222: The Moist Child Will See You Now

0:00Hey, what's happening everybody? Welcome to the show. It's the Jeff Kirsten show for September 8th, let's say. September 8th, 2026. Welcome to your home for the wettest elf boys. That sounds like a that doesn't. I don't know. Doesn't seem like the doesn't seem like it's gonna go well. That's glistening children. No, is that not? Today is the day, of course, for the first of two Nintendo Direct, this morning was the legend

1:03of Zelda focused one, which I thought was funny because they just had like a couple of very brief announcements with no details and then a bunch of ocarina of time stuff for the upcoming remake naturally. There's there's something wrong but there were you know they're talking about the movie. They don't show the movie. I think a lot of people expected like oh there's going to be a trailer for the film. Of course they'll have a new trailer for the movie in there why wouldn't they? They did not, but they did announce a release date of sometime in April. And they announced the name of the film, which is called the Legend of Zelda. I know I was pretty fucking blown away myself. You got me a moto up there. These blazing announcements. Yeah, please, please look forward to our upcoming film, which is which is titled The Legend of Zelda. Like okay. I don't know. The pictures I saw looked like a guy. Is the guy names is the guy

2:10name Zelda? What does it? This seems crazy. I don't know. Is that we get? We get to the bottom of this. Is this going to actually be Nathan Fielder interviewing someone for like a couple hours about elf boys? Like okay. Okay. We get in on this. What's the what's the situation here? And they're going to be touring an orchestra around the world playing the Legend of Zelda music. And there are new Legend of Zelda themed graphics in the Nintendo today app. So yeah, if there's a lot going on over it Nintendo. The the game, of course, you know, when they when they announced when they finally announced, hey, we're doing an Ocarina of Time remake, which you know, the existence of such had leaked fairly, you know, fairly reliably prior to that announcement, right? And so the

3:15so the the the initial reveal was just like Link sleeping in a bed and it kind of looked like shit. And like, there's a lot of stuff in here that just looks weird. And they did not spend a lot of time on it and did not give any meaningful detail on it and whatever else. And so this was them saying like, all right, fine. Here you go. We're gonna we're gonna we're gonna play the game in front of you. We're gonna show some actual gameplay. We're gonna take a look at, you know, a new trailer for it. And we're gonna break down all of the great integrated phone app features. Which I God bless them for continuing to try to the Nintendo Switch app is gonna integrate with you. You can already, you know, I know you're all buying Splatoon clothing, but let's also right now notes for a Zelda thing and maybe you can transfer money over to the app and use it to unlock your level up your egg. It says like a bunch of weird silly shit that they're doing for phones.

4:19The big news, the thing that's got everyone talking about this Ocarina of Time Remake, obviously. And this is something that I think, you know, we talked about like wondering how they would handle it back when they hadn't really showed it. But they they just straight up put it in there. Link can jump. They fucking link and fucking jump dude. I know. They they're creating an Ocarina of Time Remake and they are going to allow you to jump at will. He can swim. He can jump. It's uh, it's it's it's fucking crazy. And I'm not talking no Z targeting little side step in hop type deal. This month, he can he can jump. Link can jump. It's a big deal. This actually literally is something that I think I spent like a good chunk of time thinking about, I wonder how they're going to handle that because when we go back to the original release of Ocarina of Time and the

5:23the confining and in coherent nature of the Nintendo 64 controller, they had to make some choices, right? You know, like they opened the gameplay footage with literally the camera rotating around and then like literally talked shit about the N64 controller. Like look at all this free camera movement. You might remember that the N64 controller only had a single control stick, which my daughter who was watching with me this morning turned to me and said like, it only has one stick? What? I said, yeah, it's a bad it's bad. Um, and uh, so that I yeah, you know, they're they're going to give you a right stick camera rotation function. They're going to allow you to jump. They're making a video game. They're making finally a modern video game, which I, you know, is that going to actually ruin Ocarina of Time? I probably not.

6:24I like the idea of just being able to jump wherever I mean, whatever, they're going to build the game with that in mind. So it's not like, it's not like you're hacking a jump back into the original Ocarina of Time, which that would be, uh, that would be ridiculous. I mean, let's not let's not get too far ahead of us. The thing that people are actually talking about when they, they should be talking about the ability to jump, uh, is the, the look of the game. Uh, because you can't have a, a Zelda announcement without people getting very fucking up in arms about something related to the way it looks. Uh, it's, you know, that was kind of the other thing that came out of the previous, the original reveal is people looking at boy link and going, uh, the swi, does this look so like unreal engine like fake fan game kind of thing? And that's still, that is still, I think the, the criticism I've been seeing going around. I, I think I like it. I don't know. Like there's some, um,

7:28there's some discrepancies, I think between, and I guess it's normal for your main character to have more detail than NPCs, but, uh, you know, they, they're, they're running around a town and, um, and the characters you see in the town are like, they look like someone sat down and said, how could we make this N64 game look modern, but without spending a, like, you know, all of our time on it and, and they look better and you're like, oh, this is okay. Yeah. And, and in the trailer, they show the, the creepy looking, and by creepy, I mean sexy looking fairies and all of this stuff. And you're looking to go like, oh, yeah, this looks like a remake of Ocarina of Time. And then you look at Link and he's just smooth and shiny and slick in a way that looks somewhere between doll like and incredibly greasy. And, um, I don't know, I, I think I, I like, you know, bubble, I actually

8:30really liked the way that he looks and I like the way the animation, the way he's moving around, when he pulls out his, his stubby little boy sword. That doesn't sound good either. God damn it. Uh, I think it like it all, it all looks like pretty nice. Um, and, uh, yeah, I don't, I don't know that I really have a problem with the way that it looks. Um, it, it's, you know, the, his little friend in town, whatever the fuck her name was. Sarin, Sarin, I, anyway, anyway, I've gotten really good at forgetting NPC names in Zelda games. Like, is it, is it Impa? No, then I don't fucking know. Is it, you know, who cares? What are we talking about? There's like three characters in the Legend of Zelda. There's a lighthouse. There's a guy and a girl and a lighthouse. That's it. That's the Legend of Zelda. Only the lighthouse is a princess and the girl is a pigman. I might have mixed this metaphor up a little too deeply. Anyway, um,

9:37um, yeah, it's, uh, it was very interesting to go back and look at it. They're doing some neat little things around the edges that you just look at and go like, oh, yeah, okay, sure. Like you can, um, you can hum into the microphone and, and do your Ocarina song is that way. If you don't want to punch them out on the controller or whatever, you can, you can like sing into the mic or, or, or whatever or, or they are, they are selling in Ocarina. So theoretically, well, I mean, you could just have an Ocarina, I guess, but you could buy their official Ocarina and play that and, and that would be like a fun, weird way to do that. I don't know. I'm, I'm not, I don't think I'm gonna, this, I'm okay hitting the buttons. I think it's a neat idea, that they're, that they're doing that. Um, I have an Ocarina. I don't know where it is. They gave me an Ocarina back in 1998. Um, they gave me an Ocarina back when the game was coming out originally.

10:39It's not something I were selling. It was just like a, I think they just, I think Nintendo of America went to someone who makes Ocarinas and said, does we need a hundred of these to send out with copies of the game? And they went, all right, okay. So they're just like little ceramic, you know, Ocarina ass Ocarinas. Um, and yeah, I don't know. It's, Ocarinas are fun in their, in their own, in their own weird way. Um, so yeah, I don't know. I like, I guess I see where the criticism is coming from. I think, you know, like there are, there are funny jokes to be made at the expense of the look of the Ocarina of time remake. Don't get me wrong. But at the same time, I look at it, I go like, yeah, I actually think it, I think I actually think it looks kind of cool. I think the, the animation, the way that character looks and all of that, I think actually looks way better than people are giving a credit for. Um, and, you know, I'll be curious to see in the end if he really is as shiny in every single scene as he is in the footage they showed, which some of which

11:42was around him swimming. And so it makes sense that he would be a wet boy. But, um, yeah, yeah, I don't know. I actually thought I, I think that I, I was pretty impressed with what they showed, I guess. I came away from it going like, yeah, man, that's, I would, I would be down to play more, more of that, uh, or craft and joyer in the chat says, adult link looks fine. Child link looks like a freak. I, child link looks like a child. Like I don't, like I don't know how much time you've spent looking at kids lately, but as someone who spent a lot of time looking at kids, like, man, that doesn't, that's, yeah, that's not. As someone who has three kids and, uh, spends a fair amount of time with them, um, and the, the, the expressions they have on their face and all of the wonder and everything that kids look at when they look at things, um, I actually think that there's aspects of the animation and stuff that I look at. I go like, yeah, no, that, that's like, that makes sense of like,

12:44that's kind of how a kid would look at some stuff. Uh, they are obviously doing, you know, they're, uh, very stylized, fucking eyes and everything with it. Um, and, uh, and I think that, that some of that stuff maybe goes a little far, but, uh, yeah, I don't know. Like I, I, I think that the, the, kid link that they showed, I think looks like pretty appropriate, um, and, and, and animates like in, in ways that, you know, like if you were animating like a child who hadn't been out, who had not crawled inside a tree and found spiders and, you know, all of the other weird shit that Link will get up to in this game. Um, I, I look at that and go like, yeah, okay. That, that seems, that seems about right. Um, so yeah, I, I don't know, I, I came away from it going like, yeah, that, that looks like there's a lot of stuff in there that like, I'm not personally interested in like anything related to the phone app. You know, they talk about you can, you can

13:46enter your own, acarina songs on the phone and send it back to the game. I'm like, okay, and, and I immediately thought about like, oh, okay, yeah. So like I could put big pimping in it like I did to animal crossing on the game cube. Make set that to my town tune. Um, but like you could kind of do that originally. You just had to play, you just had to work the N64 controller all weird to, to play songs in the game. So, you know, sure, man, I, I think that like the little stuff that they're doing in there seems fun enough. And I think my big curiosity about that game is around like, are they going to do a lot to the combat? There's a little bit of link moving around in there that you're like, oh, this kind of looks a little glidy in some spots. How much are they overhauling aspects of the gameplay? It doesn't look like much. I mean, they showed, you know, em, you know, shooting a sling shot at targets and stuff and you, it's got gyro aiming in it because

14:49of course it does. Because I don't like it. Is gyro aiming ever going to? Do you think gyro aiming is going to be like a big stand? Or maybe it already is a big standard thing. Do the kids still like gyro aiming? I'd still don't. I still hate it. I still hate the way it feels. Um, but, uh, but I don't know. They're doing stuff like that and reworking some of the UI and item selection stuff. And, um, that all seems totally okay for that game. For, you know, when you think about like what that game did for item selection and UI stuff, um, as a follow up to the SNES game, when you think about Zelda, when you think about Zelda 64, when they first announced it and first started showing screenshots of it and stuff, like, you know, the big C buttons with items on them and all of the fucking on screen button indicators that they had at all times,

15:51like which is pretty ridiculous. Um, but made sense at the time, you know, that's something they did instead of like a, or in addition to, okay, hit start, go to your subscription, select an item. Okay, now pick, you know, okay, we're gonna pick this bow and arrow, we're gonna pick this sling shot, whatever. And now we're gonna go back into the game and do this, you know, the things that the legend of Zelda games had all along, um, you know, reworking the UI to be less about that, I think is, uh, a good change. We'll see. Yeah, what are they gonna do with the boots? What are they gonna do with the water temple? Like, of course, of course, these are the hot button issues of our time. Everyone wants to know what are we doing with the boots? It's disgusting. These boots, uh, a little bit of speech in there, but it didn't look like, it looked like major cutscenes were spoken, but like standard NPC interactions may be warrant. I don't know, it was hard to, I apologize, I did have, uh, three children getting ready for school and, uh, screaming at the top of

16:57their lungs while I was watching it this morning. So, so if there was speech in all of those interactions, then maybe I missed a little bit of it, but it seems like that the, there's definitely speech in kind of the, from the major characters and, and, and kind of cutscene type stuff. Okay, yeah, so it's, it's just the, the in-game cutscenes. And, you know, Navi still says, listen, hey, motherfucker, listen, like, you know, like, whatever, they're making that game. So, as that game is, you know, kind of one of the greatest games ever made, um, but also a game that sort of maybe could use some work if you were going to bring it back. Because of the way standards of change and controllers have changed and a lot of that sort of stuff, um, this seems like that they're very aware of that. And when you, you know, like they addressed the two very key things, right? You can spin the camera, you can jump. Okay.

17:57Will that rob the game of its magic? I fucking, I don't know. Does the game still have any magic to begin with? Again, as someone who has largely stayed away from Akamina after reviewing it, uh, all those years ago, um, I'm very curious to find that out. There are, um, there, like, I feel like opinions on Akamina of time these days are a little more mixed in terms of specifically, like, how easy it is to go back to it. Uh, and, and you have a lot of people that are like, hey, this is a really neat game, but also the UI stuff is really cumbersome to deal with and the water temple sucks shit and, you know, like a lot of stuff that, you know, has kind of become common criticisms of a game that at the time of its release was, I'm not going to say it's beyond criticism, but like, fuck, dude, like, you know, games didn't do that shit then. You know, uh, like, when Akamina was coming out, it was, they tackled all of these problems in really amazing ways

19:05and came up with solutions that worked for the time that put pushed a lot of the, you would think of as problems, they pushed a lot of that out of the way. Like Z-targeting, you know, being able to lock on to targets and hop around them and stuff, but it's really, these are like landmark solutions that we're still dealing with to this day, you know, like, you are probably playing a game right now that has some form of lock on targeting that, but, you know, it is largely derived from Akamina of time. It's become a really, and back then, it was crucial, right? Because again, it is the first time that some of these concepts are being translated into 3D, into polygons, and so judging distances and figuring out all of that shit was new for everybody, you know? And you had gone through some of that with Mario 64, because obviously Mario 64 had to tackle some of the same issues in that transition.

