Rebel FM
Rebel FM - Episode 4 - 01/28/09
This week we're joined once again by Area 5's Ryan O'Donnell and Matt Chandronait to discuss what we've all been playing, share our thoughts on narrative in gaming, and explore the heights of sarcasm (in invoice form).
Oh yeah, now I'm on the mic. Let's get it. Let's get it going. Come on. Oh, oh, and this. That's all I got. You are now in possession of the rebel FM for good. I now let us enjoy some cake or pie. It is Wednesday January 28th. Welcome to episode 4 of Rebel FM. My name is Philip Kohler. Joining me this week is the staff of eat-sleep-game.com. Anthony Gaiigos, Arthur Geese, and Nick Suttner. I realize we should say our own names. The people associated with that name. I guess so what's your name? Jerk. Mr. Consonant Professional. My name is Nick. Hi, I'm Anthony. Where are they? Alright, also joining the rebellion today. We have two special guests, the co-founders of area5.tv. Match Android A. I'm Ryan. Why are you pointing at me? And Ryan, I'm talking to the system so quickly. My name is Ryan, and I'm talking into a split-screen thing. No, I'm Ryan. This is so professional. I wish you guys... Are you getting impressed? I'm super impressed. I've never seen a real podcast before, but now I'm seeing it. Is there? What the hell is going on outside? I just set off firecrackers outside. Welcome to our fucking weekend. There have been firecrackers going off all weekend. It sounds like a dead rain stick. It's fire on my game. It's great at the lunar year. And I'm like, "No gun makes that much noise for that long." It's like an Oakland man. This is week two of the greatest week ever. There was a wedding till we had record. I'm just glad it sounded like some violence Monday. But that's my favorite Monday of the month. All right, we have a few cool things planned. This week we're going to be talking about what we've been playing recently. We're going to have a little discussion about Gravity Bone, which I brought up last week. I like how if we had the word recently, then it's not like stealing what you've been playing. One of yours doesn't exist anymore anyways. Yeah, I don't know what you're talking about. And then we're also going to be talking about narrative in games and what we think about it. How we'd like to see it done. You're out of here. Just want a gun. No, sir, I don't like it. Done. Well, that segment was easy. That was an easy segment. All right, check that off the list. Matt, why don't you start us off with what you've been playing? What did you do this weekend, Matt? What did I do this weekend? I don't know. I'll just give you a casual. Yeah, you know. So don't tell us what you've been playing. Actually, I haven't been able to play hardly anything since we were trying to get Area 5 off the ground. And so this weekend was kind of the first weekend where I didn't feel guilty playing something. And so I ended up playing WoW for like 12 hours on Sunday. It was awesome. That sounds like my weekend. Wow. Just a lot of WoW. Yeah. And like, actually I played a bunch of Far Cry as well because like I still haven't finished that game. And it's awesome. Can I ask what you're doing in World of Warcraft? I just want to bore these guys for a little while. Just like grinding instances to get gear so that my guild can start doing the 10 Med Raids. We want to start Nax soon. So I need to get my, I'm a mage so I need to get my gear up. So this weekend the Lunar Festival started in World of Warcraft. I was doing that stuff. I went to all the Elders and got my inventory. See, I'm working on that right now which is really nerdy because what you can do it in the Lunar Festivals, they put Elders in all the towns in World of Warcraft. Are you guys going to start comparing the manicures after this? Yes. No, this is totally awesome. I want to explain this, they put Elders in all the towns, like all the towns in the whole game. And you can, you can go and like get special coins from each of them. And they have to keep the zombies back from that one terrible podcast we did. That would be excellent. But I'm just saying like this is how awful and nerdy I am is that I'm actually trying to go to every single elder in the game which is taking forever. I did that. I'm serious. I look bigger than you. You win. All right. That's enough. Sorry, guys. I just like talking about it while like not even looking at Phil just like looking at everybody else watching them fucking roll their eyes. I think the thing I like about World of Warcraft is like we'll be doing something else like Saturday. We were playing Horde and I think it was David Ellis was playing with us. Guess what guys? I did 70 and everyone's all yay. I'm happy with my group. Is that a while he was playing Horde? Yeah. It creeps into discussion. Kathleen, please. No, you know, we did 70 while you guys were playing. It's such a non-interactive combat that you could be playing years before while playing. I mean, it's not like you really do anything. Anyway, anything else? No, that's it. All right. Except for Horde Mode and Gears of War, which is awesome. Yeah. Well, Arthur has been playing make us all pasta because he's awesome. Dude, I love that game. I think you won. No, I lost because I'm ready to pass out over here. Yeah, tonight I played make pasta and this morning I played fixed web code. But over the weekend, I guess it's am I up? Are we talking about what we're playing now? Yeah, we are. I played some Gears over the weekend. I helped. First, Anthony and I smashed ourselves in the balls repeatedly trying to get through a certain part and on insane. Which part? Because that was, Ryan and I had a lot of fun and insane moding Gears once. Except for one part. Except for one part. It was in a vehicle. That shock. It was the part after you finished the crumbling ice and you have to take down a tower before you go into the cave. It's before the corpse or peek a boob. Right. Segment. Right. So we take down the tower and we take down the truck as when we go into the tunnel and there's nowhere to go in the tunnel. It's a dead end and we do this like three times and we're just convinced the game is bugged. After Anthony gets sick of it and I get sick of it and we quit and then I go back to it a few hours later. I realized that there was a reaver for the back that we passed. And apparently until you kill that reaver like it won't activate the fucking checkpoint. Whoa. That causes a corpse there to break down the inside of the wall so you can keep going. And that was awesome. That's inconvenient. Yeah. All the worst parts of Gears 1 on insane were when you split up. Like those were all the fucking annoying parts. Yeah. On insane the hard part was the vehicle part. