saw somebody in before, and he was using it a lot.
36:03 --> 36:19 Yeah, there's some cool in this game. It's. It's fun. It's just fun. And it's kind of mindless fun. Like, it doesn't have to have a point to me. It's just. I'm gonna. I'm itching to play just talking about it right now. I spent 40 minutes talking about this damn game. We haven't even touched about yours. And I feel really bad about it.
36:19 --> 36:26 I mean, you just said, like, after this podcast, you're like, I want to play it again. And like, that's. That's a sign of a good game. You know, It's a sign of a great game. Yeah.
36:26 --> 36:27 Yeah.
36:27 --> 37:25 So, no, it's. It sounds like a great one, and I think I would like it. It just. It just. Like, I know how many hours it's going to take in my life, which I don't have much free time. But at the same time, like, if I'm not. Like, if I'm not feeling like I need to finish a story, then I don't mind so much because then I can throw in a podcast or a TV show while I'm playing it and just exploring and having fun. Like, that's what I feel like I've been missing with games. Like, I've been trying to get a certain set of mods to work with Skyrim. I mentioned before, there's these giant fan mods, like, 600 gigs worth. It's ridiculous. And there's a lot of cool stuff in them, but it's Skyrim and it's Buggy. As shit. Because it's Skyrim and Skyrim is always buggy, especially with hundreds of mods. Right. So, like, this is. But this is a game. Crimson Desert is a game where it's. Comes at you. It's all there already. Don't do anything to it. And it's just an open world. Yeah, I would probably be down for this. I'm just going to wait for Steam Cell. I'm Steam Cell. And also I want mods to change things. I want mods, like, I want people who've played the game for hundreds of hours to go in and tweak it and quality life it. If the developers don't already. I've already seen them very active doing
37:25 --> 37:35 updates since they're already doing stuff. Like I told you before we started, they were. They're talking about doing a multiplayer for this thing because Pearl of this is known for Black Desert.
37:35 --> 37:37 Yeah. It's online mmo.
37:37 --> 38:24 Right. And this plays. This feels very MMO without being an mmo, without having, you know, and. And you won't. It won't be. You won't be forced to play with people. It'll be like, you know, like gta, where you could do GTA online or you could play it solo. I. I prefer to play it by myself now. It'd be fun to grab you or grab my buddy Lord Optic or something and run around and do stuff together. That'd be a good time. But I don't want 800 other people encroaching upon my, you know, my mining camp that I have set up somewhere or some. So this is definitely something that I wanted. Something that I didn't have to focus on. I wanted like a. A Final Fantasy 14 where I can come in, put a couple hours into it, and then call it a day and not. And not feel glued to something and not be like, how's this going to end? I. I don't care how it ends.
38:24 --> 38:29 I like the story in Final Fantasy 14, but it's just like, it's not. It's not why I played that game. I played that game for years.
38:29 --> 38:33 But you fish for fish for 20 hours straight. And you could do the same thing in this.
38:33 --> 39:02 So, yeah, I'm with you. Like every. Every year. I usually get a bug for an mmo, but I'm like you. I never want to play with other people. I'll play Guild Wars 2. I'll play Warframe. I'll play Elder Scrolls Online and all this stuff, or Even Final Fantasy 14. I never want to group with people. I don't it's. My schedules are different than friends and also the randos. I don't want to talk to randos. The last thing I want to do. So if it's a single player game that feels like mmo, oddly that I'm kind of into that. So I definitely get it. I think the desert looks like something
39:02 --> 39:04 you would be into. It's a good one.
39:04 --> 39:12 It's a good one. Yeah. That's the backlog. God damn, my backlog. Well, let me talk about my game.
39:12 --> 39:14 Yeah, sorry. I just.
39:14 --> 40:12 I actually beat mine. I think it took me about 40 hours. Mine is death string two. First let me say that I've watched Wolf play the original Death Stranding years ago on stream and realizing that I can't get in that kind of game. That's not. That's not a game for me. But I played it last year and I'm glad I did because the first S Stranding was excellent and it was not the game I thought it was. Right. If you watch trailers and gameplay or people streaming it, if you're not paying attention, it just looks like Amazon Delivery driver Simulator. Like you're literally delivering packages. That's the game. And yes, that is like the core gameplay loop. But there's a wider story like narrative to that game that it was really awesome. And a lot of the. A lot of the story was told in cut scenes that were toward the back half of Death Training one. But by the end of that game, I was dying to play the sequel. And I was so gung ho to play the sequel because when I played Direct Death String one, the sequel is only like a month away. So I'm like, yeah, it was pretty
40:12 --> 40:13 close to the next release. Yeah.
40:13 --> 40:43 Yeah, like I'm going to be. I'm going to play it. I'm going to beat this. I'm loving it. I can't wait to play the sequel. Can't wait till it comes out. And it came out. And that's when I realized I wasn't paying attention. And death string two was only for the PS5 last year and I was so pissed off because I don't have a PS5. I played on a PC and that sucks because I was really dying to play the second game and I did my best to avoid story spoilers of the second game and all that. And thankfully it's a Kojima game. And trying to explain story and plot points for Kojima is a lost.
40:43 --> 40:44 I don't know what's going on even if you watched it.
40:45 --> 41:59 Yeah, I do want to spoil a few things at the end when I'm done ranting about this game. But even I'm gonna spoil it at the end. I'll give warnings, but even I do, you won't know what the fuck's going on because I, I still don't know what's going on and I beat the fucking game. But yeah, the story is always weird, these games. But the first game ended really great and I was, I loved it. And the sequel is everything I loved about the first. First game for most part, just times 10. But I was so upset that didn't come out on PC until just now. And I'm playing it now and I'd like to. I like the game a lot. I loved it, I think it's great. I think everybody should play play it. But man, is it lonely playing this game on PC now when the people who are most into it, the most hyped about it, already played it and they're not talking about a year later. Nobody's talking about this game. There is a lack of hype for destroying two because it feels like it came out a year ago and I'm playing the port. This, this is the same reason why with GTA 6 is coming out, it's going to come out on PlayStation 6 or 5 or whatever first and then a year or so later it'll probably come from. They don't even want to tell you when it's coming out for PC. It's basically when they want people to buy it twice. Right. But it's gonna be the same thing all over again. I hate this idea of console exclusive and then maybe you're later release it on PC. That pisses me off.