20:07And so like half of that blueprint is written by the time they get to Zelda 64, by the time they get to Akamina, you know, like Mario has figured out a lot of that stuff. And so, in a lot of ways, Akamina is kind of their second big crack at it, and they did really good the first time. So, you know, again, for as hard as some of those games can be to go back to because of whether it's limited camera controls, the very nature of the N64, the disgusting nature of the N64, the disturbing awful nature of the N64 controller by modern standards. You know, I think they did a really incredible job making those games. And making those games work and making those games still feel like they belonged to the same franchise as, you know, their predecessors on, you know, 16-bit machines. So yeah, I don't know, all of that is to say I'm really looking forward to seeing that thing

21:11in greater detail. Like I'm happy to play that game again after all of these years. And yeah, I don't know. Like I thought it looked really great. I hope that they don't do Majora's Mask after this because, you know, why, you know, like the point of, you could argue that like we should be remaking bad games because there's so much to fix, right? Like there's, if you remade Majora's Mask, you could make it a, you could actually make it a good game. You could actually like do stuff to it that makes it. And honestly, the UI stuff goes a long way because one of the annoying things about Majora's Mask was related to like, okay, we need to get a swap this mask. Take the mask on. Move this mask over here. Do this man. Like all of that stuff was a pain in the ass to deal with with that game. And so, you know, kind of you could rebuild some of those controls

22:19to kind of fix some of that stuff. But, but yuck man, yuck. And then do, you know, what a master quest was a URA, Zelda, Ultimate Avenge Attack or whatever. Do that remake all of the, all of the things they put out on that game cube disc with this. And then don't do any more remakes. I don't, I can't think of any more Zelda games that I would necessarily want to be completely remade or rebuilt. Like there's things you could certainly do with Wind Waker, but they already kind of took that challenge on a while ago. And I, yeah, I don't know, man, I don't think that I don't think the Legend of Zelda, I don't think most of the other games in the Zelda franchise really need that. Like academically, there's something really interesting you could do if you tried to remake the

23:19original game. If you really just sat down and said, okay, we're going to take this story and remake it. Or they're like, okay, okay, what you're just making an entirely new game at this point because, you know, what are you, what, what are you doing? Yeah, remake of the adventure of Link could be interesting. That's almost something you go like, hey, we got the, you know, we got the, we got other developers, we got Mercury steam out here doing an adventure of Link remake. Like that would be funny and or weird. Yeah, make a search action game out of it or something. But, but by and large, you know, like games that came after Ocarina, I don't think we think really need that treatment. But it does leave me wondering, you know, like do you think that Nintendo will ever make a like modern Zelda game? Do you have anything they want to make a new Zelda game in the style of that run of Zelda games? You know, Ocarina, Wind Waker, Twilight Princess,

24:26like like that style of polygonal Zelda. Or are we just like so firmly beyond that and into whatever breath of the wild is that like anything they make from here is just going to be derived from that. I guy, you know, I don't, I don't need or especially want anything else of that lineage. I think tears the kingdoms fucking rad. There's so many cool things they do in that game. But like very little of it is specific to like Zelda or whatever. It's like, hey, check out all this amazing building stuff we did. It's like it's like banjo kazooie nuts and bolts except you're solving shrines. You know, like, oh, this is, yeah, this is fucking awesome. Like it's a killer fucking concept. And the tools you have at your disposal inside of that game when you're moving all of those things around and building fucked up vehicles and everything, like it's great. It's great.

25:29But I don't need any more of those. Like the two that they made, I don't even, you know, I have very little interest in breath of the wild at this point. It was a neat idea. It was a great departure from, you know, what Zelda games were. And yeah, I don't know. I always maybe Luke warm on it at the time. And now that we're a few years away from it, I'm straight up like, yeah, dude, I don't know if I want it. Okay, man, we only put a handful of dungeons in this game and they're bad. And like, oh, great. Cool. But here's the kingdom, like, like, tech-wise, fucking like revelatory, like crazy that they made that. Like awesome that they made that. But yeah, I don't know. It just leaves me wondering because, you know, they obviously they remade like links Awakening and you know, they did the, they did the game where you play as Zelda and clone stuff, which is like kind of a cool weird idea. And so you could see a potential path forward

26:34for them making another brand new, like top down Zelda or something. If they wanted to go further down that road, because I think those are a little less expensive for them to make. And so it wouldn't be out of, out of character for them to kind of make another one of those. But that's not really what we're talking about. It's like, what is the next big mainline legend of Zelda game? What do they actually do? I don't know. I don't know that I need, I mean, you know, okay, as someone who reviewed the legend of Zelda Twilight Princess, I can tell you pretty firmly that even after all these years, even after like they came to the same realization that everyone else of sound mind did and went like, oh, yeah, we've, we've got to make a change. There's too many like this is, this is played out. This is boring. We've taken this as far as it can go. And we need to do something else. I don't know that I necessarily want them to make more, well, okay, I don't want them to make more

27:34of those games. If they were to sit down and go like, all right, back to the old formula, like we made those two crazy Zelda games. And now we're back to making more of those. I don't think that's the answer, you know, I don't think that's that interesting, but I don't know, but I will, but I will also of course say that I don't want them to make any more games along the same lines as Breath of the Wild. And so I don't really know what to do from here. Except for the idea that like, you know, there are, like this Ocarina game, the Socarina game will probably be largely played by an audience that like, didn't play the original, you know, like that game is decades old at this point, man. And so, I think it's very easy for them to continue along these lines and just go like, you know what? We can just put all these games out again. No one played them. Or rather, the people who played them,

28:38are, you know, are in the minority and we can, you know, we could put out a remake of this. And there would still be millions of new players that would probably come to it and check it out. And it will probably still self-find to, you know, whatever, creeping nostalgia play that we want to slap onto this as well. So, I don't know. I think there's very little downside to them doing the remakes because obviously suckers will eat it up because we're suckers. And, you know, there's a brand new audience of much younger people out there that never played any of those games to begin with. So, yeah, I don't know. That's kind of a bummer to say out loud like that, man. Yeah, they probably will just pump out a bunch of remakes and, you know, when will they make more and will those games actually

29:40be good in the way I need them to be good? And I don't even know which way that's kind of the exciting part, I guess. I don't really know which way I want them to be good anymore. When it comes to Zelda, when it comes to Mario, even, I think a lot of the Nintendo franchises, like, Super Mario wonder is a fucking cool as hell video game, you know, in the image and style of a 2D Mario game, the things they do there are really fun and interesting departures from that. I don't think you can make another one of those. I don't think that that would be all of that interesting or whatever. And then you think about it like, okay, well, what do you, what do you do with Mario from here? I guess, like, ultimately, Odyssey is like not. The maybe they haven't fully explored all of the concepts and ideas you could do with something, you know, like Odyssey. Yeah, yeah, and then you have like Bowser's Fury. I think every one of the, when Bowser's Fury came out, I think that that was like the,

30:41the big thought, right, was like, oh, well, this is clearly going to directly inform whatever is next for Mario because they made this big open world thing. And like, you know, I think there's, but they never really fully made good on that. But that's a great game. I think Odyssey's incredible. And yeah, but I don't know, you know, there's a lot of room for them. Like, if they wanted to remake Mario 64, they wanted to remake Mario 64. Maybe they would have done that already. You do have to wonder with Sunshine coming to the Switch, like the GameCube online or the GameCube service or whatever. Um, like, flood is back, motherfucker. Like, do you, do you just literally try to do that? And yeah, obviously, yes, they put Mario 64 on the DS, but you know, they,

31:45they technically remade Ocarina once already as well. So, you know, like, obviously, they revisited those games or whatever. I think it would be really funny for them to do a Sunshine follow up. But I think, you know, it's, flood is such a fucking moronic concept and such a like a goon squad kind of fucking move that like when I think about it's a water jet pack and you got a shoot goo with it. That just sounds like a Luigi game now. And maybe it always did. But like, that's like Mario, that is beneath Mario. You want to put out a talking water jet pack and go around do shit? That's something Luigi should do. Maybe even while Luigi, like, fuck this man. Like, that's some fucking B team trash squad move. You don't let Mario doesn't need to dirty his hands with such garbage. Um, so I don't know. That would actually be like way more interesting if they

32:51just said, okay, we're actually making super Luigi sunshine. I'm like, okay, yeah, actually weirdly enough. I'm super fucking on board with that. Um, and he cleans up Splatoon levels now. That's how far Luigi is fallen. He's like, okay, well, Splatoon is the main thing here. And I'm just here. Oh, I'm here to clean up the mess. Um, yeah, I don't know. Anyway, I think that the Ocarina stuff looked cool. It's like people, obviously people are going to feel very specific types of ways about this because like people have a lot of nostalgia and childhood memories and whatever else wrapped up in in Ocarina. Which I it's been, you know, again, as as we've been looking at all of these N64 games lately, and and ranking them on Fridays, which you can all those videos are on YouTube. You should really, you should really check that out. Like, if you're if you're watching this footage

33:52and going like, man, this isn't what I remember of my classic N64 games. You should check out what N64 games actually fucking look like. You should go back and look at some of those because they're pretty fucking bad. The N64, as it turns out, was maybe not the greatest video game system ever made, but a whole lot of people were like nine years old. So, um, so hey, you know, you, uh, you made bad choices as a kid. It's fine. It's fine. A lot of us did. Um, anyway, let's take a break. We'll come back. We'll get into the rest. The rest of video games, everything else that's happening with video games after this. Hey, you know, Ridge, right? Ridge makes a ton of solid stuff. They've got great wallets. They

34:57got these cool key holders, tracking tags and putting the wallets so it doesn't get lost. And, of course, of course, you know, they make a fantastic power bank. Ridge's power bank has a zillion. Well, how does I get, you know, like honesty and advertising, right? So I was a zillion. It's, but it's every single one you would ever need. It'll do mag, safe, wireless charging. It'll charge an Apple watch. It's got a lightning cables, got USB-C. All of the ways that you need to charge all in one premium device and the cables are built right in. So you don't need to drag a bunch of cables around with you and adapters and all of this sort of stuff. It delivers 20 watts of power. So it'll charge up nice and quick. It's also mag safe compatible if you just want to slap it on the back of your phone and leave it there, you know, for it's just like a thicker phone, constant battery situation. You can do all of that too. You know, it's got, of course, along with the USB-C, it still has lightning on it because, you know, my wife's got an old iPad, you know. So having something that still has a lightning

36:01cable on it, pretty fantastic. They look great. They come in a lot of different colors, like Phantom, Dark Cherry, Matt, all of Basecamp Orange and Matt Black. It's not something, you know, this is the same no middle of the mall-ass power bank. It's a nice looking device. It's got a LED charge status indicator displaying your battery and charge levels at a glance. It's got an integrated kickstand. All of the stuff you would need and then some to keep your stuff charged up and, you know, keep it in your face, keep it in action, all of that. One thing to pack five ways to power. You can find Ridges Power Bank at Best Buy or you can get it right now for 10% off at ridge.com by using the code Jeff G at checkout. Just head to ridge.com and use the code Jeff G and you're all set. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Support the show. Let them know the we sent you. The cablecade of old video games continues as I have spent a chunk of time over the last week

37:05playing. Let it die. You know, that's right. Let it die is back. They have taken let it die offline. Let it die was an online only video game, a live service game, where you were building up a base and you could rate other players' bases while also going into this tower and getting all of these, you know, getting in all of these ridiculous fights. It's one of those, what's the right way to put this? It's a very like a lot of very obfuscated details and real weird shit going on all throughout. All throughout let it die. You know, and it is kind of a momentum based kind of melee combat sort of deal. It's not a dark souls, but it did come out at a time when every game was like, yeah, you're going to hit this button and he's going to wind up and hit. So make sure that

38:09you're, you know, that you've got a little bit of runway to get this to hit this dude with this pipe. And then Uncle Death will tell you what to do next. It's a cool fucking game. They took it offline and instead of just removing it from all these services and everything else, they decided to, they decided to find a way to get more money out of people at the very end of service because they have generated an offline edition of the game. It is now called Let It Die. Well, on Steam, I just still just listed as Let It Die, but they, they're selling what is called an offline key and basically what this does is convert your game into an offline game is 20 bucks. And you can bring your save from the existing online or the no longer existing online version of the game. You can import your characters and progress into the offline version of the game. They have seemingly created, you know, there was never any live multiplayer in this game. It was server based, but when you went to raid someone else's base,

39:13they weren't there. You would create your base and put defenses in it and go like, oh, there's going to be some guys here, some guys here. There's going to be some dudes in the bathroom doing God knows what. And then when someone raided your base, they would have to fight their way through the defenses that you had placed. And it was like a fun idea. They carved you up into this, like they carved you up by state. And so I was, I'm still, I'm still part of California. And, you know, there's like state-based leaderboards. We also go raid other states to determine who the best state is and a lot of silly shit like that. They've, you know, seemingly just made an offline version of that. And so from a gameplay perspective, it's not really any different from when the game was online. You just don't have to purchase a bunch of dumb shit. They monetized it out the ass at some point to where it was like you could buy limited access to a premium elevator that would let you get up higher into the tower faster and stuff like that instead of using the

40:15trashy regular elevator. And you would, you would buy like a month of access to the premium elevator, like bad, bad type of monetization shit like that. And so they've, they've reworked a lot of those systems. They've taken a lot of the timers and energy type stuff out. And it's a, it's a smoother experience for that style of game. I think it is in some ways maybe a little difficult to go back to because, you know, a lot of time has passed. And, you know, like the novelty of like, oh, I'm going to go raid somebody online like, oh, without that, I think, you know, the game is maybe slightly lessened. But ultimately, it is still largely the same experience. It's been, it's been fun going back to it. Yeah, I assumed when it went offline that people would start cheating and doing mods and stuff like that. Sounds like, yeah, it looks like from the chat here that there already are some silly little things in there. But it's got a good, it's got a really great style to it artistically.