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. That was awful. I like to find who came up with that. That vehicle part in any level was just annoying. It wasn't very fun. Yeah. Anyways. But it got even worse on insane. On insane. It's just fucking fast. Yeah. It doesn't feel precise enough. Plus it's all just memorization of where the dumb fucking bats are coming from. Anyway, having to replay that part five times, six times, ten times, fifteen times is not fun. When you don't have to do that on the parts of the game that represent the core gameplay. And the core gameplay is fun and balanced on insane and that part was not. It's just that the whole section like in the first one is pointless. At least in the second one the vehicle you're in shoots and things. It's true. Oh, like a light gun isn't good enough for you. No, a light gun is not good enough for me. I can aim a light gun and then it's empty and has to recharge to me while I'm being torn apart by bats. That aren't in the second one. You know why? Because they fucking suck the first time. That part was not cool. Any more Metal Gear playing? Hater? I actually didn't get to play Hater. I don't hate Metal Gear. I just don't think the story is any good. I mean, I thought that I stressed on the last podcast in my post on the site that I think that the combat is good and the gameplay is interesting. I like all the options that you have. You just hate Hideo Kojima. I understand. Metal Gear and Gear is the both not again when we talk about story. Yeah, I think though they have some issues for different reasons. So I'm not going to talk about that until we get to the next segment. But I didn't play some more Metal Gear. I was just as a part that I really hated. It's the beginning of Act 3 where you're chasing the dude through the streets of the script, Eastern European town. I really like that part. So did I. I don't like the stealth, I've always felt like the stealth mechanic in the Metal Gear game. So it was sort of left behind after Splinter Cell came out. And I'm not narratively speaking and I'm certainly gunplay speaking, but like from a stealth point of view, I feel like the Splinter Cell games were a leap forward. The Metal Gear stayed pretty much the same. But those Splinter's was also like completely unforgiving. I mean, that's a big difference as well. Like Metal Gear, you can get seen a lot and screw up. I mean, in Splinter Cell, even like, I mean. In the first and second Splinter Cell, it was really unforgiving. Chaos Theory was really good about that. And I will say that Splinter Cell, Double Agent, I'm a gigantic fan of it's the best stealth action I've played since Thief 2. I mean, Splinter Cell is a stealth sim. I wouldn't call Metal Gear a sim at all. I think Splinter Cell Chaos Theory is the best game out of that series. And I felt like Double Agent, at least the 360 version, was the game made by the B squad. That's what I was going to say is that at least with Metal Gear games, you know every single one is being made by Hideo Kojima. And you know they're going to be good. Whereas with the Splinter Cell games, you actually have to look and see which of you did it to know like, "Oh, this is going to be a mess." Yeah, most people don't like the last one as much as Matt and I do, but I think it's by far the best Splinter Cell in no question. But yeah, easily. It's just super polished in almost every way. I mean, all the combat, like the animation is really, really well done. So like, you know exactly. I felt like the early Splinter Cell games, the reason I didn't like them is because all the interaction was very menu driven, which seemed like really lame. It's like, I don't want to, I just, you know, make the button context sensitive, but don't make it look like it's an RPG and I'm choosing a bunch of stuff from a menu. And they slowly started to strip that stuff back and you're right. By the time they hit Chaos Theory, there wasn't as much of that in there. But it's the last game called Double Agent. That sounds wrong to me and I don't want to... The game is double, it's because you, you're supposed to be like kicked out of the NSA. Right. And then you go to work for a domestic terrorist organization. Right, right. Anyway, I don't know. It's like the, there's a stage that's essentially the tanker stage in that game. And it's, to me, far more fun to play that than it would be to play the tanker section of Metal Gear Solid 2. Even though they're both really similar, you know, there's a bunch of enemies on a tanker. And your job is to kind of sneak through the crates in the boxes and, you know, get the jump on them and take them down. It's just really, really well done. There's lots of like hanging from wires that are, I don't know. I thought it was a really beautiful game. I feel like all that stuff was in Chaos Theory where as Double Agent, there were a lot of sections that were instant death. Or instant mission fail parts, like especially in the hotel in Shanghai. I like that section a lot. I like the daylight section in the Congo. Oh, that was, I thought that was the best part of the game. Oh man, like just the, the shirper, it's funny to me that you say polished because the performance issues in that game were so pronounced. Like it could never, any time there was light, it could not maintain a constant. On 360? Yes, on 360, I have it. Yeah, we have it too. I mean, I never... You can take a look. I never had a question with you guys about this. Maybe it'll be difficult for you to answer. But I've always been interested in getting into the Splinter Cell games, but I have never played one. I think the last one is the... Yeah, I was gonna say... Definitely the most... Would I be able to get into it without the history of having played, like, the controls and stuff? That's the thing, it's like Metal Gear, take it or leave it. Like, if you like the narrative cool, if you don't like it, you probably really don't like it. But, I mean, I feel like it is an important part of that game, whereas Splinter Cell, you can kind of just leave it. Yeah, it's all gameplay. I'm more thinking about, I guess, like, from the control standpoint, because I know a lot of games, like... Especially games like Splinter Cell, where it was coming out basically yearly for a while. It's a game that requires a lot of patience. You know, it's like, if you... I mean, I know it's a cliche to say, if you play it like a shooter, you're gonna... You know, it's not gonna work, but you really... I mean, there's a lot of sitting behind a box, waiting for Sam Fishers, like, animations to change slightly, which lets you know that you can do, like, a certain move that's an instant takedown, that sort of thing. And a lot of things... It's a lot like a puzzle game in parts, especially in the first one, the third one, where you're like, "Okay, well, there's dark here, here, and here. Like, I can get to that dark spot from here, and then I can hide here, or... Well, I can shoot out that light, and then make a path of darkness to go. And if I'm really careful, no one will see me, or I can hide a body here." Right. And there's sort of weird emergent things in Chaos Theory that I don't know that I really saw into Allegiant, like, knocking somebody out on a mission where I couldn't kill anyone, then dragging them over to, like, shallow water and leaving their body there thinking, "Oh, well, I mean, it won't do anything." He drowned, and I lost the mission and shit like that. But I'm pretty sure that stuff is all in "Double Agent" as well. In fact, I think "Double Agent" would make a great game for a sort of backlog segment. It'll make me play "Double Agent" again. I'm not forcing anyone to play anything. I would play it. I mean, I have all of them, Phil, so you're more than welcome to borrow. And I would say, Phil, that you've got to... You think about, like, it's a Tom Clancy game, it's done by Ubisoft. You know, they're going to design it so that people who have never played one before can come in and go through tutorial section and get into it. It's not like jumping into a fighting game series or something. I mean, I understand that a lot of people prefer Metal Gear over Splinter Cell because of just aesthetic considerations. Sure. But from a gameplay standpoint, Splinter Cell has always been a leap over that. So, I only played a little bit of Metal Gear. I played some Crysis, finally. I still haven't tried that on my new PC. You should definitely do that. Just make sure your video card isn't overclocked at all. Oh, mine's factory overclock. Well, factory overclock is fine, but, like, driver overclock. Oh, okay. Like, it would go normal for two seconds and slow down, then go normal and slow down. Gotcha. That was annoying until I fixed it, but Crysis is fun. Yeah, I played some of that as well. It is not culturally sensitive at all. Yeah. We're going to talk about a game with narrative that doesn't matter. Oh, man. Oh, and we can talk about that in the next segment. The intro