41:59 --> 42:00 Yeah.
42:00 --> 42:12 So I don't know. And that's, that's been disappointing because I think this game would have sold a ton More on PC had it launched alongside the PS5. I don't know. But I did play it. Did you finish the first game chart?
42:12 --> 42:43 No, no, I think I got to. Where did I end up? There was something happening in one of the towns and we were trying to. Oh God. Who was it? It was fragile. Is that what her name is or something? She was walking in the rain? I think so, yeah. Yeah. And she had the umbrella or whatever, the weird looking umbrella. She was talking to me in a town underneath an overpass and she was explaining like what happened to her and why she has to wear the suit because she, you know, they put her out in the rain with the. Whatever.
42:43 --> 42:43 Yeah.
42:43 --> 43:22 And I think that's where I ended we did the, the trench fight scene with that actor. I like, I can't remember his name. Yeah, Mad Mickelson's character. I was like, what is he doing? I still don't know what's happening, but I was in a trench war with Matt Mickelson at some point. So Norman Reedus and Mad Mickelson walk into a bar. Like it sounds like a joke, like it's, it's crazy what's going on. So that, and that's where I, I, I don't remember why I stopped. I think I was just like, I don't, I still don't know what the hell's happening. And I know you were like, keep playing because it gets good after this. Like you're there, you're there when things start picking up. And I was, I just couldn't grab, I couldn't grab me.
43:22 --> 44:41 Yeah. Like the problem with destroying was, and, and the sequel has this as well is the core gameplay loop is you're basically trying to connect the land mass through micro missions. Like it's an open, technically, it's an open world map. You can go anywhere you want right from the get go. But if you haven't unlocked a hub, you can't really do anything in there. And if an area is not online the network, you can't see other player structures in the game. For those, for those who've never played Death Stranding, I'm saying package delivery. I'm really selling it. Not so great. But the idea is like you're in one hub and you're given a mission, usually package to deliver to another hub that's a ways away and you got to travel there's. And initially because that hub is offline, you have to do it by foot or maybe vehicles, but you have to bring your own ladders, climbing pitons, maybe some kits to build bridges if you want. But it's all you using the tools and gadgets to kind of make your pathway to that location. And then once that hub comes online, then you can start. Then you start seeing randomly other people who've played that game and their buildings and their things. So one of the cool things about the game and one of the things I enjoyed a lot in Death Strike 2 is in addition to the roads and highways, there's also monorail. So once you can actually put a lot of resources, no monorail. In the first one you had highways for sure, but in the second one
44:41 --> 44:41 you had the highways.
44:41 --> 45:49 I remember that you have a train system that goes from all the major hubs and there's mines that have tons of resources, so you don't feel like you're strapped for resources until you get a hub online. And once you build the monorail, it's very easy to then cart resources from one half map to the other. And I just. I spend many hours just doing that. Like, I put the story in the back burner and I was just building things. It was actually fun to build things. And the monorail itself is just. It's cool because once you've gotten a place online, a lot of the time other players have already built in that section of track for you. So you're just kind of seeing what they've built and you're just filling in the gaps. So I never felt like I had to. Like, it didn't feel like a chore to build the highways and the monorail tracks. Whereas the first game, a lot of the times because I played so late, there was no roads or there's very few roads. Right. So I had to build it all myself. And they deteriorate over time because that's what the game was like. But the sequel game, I had nothing break in my entire playthrough of 40 hours. So when I built something, it slowly deteriorated. But more likely I was repairing somebody else's something that was. Was existing for a long time. So like somebody else built a bridge that was going to deteriorate. So I fixed it. My stuff never really broke, which was a nice quality of life improvement.
45:49 --> 46:01 And just the time rain and all that stuff still present in the second one and all that, obviously. But British Telecom is. Sinistar likes to call British Telecom.
46:01 --> 46:37 Yeah, there's. There's definitely. There are definitely. There's more of them. There's now like different assortment of BTs. Like the BTs are basically ghosts. Like the story of this game is it's an alternate universe kind of alternate reality of Earth where when dead people suddenly. When dead people die, if they're not disposed of through an incinerator, they explode in a nuclear explosion. And your main character has an affliction. All the special characters in the game have something called Dooms. Again, it's very Kojima. Like, this could easily be a Metal Gear Solid plot. All the main characters have special powers,
46:38 --> 46:38 spin off or a.
46:39 --> 47:36 Or it feels like it feels. But the main character, Sam, who is played by Norman Reedus and is very much normal Reedus looking. He can't die. He's called the Repatriate. When he dies, he'll explode like any corpse. But he comes back to life every single time. That's the gimmick, right? That's how it's a video game logic. You die, but you come back. And there's a few times I died in the game where I'm fighting the bts. There's one section where the game is trying to explain that you can use a certain grenade to pokeball capture BTS using combat. I could. I couldn't figure it out. But the. The tutorial for that, I guess, was have three BTs attack you at once. And I was getting wrecked. And so when I died, I explode. And when you come back to life, there's a giant freaking crater of where you died, and it just stays there. I don't. I don't know if it ever comes back. But from that point on, whenever I took the monorail over it, I just saw where I died. It was like I felt so shameful. I did this. I fucking nuked this place. It's crazy.
47:37 --> 47:39 My shame is immeasurable.
47:39 --> 48:07 It's crazy, but it's very quirky, right? The concept of, okay, when people die, humans die. If they're not disposed of, they explode. Well, how do you explain all the bandit and human enemies you fight? And there's lots of them. There's tons of bandits. Not only is there BTs and ghosts you have to deal with and the horror element style, but there's also, honestly, Metal Gear Solid style takedowns and stealth missions that tackle bandits. I mean, there's lots of weapons, shotguns, rifles, sniper rifles, everything.
48:07 --> 48:11 For the first one, for the most part, was non lethal. That I remember. And then I started.
48:11 --> 48:16 Yeah, they start telling you these are. This is non lethal sniper rifle. It's a non lethal rifle.