41:18And, and just the vibe of that whole game, I think is really neat and weird. Like you're stomping on frogs and mushrooms or growing out of them. You can eat the mushrooms or throw the mushrooms at enemies. And it will have different effects depending on what you do. And, and a lot of silly stuff. You know, it's weapons like lead pipes and bats. But then also a hot iron that you press into people. And they, and when you kill enemies, they just fucking exploded. It's got a, it's got a really, it's got a really cool fucking style to it. And so, you know, if you ever played, let it die. I think it's a, it's as good a time as any to maybe get back into it. If you're, if you're missing it at all, I think the $20 offline key thing is like a decent, a decent way to go. Certainly preferable to them just completely taking the game offline and removing it from service. For sure, the character imports like a limited time thing. So I think you have until the end of

42:21November or something. If you, if you want to import your progress, you, that there's a limited time when they're going to do that. And then I guess they're probably just like, we want those hard drives back that have all the characters on them. So you have until November and then we're deleting them or whatever, whatever the problem is. I don't know. It's fun. It's fun. But it's, it's a very specific type of fun that I will say is maybe not for everyone. But, but Uncle Death is a great character. There's a lot, yeah, I don't know, man. It's got a really cool fucking style to it. And is like a fun weird game, fun weird melee action game for sure. Other than that, I am, I'm continuing to play Wolverine, which, you know, I'll have something more specific to say about Wolverine later this week. But, but that's, that's the thing that's actually been monopolizing my time as of late.

43:23Why don't we get into the news here? As I said, the Legend of Zelda thing had a handful of other announcements associated with it. And, you know, some of that was, they are, they are doing not a not an exhaustive world tour, but they are bringing an orchestra around to play music from the Legend of Zelda series. Starting in 2027, well, running through, well, seemingly through July of 2027. Starting in Japan, in North America, they'll be starting in February and Chicago. They'll do some shows in Seattle, a couple in Houston. Oh, and then in October, I guess they'll do somewhere in San Francisco. So I guess these are, these are not, this is not the final list of, of dates. This is just what they've announced so far. London Stockholm,

44:26couple in Scotland, in Australia, they'll hit a Melbourne and Sydney. That's right. Both eat it perth, I don't know that. And, yeah, I don't know, a handful of other kind of Zelda related announcements, but, you know, the game was really the main focus there. There's a report going around, this is, I don't know, if you remember, recently the Horizon Live Service game, the report going around is that that game is getting the live service ripped out of it and it is being remade into a more traditional kind of co-op experience after some fairly negative internal testing. And as part of that report there was something in there that said, hey, you know, it come December, they're going to check in on the project and see how it's going. And there's also another project going with a small team working on it that will also

45:29be evaluated later this year. According to video games Chronicle.com, who is sourcing a report from MP 1st, the claim is that there is a killzone game in the works. The speculation here though is that it's specifically a remaster or a remake, potentially of the first game, Killzone 1, which is kind of fucking crazy to do. But anyway, it sounds, if the way this report is framing it is that once the Horizon thing is done, more and more of the developers will pivot over to the Killzone project. And that potentially there's an external studio also primarily working on this. So it's, yeah, I don't know.

46:30The report is that the gorilla is working with an external studio on a Killzone remaster or remake. You don't remaster the original Killzone and also you don't need a lot of people, you know, especially if you have an external studio doing most of the work. If you're just doing a remaster, that would be, you know, not really that large of a project, a full remake. A full remake of Killzone 1 would be interesting because Killzone 1 is a really fucking weird game. Killzone 2 obviously and 3 to a lesser extent is the much more known example. But like, Killzone was like it had, I have God, it had like a really weird fucking ladder climbing mechanic in it that I remember at the time being like, what the fuck are they doing? Like there was just stuff in Killzone 1 that like was strange compared to other shooters of the time. And then by the time Killzone 2 came out, they had ironed a lot of that out and just kind of like, they were just kind of your standard, you know, console style first person shooter games by that

47:37point. Killzone 1 had weird flavor to it like that where it felt outside of the norm that I also think that if you were going to remake it, you would probably iron out all of that stuff anyway. The point being like, there's not, you know, you could, you know, you're really, if you're doing a remake, what you're really taking in is like, hey man, the Hellgast look fucking cool and tough. And they're fun to shoot. And that's about it. Because you, anything else about, yeah, the weird kind of shooting and aiming, like like some of the other fucking weird shit that they did back in Killzone 1 is exactly the sort of stuff that you would probably take out. But I do think it makes a ton of sense in some sick way for them to kick the tires on Killzone and go, hey, is this something that people might care about? Is this something that we could like

48:39get people back into? And would people be interested in a new, first person shooter franchise in 2027 or 2028 or whatever? Yeah, Killzone 1 has all of the character swapping and like, it's a fucking weird game. When you, especially when you compare it to Killzone 2 and how not weird Killzone 2 is and how very fucking standard and in some ways boilerplate a lot of the stuff in Killzone 2 is. And then you could Killzone 3, which is like kind of a, I don't know, Killzone 3 was a very half-hearted sequel to, I thought. And then you get to eventually that PS4 game Shadowfall, which was a totally different thing. Kind of said in the Killzone universe, but like, the Shadowfall is like a neat thing, I guess, but I look at it like this, you know, like if you're

49:39PlayStation, the main thing you know right now, especially after what happened with Gears and some of the other fucking shit, the thing you know about Xbox is that they are unreliable as a partner, as a, as a software publisher. And while they may be on the hook legally to continue to put Call of Duty on the PlayStation, just like what the fuck are those guys doing? No one fucking knows, they're erratic, their strategy looks less like a strategy and more like the blowing of the wind. And so if you're Sony, you're like, you know, hey, Call of Duty does really well on our platform, but we don't know if we can rely on that forever for a couple of reasons. One, it seems like they're kind of fucking it up a little bit and maybe it won't be as popular as it once was. And so one, that's bad for us revenue wise, but two, it also creates opportunity.

50:42And what do we do with that opportunity? We have an opportunity to make our own first-person shooter franchise all over again, because what if, right? Like what if whatever happens with Xbox, we don't really know, you know, and Call of Duty is now loaded in with that because of, you know, obviously Activision is owned by Microsoft. And so I think there's like, if there's, if there's ever going to be a time to try to fucking do something with a first-person shooter franchise, like this next few, like this next couple of years, seems like is when you would think about it. Because you don't know what Microsoft's gonna do with their new hardware, like everything is up in the air and fucking weird around all of that shit. You also don't really know if those games are going to continue to sell or if they're going to slowly decline, you know, like what's going on. So again, if you're Sony, I think you're you're making a pretty safe bet if you say we should probably like fucking dust off some first-person

51:46shooter franchise that we think we can do something with. Because like Battlefield did great out of the gate, it's maybe not doing the numbers that EA thought it was going to do. And you know, Call of Duty is, I mean, Call of Duty, I think is still biggest on PlayStation, right? I mean, I, you know, anecdotally, anytime I load into any kind of Call of Duty match, it displays icons based on who's playing where. And those icons, obviously, you're familiar with this. They're different based on where you're playing because PlayStation won't let them show Xbox logos and vice versa. But when you're on Steam, they don't really give a fuck. So when you're connected via your PC via Steam, it shows you which players are on PlayStation, which ones are on Xbox, which ones are on PC, but through Xbox and which ones are on PC, but not through Steam, which I can only imagine must mean battle net or something. I have no idea. But anyway, the icons on that stuff, like in, I'm going to say 95% of my matches of Call of Duty, which I'm not playing that many anymore,

52:48but through that modern warfare for beta, of course, and through, you know, the last year or five of playing Call of Duty, the overwhelming majority of icons that you see in there are PlayStation logos. And I think that lines up with sales data. If I remember correctly, you know, that stuff's obviously something of a mess, but outside of the game pass impact of last year and what have you, it really does seem like that PlayStation is still the kind of the lead platform for Call of Duty, which is kind of fucking wild to think, but here we are. And if Sony is looking at that and going, that's great, but also we don't, we're not positive we can rely on that. I think there's, there's whatever, those are some reasons that I would certainly at least like take a flyer on to be like, yeah, man, I don't know, spend some time on Killzone. See if you can make people care about Killzone all over again. And, you know, with a remake or something and then we can figure out

53:53what we want to do from there. Like if we want to, if we want to advance, go forward with this, like we've taken a shot with Concord, Bungie is doing whatever the hell Bungie is doing, someone speculated that maybe Bungie was also working on this thing, but that's who knows. Totally I'm substantiated. I don't think that comes from a reliable source. So I wouldn't necessarily peg that on anything, but like, yeah, I don't know, I would not be shocked to see especially, you know, Herman Holst, in something of a position of power could very much say, now is the time for Killzone and make it happen, so, uh, fuck man, who knows? Who knows? Why not? Why not? The Hellgast still look fucked, man. It still is cool to shoot Hellgast in the face. They're like space Nazis, fuck them. Kill them, man. But the multiplayer in Killzone, I think, well, whatever, all bets are off, right? They're not,

54:56Killzone has been dormant long enough. And, and all of that. And I think that the fan base for like Killzone multiplayer was never massive to begin with. And so I think you could pretty much, it's blank slate, right? Like it's kind of the best case scenario where you look at it and go like, yeah, man, these Hellgast looks scary as fuck. We should leverage that. We made that. We own that. We already own that. We can just do that, man. Um, and, and then build whatever you want around it, because the Killzone 2 multiplayer did not set the world on fire, but it was really neat. They, they had some ideas for like bigger game modes and concepts than the competition was doing at the time. And, and I think that the Killzone multiplayer, despite the game kind of feeling like mud in some spots, that multiplayer was, you know, it had had good ideas. And so I think there's like a good, there's a good mix of like, there's things to pull from from older Killzone games that are like good

55:56ideas that have not been done to death. But also you, you're not beholden to any of it. You've got a blank slate. There's, there's no reason. Like aesthetically, it's fucking killer. Like it's, it's, it's sci-fi. So it's not the same shit, but sci-fi in a way that's like different enough from Halo. It's not rooted in any of the fucking same future bullshit the Call of Duty gets up to. So it's not a game about wall running and jet packs and whatever else. Like it's just, it's a, it's a good lane that I think that if they could find a way to get people to care about it and exploit that, I definitely think that you could make Killzone matter in this day and age. I think there's, there's just enough of a window here or competitively none of the other competitive shooters on the market feel like that entrenched. It's a time of turnover if anything else. I mean, you know, like, do you think, I guess my question is like, do you think that like generationally that there's like an age? What am I trying to say here? The people who really like

57:04Call of Duty are old men and they're not going to be here forever. They're not going to buy this game every year, right? Is that, does that, does that seem right? That seems right to me. Like demographically, I don't know, like, you know, the kids got into Battle Royale and obviously Call of Duty had a very popular component to that. But kind of this sort of post fortnight malaise, I don't know, like shooters to me feel like they're just like there's nothing, there's just nothing going on, man. You know, like what's Fortnite doing? I was like, I mean, we're putting a fucking creepy looking Sonic the Hedgehog in the game. You're like, fuck that, dude, that sucks. What are you doing? Fuck this. Like, okay, what's Call of Duty doing with Battle Royale? I'm doing more of that. Like, okay. What else is there? What's PUBG doing? I don't know, but it's mostly on phones in India now. Like, okay, what about Battlefield? Yeah, it's off to a great start and then you got this. Okay,

58:08well, what else is there? Well, you got war dogs. Okay, is war dogs going to be like the new hotness that's going to last years and years? I don't know, maybe. I don't know. War dogs seems like it is too serious for the people that are in that like, yeah, man, I got off work and wanted to come home and play a fucking video game and just fucking hang out and be a, I just, I just want to get on a microphone and be super racist. What's the game for me? You know, like, I don't know that war dogs is necessarily going to be that game, maybe it will be on it. But the, you know, the things it would take to replace Call of Duty. Yeah, Hayes reboot obviously would be, would be huge in this space. Anyway, I, you know, yeah, at least in those are cases, the answer is mag. I got a question about like someone wrote in with a question about mag the other day. Um, mag the massive action game. There's, there's

59:10very little to I don't think there's anything to be gleaned from mag. I don't know that there's anything that you would, um, you pull cheating just as anecdotal, but my 13 year old nephew is way into Call of Duty now. Okay. Well, yeah, I don't know. Like, the kids, kids love boots on the ground combat. Um, mag had some cool ideas and mag was not a great game. And I think that a lot of it's cool ideas, a lot of the cool things about mag, which was a PlayStation 3 game. If you, if you, if you, if I'll forgive you for not remembering what the fuck mag is, I barely remember what mag is. Um, mag's whole thing is that it had a high player count. It was, was it a hundred or was it two fifty years? I forget what the actual like cap on players was for mag, but at the time it was fucking kind of bananas that you could have that many people