will come up. But, you know, I have a soft spot in my heart for any game that lets me pick up a chicken, throw it, and then shoot it. Like, I played Skit. Chicken. Nice. I played the Legend of Zelda. No, it was a Wii game. That's pretty much just that. Like, picking up or shooting chickens. See, but no, like, I throw a chicken and then say, pull to myself. And then shoot it with the shotgun. And that is fun to me. And, apparently, Anthony, like, do it with crabs on the beach. Yeah, there is something to do about that game about just, like, starting it up for the first time and, you know, seeing... I mean, everybody talks about the visuals with it, but just seeing the visual quality and realizing, like, okay, this is why, this is why I like having a PC that can run this game. Yeah, right. And, I mean, the cool thing about the visuals in Crisis that you don't see in other graphics engines is that, whereas other things model the surface of a character, like, in Crisis, you can see the parts interacting with themselves. In Crisis, like, you can see a bicep flex and work with the other muscles in an arm and, like, the pec muscles, like, overlay into the shoulder the right way, and, like, as an art student with some anatomy background, like, that really sticks out to me. Yep. I also appreciate it because that is really fucking difficult to model. Yeah. Well, and, like, you look at a game like half... or, sorry, not half-life, like, Fallout 3, and you see somebody bend their arm. And it has that really bad crease in it because, like, the rigging doesn't have the proper muscle flexing built into it. And, like, that's the kind of thing that if you've done any 3D modeling, or you're an art student at all, or if you're just paying really close attention, like, if they do something like that in Crisis, like, I would notice that too. I'd be like, "Oh, man, look at the way that arm flexes." Yeah, I mean, you have a background in 3D modeling, right? Yeah. Yeah, so I think that you'd really appreciate a lot of what goes on in Crisis. I mean, I don't necessarily think it makes the gameplay better. Right. Like, I could have used a little less detail on the back of the leg, on the back of the knee joint for a few more frames of performance, but I can appreciate it. And one thing also that I was surprised to be enjoying in the game as I got into it was the stealth. Like, usually in first-person shooters, I'm not a big fan of stealth, but here with the way the cloaking works, I actually found myself sneaking around quite a bit and getting the drop-on enemies. And it was actually just really enjoyable and easy and sort of casual, I guess. And it's, yeah, that's another game that has sort of emergent gameplay, and the way that different people handle it. Like, I know that Anthony didn't play it all, like, he saw me playing it. At least stealth if I got in trouble. Other than that, it was, I'd run around with maximum armor on and just shoot everyone I saw. Right. Yeah. Which is fine. Which is awesome. And there were points where I said, "I'm gonna go punch a Korean in face." Yes. And then I got shot and said, "I'm gonna go invisible." I go cry by this tree. Exactly. There's a lot of laying by trees when you're playing stealthily. And I've played gears and horde with everyone, but I mean, everyone knows about horde. I still haven't played horde. I don't really like the rest of gears, but I'm guessing I might play horde. I don't know. We can start up like a very pure co-op experience, I feel like. It definitely points out how good the combat in that game is because that's all it is. True. Ryan O'Donnell, I demand to know what you've been playing. I, like Matt, was not able to play games for a good long while. Are you guys putting an episode up this week, by the way? Yeah. Part two of the game of the year, 2008 chat will go up in the middle of this week. It's cool. But no, I finally convinced myself to start playing something because Mr. Nick Suttner here hooked me up with a copy of Skate 2 for PlayStation 3. That's awesome. Which I'm enjoying. It's a very interesting game because I really, really liked Skate 1, but I didn't have a ton of time put into it, so I did not become the Skate Master. But I do remember thinking that when I was playing it, I remember saying like, "Wow, this is an essentially perfect Skate game for me." It's like controls, kind of like a fighting game. We talked before about fighting games with analog controls. It's basically a fighting game, Skate, where there's only one character and there's only one set of moves to master. You're fighting the pavement. Or you're fighting the environment. And all the moves at once, as long as you can master them with your thumbs. Right, it's super hardcore. At any given time, you need to really be conscious of what you're doing with both sticks and face buttons and shoulder buttons. So there's just a lot of stuff to keep track of, but I think it's a, I don't know, a really rewarding game. Even though I'm kind of awful at it right now, I'm trying to get better. As for the differences between Skate 1 and Skate 2, it seems like it's mostly more streamlining and polishing, that sort of thing. Like, yes, you can get off your skateboard now, although you kind of pivot around like you're on a skateboard when you're off of it. But it lets you run upstairs, which is good. You can move around certain objects in the environment now, which is nice, but a lot of times you're like, "Why isn't it just moved to the right spot to begin with?" Why is this ramp that's like six feet over from my landing spot? Why isn't that in my landing spot? Exactly. On PlayStation 3, there are, I don't know if it's this way on Xbox, but there are frame rate issues. There are times when it gets upwards of like 60 and everything's great. Most of the time it runs at 30 and then there are points when it's running a little bit lower than that. So that's kind of obnoxious and it also seems to run a little dark. A lot of the shadows look a lot darker than I'd like. And there's no internal adjustment in the game, which usually a PlayStation 3 games are kind of saturated. They're the ones with the sparks. What's that? They're the ones with the sparks, usually. More sparks? More sparks, yeah, exactly. But, you know, none of that stuff really matters. The only thing that matters is that it's this giant open world skating game. The controls are fantastic and at any given time you can warp to any mission that you'd like to warp to that's available by going to your map and just choosing what you want to do. Proving once again that fast travel is the only way to go in an open world game. And it totally works. It's awesome. Well, I mean, I said this on the last show, but I think if Skate had something like Burnout has where every single road had its own like record to break and thing to do automatically, that you didn't have to like start, I think that would help a lot just towards making it more engaging, just getting around the world. Like, I think if that was the case, I wouldn't want to just teleport between objectives. I actually just want to skate down the street and constantly be like trying to skate. For me, the only reason I don't want to skate around on the street normally is because I'm not good enough yet. Like, I feel like I need to do some of the events to raise my skill level and then once I can actually like make it around the streets and make it look cool, then I will probably, I won't even need the objectives anymore. But that's the problem is when, well, I don't know. Like, that's what I need is I need something to kind of, I need a more formal framework to like test me. Like, that's why I feel the objectives are like going to them and I like having to do a specific thing in a specific place. I like ending up, I like doing a mission that puts me in like a cool skate