48:17 --> 48:21 Eventually you get shoot beanbag chairs at people.
48:21 --> 49:03 You know, one of the characters tells you he gives you a cheat code. And if you do the code on the inventory screen, it makes your weapons lethal. But when you do that, if you don't dispose of the bodies, apparently they do explode, or you get. You get docked legs or something in the game. So the game goes out of its way to tell you you're not actually killing humans, you're just incapacitating them. Which is kind of funny. But to add on that, there's also robot enemies. Now there's mech enemies. The law of the narrative is based around the bad guy from the first games mysteriously coming back. And he's got an army of. Of weird BT hybrid robot creatures. And they're very rad looking like red metal cyber blades. The whole, the whole bit. They're very cool looking.
49:04 --> 49:10 If there's something Kojima does not skimp on is cool looking shit in his game. Yeah. Like his stuff is dope looking.
49:11 --> 50:46 Yeah. And like in the opening trailer, if anybody watched the trailer or the openings opening, once you. Once you get the opening in the game done, you start off in Mexico and you go to Australia. Australia is the. The heart of the game. And you meet the bad guy, Higgs, for the first time. He's got a battle guitar. He's got a guitar that shoots lightning bolts. It does not get much more Kojima than that. Like, you eventually unlock the guitar for yourself to use and it's fucking rad, dude. Like, you can walk into combat and swing it around because it's an ax, because. Right. That's a guitar. Or you start using it in combat and you can do like fast lightning bolts with it. You play on it. Or you could like charge it up and do big strums to do lightning attacks. It's. It's really rad, dude. It's. It's stupid. It's dumb as hell, but it's fucking rad. Like the. One of the. Towards the end of the game, one of the big battles is basically a guitar battle, right? Like you are actually fighting the bad guy, the boss in a guitar battle. In moments, it pains to you and it says, mash this button to strum the guitar as like a mini game, to strum it faster than the enemy, to deal damage to them. And like the one encounter you're just like, I'll. I'll spoil. I'll talk about it after. When I'm done talking. There's a sequence I want to talk about. But yeah, it's. It's cool. But all the characters are very fun. Kojima must have like a vault somewhere of all the faces he scanned because you have Norma Reedus, obviously is the main character. You have Leah. Sedu is Fragile. She's. She's a very well known French actress. I believe she's French. You have. Was it Guillermo Del Toro? Del Toro, famous director. He's not voicing the character.
50:46 --> 50:47 It's not his body, right?
50:47 --> 51:26 Yeah, it's his body and his face, but it's not his voice. They have somebody else doing the voice. Although the actor sounds. He's doing his best impression of Del Toro, but he plays Dead Man. He was in the first game and he's in this one. His gimmick is that he's called Dead man because he's made of dead body parts. Fragile is called Fragile. Because her body's falling apart. It's. She's fragile. Right. The. The new character you meet in the beginning is Tar Man. He's the captain of your ship that you have. It's a mobile base. He's called Tar man because the ship itself, the. The concept of tar is that tar is. Is brought from the other plane. Like the, the. Oh, the beachy plane.
51:26 --> 51:27 Like the beach you die.
51:27 --> 53:22 It's the beaches and where the beaches are, tar is a gateway to the other side. And the ship he has and he captains, he takes it into lakes of tar and travels to other parts of the map and then rises out of the tar. It's like a sub, but it's with tar. But he navigates. It's called Tar man because he's missing his hand. He lost his hand in an accident with the tar. And when he plugs his hand into the machine, he can sense his disembodied hand in the tar fields and that's how he navigates. And like when you. When the game wants you to like be. Not be able to fast travel with the ship, it will say, oh, the tar currents are unwieldy. I can't find my hand. Like it's. Again, does it make sense? No, but it's cool as it's. Kojima. Yeah. Like the shit he comes out of his mouth or what he puts in his head is just batshit crazy. So it's. It's really, really wild. There was an early sequence. So in the first game you do have though, you have that trench warfare. There's a few sequences where you're doing. You're going to famous battlefields, I guess, for encounters. This game does have sequences that are very familiar or similar to that, but they happen a little bit earlier. But the first one, it feels like you're in a Mexican town and it's like Cinco de Mayo or something. Like there's lots of lights and fireworks. And I took screenshots, I have to post them to Discord. But there's a field, there's a scene where it's just nothing but fireworks and pinwheels. And the screen is full, full of sparks and embers. Like it just lit with fireworks. Very attractive, very pretty game. I was very in awe of that sequence. Very awesome. And like this is a game that ran on console. It runs amazing on my PC. Like I played this at 200 frames the entire time without any drops. Like it's a very pretty looking game. And the first game, compared to the first game, as nice as that game was too graphically it took place. It was supposed to be the United States, but it felt like you're in Ireland or Scotland. Right. It was just all hills and green grass.
53:22 --> 53:37 There was very little university. Like that was kind of the thing. It was just really dreary all the time. And you have the time rain, which made sense. Like that's what it was. It was always rainy. You didn't know it was coming. But I don't remember there being much sun in the first game, to be honest.
53:37 --> 53:38 Almost never.
53:38 --> 53:39 Yeah, yeah.
53:39 --> 54:42 And it was always grass and it was always mountains. The second game takes place. It starts in Mexico, which is weird. It's only for. It's only a little bit like a tutorial zone. But the first thing you come across is desert, is Mexico and there's a massive dust storm. Like we're talking. Was it Mission Impossible where he's in Dubai and there's that giant dust storm sequence. That sequence in Death Stranding 2 and it overtakes you is awesome. And that's just desert. And then you get to Australia. In Australia, if I don't know Australia very well, I know it's very big. But if it has this range of landscapes, I'm impressed because like in this game, you have deserts, you have green hills, you have ruined urban landscapes, you have beaches, of course, but you also have mountains, much like crimson desert. And the mountains. When I'm saying mountains, I mean mountains. Like you're trudging through 6ft snow, dynamically leaving footprints behind you. It slows you down. Your vehicles can get stuck the whole bit. When you're going through the mountains and there's a BT area and you're trying to stealth through the mountains, you're making sure that you don't freeze to death while you're trying to avoid the ghosts.
54:42 --> 54:42 Okay.