1:00:12in a game, two fifty six. Yeah, that, that sounds right. 128 versus 128, wasn't it? Yeah. Um, and it was real ridiculous, man. It was, you know, like, there was a lot of, uh, there was a lot of players in a, in a match for the, you know, week and a half that people were playing that game. And then, you know, they never filled up again, but, uh, nowadays, you know, like, that's not the player count stuff is not as much of an achievement. It's not that interesting. It's, it's really what you do with it. And so like, you never really felt, I think that my big problem with mag, if I remember correctly, because it's, you know, it's not something I spent a lot of time thinking about after maybe writing the review, I might have reviewed mag. mag seems like a game I would have reviewed. Um, but because you're split up into squads, I think, you know, battlefield can get kind of mired in

1:01:12this a little bit as well, but like, the thing with mag is that you never really felt like you were a massive, like, you were, you're part of some massive battle. When you look at the map, you go, oh, the map is big. And oh, this guy's over here. This guy's over here, but like, you're, you and your squad are over here just shooting to some dudes, you know, it didn't, it didn't necessarily feel like you were a part of some big action, you know, it didn't feel dramatically different from other competitive shooters of the era. And so the higher player count was more of this like kind of theoretical benefit than something that actually mattered. And so that's, that was sort of its downfall if I remember right? It's like that because that was their entire pitch, right? Um, mag came out after 07, that seems, that seems impossible to believe. mag seems like a game I would have reviewed at game spot, but yeah, I don't know, it's all a bluer, it's all a fucking bluer. Um, but I think the knock on mag ultimately was just like, yeah,

1:02:17you know, it, it, it was just kind of an okay game. And sort of that was that, right? Um, so killzone is the thing you would pull from. And also like, what's the world of mag? What are the characters in mag? Who knows? I can tell you about Rico from killzone two and how I would love to smoke that motherfucker. Shooting Rico is a game unto itself. So yeah, I'm all for it. The idea of PlayStation thinking about making which that is that is the report here again. This is not something that is confirmed news, but again, when you think about the timing and you think about where gorilla is at and what they may or may not be working on in conjunction with the, that horizon thing. I think thinking about a killzone game makes a ton of sense, makes a ton of

1:03:20sense. We'll see. We'll see. Uh, in news that can only be seen as things are going great, Xbox has announced plans to reduce the amount of time you can spend gaming in the cloud. These changes will roll out in November. Um, and the, the, the cap on your cloud streaming time will vary depending on which tier of game pass service you're subscribed to. If you are in game pass ultimate, you will be limited to 15 hours. People in the premium tier will get 10 and people in the essential tier will get five. Uh, the, the statement they put out about this on, uh, on Xbox wire is that they expect about 4% of their players to be impacted by this.

1:04:24Um, which is, you know, that's, that's not a, that's not a super high number. Um, but it does say here, you know, like moving to monthly limits allows us to keep offering the service while continuing to invest in its reliability and performance. Uh, we understand that some players, for some players, the practical result is a higher cost and the higher cost comes from they will now sell you cloud time. If you go over your limit or if you, if you don't want to subscribe to game pass at all, you can just buy hours of cloud time. Um, and so again, they do say that it will impact 4% of game pass subscribers. So that doesn't even necessarily uh, that's, that's, that's, that seems like a pretty small number because it was 4% of cloud players. I have to imagine that as a much like, or impactful. Yeah, I don't know. Um,

1:05:35I guess 4% of all game pass subscribers would still be a bigger than anyway. Um, either way, none of this, either end of this sounds good, bad, right? Because you are in a situation now where either the, you look at this as like, this seems bad because like, you're having to put these limits on your existing subscribers and nobody likes to feel like that they are getting less than they used to for their monthly fee. The other number of, you know, only 4% of game pass subscribers will be impacted by this. So okay, you're telling me that of the game pass subscribers, only 4% of them are hitting these limits. There's only 4% of your game pass subscribers that are, you know, theoretically going over this 15, 10 or 5 hour cap, which none of those numbers are large. Even the 15 hour, if you were, are you, are you playing fewer than 15 hours of games in a month? Probably not, right? Um,

1:06:40and so this kind of makes the cloud service seem, I'm not going to say pointless, but like, useless at either end, right? No one is using it and the small number of people who are are about to get fucked over. That's bad at both ends. Uh, how many of those people do you think will buy more? How many of those people are going to hit the 15 hour mark and go, well, I guess I've got to buy more cloud time. Um, this just makes their cloud service seem like a dismal failure, which, you know, yeah, right? I mean, it's never, I don't know, they talk about needing to invest in its reliability and continuing to invest in its reliability and performance. I have not had a great time with Xbox cloud services, even at home on incredibly fast internet, um, whether using a wired device or a wireless device like, you know, trying to play a, I was trying to play Call of Duty

1:07:41about a year ago or something on my steam deck. And, um, literally saw a message I had never seen before, which was your latency is too bad. Like they literally would not let me in a match because the cloud latency was so messed up. I was like, oh, interesting. That's, that's fun. Um, this will not affect you if you are, um, if you're obviously, because, you know, it, I wouldn't, um, but they do have the ability for you to stream games directly from your console to remote devices. You'll still be able to do that. Uh, if you're, if you're in a position to care about that. So, so that still sort of exists. But I don't know, like this seems like, obviously, hey, man, um, the company that invested a lot in AI and server stuff is finding that their server infrastructure is getting more expensive is like, yeah, of course, of course. Like you kind of did this to yourselves. But also they've never made a great case for the cloud. And like this story to me

1:08:46underscores that like the cloud shit is not there. And, and also that they're not prioritizing it. Remember that they've been out there as of games come just like last week or whatever you had asha Sharma out there saying like, we've got to think about more ways to get people to be able to afford the console and figure out like, like, we've got to figure out how to you know, like, like handle this. Cloud was the product that they already had that theoretically handled this. Obviously, they would have to upgrade their server racks to be Helix devices instead of, you know, like a existing Xbox hardware. And so that would be a massive undertaking to upgrade all of those racks to whatever the new shit is. But like that was at least the working theory when you when you hear them say, oh, yeah, consoles are too expensive. We got to figure out ways to, you know, solve this problem. Like the other shoe on that messaging

1:09:48seemed like, hey, we've got something to say about the power of the cloud. And, you know, hey, we know that these consoles are super expensive. But you can just sign up and play on your TV. And you're, you know, when your TV is not recording your voice and uploading it to LG's servers, you can use it directly to play Xbox games or whatever. Now this sounds like that that's not a strategy for them going forward and not really an option for them going forward because the cloud stuff is proven to just be too expensive for them to run for them to run at its scale. Without charging people more money than they will probably want to pay to play console games via a stream. That sounds fucking again. That sounds bad. None of that sounds like a great like path forward for the console space. You know, a mix of like a high-powered, very expensive machines

1:10:49that they are going to let you lease or something like that becomes their affordability story, right? It's like, well, we figured out, you know, you can finance one fucking carna and Xbox. Like great, great. That'll go fine. Repo man, breaking into your house and fucking stealing your Xbox back at night, rent to own, got a fucking lazy boy here from the RTO. And an Xbox that I'm written from fucking Microsoft. Yeah, man, it seems like a fucking bad road forward. But, you know, I guess I figured that like this would at least be their moment, right? Like there's been people waiting in the wings trying to find out like, how do we get the cloud to matter to more people? And this was it. This was their shot, right? They're like, okay. We've got it. The consoles are too expensive. Play in the cloud. And save up money to buy a real console if you want one, but you can just play in the cloud. But now that seems like that is not an option going forward. I don't know.

1:11:52Play station held a state of play that as far as I can tell was widely regarded as one of the worst ones they've ever done. But I guess people say that about every single one of these, don't they? That said, there was maybe not a ton of stuff there. Man, Eater 2 was announced that the shark game, the role playing shark thing. They showed a little bit of Metro 2039. They showed off the Monster Hunter Wilds add on that, you know, a little bit of ghost of Yota DLC. They took the opportunity to give you one final look at Wolverine with their launch trailer. They showed a Lego PlayStation, which immediately led to people going like, oh, it's a physical good and discarded physical physical toy disc drive on it. Yeah, that's not, I don't know. That joke is not nearly as funny as you thought it was. Keepers coming to PS5. There's some new update stuff coming to Gran Turismo.

1:13:02Soros is getting a couple of new modes, like a new game plus and stuff. A handful of trailers. I don't know, not much to really write home about. They even put together a double whammy of this where they did a state of play and then did state of play Japan to focus on games coming from Japan, which it seems like a weird thing to break out separately, but they, you know, it's kind of, it's probably something that's good for their partners and as a good show of force kind of thing to present it in that specific way. There's a fun story out of this. This is a translation that came out of the Nike via a Tomaton. It was an interview with Sega's president and chief operating officer, Suji, Suomi. And one of the, there's like kind of a fascinating thing that he is seeing that is

1:14:06an increasing number of fans of Sega's games don't actually play the games. And, you know, and that basically Sega is considering them to be fans and thinking about ways to, you know, potentially through merchandise and what have you, you know, that there are people here. There's this, this is from the Tomaton story. According to what Suomi, the company has in recent years seen an increasing number of fans who don't necessarily play games. While he mentions this is true of all of Sega's IPs, he singles out the Lyca Dragon series as an example. Lyca Dragon related merchandise has been performing extremely well for Sega, with about 60 to 70% of customers being women. Who Suomi explains that this layer of the fan base often becomes acquainted with the story and characters through official YouTube content or by watching streams by popular content creators and quote, many of them have never actually played the game. But that it's Suomi says that Sega still considers them a fan and a quote gamer.

1:15:14And that this is something that they are thinking about strategically when it comes to whether it's trans media opportunities, merchandise or what have you, that it's kind of presenting them with new ideas or the new potential for reaching audiences outside of just literally playing video games. Which I think is interesting. It's something, like we talk about it. It's one of those things that kind of only comes up and has not come up in a long time. Maybe it's kind of settled the business. But remember, it wasn't that long ago that Epic was out there. You know, Epic, a company that never says bad takes in public. Never has dumb ideas. The head of Epic is never online saying dumb shit. But Epic was one of the companies that was like, hey, they're sure a lot of people streaming our video games and we probably should probably get a cut of that. And so there has at times been this idea that like, and Nintendo kind of fell into this bucket for

1:16:20a period of time as well. That like, oh, all of these people streaming these games of hours should probably be paying us. And that specific concept hasn't come up in a long time. But this is sort of adjacent to that in a way when you think about it. And it's them approaching it from a very different perspective of like, hey, actually, these people are getting extremely familiar with our characters and our universe and our worlds. And this allows for opportunities for us to whether it's making TV shows or, you know, like scarves, I don't know, eye patches, cool shit like that. It does seem like that there's just a lot of opportunities there for some of these franchises. You know, I think like, what is it? It's like a dragon. I think makes a lot of sense there. I think the persona games would probably be a good fit for this concept for like, oh, yeah, maybe there's a lot of people who

1:17:25have just watched all of a persona game on the internet instead of playing it. And maybe they would be interested in buying cool fucking track jackets or something. And I think this is like, this is, I think it's a smart realization on their part to go like, hey, yeah, there's probably ways to monetize viewers or whatever. I would argue that now that would be a really good time for someone like Twitch to step in and be like, hey, we should probably be better at like Twitch advertising, right? It's not great. And like, they're, you know, like the they there are a lot of, you know, Twitch is one of those things that's like they have a lot of numbers, right? There's a lot of streams happening on Twitch, but they aren't all equally valuable. And so that's been something that

1:18:29the Twitch has struggled with over time is the very nature of like selling ads on their website and when whatever they seem to be getting a lot of campaigns like stuff runs on Twitch all the time. And now they do all these integrated things where you can like I get an email every so often. That's like, hey, we'll pay you X amount of dollars to play this game for and it comes from Twitch. So like Twitch is out there kind of being acting as like a middleman between like this game maker or this movie trailer peddler or whatever. And it's like watch this movie trailer on your stream and don't say racist stuff for 45 minutes. And then we'll give you $11 or you know, whatever it is. Some fucking disgusting amount of money. This stuff should just be right alongside the streams. Like if like let's say Sega has a lot of ideas around merchandise and you know TV shows DVDs whatever like if someone is streaming in that category, if someone's streaming a like a dragon game, Sega should pay Twitch to put fucking

1:19:33like a dragon ads and shit around it. And maybe an instead of running ads, right? Like instead of interrupting streams with ads, it should be like, oh, Sega is paying for there to be no no mid role ads in this because instead they are hoping that you will fucking watch this stream for hours and hours and then go, I've got to buy some cool Yakuza stuff. I think that that makes a lot of sense like integration wise or whatever. Especially if they're trying to target people specifically who are watching streams and might not buy the game. You could also try to sell the game that way. But you know, yeah, that that seems like something that there's room for that to there's room for that integration to happen and be like tight and not like awful, I guess is what I'm saying. Like there's room to do that sort of advertising and not have it absolutely suck shit. Um, and I like

1:20:40if I was Twitch, I would be reading that article and being like, fuck dude, we need to be the arbiters like we need to be the company that does this, the company that makes this a reality. Like the company that that builds all of this shit like that's that's like a fucking priority one type of fucking thing. Um, if they think there's going to be a future for that sort of stuff, I just got speaking of emails from Twitch. If I wanted to play Marvel rivals, the other thing that happens is they send you these emails that say like this is a new opportunity for a sponsorship and then if you ever click on it by the time you get to the page, the web page about it, it's already gone because it's like a limited number of people can say, hey, I want to do this or whatever. And so before the ad budget is already spent or whatever. And so it's this other thing where you have to like be like super on top of it, which seems like extra crazy. But I literally got an email an hour ago saying do you want to do Marvel rivals? No, I'm good. I'm good. Um, that's the news.