park or something like that. And then after the, after it's over, after I've defeated that objective, then I'll just like skate around there for a while. Yeah, this one has some really great small like parts like that. And it does a better job of making the objectives when you go there. It's like you have to do, you know, you have to do like five kick flips or five different flips in this area. It doesn't tell you what type of flip and where exactly to do it. So there's more freedom like that. So in that regard, it's not quite as strict. You don't have to be like as good technically. So that's the main thing I've been playing, but I've also been playing some other things like Castlevania Order of Ecclesia on DS, which I played because I listened to an episode of your podcast where Shane said it was his third favorite game of the year or something like that. Did you actually buy it? I did actually, actually buy the earth bucks this year. Well, yeah. Well, well, more like with, with trade in books. I don't know. But uh... You can grease in the machine. Yeah. I know. I ordinarily don't do this. Didn't they just announce they made like three billion dollars off use games? Oh, okay. Let me really want to talk about it. Like, I don't shop at GameSpot. I don't shop at E.B. I order everything new from Amazon. Right. But we lost our jobs. And so money is tight. Totally. And you know, I made, I decided to go do something that I don't usually do and I'm not proud of it. As long as you can sleep in that, that's fine. I do too. I try not to ever trade stuff in. I don't support that sort of thing. But every game that I bought using this trade in credit was a new copy. I don't buy used copies. Nick is just asking how you sleep at night because he wants to know how you sleep. He's telling me. He's slept in three weeks. So, I traded in so many games. So, I'm not very far in Ecclesia yet, but it definitely seems, um... I think Shane's right that it's probably the best one since Symphony of the Night, even though I'm not very far in it yet. The way that they have the stages split up into different worlds on an overhead map means that you don't have vastly different looking areas that are tacked one right next to the other, like you did in the previous Castlevanians, which I always thought was kind of weird. So, you know, it makes sense that you go from this place that looks like a town to this place that looks like a forest and it just flows better. And then the combat system is really well done using these glyphs. Basically, you can have an attack on either of two buttons and two different attacks, and then you can rapidly press between them to do combos and stuff. It's just a little bit more fun to attack things than it was in previous games. So, that's nice. And then I've been playing a bunch of different iPhone games as well. Anything worth talking about? What was a little block when you were just showing me? So, that's called Edge. That's a really fun little game worth checking out where it's kind of at an isometric perspective. You're a rainbow cube rolling through some great environments that are also made of like squares and cubes and stuff. It looks all, I don't know, bitty and cool, and it's got some nice, simple sounds. And you basically just roll your cube around onto different spots and the levels change up a bit. I don't know, it's kind of like marble madness. A little bit marble-less ultra and even like crush as well, I was thinking. There's not really a mechanic like that where it like changes it, but I think just getting used to that perspective of having to like realize where you are in relation to the geometry is. Yeah, I mean, basically, the only way, your only interaction is to roll in one of four directions and you can kind of roll up the side of certain block walls. So, it's not like a platformer, but it's kind of like a platformer-ish sort of thing. It's like short stages where you're trying to navigate them and get to the goal, and then that's it. And it's a pretty fun, simple little game. I like it a lot. I've been playing Cran Physics Deluxe on iPhone as well. Oh, man, I keep forgetting to get that. Oh, shit, I didn't even know it was on iPhone. Yeah, I keep forgetting to get that one. And I never played it when it was on PC. I never played in the early demos. And there's a lot of tricky little brain teasers in there, and at the beginning of the game, it seems like, oh, this is going to be pretty simple. All I can do is draw these blocks, but they teach you or basically unlock new functionality, new things you can draw as the game goes on. So, eventually, you can draw little axles or little screws that you can put things on to make them rotate. And then after that, you can do a string that connects two things, and basically the complexity ramps up as you go along. Does the drawing with your finger work really well? It works pretty darn well. I mean, the framerate could be a little better. I know that almost any time anyone says the framerate could be a little better. It's like, oh, the framerate must totally suck in this game. It's not that it totally sucks. It's just not the greatest, but it doesn't really affect gameplay that much. It doesn't play the awesome music. It does play the awesome music. It seems like it's a lock for a DS, right? I don't know, but it would work fine on DS. It would probably run a little better around the same. You'd probably pay about $25. Exactly. Super cheap on iPhones. Super worth it. It's another great one. There's a game called Field Runners, which is like a tower defense game. I've heard this is the new Hotness. It's the new Hotness if you're not a super ultra fan of Pixel Drunk Monsters, which is superior in basically every way. This thing, I haven't played that many stages of it either, so I'm not going to have ultra-in-depth knowledge. Yeah, I'm sassy that it's coming in. Do you carry your iPhone charger around with you? No. It's my iPhone battery's fine. It doesn't run out. I get one day of use out of it. I don't like the extra battery. No, I don't need any of that. And you lend it to cross-dressers? No. Also, like Patrick. But Field Runners doesn't leave the house. He leaves his iPhone plugged in all the time. Yes, that's exactly. I play with it plugged in. I don't know. But Field Runners is really simple and cool. There's not that many tower types. You kind of, where you place the towers, it makes the path which the enemies will travel through. So you can kind of-- That's what you call a tower defense. Right, right, right. And it works out. You know, it's pretty fun. The way it just kind of ramps up in difficulty, like the enemies get stronger as they go on. So even though they look the same, it's still, you know, I don't know. It's just no Pixel Jump Monsters. What can I say? But it's like $5 on iPhone and it will keep you busy. And I'm trying to think. Is there any other sweet iPhone games that I've been playing? Oh, Nutanika 2. Which I guess is, I don't know who-- It's a collaboration between Kenji Eno, who does the art and someone else. It's not at all like Nutanika 1, which was like a little puzzle game. This is also a little puzzle game, but totally different. You basically, all you do is interact by tapping on these dots, which causes a shockwave to come out of the dot. And then it pushes this little rubber ducky into a goal in this-- It's like Spacey and Psychedelic and has fun sounds. Do iPhone press accounts exist because-- I wish. Because I was like, "Yeah, Ryan's like, "We don't got no money." And I'm like, "I wonder fucking why." Well, that's the thing. It's like, iPhone games cost like $2. You know what I mean? I've only bought like 300 of them. Well, let me put it this way. Even if I bought 20 of them at $2 each, you know, I'm only spending the cost of the normal game. Well, I don't know how much is cran physics. Cran physics is probably like $5. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, it's about 1/5. The price of a used DS game or something like that. It's great because all the developers are getting rich off them, too. So many people because it's only takes like two people to the game. I've actually heard some people talking about how there are a lot of developers that thought that that would be the case. I'm sure there are tons, but I'm sure a lot of them just don't sell. But the ones that catch, you know, I keep reading stories about some guy now is like making millions just him because he made the game. It was like a triangle game or something. No, no, no. It's a big problem with the App Store, actually. It suffers some of the same issues that Live Arcade does. And there's just a glut of content out there and it's hard to find. So unless something gets kind of a bit of a buzz around it and, you know, comes up from in that way, then I'm willing to bet that there's probably plenty of really good iPhone games that just haven't reached popularity even to literally deserve it. Which is why I'd like to cover more iPhone games. At first, there was no reason to do it because there weren't that many good games except for Enigma, which is the one you're thinking of where the guy, these guys that made this game, it was a Mac game before. And they made plenty of other Mac software and Mac games before for the past 10 years or something like that. But they made more money off this one game this year than they have in the entire lifespan of their company for the past 10 years off this one game being on the App Store. They were like a Mac gaming company. Exactly. But I mean, that's what I mean. Like for these guys who were a Mac gaming company, you know? I'm not shitting on this one. No, I know. I'm just saying. What do you plan on Mac who said it's born well? The end. And that's like cash down your face and going to the bar. I mean, don't expect a lot of success. Where's that a bar? And the knee, what a view. And the knee, did you actually get started playing condemned to? Yeah, actually I'm all the way up to the part and condemned to where you have to run from the fucking bear. You can't see it. You're furthest. I mean, spoilers. Every single person is like, just completes that sentence without even a press. It's like, the whole level is you're running from something and you buy out of the end that's a bear. You don't find out. You know from the fucking first moment you see it. It's a bear. Before you start running, you see it. You see a bear attack a guy and you're like, oh, there's a gear to find something that looks like animal. So, like, bear something? Yeah, and you can hear something growling all the time. And then when you finally get in the house, you see a guy and he freaks out and then you see a bear attack him. And then he, the bear leaves. And then if you continue to watch the guy, which I did for some changes, you see him, you see him start to cry. And he starts pulling himself along, like missing his legs. Just crying. Oh man, I'm peeking real bad, sorry. I'll sit back to the mic. I pick up like a motherfucker. You're totally peeking. And so, yeah, I've been playing a condemned two, which is good because as far as the narrative goes, I mean, it's already ten times better than the first game was. Although it's a little funny playing the first one and going straight into the second one that I like in the first game. Can I make this a joke? No, you can't. This is your like, the first game. You're like this overweight Mexican dude. And then the second game somehow you've become more like a crazy hobo. And then the second game you become like, why do you become your son? You know what I mean? And then not only that, but the lady Rosa that helped you out in the first game, and she's all of a sudden become like, what looks like a decently looking point. No, she goes from being like, grandma to Kima Greggs from The Wire. Like she literally turned into Kima. It's crazy. Yeah, but I'm enjoying it and I like the fact that you can fight with your fists. The combo, like the fighting system is so much improved in this. I haven't gotten far into it yet. I'm still like, on like the first level somewhere. But I've already noticed that just the fighting system, there's so much more you can do with it. And they're encouraging you to do more. Although I don't really use combos that often because I'm like, a lot of times you have to... Because you suck. A lot of times you have to punch enough that you'll end up getting hit if you're not careful. This is really hectic. I mean a lot of times will be a time when you're being attacked by like three different guys and it's very tense and you're just kind of like flailing a bit. That's what I'm actually concentrating on. So to keep your head about you and not be a punk bitch. No, I mean, it's just... I don't play many scary games for a reason. I actually don't think condemned to is very scary at all. The first condemned is a lot scarier. I think, Waiter, well actually didn't you just finish the level that's sort of like a dream sequence? Yeah. I thought that level was pretty fucked up. I mean there's plenty of fucked up parts and I'm just saying that there's plenty of like suspenseful stuff but it doesn't scare me as much as the first one does by any stretch. Which reminds me, did any of you guys play the Fear 2 demo? I haven't yet. It looks exactly like condemned to except with more guns. All of the same, same engine. I mean yeah, it's just like, it doesn't... It kind of controls a little weird for a shooter. Like you're a little more like, there's more momentum and maybe that's the sort of kill zone of two things. Maybe that's the kill zone two thing. The people are talking about the idea of momentum and like force behind your movements. Right. It's definitely Fear 2 and condemned to both control. I play Fear 2 on... I downloaded the demo and I played it on PC. So on PC maybe I'm not going to notice that kind of thing with the controls so much. But the one thing that I did notice is that it's still not scary. But the creepy parts are creepier than they were in Fear 1. How is the gun planet? Because I'm curious if it's improved because I loved the original Fear a lot but I know it is again that a lot of people cite as one that doesn't really hold up when you go back to it because it's so linear. It felt really good to me. Yeah. In Fear 2, like the... The one thing, it's very clear that they have the same kind of smart level design that their AI is uniquely suited to use to its advantage. And you can actually do things that only the AI could do before. You can tip over a table so that you can use it as cover and things like that. But the AI will still do the things like where they'll pop out from around cover, like take cover behind low objects, try to flank you. But the one thing that I noticed even in the Fear 2 demo is that the level design they actually feel like real places. Whereas Fear 1, they were just like random office building under construction. Random construction site into another office building. It was mostly just office building. Fear came out in early 2005. Right. But the level design never fell out in place. Condemned and I thought Condem stood, more interesting level design. Yeah, 2005. Alright, whatever. The level design, the reason that it is boring is because it was all in service to the gameplay. The way their AI worked was that it read the environments. And so each environment had to have two paths all coming to one spot and a few escape routes. You'd think it's pretty much standard, but when you hear the guys at Monolith who make those games talk about bringing people from the Call of Duty team onto their team, they have to retrain these people. Even though they're like, yeah, no, you've made a