54:42 --> 55:31 It's very rad. Just like. Yeah, there's multiple environments. I never felt bored with the landscapes and it was fun. When you have a mission that's taking you across the map because some of them do that and you're driving or walking. The environments are constantly changing and they all felt very unique. There was one area that was like a valley, so it was like California style cliffs. But then the valley was all green and lots of trees. There was one sequence where it was through a forest, but it was raining down fire. So fire would dynamically spring up. And it felt like it wasn't random. It felt like it was hand placed because it felt like it was shuffling you into a certain pathway through the valley. But it was fine. But it was. But visually it was very impactful. Looked amazing and all and just one of the best looking games I played in a very, very long time. Very impressed with it. So much more over the first game. So visually sounds like a really good creed. Sounds like a.
55:31 --> 55:38 The fire swamp from the Princess Bride to avoid the lightning quicksand and the rodents of unusual size.
55:40 --> 56:22 There was some crazy. Yeah, the environments are all like just interesting but. And like it's supposed to be earth but like, yeah, fire from the sky, lightning bolts and then yeah, the random ghost with the BTS is pretty awesome. Yeah, very visually cool. Gameplay wise is still delivering packages but there's more tools and gadgets to play with. You have like, like Call of Duty esque body skeletons. What do you call them? Power armor frames, like power skeletons. There's more of those in this game. There's one that like, you know, makes it so you. You can climb easier. There's one that makes it so you can carry more. The one I used most often was the one where you're less likely to trip and fall. Because in this game when you trip and fall, your parcels spill off your body.
56:22 --> 56:23 Yeah.
56:23 --> 57:31 And if you're trying to do a delivery and you're crossing a river the wrong way, there goes your packages. There's a. There's a few moments when I was trying to use ladders to climb up a mountain. The game tells you you can. It says you can go up the mountain. It's faster or it's more direct. It's more direct. Not faster. More direct but it's more dangerous. Or Sam, you can go around the bottom. It'll take you longer, but there'll be less BTS that way. Or maybe there's BTS this way, but it's more treacherous to go this way instead with but with less encounters. So I was always trying to do the more direct route. And yeah, I clim. I got a halfway up a mountain and I was going to try and build a zip line to make the coming back easier, but I was just out of range so I had to backtrack a little bit and I fucking fell down a mountainside. All my climbing pitons, all my ladders all fell off me. Fucking fell down the mountainside. I. I managed to survive, but I survived with nothing. I was so pissed off as I'm like desperately trying to climb back up to, to try and finish my route and I couldn't do it. I had to backtrack. But I mean it was frustrating in A good way though, if you didn't feel like the game was out to get me or something. I didn't feel like it was buggy. It felt fair.
57:31 --> 57:31 Just.
57:31 --> 57:32 It was just.
57:32 --> 57:59 Yeah, no, that's definitely when I played the first one. Just tripping over a rock. I mean, it's so natural. It's a natural thing. Like if you're running around with all this weight and you're running in slippery rocky areas, you're gonna eat shit. I mean, that's just life. That's how it is. But you're right, like, it's not like, this is totally unfair. This has happened. You're like, I'm stupid because I'm running around with water socks through these rocks and I'm not doing a very good job of getting good shoes or good footing.
58:00 --> 58:18 Like I. I'm dumb because I was in a bandit camp and then I stole a bunch of like resin and metals or something. So I have like a. A tower. Leaning tower, peas on my back. And then I stumbled because I wasn't packing my gear correctly. And I. And I mean, that's fine. That's on me. That's when I should have, like, I should have stole a truck or I should have brought a truck and park
58:18 --> 58:20 triggers where you would hold on.
58:21 --> 58:22 Yeah, it's like bear down.
58:22 --> 58:30 You're white knuckling on the controller to hold on. The. You're running with. Oh man, I'll never forget that. It's probably where I got my purple tunnel from was that.
58:30 --> 58:40 Well, so I'm using like. So I'm using the. I played with the 8bitdo Pro 3 and it has for the audio since there's an extra set of triggers in the back. So I was using this to bear down, so.
58:40 --> 58:42 Oh, nice. Okay, cool.
58:42 --> 59:07 It's less harmful in my hands. Yeah. But yeah, it's, it's. You don't. I didn't trip nearly as much in this game as I did in the first game. It's funny, the opening sequence In Death Strang 2, you have the baby strapped to your back, but it's a toddler, so it's like a one year old strapped to you instead of just hanging there on a baby Bjorn, whatever. And I'm like, you're going to start me? I haven't played this kind of game in a year with the toddler strapped to my stomach.
59:07 --> 59:08 Baby on your back.
59:09 --> 59:57 And you're in the. On your stomach, dude. And you start on a mountain. You start on a mountain. I'm like, fuck you. So like I fell because I'm going. Of course I'm going to. Because I'm not used to controls. But you fall so that the baby's not hurt, but you are. It was the dumbest fucking thing. It's dumb in a good way though. Really dumb in a good way. But yeah, it's. And like. But it's a game that I wish more people would play because we look. We look at games these days and it's like it's a Souls like. Or, you know, it's a. It's an Extraction shooter. It's a Call of Duty shooting game. Everything is always a genres or genre fight. It's Diablo. Like everything is a copy of another game. Even if it's not meaning to be. It feels like the same tropes are already been established. Nobody ever is going to make a death stranding. Like nobody. No.
59:57 --> 01:01:20 Like only Kojima would stand alone on its own. It really does. And there's not. I mean, the joke Wolf always puts up is what to Expect when you're FedExing is what he calls his. His playthrough of death stranding. Like, it's such a. You. I don't know if anybody could explain like at the beginning, because I watch people play it because there are so many people that are jazzed about. I'm not a Metal Gear Solid fan. I mean, it's. It's a cool game, but I'm just not like Metal Gear. I'm not like Kojima, dude. Kojima. Like, the only thing I was really jacked about was Silent Hills. That never happened. Now I'm getting od. But that's a whole nother story altogether. But I, you know, and then Jake convinced me and I. I got. When I bought my video card, it came with a free copy of Death Stranding. And I was like, ok, well, I got the game. I might as well see what's. What it's about. And I played 15 minutes of it, all right. And I was like, it's pretty beautiful. It's very. It looks like the Pacific Northwest, you know, it's green and cloudy and rainy all the time. Why. Why is my getting rusty in the rain like super fast? What are these weird goopy things that are chasing me? What's. I don't know what's going on. And I talked to, you know, I talked to Wolf about it and he's like, it's just Kojima. It's just. It is what it is. And Jake, I think last year he was just. He was hounding me about It. And I was like, you know, Death Training two looks cool, but I know nothing about Death Training one. And of course he goes with his squad goals. Let's play Death Straining together. We'll do an episode about it.