1:21:47I'm trying to figure out what to do with Wolverine. I, you know, I'll probably record a separate video because the embargo for Wolverine is like Thursday morning. Um, and so I, you know, like I don't necessarily want to just wait until Tuesday and talk about it on the regular podcast. I wonder if I should produce do a separate kind of one off little podcasty type thing talking about it. Maybe a video for the internet. Something like that. I don't know. I'm thinking that through the thing and think it through the timing on it because this week's a fucking train wreck over here in this household. Um, so we'll see here. But uh, that's it for the news. Unless anything else dumb has happened in the last hour. You can always look. Doesn't look like it. Looks like we're good. I'm watching BlizzCon. No. Is is BlizzCon. I've seen like there's I know BlizzCon is happening soon,

1:22:51but I don't I have I have never watched BlizzCon for any length of time. I think I watched their opening thing once. But I have, you know, that isn't I have never paid close attention to BlizzCon. That's that's one of those things that I'm happy to learn about after the fact that I'm not going to sit and watch BlizzCon streams all weekend. But they are teasing some kind of starcrafty kind of thing. They've got crazy glitches on their website. So you know what announcement is is do and they're they've had a shooter like some kind of. I don't want to say starcraft ghost, but boy. But we with that that that rumor has been kicking around for a long time that they had a shooter in the works and it seems like maybe that now is the time for something like that. And we'll see with that ends up being, but it seems like that would be something that is a little more single player focused. I don't you know, some people were trying to say like, oh the fucking it's going to

1:23:56be destiny like or what I was like, no, no, I don't I don't think I don't think Blizzard needs to fucking make yet another fucking live service game. I think we're I think we're I think they're they're good on that for a little bit, but yeah, I don't know like when when people say like, hey man, watch BlizzCon all I can think about is like when they were charging people to watch BlizzCon on televisions like buy this pay per view so you can watch fucking a bunch of Blizzard guys play fucking very underwhelming fucking metal or whatever. No, thanks. I'm okay. Like if you're deep into that community, I'm sure that's very wonderful, but I'm okay. I'm okay. I don't need to fucking see that shit. And yeah, man. Yeah. Uh, let's get into some emails.

1:24:58podcast guard.bike is the email address for you to send in your emails to me, and I'll see him. Just like I'm seeing these other emails here. Oh, there's a new play date update showcase tomorrow. I found my play date. It was it had been missing for a long time when I moved everything to the garage. The play date. Yeah, hot drop here says BlizzCon used to cost money to watch. Yeah. Yeah, they sold because you got all the stuff. You got all the digital. You got your fucking wow skins and amount and all of that other shit. Like they, yeah, they, they would, they would give you all the pets and everything when you bought the pay per view. It was like something where I think you could just watch it on YouTube or something, but like they literally put it on like pay per view on television also. Um, and uh, yeah. Yeah. Um, it was it was weird.

1:26:05I don't know. Like the Blizz, BlizzCon's opinion or Blizzard's opinion of BlizzCon was always very high about it being this premium thing that you definitely needed to watch and definitely had to like how could you miss it? Yeah. Yeah. You're going to announce expansion and expansion for the game you have out. Like it's not, you know, like yes, I want to watch the fucking world of work after cinematic because you've spent millions of dollars on them, but like you're going to post that everywhere. It's not. I'm okay. I got that's not my area of cover. Like other people are going to the event directly to cover it. I don't I'm good. Um, let's look at some emails here. Uh, Troy from Atlanta asks, is the play date the modern equivalent of the Neo Geo Pocket color? I had this thought while you were talking about it on last week's show. Obviously one has a color screen and the other one doesn't, but I just mean the general vibe of how it's a cool handheld that maybe isn't destined for greatness. No, not not really.

1:27:12The thing so I mean with how you're putting it, I guess so like sure, but no, the Neo Geo Pocket color was a handheld from the people that made the Neo Geo. And so it has a lot of the franchises and games and things that the Neo Geo had. Um, just in an importable form. And so the weird thing about the Neo Geo Pocket was that, you know, is that it felt like, oh, it's a handheld from the people that made the Neo Geo. Remember, remember the Neo Geo was also a platform and the vast majority of games that came out on it were from the people that made the hardware or companies that had directly licensed with them. Like it didn't have some big third party element of, you know, like no one with a Capcom was not making Neo Geo games. Namco was not, you know, like the big third party players did not give a shit about the Neo Geo. And so when the Neo Geo Pocket came along, it was not that different. You did have a couple of cases where like, you know, Sega put a

1:28:17Sonic game onto the Neo Geo Pocket. And obviously you had the SMK versus Capcom stuff. And Pac-Man literally came out on the Neo Geo as well. So you do have some examples of like, oh, this is, and I remember that feeling really weird. Because again, you're used to the Neo Geo being like, hey, it's fucking ninja combat and cyber lip and all these hot franchises you know would love. And then some of those became metal slug and and King of Fighters and, you know, like actually beloved amazing fucking franchises that still matter in some way to this day. But at the time it was like they were just off in a corner making insane shit and putting it into arcade cabinets. And you were like cyber lip, huh? That's a weird, okay. All right. This is a weird, it's weird to play this golf game here, but this golf game seems sick. And so the Neo Geo Pocket and the Neo Geo Pocket color by extension just felt like extensions of that idea of like, hey, SMK is this weird company.

1:29:23And yeah, they used to put games on Nintendo platforms and all of this other stuff. And now here's what they're doing. They had licensed some of their games like, you know, World Heroes is on the snest. Like there are definitely some examples of their games coming to non Neo Geo hardware at the time. But the vibe of the platform, the vibe of SMK as hardware manufacturers was they were going to be the ones to support it. And that's about it. And so that's the difference, right? Like the panic has certainly funded some play date games. And, you know, they're still putting them on the platform. I saw, yeah, they they I know they pulled a couple of games out of the market place on the play date because they just looked like, and apparently were like AI generated junk. And so I, you know, some some games slipped past them that they then they yanked out of the store after the fact. So I imagine that they're trying to be smarter about that. But you can, I mean,

1:30:28anyone can put out a play date game and like you can sell them on itch or just give them away or whatever. It's just a file that you distribute that can then be side loaded onto a play date. So theoretically, anyone can kind of make anything for that thing if they wanted to. But no, it's not not a ton of similarity there. Ultimately. Brady from Yokohama writes in says, what you said last week about GTA being the end of an era reminded me of what we were hearing from major companies prior to the release of the Witcher 3, whose success seemed like a shock and gotten major investment in single player going again with many remasters keeping the lights on in the meantime. What do you think has changed between now and then? So what I was talking about last week was like this idea that like there's something about GTA 6 that does feel like, you know, like like it's kind of it's one last heist, right? That it's like here's this is the last time you're going to see a game with this type of development time and budget and

1:31:33all of this sort of stuff because there aren't a lot of other games out there, a lot of franchises. In fact, I would go so far as to say there are no other franchises that could do this. There could go a decade of active 11 years, whatever it is of like ongoing development and still like launch with no monetization and some of the other stuff that they claim GTA 6 will have. Now they kind of get to have their cake and eat it too because they will eventually have new online stuff and they will sell you plenty of things in their online game. I'm sure. That's not to say that there won't be a GTA 7, but a lot of the people that made GTA what it was at the top of that food chain. The people that are credited all the way back to the original Grand Theft Auto, some of those folks have moved on and more of them will move on. How much longer do you think that Sam Houser will run Rockstar?

1:32:37When do you think he will retire? Do you think he has another game in him? Do you think he can do this again? Or maybe he sticks around and they make another red dead and then he bounces after that. Sam Houser is credited on GTA 1. Sam Houser was not even... There was no Rockstar when GTA 1 came out. I think people often forget that the Rockstar brand was cooked up after the initial release of GTA. It was still DMA design and like BMG Interactive published the game or ASC Games published the PlayStation version in the States like publishing rights were kind of distributed or whatever. And so when I talk about like the end of this, I don't mean there's not going to be GTA 7. I mean that like by the time they make GTA 7 there will probably have been complete turnover when it comes to all of the people who made these games what they were because a lot of them have probably made a fuckload of money. A lot of them have just gone through a decade of development

1:33:38and many of them will probably say like I'm not fucking doing that again. And Strauss-Zelnik will probably also get an increasing thumb on the scale of this and say that's right. You're not going to do this again because you're going to give me another one of these in fucking five years. Not ten. And so I suspect that anything they do with this from here on out is going to have a different... They're not going to get this blank check again, right? The blank check of developing GTA 6 while GTA online is making a fucking... insane amounts of fucking money. Like all of those circumstances I don't think will line up in that way again. That's what I mean by that. And you talk about like oh they'll you know Witcher 3 led to a more investment in single player and all of this sort of stuff like yeah did it. I mean

1:34:44like... Sure I guess we'd have to go back and look but that doesn't I don't know. No one is going to look at the potential success of GTA 6 and think oh man we've got to do that because no one will have the money to do. Nintendo is the only... You know, rockstar in Nintendo. Not that different when you think about it. In terms of their approach to game development and all of this sort of stuff. But I guess like my point is I don't think that take two is going to let this happen again in a corporate sense. I don't I don't think but the... So yeah, I guess I should explain that because people are having trouble fucking understanding it. Rockstar in Nintendo are both companies that are at the top

1:35:45certainly but but I think you know there's a meticulousness to them. That some would say is like I think detrimental because they are willing to spend fucking all this time on little details and they care about all of those little details in a way that plenty of other developers would love to be able to but they simply do not have the resources to do so. Nintendo obviously is afforded that time and afforded those budgets because of just the nature of what that company is and rockstar has been able to do it because of the success that they have had. Yeah, Red Dead Horse Nuts. Yeah, I mean they can they can sit there and they can focus on insane little shit because they know that they have a fan base that will pick up on it and so that helps them justify like why did you spend X-mini weeks on fucking horse testicles or you know like this weird you know weird thing happened over here like they are their approach to to game development in a high level at a high

1:36:50level I think is actually very similar in terms of the way that the people at rockstar think about their games and think about what they want to do with their next game and all of that stuff I think there's there's a pretty direct connection to some of the way that Nintendo over thinks in some or appropriately thinks I guess depending on your view but the way that Nintendo thinks about its games and its design there's an intentional they're very intentional in their approach I think at a high level obviously you know the further down you get it's I think it does become quite a bit different but there you go so when I talk about like you know GTA 6 being that kind of end of an era that's what I mean is I think that this industry is not in a position to just go and fucking say yeah all right go we'll see you in 2037 right is that GTA you know are you gonna you're gonna take

1:37:54another 10 11 years to make another grand theft auto you're just it's just with the way everything else is right now and everything being up in the air there I I would bet that we would see a GTA 6 I'm sorry a GTA 7 in the first half of the next decade which also sounds like an insane amount of time but um but I that seems like a 2032 2033 it the latest right the latest latest because I don't think that take two is gonna like let this happen again and I think that you have enough people that have left or maybe will leave I imagine that once you know some of the if a lot of the kind of team leads around Rockstar North were to move on after this which who could blame them even if they loved it and had a great time I mean it's still you spent a decade doing this are you gonna how much longer are you gonna do that like that doesn't sound like something that's sustainable um and certainly

1:38:57like someone like Samhazard who's been doing this for a very long time and a lot of the people that he surrounded himself with um for a lot of those years a lot of those people are long gone I think back to um Ken Levine you know it's the we we I talked to Ken Levine um he came by the office and we we sat down I think I want to say this was we'd done right before BioShock Infinite came out um but uh maybe it was after I either way the thing that stuck with me which is something I think about a lot now when when because people immediately go like oh they're gonna make another one they're gonna make this like like people forget that the people that make these video games are human meet love 69 says Samhazard 54 years old so I can whatever you know he could he could easily work another 10 years another 15 if you wanted to right I mean that's you know there's nothing

1:39:59certainly nothing stopping him at that age I'm not saying he's too old to do it or whatever but at some point there is an idea of like dude how many millions have you pulled in over the years working on Grand Theft Auto do you want to do this again are you ready to sign and this was the Ken Levine thing it was you know BioShock Infinite took a long time to get to market it was a you know a troubled development because all development is all development is always troubled but you know BioShock Infinite took some time to get out and the the thing that Ken said that stuck with me was this idea of like am I am I really ready to sign up for another one of these am I really ready to say okay the next X number of years I'm going to devote to I'm going to go do this again am I do I have the energy do I have the strength to fucking do this to to to go and make it happen all over again from scratch um and it was like yeah man fuck like you know like when you think