great shooter. Call of Duty is great, but our levels are totally different because our AI uses the level. It's known for its AI. Exactly. So I mean, I think it goes to show how good the AI is in that the expansion packs for Fear, which weren't made by Monolith where they added new environments. There was much more varied in terms of environment. But they weren't good still. They weren't able to capture the same feeling of the AI and the really intense firefights the way that they did with Fear. I'm just glad it's called Fear 2 again. Yeah. And I played the Fear 2 demo on 360, although I downloaded the PC version. And it's good to see that this actually looks like a competent console version of the game for a change. They're both a goddamn mic right out. Yeah, I'm going to drop in to show you this. Stop using the mic like you're eating ice cream. That's what it should be like. Like I'm eating. Okay. That's a more PG. And put it phasing your mouth. That's more PG concept than I'm familiar with. The Fear port for 360 and the Fear port for PS3 were pretty terrible. Yeah. And those weren't actually done. They weren't part of Monolith. No, they weren't. They weren't done by Monolith. That's probably a big part of it. Anything to do with Fear at that point. Yep. So I've also been playing more Civ 4. My second game is Civ 4. So good. I'm an Indian empire that is actually Hindu. We practice Hinduism. We don't practice Judaism like the Aztecs did. And I've been a lot less tyrannical with this one. I've actually allowed freedom of religion instead of keeping established religions. Let me know. This goes against the whole of Anthony's impulse. I've always felt like the Civ games are very American ethnocentric, western civilization ethnocentric, and that you can go the tyrannical path if you want to. But it seems like the benefits for going for freedom of religion and free markets are just vastly out way going. It is. Yeah. Anytime you do freedom of whatever, there's always benefits like civilizations that don't practice that will start to envy you and rebel against their own people and stuff like that. So it's like the first one to get to the freedom type issues has like a distinct advantage. And I guess, you know, when I say it's ethnocentric, I mean, I suppose it's more of a philosophical debate and that you can say that, well, freedom of religion and the free market and everything are simply better systems. But it's hard to say. I don't think anyone would be arguing that at this particular point. Yeah, this particular point in history, I totally agree. But from a gameplay standpoint, I think it would actually be a little bit more interesting if you could make a tyrannical society work. I think you can. I mean, there's the option to definitely be the first to discover fascism and stuff like that. Sure. And there are benefits to discovering fascism. You just have to manage your society in a totally different way. Like, if you're going to do that, you have to make sure that you keep like a ton of soldiers in every city to get everyone under check. Right. Like, for instance, when I knew I was, I knew I was about to attack another empire and the Indian people for some reason like to be mad at me. So I, like, before I did it, I built a jail in every city to suppress people when they would go, when, when I knew I'd be in prolonged war. So it's awesome. Please, Anthony, explain to us the benefits of fascism. I was like, why? I don't know the, I don't know the benefits of fascism, but I would, but I was like, I'm going to throw people in jail if they fuck with me. So, so, and so I did that. And then I convinced like my neighbor, I gave him like the ability to make planes or something like that in order to go to war with me. So I wouldn't be on my own. Even though, like, I was like, light years ahead of him technology. I was like, whatever man, you can send some cavalry and like that to get slaughtered to soften things up for me first. I've actually, I was actually really happy when Civ Vork, Vork came out and I could go for the, um, I could go for the, the, the peaceful diplomatic conquering of the entire world. Yeah, you can just win by having the coolest civilization. Right. I'm always balancing that between like trying to be the first one with rifles and stuff like that. Because the second I see someone else go to war with someone else, I'm like, oh, this is my chance to get a piece of that pie too. You know, it's also a really fun exercise is to do your own custom map and like create like an area where your capital city is surrounded by just a shitload of the best resources and just see how fast you can win the game when you have that kind of advantage. That is a good idea. So if you get bored, it's a big game hunters and so forth. Yeah. Yeah, I like to do really screwed up things in that game too. Like, uh, like for some reason, uh, Rome, like the Romans declared war on me for like, I have no, I've like, they just kind of asking me for shit, like not offering anything in return. I just kept saying, you know, fuck off. Right. And eventually they declared war and they came over and attacked me with like one unit because they were on a different continent. So they sailed over, attacked me with one unit, burnt a farm and I killed it. And I was like, fuck that. So I stopped every like good thing. I was building my society schools, universities, whatever, and I was like, everyone is pumping out soldiers and boats and I booked this fucking fleet and I marched it over there and I just burned like their capital city because, you know, when you, when you take over, you can like install a new governor. You can burn it. You burn it to the ground and then I burnt a shit ton to the farms. Then we all loaded back up on the boat and just left. I was like, let that be a, let that be a fucking lesson to you. Like they, and because of that, Rome never got passed. Like when I finally saw Rome again towards the end of the game, like when everyone else is flying fucking jets and stuff like that, they were still like archers and stuff like that. Like I left those bitches in the Stone Age, which teaches them not to mess with India. Well, it also shows like, like my, my, uh, my impulse a lot of the times would be if I got went to war with the civilization to not even let them declare peace until I'd taken over their whole civilization. Exactly. But that shows you that you can just like go in. They'll try, they'll try and be like, peace treaty for 10 turns, please. Right. And I'm just like, nope, you had your chance. So, um, but yeah, so I've been playing seven, then I've also been playing, uh, apologizes apologizes Ace Attorney, you know, the fourth and the, I guess, and I mean, technically it's, I think it's the real DS one, right? I mean, it's, it's to me so far, I'm in the second case. It's doing everything that the other Phoenix rights did. Like there's almost nothing new to the DS except the occasional, like, like, oh, when you're in court and they're like, show us exactly how the chair must have been facing so you rotate the chair with the DS real quick. It's like nothing really that special. Oh man, really? Yeah. And I was talking to Arthur and I was like, it's so funny to like, like when I play something like Dynasty Warriors, you know, cause it's just like, those like games are like pretty good. You play Dynasty Warriors? Well, yeah, I used to, man, back in the day, like when they first come out for PS2, me and my friend were all about the first couple of dinosaurs. I just never understood the appeal. And, uh, 50,000 Chinese people, yeah, you understand the appeal. Yeah, plus it was the first game me and my friends that ever played were like, oh, we're like on this big battlefield, something like that, like, and, uh, but I, you know, those games like bother me because they never do anything new, but