01:01:20 --> 01:01:21 Yeah.
01:01:21 --> 01:01:33 Okay. And we started it and I played it on my Steam deck. Played great on the Steam deck. And I played it in here on my PC. It looks beautiful on the game. And then I just got so much further in the game. I was like, I. I still don't know what's happening.
01:01:35 --> 01:01:35 It's.
01:01:35 --> 01:01:46 It was like, like when we talk about Crimson Desert and I hate to go back to it, but it's, you know, it's not story focused. It's more the location. Right. This game is so story focused, but the story doesn't make any sense.
01:01:47 --> 01:01:51 You don't get the story until the end of the game. That's the problem. It's. It's end loaded for sure.
01:01:51 --> 01:02:04 You have to fight to get to the end. And my curiosity just was not winning. I could. My curiosity wasn't enough to. I'm. I'm going to try and finish it. And the more you talk about two and. And I think the way two looks is badass.
01:02:04 --> 01:02:05 It looks really.
01:02:06 --> 01:02:25 I, I. It could definitely sway me into. To falling back into the first one so that I could play the second one and maybe get it. It's. I just, I wish that I was more of a. Like, I'm cool with Kojima just being like, this character is made out of a mering pie. And you're like, oh, that seems to make sense. I get it. You know, whatever.
01:02:26 --> 01:02:51 There's like Heartman, the character whose heart stops every 21 minutes and he uses that to search the afterlife for his family. Right. That was the big character from the first game. There's one character of the first game who's giving birth to a ghost baby and she breastfeeded, but it's a ghost. It makes no sense. But they do explain some of the stuff with flashbacks if you care to go there. But it's still fucking weird to try and talk about. This game is crazy. Trip.
01:02:51 --> 01:02:54 That was a. That was a Trip. That. That character was weird.
01:02:55 --> 01:02:55 Yeah.
01:02:55 --> 01:03:21 I mean, I get it. I get it, but it was weird. And, and I love the bts. I thought the BT concept was cool. It really touched on the horror aspect of the game. Really stressed me out. When the thing starts clicking around your back and it's, you know, looking for. I thought that was really neat. And I love the design of everything. I just, I Just wish I, I wish I was artistic enough to get it. I don't know, I feel like.
01:03:21 --> 01:05:47 No, you know what it is, it's hard is you just didn't get a chance to get to the story part like you were getting there. And that's why when you said trench warfare, that's when the story starts coming in. When you start seeing the Mad Mikkelsen character and you start getting the story, but it drip feeds you the story. Like Nintendo with those fucking online games, like three games every six months. It's. That's. And that's the problem with this game as well is there's like, there's hints of story. You're compelled to do it, but you're getting nothing. Like you get a little bit of story or a boss sequence like every four or five missions and it's just like you could rush on to the next story missions like rush the hubs, but then you're missing out on building the roads and the monorail if you're into that kind of stuff. And that's the thing. But the best story moments in the first game and in the second game are all end loaded. Like the end of this game. And I'm going to give a spoiler warning for five minutes. This is spoilers of. I'm not going to give the. Again, I cannot explain the story, the plot of Death Strang 2. I will just say if you're a fan of anime, especially Evangelion and the idea of Evangelion and extinction of humanity, that's the overall theme of death stranding. So I'm going to spoil a little bit here, but I can't spoil everything. So you've been warned. But in this game, the ending sequence, the last three chapters are almost all story and they're fucking long. There was three moments in the ending of Death Strang 2 where I'm like, oh, okay, where's the credits? This has to be the ending. But then it goes again and then, oh, this is another. It wraps up another ending. Oh, I get to see the. Okay, this is what happens to this character. Oh, this is the ending of the game now. Nope, keeps going. It keeps going. There was three spots in this game where Kojima could have rolled credits and called it a day. But it keeps going. It keeps on going. But partly because they're trying to wrap up, continue the story from the first game. The thing with the first game was humanity's. Basically there's something's happening that could be an extinction for humanity. And the idea, the phenomena of Death Stranding the corpses exploding is meant to hasten the extinction of humanity. That's the gist of the game. And when you play Death Stranding 2, there is a option to catch up on the story of the first game. It gives you a short vignette of the story blurb or whatever. Yeah, but they don't. They don't cover all the major reveals in the first game, which is. Which is kind of weird. They don't. They. Even Destroying two cannot explain to you the plot of Death Straining one. I thought that was funny because I watched the recap and I'm like, I
01:05:47 --> 01:05:50 still doesn't know what the first game did.
01:05:50 --> 01:05:52 Yeah, it gets fucking crazy.
01:05:52 --> 01:05:54 That's so. Jesus.
01:05:54 --> 01:06:53 But I will say the end of this game, though, it. There could be a sequel if they wanted to. But the idea of Norman Reedus, I could see them saying, you know what? Norman's good. We'll find somebody else for the third game. So, like, I mean, they could do more with him, but they could totally do a different direction. They end it well, because Kojima, I think, is in his early 60s now. Like, he's. Or he's late 50s maybe. I think he. And he said he's not sure about a third game. So if we don't, it's fine. This game ends well enough. So don't worry about if anybody's thinking, well, I don't play this game if there's me a third one. Or I'm worried if I haven't played the first. You could play this game without playing the first game. But I would recommend playing, like, watching the ending sequence of the first game just so you have the big reveals about Sam and the baby and Mad Mickelson. So you know how it all wraps together, because that is important for this game. Like, the bad guy in this, even though it's Higgs, it's Troy Baker, who's excellent in everything he does. He's a great bad guy. But the Troy Baker Higgs in the second game, very different than the Higgs from the first game.