1:41:09about it that way this this idea of these these development cycles that are only getting longer um and this is something you can go find the interview with uh with Jason Blondell uh that I did um when he was announcing the studio that he was doing with PlayStation that has now since been shuttered you know he it was a similar idea of just like you know you've only got so many years in you to make so many games you can only put so many discs on the wall I think is how he put it and it was this idea of just like how how are you going to spend that time how are you like what are you signing up for next what are you going to do with the next five years of your life and GTA isn't even more extreme version of that so I don't think you could blame anybody who's been through this especially someone who's been there for this entire time and longer if coming out of GTA 6 they were like all right it is now time for me to step away the franchise is in good hands and I'm going to go do something else but the minute that you get and I

1:42:13I you know having limited insight into the people here but you know having having dealt with decisions that Sam Houser has made over the years myself and and having uh to having talked to a lot of people who have dealt with the fallout of some of his decisions and some of the other things that he some of the ways he is conducted himself and and run the company over the years um I think at some point you just go like yeah all right I'm good but then also he would be someone I would view as one of the last real protectors of the old ways when it comes to that sort of stuff and I'm sure there people are rockstar North that you know whose names we don't see nearly as often where I've been there for a tremendous length of time as well right but you do have that thing of like it's like when a company gets purchased and the corporate culture eventually seeps in this was something we heard about a lot with Blizzard actually um was that Activision bought Blizzard and Mike Moreham and the people around him did everything

1:43:17they could to keep Activision out to keep Blizzard Blizzard but that's a long fight it's a hard fight and the fight only gets harder if the money isn't being made if the if the games aren't if the games are going great and you're making money making money they're gonna leave you alone the minute things need like they can't wait to step in and go oh we're gonna fix this and so my view on this is that rockstar has done an amazing job of continuing to be rockstar and astounding job of just being fucking rockstar to its detriment in some ways there are plenty of people who work there who have fucking horrible stories of what it's like to work at rockstar they're not a developer to put on a pedestal um you know you even now they're in the news for union busting like it's but before that was something that was you know before unions were something that were even really being thought

1:44:19about there were plenty of people who fucking got burned out there were I mean they're literally people who took their own like like it's there's a fucking a long list of things casualties related to the development of GTA games uh and so in some ways maybe this is not a corporate culture worth preserving or whatever like I don't want to you know like I don't want to be clear about that but point being back at Blizzard those higher ups found it harder and harder and harder to keep Activision out and once they either got sick of the fight or had lost enough of the fight that they realized that this was not the company that they want it to be they left and I have to imagine that once you know another handful of people there's very few people left that

1:45:19would be kind of like with GTA I imagine at some point you go okay now take two has a much more direct say in this there's a lot less pushback from the rock star side of things because the people on the rock star side of things won't have the cloud anymore because the people with the cloud will have left that's why I say they're not going to take another decade plus to make another grand theft auto game because their corporate parent would not allow that if they could you know what I mean that's just I don't know like again that's we we'll call it informed speculation based on having watched it happen with a dozen other companies over the years and you know like being especially companies that have that kind of iconoclastic fucking shit at the top right um like eventually that stuff changes and so I do wonder you know what we see out of rock star after this and uh

1:46:25will they will they still you know would they ever be allowed to take that length of time to make a game ever again again I my gut tells me absolutely not so so that is where I'm coming from it's not something where it's like oh well the Witcher 3 led to more single player development so why would GTA 6 not do the same the answer is simple no one is going to be given the budget the GTA 6 got unless potentially they're making GTA 7 not even red dead three would get that type of budget anymore maybe a table tennis too maybe maybe a maybe a bully too you know maybe maybe you go to the wall for that I would um but the simple fact is that you know like you can't like no other studio will be able to learn much off of the success or lack thereof of of GTA 6 uh because the circumstances of its development are so unique that you can't really like what are you going to glean from that

1:47:27hey if you have infinite money and time you can make something really crazy really yeah wow that was like Nintendo gave that advice the Nintendo did like a gdc keynote about how to make games or whatever you know like like whatever but there was one gdc where they got up in front of people and they're like yeah you know we're just willing to throw everything away and start over sometimes you got to do that our recommendation is that you work on the game until you until it's good okay yeah that's very easy advice if you're fucking Nintendo and you have the cash that Nintendo has to just fucking float that and go like I don't know man Metroid Prime 4 will come out someday and Metroid Prime 4 is a great example of that process going wrong I think but um yeah most studios out there they eventually have to ship a game or go under right it's not you don't have the amount of money it just sit around and go yeah we did all this work and I'm just not feeling it I'm gonna turn this table upside down and then we're gonna start over it's Mario time

1:48:29in all caps mother fuck it's not you can't right you just can't uh and so I say that with you know with with like what I feel is like an appropriate amount of respect for rock star and the thing they've built you know I'm reminded again you know the rock star brand came after GTA and I remember I was talking to um the woman who ran public relations for rock star when it first started and I don't think she was there for I think she moved on not too long after that and she's I think she's still doing PR for games somewhere but um but I remember you know it was it was said like oh the the GTA people like they're they're you know some of the GTA figureheads they're you know they're kind of building this kind of new brand or whatever under undertake to or you know whatever it was and and they're calling it rock star

1:49:31and I was like oh why is it why like because you know you know and that right out of the gate they carried themselves like that this is before GTA 2 was out and they will already a fucking problem man so yeah I don't know they're they're a very interesting company for sure a very interesting company um let's see Jason from Stevens Point Wisconsin right San says how do you think Sony's decision to go discless would have been received if they had made a clean break starting with the next generation instead of the back half of the PlayStation 5's run I still primarily by physical buying used lending borrowing games with friends getting games for my kid from the library I'll buy digital at a

1:50:31steep discount but I have trouble buying full price day one games digitally I paid a premium for a PlayStation 5 with a disc drive and I want to continue to have the option to use that drive for the whole generation being able to make a more informed decision for the next generation would have felt more fair but having the rug pulled out when the ps5 is barely halfway through its relevant lifespan feels bad man so I you know they made this announcement specifically to signal that the PlayStation 6 like this really is meant to be a PlayStation 6 style announcement right this is them saying hey there's probably going to be no physical disc option for the PS6 and that's why we're letting you know now because by the time we get to 2028 you know the theory was I think or the sensible move there would be to make this announcement now so that you're literally separating it from PS6 news it'll be old news by then they know it's

1:51:33not going to be a popular move right they know like oh if we say hey we're not going to do any disc they don't want that stink on the announcement of the PS6 and so they announce it way ahead of time right so they can get out in front of that news and be like okay we'll take the hit here because we'd rather take it here instead of taking it here I think the hit they have taken has been larger than they thought it was going to be but again if this dies down by the time they're ready to talk PS6 then they've probably still gotten what they want out of it um the problem is that you still have them you still have like Sony big wigs if you will getting out there in front of people and saying yeah I don't know about PS6 I don't know we don't have a date we don't have a date and it's left you wondering like okay well when is that going to be ready like it seems sensible that like by the time they got away from discs in 2028 that they would be very ready to start telling

1:52:35you about the future of PlayStation and so it'd be like okay now it's not a shock to you when we show you this device and there's no slot on it because you knew that was coming but again as the generation seems maybe a little bit up in the air at least that you know they seem to be signaling to some extent that they're like hey we're a little flexible on this because components are a fucking disaster and pricing is a nightmare and we don't know any this is going to go I'm sure like in some weird what you wouldn't think it or maybe you would but um um it's a very important midterm election in a lot of ways right the upcoming elections here in the US are quite consequential I think but it's actually consequential in a way that like companies like PlayStation and Nintendo and all of these other people have to pay like more attention to because they have to look at it and go like okay is this going to affect anything around like are they going to be able to get in there and actually strike down these tariffs are we gonna have to worry about weird fucking made up bullshit trade war stuff out of nowhere are

1:53:39they're going to be like there's a lot of shit right remember the PlayStation 5 pro if you want to talk about fucking companies being very aware of politics or whatever the PlayStation 5 pro shipped on like election day or shipped on like the same like it was right there um and I remember the time I remember talking to someone who was just like yeah I don't know like what you know we're putting this thing out and it's happening in the wake of all this other news and we'll see which way that news goes because like I don't know and so there you know there was there was stuff there as well but um but yeah so I think that you know there is a lot obviously around the AI stuff and so if that bubble bursts what does that mean for um the potential to get your hands on components for somewhat less in the future obviously today's stuff is all fucking wasted and and whatever else but what does that change about component availability

1:54:44um and so there you have these things up in the air around all of hardware all of everything right I mean you know tomorrow tomorrow apples gonna get up in front of people and announce new phones and they're probably gonna be notably higher priced than last year's models despite you know if the if the rumors are to be believed it is not going to be a dramatically improved device um we'll see uh so like you know like everyone is kind of holding their breath and watching this stuff and you know I think to a certain extent from a business perspective especially international businesses they're looking at the midterms and and what's gonna happen from there as like hey is uh you know is there gonna be any relief on this front for us so that we don't have to deal with the bullshit um and and so on right so I think that like that is muddied this message right they

1:55:49they were probably they probably had a pretty good idea in mind about like we're gonna announce this here console comes out here and so this gives us a good window to deal with whatever the fallout from that is and move on that's still almost certainly the the the play here the idea but it's just that the the the substance of the PlayStation 6 information and when that hits and what that is that's the stuff that still seems like I'm not gonna say not locked down at all because I think there are just some hard realities about that that they can't get away from but there's probably something uh some wiggle room on that that they need to figure out so that's why I think this seems extra weird is because you know this is really an announcement about the the future of PlayStation the disc free thing was was really more of an announcement for the PlayStation 6 um and and then being ready to kind of make that transition uh over to a new device

1:56:50and and you know everyone else on a PlayStation 5 can kind of do that digitally uh but a lot of the you know a lot of talk about upcoming consoles seems to have not dried up completely but it feels a lot less certain a lot less inevitable I guess of like oh well this is the time frame and this is that it like it does it does feel like there's just you know like a lot more is up in the air right now so uh I think that that doesn't help this message seem the way it is supposed to sound which none of that's gonna sound good ultimately but but I think it's why it sounds extra weird and it makes it sound more like a PlayStation 5 announcement which I don't think it was ever really meant to to be you say you know like Jason his email here says the PlayStation 5 is barely halfway through its relevant lifespan you're almost certainly right it wasn't supposed to be that way you know

1:57:53they're supposed to be a much closer to the end of that lifespan um and then everything became super expensive and no one can afford a PlayStation 5 little PlayStation 6 so you know whatever um some people in the chat talking about uh you know like like rain says I wish Apple had better gaming pushes there's some talk like I you know the iOS 27 beta seems like it has references like hard references in it to two specific controllers um there are two model numbers cited and like feature sets around haptics and and analog sticks and and that sort of stuff and so you know there has been a slightly a slight uptick in hey dude does Apple have a controller like that story is suddenly back all over again it feels like it's I mean it has been it's been like a decade or something um um uh dandruff says why did Sony announced the fading out of discs at all wouldn't it have been better to

1:58:56just slowly reduce the number of discs and boil the floor the frog slowly no because eventually you get to an announcement hardware and there's no option with a drive on it and people then go what the fuck and then they get mad there they get mad and that anger gets directly associated with the PlayStation 6 what they want is a more vague anger about the disc stuff that hopefully does not get attached to ps6 and that by the time they're they're rolling with PlayStation 6 and talking about it in pre-orders and whatever else that that is subsided a little bit if you just start if you just start making fewer and fewer discs you end up with a different type of angry person who goes out to a store to buy something and discovers they can't find it which is that's not good either um and so this is them just taking the hit early you know um and saying hey we're gonna give you plenty of warning that this is gonna happen in like a year and a half and and there you go those

2:00:01are our plans going forward and and you know that they know that that's not a popular move they know that that's you know going to be met with with plenty of pushback but I I again I think they have gotten a lot more than they thought they were going to I don't think that that's gonna change their direction on this but um but I do think that you know that that it has been you know it's been louder it's been angry is you know it's been um some of it has been unacceptable in some ways there's been stories going around and the stories are always written in a in a slightly sensationalistic way uh in Japan Sony has had to update some of it's and this isn't specifically around the physical disc stuff but it is I'm sure partially associated with that um they've update some of their policies around customer support to basically say like and this is again specific to Japan uh with that of made these updates they're saying like hey if you get us on the phone for like customer service

2:01:04or like if you're getting customer service from us and you are like a fucking like threatening us and abusing us or whatever else like we're going to ban you from fucking PS like we're not gonna take that we're gonna you know call the cops where appropriate we're going to like if you're gonna cross a line with people on a on the phone and and threaten them we are going to fucking not work we are not going to do business with you as a customer like we're like which I think is a a reasonable thing to do it is not something that is purely born out of the the physical change it's something that like you know like like like Japanese game companies have had to do this um yeah Japan's been enacting laws around this yeah Fawful says they've been acting new laws around customer harassment of workers and this is something that I want to say Nintendo had to come out and say a while ago but it was more in the context of like stockholders or something it was it was some kind of weird um yeah but you know there have been a couple of cases in the past where Japanese companies

2:02:07specifically have come out and said we're not going to just let you abuse us that's right square square was the yes square was the other company that did that's a good yes here was keep thank you um because they were getting specific fucking weird abuse from lunatics um which I think you know like society is sick I don't know what do you want to say about it like how do you know I a lot of this stuff is specific to Japan but it's not like customers outside of Japan or just people on the internet outside of Japan are like a reasonable and fucking normal like no one can be normal about anything at all anymore and people jump to threats at the drop of a hat and there needs to be there needs to be some consequences for situations like that like there has to be like you know you have to try to fucking restore some kind of order around that it can't just be the people are there going like well I'm gonna I know you live I'm gonna come shoot like you just can't fucking have a society that runs that way like those people need to fucking be dealt with um