these games because they're so story driven, like, I don't mind at all, like, doing the exact same things over and over again because it's just like little tiny twist and fuck, it's like so much text, but I don't mind. Like, I mean, you complain about Metal Gear being stuck in a cutscene, but half the time in that game, you really are just clicking through text for, like, minutes at a time, but I mean, I don't care at all. I mean, it is essentially, like, more like reading a novel or a comic or something where you're doing slight interactions, but then you're just gonna read this. Yeah, I guess it's, like, turn to page whatever. Yeah. It's like a, it's, it is like a semi-choose or an adventure. But it's probably, I mean, it's, it's, it's only semi, right? It's a story. The story always turns out the same way. Yeah, I mean, there is a very reason that FAQs, no matter where you look, look the same. I mean, it is like, it is very linear in that sense, but... Yeah, I would love to, I mean, not to cut you off, but I really would love to see someone make a choose your own adventure game where, you know, after playing Mass Effect with the dialogue system, I was like, why can't I play this thing, choose the way that it turns out? Maybe I play it for, like, three hours and it's over, but then I can play it again five different times. Ryan Scott would tell you that there is a game that does that, and it was called "Way the Samurai." Isn't that, wasn't that, what that game was called, "Way the Samurai?" Yeah, I mean, I know the game "Way the Samurai," but I don't know. It was like, it only took you, like, two hours to beat, but you could beat it, like, 50 different ways. Oh, that's right. It was like 50 different stories. That's really nice. Well, they didn't shit like that during the beginning. They didn't shit like that at the beginning of, like, the Saturn and PlayStation era, like, games like D. Sure. I'd like to see a modern take on that where, you know, like... I agree. 'Cause I think we can do cinematic games now. You know, we can make something that's like, nearly movie quality, or at least, is good enough quality that is worth looking at for long enough. I think Heavy Rain will, hopefully, be an example of that. I think we're getting into our narrative discussion through it. Well, I have a feeling it will end up being a bit on the short side, but I also think you're going to be able to play it, you know? No, no, no, no, no. 2009 prediction. I have a prediction on that game as well. We'll save that for narrative. I just want to ask one last thing, Phil, have you actually played the Apollo Justice game? I haven't played Apollo Justice. I am, like, very slowly working through the Phoenix Wright series, but I'm still only on, like, the second case. Because Phoenix Wright games the, like, very tongue-in-cheek with their humor and stuff like that. It's just, like, most recent ones kind of get into me because it's got, like, this ongoing thing where you're, like, looking for Phoenix Wright's daughter's panties because they've been stolen. And so you're always just talking. She's always talking about her panties and how they're her favorite panties. Are you serious? Yeah, she's a 15-year-old girl, and she's very new-byle, and, you know, it's like, it's like, oh, my panties have been stolen, and he'll even say sometimes, like, can you not say panties? He's, like, he'll say that in the game. But it's just, like-- It's just like the American talking about the Japanese. Yeah, like, when you play it, you're just like, oh, this is just not okay. Yeah, like, why is that the plot? Why couldn't her, you know, trophy got in store with me? Or, like, I went to the hospital, and there's, like, this crazy doctor in it, and he was, like, talking to Phoenix Wright's daughter, and he's like, do you need anything examined in any places? And I was like, what the fuck? Dude, dude, I think I got to show you this, Anthony. I actually amanda's a huge fan of the Phoenix Wright series, and I bought her the Phoenix Wright manga. Yeah. And I've got to show you that, because I think there was some pretty messed up stuff in that that you probably just-- Is it the new version of Phoenix Wright and that? I mean, I guess in some way that wouldn't surprise me, because things like Dragon Ball, the manga, even the cartoon in the Japanese form, like, the old Sensei guy was like a total, like, pervert, and would say shit that he never should have all the time, so. Short story. I'm curious about the next one though, since the next game, you're playing Edgeworth now, so theoretically, they have to mix up the gameplay a little bit with that. I don't know. I don't know. On the prosecuting side. I think in one of the games, you play as Edgeworth-- you play as Edgeworth while he's a defender. Oh, really? Yeah, so it won't be-- they actually already have the assets already set up for that, which is another thing, like, Capcom is like amazing at, like, it doesn't bother me that they basically have recreated the same game, like, seven times assets and everything. Sometimes it's fine. It makes it feel cohesive rather than, you know, a rip off. Well, because it's a really distinctive art style. And I think that, like you said, there are certain games where it's all about the story, it's all about the narrative, and that's clearly one of them, so. All right. I don't know. I hate games. All right. I don't have a lot. We've been talking for 46 minutes, but so I played and finished the mall on Xbox Live Arcade. How was that? Is that worth buying? Thank you, Microsoft, for sending me a code. I can't tame it. But it's a really interesting game. I mean, I'll probably have the story very wrong on this, but I believe it, like, won some independent games competition, and then got some top-up Microsoft something to turn it into a real game, and I'm not very good because of that. It's still kind of like bears the markings of an independent game in like a bad way, and that a lot of it doesn't feel polished. It looks kind of polished. I mean, when I saw "Fresh" playing it, I was like, yeah, you know, this looks pretty cool. It's very colorful. I kind of hate the art design, just because it's kind of-- it's like a very childish and very, like, N64. It is really the high res, and it looks-- It looks like a high res N64 game. And it's kind of structured, like, want to-- But didn't you like the art design and say something like boom blocks, which I would say is also a very-- Oh, that game's like an very N64, like? That game's heinous looking. It didn't bother me in boom blocks. It was okay. I thought some of this stuff was cute, like, little block gorillas, and-- [LAUGHTER] But so the thing is, is the mall-- I mean, it looks like a platformer very much. It's more of a puzzle game. The idea is you have this alien named Frank, and you have the mall who's this big, like, terrible blob with eyes, and you kind of drag him around by a little, like, tether. You can make it any time and have him come and eat these little pink puffs, and there's all hierarchy of different types of foods, like, when he eats certain types of animals, he'll turn-- he'll get the ability to, like, pink breathe fire. Nick. Pink puffs. [LAUGHTER] Did you say "win here"? "win here"? Oh, okay. Sorry. I'm humbling. Like, when he eats, like, the fire monster can then breathe fire, and you can go burn down trees to make more great little pink puffs pop out, and it's just about kind of eating cream. Just to make sure of, like-- So someone ripped off Yoshi's Island? That's what you're saying? I think they ripped off a boy in his blob. Kirby. It's, yeah. I think Kirby and Katamari, and there's lots of elements from other games. It is pretty-- Like, it was hard. It is pretty clever. It is easy, but it's still, like, just the basic structure of how things are laid out, and the levels