01:06:53 --> 01:06:55 Like, not just say they don't look the same.
01:06:55 --> 01:06:56 No.
01:06:56 --> 01:07:07 I remember seeing what Higgs looked like in the second one, and I was like, it's like fucking Kefka. And they're like, this Higgs. And I went, no, it's not. Yeah, I know what he looks like in the second one. He looks nothing like that.
01:07:07 --> 01:07:25 Yeah, in the first game, he was kind of like Egyptian inspired, but he's more like Guerrilla Warfare hood, Death Mask. Yeah. In the second Game. He's glad rocker. It's David Bowie dressed in red metal armor. It's. It's totally different vibe. And it's, it's the. Oh, I didn't mention doll, man. You have a living doll that hangs off your, your belt.
01:07:25 --> 01:07:27 Oh, you told me, you told me that.
01:07:28 --> 01:07:52 Yeah. And it even tells you, sam, throw me and I'll scout for you. And you. So you take the doll and you throw the marionette into the sky and he helicopters over to an area and he scouts for you. Wow. Can't explain this stuff. And it's also he's. Because he's a doll, the frame rate is purposely 24 frames for sequences involving him. So he's like low frame rate. Like it for some reason. Anyway, I love that.
01:07:53 --> 01:07:54 That's a cool thing.
01:07:54 --> 01:09:16 So weird. But like the, the one of the sequences at the end of the game. And again, this is spoilers. When you, you're basically traveling to the beach with a ship. You're going to the afterlife with the ship and you do that by going through the tar and then you come out of a baby's mouth and then you're out of the tar fields into the afterlife. But after you fight Higgs and it's a tar battle again, you're on top of some. I think you're on top of a ruin or something and it turns into a side scrolling battle. It's very limited fighting and very limited. There's like one move, you're swinging the guitar like a fricking weapon and you're just pounding one after like a movie trope, right? You're, you're shirtless, you're both beaten down, you're both on your last legs and you're on, you're in a sunset, you're fighting to the death with busted guitar axes and you're smacking each other. Taking turns smacking each other. And then when you're about to die for reasons, the character you're trying to save drifts into the abyss, comes back as a baby but like 200ft tall and walks over to you and the baby saves the day of Death Strain two. And it just like that whole sequence, I'm like, what the fuck am I even playing? But like, you can't, you can't put that in a review. You can't tell somebody, this is why you need to play Death Strain two. Because there's a giant baby sequence and guitar battles because nobody's going to believe you. And if they do, I mean, they're gonna think it's Stupid.
01:09:17 --> 01:09:42 If you played anything of Death Stranding 1 and. And the BB's being what they are. And I remember the first time you die and you come back, I was like, what the hell is going. I don't get what's going on at all. And. And sure, I still don't get it. All I know is that the baby resurrected me somehow and I appeared and it was so weird. It's so weird. It creeps me out.
01:09:42 --> 01:09:56 Bizarre baby thing creeps me out. Yeah, everything. It's also. Yeah, but the whole. The whole resurrecting sequence of the babies coming out the mouth, the sun is the baby's crying tar. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it yells at you. Like it just. It's so weird. Every character is weird.
01:09:56 --> 01:09:57 So the only.
01:09:57 --> 01:11:28 The only thing I don't like about this game is nobody one I don't like. People are not going to play it, which is a shame for people who. People who are going to play Death Drawing two are the ones who are fans of the first game or they're really diehard Kojima fans and they've already played it. If you're not a Death Rating fan, you're probably never going to pick this game up. Which is a shame because there's a lot of great narrative here. There's that overreaching story about humanity extinction, isolation, especially post pandemic. The first game came out during the pandemic and in Death Rating, everybody's isolated because they don't want to be exposed to BTS and stuff. And the sequel, people are slowly coming together, but still isolated. And it's like a post pandemic. He didn't do it on purpose, but it feels like it's a commentary on the pandemic. But there's that the story sequence at the end are amazing and epic, but to get there is a lot of deliveries. And if you don't like the deliveries, you don't like the building. If the concept of planning your route across a mountain and what ladders, how many ladders and climb pitons that bring with you is not appealing to you, then you're not going to dig the gameplay. But the story is so good. I almost like to say you could suffer through the gameplay because the story's worth it, but the gameplay will be a big turn off for a lot of people. But as cool as it is, right, like you like sailing across the highways on a coffin board, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a surfboard that's also a coffin that rides away Vitar anywhere. You want to explain that with a straight face? It's just ridiculous, right? It's crazy. Yeah.
01:11:28 --> 01:11:40 I was thinking. I'm thinking juxtaposition of our games here, right. That we're talking about is that if you want to suffer through the gameplay for the story, do it. Minus if you want to suffer the story for the gameplay, do it.
01:11:40 --> 01:11:41 Do it. Yeah.
01:11:41 --> 01:11:44 They could be polar opposites on that. It's pretty funny.
01:11:44 --> 01:12:57 I think this is why I want to do this episode because I thought it was neat. Because in that both of our games that we're both raving about, both, I think are great games for each of us individually. Right. But I can see why other people. This would be their worst nightmare of a game. Right. I could see people who would look at Crimson Desert and say, I can't play that. There's no story, no handholding, controls are clunky. But then I see other people are like, hell, yeah. Open world, 200 hours doing nothing but just exploring. I'm killed for that. Right? Death Strang. The same thing. Like people who are Kojima fans who they like the idea of, if they. If there are people who watched Evangelion said this is deep, they would probably think destroying story is deep. I don't think it's particularly deep, but it's definitely interesting. But it's interesting that way, right? Like, he gives you themes and ideas. And when you think about it like, this could be a really cool, honest. Like I said on. On Blue sky, when I beat the game, just give Kojima millions of dollars. Let him build what he wants. He's one of like the. The few people who you give $100 million or. Or more and just say, make me a miniseries. Do whatever the you want. Don't interfere with him. And he will give you art back. Whether you like it or not. Doesn't matter you. But you'll appreciate that it's art in some way. Yeah, for sure. I feel that way with him.