2:03:13and uh yeah I I don't think that that stuff is um I don't think that any of this stuff is out of line I don't think the stuff that Sony has announced around this is like of course like like people like the people working customer support even if you strongly disagree with a company's decision or whatever at some point it's just like hey that doesn't mean you take it out on the it's like the food was wrong at a restaurant and you're yelling at a server or something like why would you ever do why would you ever do that they didn't fucking make the fucking food mistakes fucking happen like just there's a certain level of angry or I rate that I think people get to be and at some point you just like crossed a fucking line like just the person answering the fucking phone or just trying to fucking leave their fucking lives they're not there hanging up the phone one haha we're taking away these discs they're not like fucking lighting cigars with thousand dollar bills and you like got one over on these fuck ups like it just don't fucking bully

2:04:14people on the phone ever because somehow fucking worth it man just to fuck dude fucking relax focus the anger is my point focus the anger in a way that is not fucking actionable by law preferably now CEOs there's some CEOs not not not that I could think of in gaming there's some CEOs that should never be able to have a quiet moment at a restaurant ever again do you think the guy from flock had to move once his address got posted the internet over and over again anyway Francine from Birmingham right sin asking about early internet video since you were involved in early internet video production

2:05:18which in my college days I can remember just being referred to as new media yeah I want to ask did anyone working in that field foresee the rise of a platform like YouTube or did everyone just assume that internet video would remain something tied to individual websites also once YouTube did appear how long did it take people doing web video professionally to realize it would essentially become the only game in town so the thing to remember is when YouTube launched it was it had severe limitations for video length and quality that were shorter and smaller than what we were posting on game spot at the time so like early video game trailers on YouTube looked bad not that the ones that we were posting looked better but you know or that much better but you know we we did have a better video player then they did for a brief period of time and so YouTube at the

2:06:18start was really just like oh are people gonna be like vlogging what are they gonna be doing they're just you know like people didn't have phones yet really like smartphones weren't recording good video or you know like there wasn't anything happening there and so the tools were really the the limiting factor and so when we were doing when when when I started working at video game spot in 96 we've literally had like a eight millimeter camera it was the same camera that Ryan McDonald was using for public access television it was just like a consumer camera and very quickly we you know started upgrading to to better equipment and and you know we we've got fancy max to ingest the video and and because premier only ran out of Mac at the time and you know and so there was you know a pretty big ramping up in the like professional space pro summer didn't exist yet there was no high-end consumer gear I was recording game footage on a super vhs vcr

2:07:24that we that we bought for that purpose which I bought the same model it's literally sitting right there under this television and it's broken which is fucked up because I want to ingest a bunch of old tapes um and I need now I need to buy a goddamn vcr I don't want to buy a vcr that was a good vcr that was a good vcr and that doesn't work um and so we were using super vhs to capture game footage and in some cases we were even just had recording interviews it was the vcr hooked up to the camera and and we were recording audio and video that way at least in studio that was happening here and there um so yeah I don't know like I think everyone knew that like video was possible on the internet but even if you go back to 96 97 and you look at the video quality and the trailers and stuff that were coming out like that stuff looked grainy as fuck it was the it was postage stamp size we were probably putting it up in like

2:08:24real video format at first I think it was real video for for embedded players and then you could download a quick time download some hot movs some hot qt's for that ass um so yeah I guess your question actually is did anyone working in the field foresee the rise of a platform like youtube I would say no because we knew that video was expensive to do because the gear was just even even the equipment uh was pricey and and a lot of the a lot of stuff you want it didn't really exist unless you were going to broadcast quality and then that jumped you up to hundreds of thousands of dollars there was no pro summer middle ground of like high end equipment and so that's why I say at first we were just using regular ass shit you know like using a a high eight camera svhs vcr and and you know what have you because like that's you know game spot was not

2:09:24in a position to build a studio at that time um but we would quickly get there I mean you know there was the initial idea I think this was something Vince Brody came up with he was one of the founders of of game spot I believe this was his idea but but you know we we were post videos we were post videos of gameplay we were doing video reviews um and you know I was able to leverage my you know I had on camera experience at that time because I had also done a bunch of public access television and so I was just comfortable doing shit on camera uh which was a fairly substantial leg up over the average person at that time I will say you know it was very handy um but uh you know it we would try to have a video for every single thing we published that that was the original goal uh and and that was very difficult to do but but anyway uh Vince's idea

2:10:30was to eventually get to a point where we were streaming live video or or the rather that we had a tv station basically broadcasting out of the website and that was game spot live that eventually became a whole department and all the video team on game spot eventually became known as game spot and they had a 24 hour uh loop of videos and so it was a real player that was just looping videos and you could see a schedule of what was coming up next and it was just the videos we had made already was video reviews it was gameplay trailers it was whatever it wasn't like specific shows and what have you but like that was the idea was to eventually get to a point where it's like hey at three o'clock we're gonna have a show and that's eventually became on the spot years later um but by then it wasn't really something that got integrated into that 24 hour feed and and eventually the feed had more than 24 hours of video in it and so it wasn't like a reliable loop and so it was just like here's a schedule of all this stuff and you could put it on and just watch it if you wanted

2:11:30to but I just I remember looking at it going like this is neat I would never watch this this is cool but like it's just a bunch of videos that I could go watch on demand on the website so like there's nothing there is no appointment viewing happening on this on this stream of pre-recorded video and uh yeah I don't know but at the time like no one was doing that at the time that was crazy at the time it was kind of expensive to do from like a bandwidth perspective and whatever but it was a really interesting you know it was the first example I can think of of something like that in video games um and so it was cool to be a part of all that though I was a little bit on the outside of it because all I did was the um yeah I was just in front of the camera like I just wrote reviews and then I stood there and read and read the scripts and and that was that you know I wasn't like Ryan McDonnell that had a he ran that whole team and had a ton of people under him and

2:12:31they were fucking crazy like the the best thing we had going for us at that time when it comes to developing what I think was kind of the future of video on the internet and I think there were things that we were relatively pioneering on that no one ever got credit for because not that many people were paying attention um is the best thing we had going for specifically was Ryan because Ryan was out of his fucking mind and always wanted to do like the craziest shit possible and so he was always like okay like E3 would come around and it would be he would get a fresh budget to fucking blow on equipment and stuff and he would sit there and go like what's something we haven't done before like putting on a live show from the booth that people can watch for three days straight like you know like like that's all stuff that like came kind of directly from him and the budget and the technology and the technology improving to a point where you could go like okay here's what we're doing and so Ryan was like okay we're gonna get a fucking backpack and we're gonna

2:13:35fucking homeers gonna wear this backpack and he's gonna run around the show floor and he can wirelessly get back to the fucking booth and so we can have him in the field with this fucking backpack and and like all of this fucking shit and and and so every year he would get a budget to spend on stuff and they would they bought you know before the tricaster was a thing that was affordable and affordable in quotes like there were big consoles and all this crazy shit and you'd be like yeah I don't know this thing was 80 grand but I can only afford this part of it we need another 120 grand to buy the other half of it so I bought this thing with this year's budget and it's gonna sit here for a while until we can get the other piece and then then we'll have a whole studio it was like it was wild stuff man and so like every six months or whatever like they were getting whole new equipment they eventually did a deal with some company called boom we did who had television channels that were broadcast in HD and the early days of HD TV it was there was

2:14:36not enough content and so they were desperate to find HD content and so they came to GameSpot and did a deal where boom was gonna get X number of hours of content from GameSpot and we were gonna get X amount of money back with that money like I think Ryan hired like three people and bought all these fucking HD cameras there were fucking crazy expensive at the time because they needed to generate content in HD and so naturally you need cameras you need new computers that can you all the fucking ingest points like everything that you needed to upgrade everything to suddenly deal with it was either 720p or 1080i I forget what the actual format was but but suddenly like we were recording way more stuff in HD all of our costs went through the fucking roof but boom was paying us enough money to cover a lot of stuff and it was fucking awesome man like it just like

2:15:39everything changed overnight like we went from like you know we you know we were wearing makeup on camera and stuff and eventually like once the HD stuff rolled in you could see the makeup and you could see everyone's individual like you would see all the fucking makeup caked on everyone's fucking face and it's like okay well we get a and so you had to get I was like finer powder make it was like finer grained makeup that would disappear in HD a lot easier so literally fucking HD fucking literally fucking HD makeup and then eventually we just stopped wearing it because like you know lighting got a little better and you just just wipe off a layer of sweat and then come here and do I'm not I'm like I'm not wearing any makeup right now I can knock down some of this shine to be honest that wouldn't you know wouldn't be the worst idea in the world but um but whatever right um and so yeah it changed everything but by that time you know like we've

2:16:43still like YouTube really still kind of wasn't really a thing at that point because that was still early days of Xbox 360 and so YouTube didn't really come along until later uh and when it did it you know they couldn't they could not like the length was like it was three minutes and then eventually 10 minutes or something but like the YouTube videos had to be really short and at the time you know we were on the other side of this doing like here's Greg Kassavin playing fucking a game for 12 hours straight online you know and and increasingly doing these kind of longer and longer and weirder and weirder live things because we had all the equipment to do it so why not do it and around the same time you know like I started really pushing for podcasts um and pushing for us to start a podcast which there was a lot of uh there was a lot of pushback internally around that because people didn't

2:17:47understand like what's the point of it there were people who were against it from like a a personality perspective of just like I don't we don't want to you know like like there were people who wanted gamespot to be very monolithic in its presentation um and stay that way and not have not have a personality and um it just became clear that like things were moving away from that by the day um and so I will take some amount of credit for pushing us into podcasting ultimately I think it was Bob Kalaco who was doing features at the time found a way to attach a podcast to like the the the concept of hey let's do a podcast to like hey we're doing this top 10 like list of what's hot here's the top 10 topics or whatever and so we kind of built a podcast around that um and uh and went from there and and yeah I don't know man it's it's YouTube

2:18:52I would not say that anyone first saw the rise of a platform like YouTube because the early days of YouTube were garbage um the early days of YouTube happened and you still had people posting screenshot lets plays on something awful you know uh hosting video especially long form video was super expensive and a lot of people didn't have the equipment to do it and and it just was not feasible for a good long time uh and so when we were building giant bomb um we had to contend with that all over again we had to think about like okay where are we gonna host our videos how much money is this gonna cost like we want to try to do longer form stuff than what we're doing or what we had been used to doing um and so we ended up signing a deal with crackle

2:19:53or like Sony had a hosting service or whatever and so we were hosting our videos there and um and and that was expensive and the the process of getting that stuff uploaded was a it was kind of a hassle but like you know but it but it worked uh and then YouTube was slowly growing at the time but it it YouTube didn't seem like a a place to put video game content because it just again the limitations were of the video players quality and the length of time and all that sort of stuff just didn't really make a lot of sense uh for what we were trying to accomplish uh and so YouTube wouldn't really be a thing and also the other thing that was happening around the time here was a version of the like how much gameplay can we put up before a company is gonna get weird about it you know like there was uh there was that aspect to like that bridge had not been crossed right because game spot was putting up like one minute videos three minute videos whatever of gameplay trailers and and whatever there was no such thing as a long form gameplay video at the time um

2:21:00and uh and we wanted to kind of go further in that direction and and you know there were some bumps in that road for sure but generally you know most people just didn't notice and the people did notice you know like like Atlas knew we were playing persona for on the internet every day but if Atlas Japan had known that it would have been a problem and so it was a case of like someone in the US office who was like seemed to be pretty into what we were doing like telling us like hey officially I cannot fucking talk to you about this because then they will know that I knew and didn't say anything and that like you know there was there was a very uh like that stuff was not really happening online very much um and YouTube was a was a weird area too because you're like okay well now someone else controls the video and can they pull it down and and you know are you making money off it or like there was there was just aspects about

2:22:00like a commercial entity on YouTube what does that mean is that even possible like a lot of that stuff just wasn't ready yet and so YouTube never really seemed like a viable option until they made dramatic changes about limitations around video length and all of that other stuff but with that came a lot of weird copyright stuff that I think you know like I still deal with to this day of like YouTube's content ID system being absolute shit um and fair use not being honored the way you wish it was and there's there's a lot of of weird stuff around that but as far as like you know how long did it take people doing web video professionally to realize it would essentially become the only game in town I remember when we got bought by CBS and went back to the game spot or back to that building back to that building god um that the big conversation there what like like the thing that happened wasn't necessarily that you realized it was going to be the only game in town because we were we were selling a subscription content and so one of the features

2:23:08of our subscription was that you could download the videos and so for that to happen we had to host all the videos ourselves which damn near killed us um because that's an inexpensive service to run and it would have been nice at some point to go like oh yeah all this shit is just on YouTube and that's it and and and and so you may have noticed over the years like the default video player on the site would switch to YouTube and like if you were a premium you would still toggle it back to our player but we defaulted new users to the YouTube one because that wouldn't cost us any money and bandwidth if there was ever a situation where a video got yanked off of YouTube for whatever of dumb fucking reason it would fall back to our player and so the idea was to try to do something as seamless as we could um but it was definitely like something there that was more it was more an idea of like controlling our costs than it was an idea of growing on YouTube which we were never good at um never never good at uh and so like the the thing about YouTube becoming the only game in town it