01:12:57 --> 01:13:46 I mean, with what he's gonna do with od. Whatever he's doing with that, even. Even the first five minutes of that game, I'm hooked. And. And it's just because it's gonna. Because the horror aspects and. And death stranding are top notch. I think they're. They're very gripping. You know, P.T. horrifying. Great design. Really wish it had gone somewhere. And I think this is. This is what it's supposed to be like. This is what PT should have been kind of thing. It looks like it's going to be A terror. And when you really get somebody that's as artistic as Kojima is, he could do anything with that and he's gonna scare the pants off you. I. I guarantee I'm gonna be terrified playing od. So, you know, if you just look at death stranding, that is not intended to be a horror game. There's some spooky.
01:13:47 --> 01:14:06 There's definitely. Dude. There's a sequence where they add giant BTs. So the first time you're going through Australia, you see the regular BTs, like ghosts are hovering and you know what to do with them. You enter sequence where there's a bunch of like red cliffs. It feels like Grand Canyon, although much smaller scale.
01:14:06 --> 01:14:07 Okay, right, right.
01:14:07 --> 01:15:29 But when you enter that area and your Odeck goes up and starts scanning and you know that you're in a ghost area, it pans over to a hillside and. And a giant BT rises up and it's got a yellow eye gaze thing and it just pans in your direction and you instinctively duck down and it's like. It's like the Eye of Sauron. If it sees you and it comes after you, you're fighting a boss battle. So trying to avoid something like that was terrifying. The few times you find you have that is pretty epic. And the bosses themselves, like the. The one sequence of the one boss is truly freaking massive spider like creature. And you have to shoot the joints and really, really cool. But he always does gameplay different. There's always something unique about his games. Even going back to like Metal Gear solid on the PS1. I love metal Gear Solid and like you can say that Metal Gear Solid one is like an action game, but it doesn't play like any other military style shooter. And they never do. They're always quite different. Even like Phantom Pain, the fifth game, I bounced off that one. But the idea, like you're capturing soldiers with weather balloons to capture them and take them back to your base. Like he. He always found ways to subvert the expectations of gameplay and did something different always. So like, for him to do od, whatever he does will be unique. And like, again, people are gonna love it or they're gonna hate it, but it's gonna be interesting either way. I think is the thing with Kojima.
01:15:29 --> 01:15:32 So definitely gonna tap into my genre for damn sure.
01:15:32 --> 01:15:42 Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty awesome. Tar man is. Is the actor, is. Is George. George Miller the director. They use his face for this. Okay. Yeah, yeah. It's crazy.
01:15:44 --> 01:15:47 Another soul captured to Kojima's soul. Soul capturing machine.
01:15:49 --> 01:15:57 Crazy. I love when he had Coden o' Brien in the first game. That was a trip. It's just crazy.
01:15:57 --> 01:16:00 Oh, I love Cody talking about how he was asked to do that.
01:16:02 --> 01:16:27 Clueless gamers. Great. So Death Strang two Crimson Desert. I think it's. I mean you and I would recommend these games but I mean it's going to be either you love it or you hate it. There's just no way around it. Either you like this type of game or you don't I guess is what it is. And that's okay. Games are subjective. Not every game is going to bounce everybody. So like I know people who love Final Fantasy Rebirth. I think they're wrong. But that's okay. They can like their games. It's fine.
01:16:27 --> 01:16:30 The one that keeps trying to convince me to buy it, to play it.
01:16:30 --> 01:16:33 But don't you want to know where the story ends? No.
01:16:33 --> 01:16:33 No.
01:16:33 --> 01:16:34 The bad voiceover.
01:16:34 --> 01:16:50 You know what? Ironically I started. I started the original 7Up again because I was like I've been listening to the soundtrack at work because it's a great soundtrack. It's one of my favorites. Yeah, when I hear those tunes I was like I kind of want to play it now. I want to, I want to be in that area and play it. So I fired it up and was
01:16:50 --> 01:16:51 remake or the original? Original.
01:16:51 --> 01:17:00 No, the original. The first one. Very first one. I want to complete it. If I'm going to play it, I want the whole damn thing. So yeah, so yeah, I was playing the original.
01:17:00 --> 01:17:23 Well the third one, the third part comes out I think next year. I think I heard is the rumor. So it's. It's going to be much faster than. Than the last time. But again they're using the same engine as two and, and two. Like the issues I have with that. The remakes. Very nice engine, very cool looking. So. And the music is rad in those two. But yeah, I don't know. Two great games. Test Rain 2 Crimson Desert. I got to play Crimson Desert. I. I just gotta wait.
01:17:23 --> 01:17:26 I gotta play Death Stranding. I. I gotta go back to that one too.
01:17:26 --> 01:17:37 So just play it on easy. If, if it's too much like just get through the gameplay and the story is worth experiencing at least once. It's so weird. It's so weird.
01:17:37 --> 01:17:49 My pride isn't hung on. On beating Death Stranding. You know, challenge, challenge mode. I'd honestly, if I could do like one delivery a game and open up some, I'd be good. The combat was fun.
01:17:49 --> 01:18:20 The second game I played it on casual difficulty so like bosses weren't difficult once you figure out the pattern and stuff. And it was fine. Deliveries were fair and then once you did a delivery usually got two stars initially. So you got the item from that location and if you wanted the upgraded items you could, you could grind out the missions. But it wasn't as much of a chore as it is on normal difficulty. And it was definitely easier than the first game. And that was perfect for me because for me it was less about the mission grinding, it was more about playing with the cool toys, cool story and kind of going through it like it's
01:18:21 --> 01:18:39 casual is fine once you start unlocking the vehicles. Then it was a lot, I was, I took a lot quicker like for sure. Speaking of, there's a another update coming to Crimson Desert that's going to add difficulty adjustment so you could play it easy, medium or hard too. So yeah, I heard, I heard folks
01:18:39 --> 01:18:45 didn't like you'd mentioned the boss, but some of the boss fights are big fu in terms of like cheesiness.
01:18:45 --> 01:18:46 They really are.
01:18:46 --> 01:19:07 So yeah, if they, I mean that's another thing like mods and stuff would adjust to over time. But if the, if the developer is taking steps to, to do that, then all of our reason for me to play this is six months from now. I was genuinely looking at Capcom hoping they would do an update or an expansion for Dragon's Dogma 2 that would fix all these issues because they did with the first game. But they, they pretty much given up on Dragon's Dogma 2. It looks like it didn't sell nearly enough.
01:19:07 --> 01:19:11 Crimson Desert is, is what Dragon's Dogma 2 should have been.
01:19:11 --> 01:19:11 Yeah.
01:19:11 --> 01:19:22 Honestly. And that's what I've heard from people that have played the original. You know, there, there may not be some really cool deep dungeons like there were. I mean even Elden Rings dungeons were I felt still kind of superficial for the most part.
01:19:23 --> 01:19:23 Yeah.
01:19:23 --> 01:19:29 But I don't know. I, I, I'm glued. I'm glued. I'm like ready to fire it up.
01:19:30 --> 01:19:33 Well, if you are streaming this, where can folks find you?
01:19:33 --> 01:20:19 Find me on Twitch. You can find me on Twitch. Chardbunk, Twitch TV Normal Spot. I'm playing, I play this just because it's fun, but I'm also playing Signalis right now which is an awesome retro indie horror is inspired by original Resident Evil and original Silent Hill games. Really cool puzzle Y. Great great soundtrack. I've actually been listening to the soundtrack at work. Cool game. And it's, it's, it's on Steam it's been around for I think two years now. Yeah, Just kind of fell into it. It's spectacular. Sing out Signalis. Go check this it out. If you're into those kinds of puzzle horror games like, like the original Resident Evil and Silent Hills, check this thing out. It's really cool. I've been having fun with it.
01:20:20 --> 01:20:25 Yeah, that's what. I have so many games on my list I gotta go through. I don't have time for 300 hour
01:20:25 --> 01:20:32 crimson and then I go back to Final Fantasy 7 comfort.
01:20:32 --> 01:20:33 Right. Another short game. Right?
01:20:34 --> 01:20:37 Yeah. I just love making.
01:20:37 --> 01:20:54 You can find me here on the channel again. I'll be doing the charity stream tomorrow, April 11, 8pm Eastern, here on the press B channel, both on twitch and on YouTube. Please check it out and donate if you can. Or if I can't donate, that's cool. Just watch me pull my hair out playing the random randomized Mario games. It's a real good time. I threw in some.
01:20:54 --> 01:20:58 He's gonna be 2 in 30 minutes in the lunch hour.
01:20:59 --> 01:21:13 Yeah. Who couldn't beat Mario 1? I was going to actually just do the first world from each of the game because I have 33 games in this bundle. But I think for the first Mario game, when that comes up, I'll make it a point to get to 8:2 just to show Sinistar how easy it is.
01:21:13 --> 01:21:16 Just walk through it. Yeah, Easy peasy.
01:21:16 --> 01:21:36 It's great. Easy peasy. For press B to cancel. We do have a patreon. Patreon.com press B to cancel. And we have various tiers there with perks for discord and behind the scenes stuff. We have not done much behind the scenes stuff lately. We're going to try and get back to that once people are feeling better after April because April's been a show for all of us. If you hear my voice.
01:21:37 --> 01:21:38 Good God.
01:21:38 --> 01:21:47 Oh, yeah. Actually, we. The podcast is turning older. We. In May, we are going to be coming up on our seventh anniversary and we have episode 300 coming soon.
01:21:47 --> 01:21:47 Seven years.
01:21:48 --> 01:21:59 Seven years, man. Been a long time. So I'm gonna. We're gonna look at having a special episode or at least talk about it. Do you. What do you do for seven years of a podcast?
01:21:59 --> 01:22:05 Yeah, we should just do highlights of what you guys. What we did and what you guys did before Sinister and I got here.
01:22:06 --> 01:22:27 I think what I want to do is I want us to do an episode on Rygar again because like Rygar was our first episode and that game is rad. Especially there's a For those who don't know, there's a rygar on the PS2 and there was a remake of it or a redo of it on the Wii, but they animified the characters for some reason. And I wanted to play that Wii version actually quite a bit, so. Because the PS2 version is actually a hidden gem.
01:22:27 --> 01:22:31 Yeah, I like the PS2 version. I played it originally. It's really cool. Yeah.
01:22:31 --> 01:22:41 So maybe we'll do an episode on Ryger as a callback to the first episode, because, gosh, we sound a lot better now than we did seven years ago. So, I mean, that was a good episode especially. You guys are different.
01:22:43 --> 01:22:43 That's true.
01:22:43 --> 01:22:51 But even with you and Sinister, you guys have been with us for like four years now. I think it's close. I think it'll be four years in May, so. So it's. You guys have been around a long time too, ironically.
01:22:52 --> 01:22:59 Yeah, I think we joined in around the same time. You actually started. Just two or three years later. That's a trip. That's a trip.
01:22:59 --> 01:23:47 Been a long time, but. Oh, for our tiers, we do have a special tier, our Circus Charles tier, where if you donate a certain amount of money, we shout your name at the end of the episode. So while we thank all of our Patreons for donating two extra special guys, enthusiast Jeff and Von Bearly, thank you for being members of our Circus Charlie Tier. Circus Charles Tier. I'm tired, guys. But thanks very much for your support and again, thank you to the support of all of our Patreons. We do appreciate it. All that money goes to, you know, paying for hosting costs and whatnot. Find Press B to cancel on YouTube, Twitch. Also, find us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. If there's a podcast app you're listening to and you don't see press B there or hear press B there, please let me know and I'll make sure that we are put there. Otherwise, pressbedocancele.com, pressbee.org, which I got to renew soon. Thanks, Chard.
01:23:48 --> 01:23:50 You don't. But you don't.
01:23:50 --> 01:23:53 But I have to. How can I not?
01:23:53 --> 01:23:56 They're paying money for an outdated joke. It's okay.
01:23:56 --> 01:24:04 It's fine. Four letters. It's a good domain name. It's worth paying the $20 a year for. Anyway, this has been pressed with Cancel. Everybody. Have a great week. We'll see you again next week.
01:24:04 --> 01:24:05 To the desert,
01:24:09 --> 01:24:34 Sam. It.
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