2:24:18was more of a problem for game spot and IGN um because eventually EA was the first publisher that I remember doing this but it was it was a a definite situation of like hey um EA is just going to put this trailer out on YouTube and bypass game spot on IGN and whoever else was left completely uh and so instead of that being you know you know IGN got the exclusive first trailer of this upcoming video game instead IGN was just writing about a YouTube trailer or re-uploading re-uploading a uh a YouTube trailer uh to their channel which then there was a fight over that where you had publishers who would go like we are the ones who were putting this on YouTube you cannot if you put this on YouTube we will give you a strike game spot was in the middle of doing a big Konami thing and Konami Japan issued them a copyright strike on YouTube and I remember someone

2:25:26having to spend what seemed like weeks trying to like talk to people like have a normal conversation about it with someone economy to get the strike to go away um and so that was still a massive problem by the time we came back to that building uh you know the the YouTube stuff was more frustrating than anything else um and so it really didn't become the only game in town until after that until more and more publishers just went like we don't need the press and that changed that shit forever and and it's never been the same sense you know like the relevance of game spot these days it's you know it's a it's a very different it's a very different situation the relevance of IGN which I you know IGN I think is firmly larger than anyone else in the space these days but I would say even IGN's relevance is certainly not what it was 15 years ago 20 years 20 years ago 10 years ago um and it all a lot of it is because of that because of YouTube because of the democratization

2:26:34of those tools that let anyone upload videos that all like all of that stuff has just impacted uh you know like what was kind of a you you could call it an unfair advantage at the time but you know like IGN and GameSpot had built audiences that came there to see that information and so we were able to kind of determine who got to access that audience you know who were we doing this exclusive with who which which you know which trailers are we trying to get first and which trailers are we just gonna like whatever like which trailers are getting promoted on the homepage and which ones aren't like we controlled and Ryan Davis who programmed the homepage uh most uh all that the home pages one for every platform and at one point of one for every genre for every platform was ridiculous um you know like he had an outsized the outsized style of control over some of that stuff because he was he just picked like whatever was the cool shit to put on those pages

2:27:36I guess um for for a lot of the time sometimes the the slots would be promised to like okay if you give us a trailer first we'll put you on the homepage for a day and you'll be on the GameCube page for three days and you'll be you know like whatever um but uh but yeah I don't know the the web video in some ways web video is still a disaster and uh you know like YouTube is fine uh YouTube is has the best player because it works and it works around the world that was the thing the problem we came to um expectations wise with our audience was you know we we were hosting our own videos and if you were in Australia it was sometimes hard to watch our videos because our we we didn't have a worldwide CDN and so if you were in Australia the download speeds on the videos were garbage and and you know like that stuff was just fucking hard as shit to fucking solve

2:28:39and because people's expectations had shifted because people were used to YouTube people had no patience for it people had no understanding and no appreciation and they shouldn't right at the end of the day but people had zero appreciation for how fucking hard it is to host video around the world and have everyone have a good reliable experience it is fucked because everyone's just used to like loading up YouTube and pushing a button in the video plays and so the minute your experience is not exactly that it's dog shit it's the fucking worst thing in the world with the fuck you people doing I'm canceling it was just it was fucked it was fucked dude so yeah I don't know YouTube I think that's there's definitely a time when YouTube was a very frustrating thing um but it was yeah obviously I think the the big for me the the big change was when publishers started bypassing the press and publishing their stuff directly to YouTube

2:29:44that is when YouTube became a thing up until that moment it was like there were some people making videos on YouTube and like they were attracting some form of audience but it wasn't like as big as you know I GN was attracting way more and like you know and and and then eventually I watched you know I got kind of a front row seat to watching and this was when we first got back when we first got back the biggest thing happening on GameSpot was a video series that was being produced externally that was called top Skyrim mods top 10 Skyrim mods the week or whatever and it was this regular like weekly or bi-weekly video series it was being produced by someone somewhere I don't think it was a GameSpot person making it and they were putting that up on YouTube and it was doing really well and so their big idea their big ideas at the time seemed to be two things one we need more videos we need we need more video franchises like that which you know good luck they never I

2:30:49don't think they ever found one and then when they were buying us it was this idea of like we there are our video output does not have a lot of personality to it is there something we can do to fix that and I don't like they never you know they never really pushed hard for other than for bad reasons they never really pushed for us to get involved with the GameSpot video process I know Vinny Caravella had a little more insight into the GameSpot video situation than I ever did but there was the I felt like we were used definitely at one point as like justification for layoffs because they wanted us to do a show together and I think they wanted it to fail so that they could go oh these people aren't good on camera and we need to let them go and the video like we did

2:31:54like two weeks of a show three weeks of a show and was just like all right man this isn't working like the GameSpot folks don't seem to want to do it and it's not it's not great content and and whatever else and and so it was just kind of this this weird thing that we were pushing on and trying to make work because we're like this could be fun like these are like we like these people they're a friends like let's let's all put on a fucking video franchise let's do a weekly video show together and and we get like Chris and Danny and some of these other people and like have a good time and then like but it just wasn't it wasn't happening baby um and uh I think like not long after that they eventually did layoff some folks over there but but I think we we kind of sniffed it out to an extent with like okay we're we're killing this show we're not going to do the show anymore because I do not want to be a part of that process um

2:32:57anyway web video it's bad maybe I don't know like GameSpot lost its way I think a multiple times like you know that was the the thing you know in in in 2006 or 2007 2007 mostly um like the the person running GameSpot was this guy who would come from e and so we had a bunch of television ideas about what what GameSpot's video output should be I I've talked about it before but like you know he was he was a nice enough guy in person but then he just wanted to bring all of these like L.A. comedians up to do shows and have them be like the he's like let's get some pretty ladies in here let's get some some comedian friends of mine and we'll get them to do these shows instead um and that became like they they were running tv.com and mp3.com at the time and so tv.com turned into that very quickly and and we resisted it um relatively well and then I wasn't there anymore

2:34:04so uh so I so I at some point stopped caring uh but but yeah like it was you know like there were multiple times over the years that that I think you know GameSpots for me the value of GameSpots video stuff and I think any any any kind of web video any kind of like um it's it's corny to say but I think you have to just be a fucking real person about it um and it was the value of doing video on the internet it didn't need to be 23 minutes with commercials it didn't need to be like it could operate outside of the the bad confines of television you know it could be better than television and um and so you know the the only the only value I saw in having someone from tv come in was like oh can we get more exposure by being on tv

2:35:05uh can we you know you know if we if we were to polish this up into a tight hour with commercials could we put on the spot on television and his response was absolutely not like okay and fuck you um and so yeah I don't know it was uh it was a yeah it was it was weird because you had suddenly this this person coming in and trying to put limits on what we were doing um in ways that would make it more ready for television but then simultaneously saying we're not getting this ready for television like okay what those the fucking point then like he would get mad if on the spot went like five minutes over was like why what who cares like who doesn't it doesn't matter like none of this none of this matters like none of that matters it was really weird it was really weird the clash between television and web video and a lot of this other stuff you know it was just uh it was a bad fit in a lot of ways

2:36:06and and so like when I think about new media and I think about like kind of the the eventual rise of YouTube I think a lot about those growing pains not to talk about this for another hour or whatever but like you know um but it was you know you had a lot of television people that can we're convinced that they were experts that didn't understand the true value of what they had with video on the internet and it was that idea of like there's something of a more real connection and it's something that I think that like you know the it's the value of twitch it's the value of of live streaming these days um is I think that there's something more real about it it's the it's the same way that I felt about public access television in the early 90s when I was doing that like there there is that feeling of like this is raw on purpose and now the tools are everywhere if you want to have a more professional television looking fucking presentation like it's real easy to spend money on equipment like the equipment is way more affordable the the ability to distribute that content on

2:37:09the internet is way easier to the point of it being free like you could go down those roads and a lot of people do and they end up making their shows look like absolute plastic fucking bullshit in the process and they suck all the fucking life out of it and uh that just seems fucking crazy to me I don't know um but of course I would say that I'm a man sitting in a garage uh let's see if we can take one more here let's see Brian from Nebraska writes in and he's worried about the joy of gaming says I need help over more than a decade on over more than a decade on steam I have accumulated

2:38:14a lot of video games over 800 I need to play my mountain of backlog games but I can't muster the mental fortitude to pick up a game or even play a game after work I have three hours of free time but instead of picking something and playing a game I just stare at my list of games and waste my time just deciding something with no choice at the end my question to you is what would you what would you do to find the joy of gaming again when you have a lot of choice I mean I think everyone is in I don't think it's necessarily a joy of gaming sort of thing but like that that analysis paralysis kind of thing is is very real I don't know um but if you're talking about it from a joy perspective and you're just like not you know getting joy from playing the games or looking through them then I don't you know maybe you need to take a break from it and think about what you really want to get out of games um but if you are convinced that yes you do like video games and you want to keep playing them and it is not a larger problem that you need to think about

2:39:16I think there are a lot of ways to sort through and think about a library of games this is something that I think a lot of people have trouble with and there are an increasing number of websites and services built in ways that can kind of you know take some of that choice away from you or or help you with that you know it can be as easy as just like getting together with a group of friends and playing a game with them or playing the same game at the same time as them and discussing it you know start a little game club um I think you know for when it comes to I I I experienced this with old video games a lot because now that we live in a post-scarcity world where you can have an SD card filled with every goddamn video game made from you know 1977 to you know 2000 until like 1999 or whatever

2:40:18no that after you that's that's more than an SD card now we're talking a USB drive anyway now that you need under 10 terabytes of storage to store every game that matters um you know it's hard to to figure out what to play there and so that's why I recommend just playing Mr. Deuce Castle it's a great game it's got great music the windows in the background are make up a big number and that number is the number of the stage that you're on and I think that's really crazy um the monsters get smarter as you play it's really it's it's a really impressive now you know I think um a lot of that can be as easy as like I think it's one of the the big cool things about retro achievements which I think people love to shit on for you know like oh you need this to play through a game what happened to play a game for the joy like yeah I guess dude I don't know because sometimes it's fun to do stuff and be able to like brag to a friend about it like that was the point of achievements to begin with is that they were something they were

2:41:20meant to be presented in the same way as a high score would have been in our Cades um and so it's something that can take a single player game and kind of make it a little social and I think that can be fun um and so like you know hey I'm gonna work my way through this game and get these you know I'm not maybe not drive myself crazy trying to get every single one of these achievements because some of them are hard but I'm gonna play through this and look at this and see what other people have done and and I think that helps provide a little bit of structure to it you yes you could also as one said mall in the chat has said here you could just put all the games on a big wheel and spin the wheel that seems like a disaster what do they even look like it's like what you know it's like it's like it's like this or something like I would why would you have that why would you have a big wheel of games that's stupid but you could do it um and uh I don't know I think that there are like

2:42:23fun weird ways to organize that sort of stuff into some form of structure I think again a lot of it I think comes socially I think a lot of it is like you know if you've got a like-minded group of friends and you can talk about that sort of stuff or play the same games either together or at the same time or whatever I think that that for me is like a really good kind of signpost or or guide post that'll that'll kind of help you along the way um and and that's been I don't know that that's been something that I can always kind of lean on is just like oh yeah and like I'm I still I haven't played it in a while but I was playing through are you of sorrow for a good long time and and got like over halfway through it and then just having that time to go back to it but um but it's hard you know because there yeah obviously you have your 800 games on steam and then also like like every other fucking game that came out before that potentially in your clutches right like there's a lot of people probably today who were like man I really should play through

2:43:26acarina of time before that remake comes out you know um there's a lot of just there's a lot of stuff like that I think um can help kind of guide you through it a little bit if you if you need something like that uh all right one more Ian writes in how often do you think about Tony Yeo not that I mean really not that often honestly maybe not as often as I should um I'm on some corner of the TikTok algorithm where I get a lot of videos of 50 cents saying stuff talking about his ideas about business were like you know his his rap career back when he was doing that and and Tony Yeo comes up in some of that stuff it's a lot of it's a lot of videos of 50 cents saying yeah I got everybody a G unit shoe deal and then none of them were the war the shoes what the fuck what am I supposed to

2:44:27pay them forever you know like it was it's a lot of like indignant 50 cent mad that no one wore the G unit shoes after he got all of the G unit guys a G unit shoe deal which I'm on his side on that one if you got Tony Yeo a shoe deal because he's not gonna get one on his own and he can't even fucking be bothered to wear the shoes what the fuck man what the fucking fuck straight up bullshit all right that's gonna do it thanks everybody for writing in podcast at guard dot bike is the email address of course head over to Jeff dot zone if you want to add free version of this podcast you can get it as well as much much more over on the patreon again that's it Jeff dot zone follow it the follow this shit on twitch and on youtube it's on both it's live here it's just archived over there you know vice versa or whatever Nintendo will have more to announce tomorrow they're having a

2:45:29Nintendo direct of their own if I can get these kids wrangled or out of my hair I guess long enough because my wife honestly my wife does the majority of the wrangling around these parts I just fucking work here then then maybe we'll maybe we'll take a look at that Nintendo direct together but I don't know it's been a if today is any indication where I watch to the Zelda direct with a kid on each knee and one of them trying to climb up my back then I don't I'm not I'm not optimistic about tomorrow we'll be back though tomorrow 10 a.m. talking some kind of shit maybe I'll just save it and watch it then it was doing watch it then if I can't if I can't get to it live either way have a good one and I'll be back next week with another episode of this podcast whatever it is called thanks for checking it out leave a five star right now I'll see you bye