are very, like, very well-designed, so it's kind of a clever puzzle game. Although, again, like I said, there are problems, like, first of all, you move incredibly slowly, which, like, just drives you nuts the entire time. You can't run, and there's a lot of parts you'll have to backtrack over and over through the levels. Like, when you get a new ability, you'll have to go back to the beginning to, you know, do something else, and just, like, totally drags. And there's things like the edges. There's lots of little clips, and you can't, like, jump up a slope, or if you get too close to the top of a slope, you'll slide down. Just, I mean, it's, like, you know, obviously this is boring me explaining it, but, like, that's kind of something. It holds the game back from, like, feeling like this really nice cohesive, fun puzzle game. So lots of little annoyances like that. They're not stuck coming out with a DLC. Is it something where, like, after playing it, are you going to be interested in checking out the DLC? I think so, because they're cheap. It's, like, 100 points each, and it's, like, three new levels, and I want to level, because it is pretty short. It's, like, maybe six or eight levels, I feel like, and two of them are, like, one, it's just, like, a shooting level, and the final level is, like, a flying level, um, so that's very different. So there's, I feel like there's lots of, like, the basic structure and all the game elements work well together, and I'd love to see, like, just a ton of levels. Maybe it doesn't need to look as good. Maybe, I don't know, I'd like to see a way to get delivered a lot, a lot more of them. As it is, it's kind of a weird balance of, you know, we're going to put kind of these relatively high production values in terms of being looking nice, colorful and high-res and nice models, but then not having that much content in terms of a puzzle game. It looked a little bit also like, uh, there was a PSP game, I think, came out via Tecmo that reminded me of Pikmin a little bit, and this game looks a lot like it. And now I can't... Tofobot? Yes, that's what it's called in the US, is it, is it anything like that game? No. Okay. It looks similar, I don't know. Maybe it's just 'cause you're walking around the space and the camera, the way the camera angles set or something like that. Yeah, it's kind of interesting too, 'cause like, the control you have over it, like, I mean, you're dragging around, the blob part is great, like, the mall itself, he's really like charming and funny and like a great game element and everything, um, but it's interesting 'cause the way you drag him around is like, you have this little leash to him and you move yourself and kind of pull him along, and it kind of works like in like Shadow of the Colossus when you're actually, like, when you're riding the horse, it's you, you're controlling not the horse, but that works in Shadow and the mall, it kind of feels like, well, just let me control the mall when I'm attached to him, like I can be him and move the mouth where I want to. There's a lot of little frustrations like that, but um, anyway, that's the mall. I don't even know if I would recommend it, let me check the demo, I guess. Are you skipping ahead and reading the letters, Anthony? I just... He's had no patience. And now I'm the best one. It is. I won't read it. And um, this game called Closure, that PC game. What? Yeah. That's right. I thought you were afraid of PC games. Well, it's a flash game, so it was easy to play. But I saw it on Joystick, they have like a free game club, I guess like a weekly thing. So it's really cool actually, I think, you guys are really big. It's a kind of like this very sketchy black and white 2D art style, it's a 2D like puzzle game. I guess I'm gonna play lots of puzzle games. And so the mechanic is when you start this little light bulb on the ground and you pick it up and it lights the area around you and as you move through, you can see the path ahead of you because you're holding the light. If you were to let the light drop and keep walking, you just fall off into nothingness. So it's like the ground is only there when it's being illuminated, stop showing everyone your best. It's like the level doesn't exist unless it's being illuminated. So it introduces this, it's like a really simple idea, but it introduces this really clever mechanic where especially when you get into more complex solutions and platforming where you have to line up the lights. What was this called again? It's called Closure. Closure sounds somewhat like that tech demo video that got released called the Unfinished Swan or something like that where it was like a, you know, first person perspective game where you're in this white world and you have sort of like a paint ball gun and as you fire the paint, it like kind of fills in the spaces in the world to let you know where to go. It's sort of a similar idea or something. Now that you're playing PC games, I've got this one at home that I should let you borrow. It's kind of like Warcraft 3 only. It's like this giant open world that like everybody can play together at the same time. You should do it. Yeah. You should try it. Is it like Monster Hunter? Yes. You do do a considerable amount of monster hunting. I play Flash games that are recommended to me and show in a screenshot. I have a great opportunity for you. I've been staring at this dark chocolate with Almonds Bar. Dude. Can I eat that? I was going to ask Anthony that. Yeah. Actually, I put those here for a reason. I'm not a huge chocolate person. And they're vegan. To begin with, yes, but see, when it comes to Christmas time, am I stocking, I always get vegan chocolate. Do you want? The dark chocolate or? The vegan chocolate and regular chocolate is the most chocolate as milk and vegan chocolate does and so it's just like a ship to Marco. So do you want with almonds or not? So you guys. With almonds. Okay. We're going to bust this up and then split it. Thanks. Go nuts. That's good too. We talked about it a lot. And then I also had to play another PC game. I played it in crossover if it was thank you for the recommendation run. No problem. Just crossover actually work well. I mean, it works with like Team Fortress, but... I'll tell you what. That was the most amazing. Just like having Steam running, like a Steam window that looks like Steam running on my Mac, you know, with... It's one thing because you could, you know, obviously load up boot camp with a Windows install and just play it in Windows, but I had a Steam window and Team Fortress 2 running perfectly on Mac and it was pretty incredible. Behind Ryan Satan was laughing. Exactly. I was able to add the Steam icon to my dock and I can click Steam and it loads Steam. That's fucking insane. That doesn't make any sense. It's really awesome. Yeah, no, crossover work perfectly. And I played Gravity Bone, which Phil recommended last week. Let's talk about that for the narrative. We can talk about it now. The ironic thing about him getting Gravity Bone using that on his Mac is that it crashed like a motherfucker on my PC. Well, actually, why don't we take a break and then when we come back, we'll talk about Gravity Bone and lead into the narrative discussion with that. I don't really have anything to talk about because between you guys, the stuff I played was Crisis Condemto and World of Warcraft, so we talked about all of it. I just want to take two seconds to say I don't remember your name, but I just want to introduce my cats because you told me I should. One of my cats is named Phoebe, she's a black cat, and then one of my cats is named Lady. And that's Arthur's cat. The one you've been hearing is Lady. Yeah, if Phoebe doesn't make sound because she's a darling, as soon as we get our camera, I'll actually end up putting up some retarded video probably of, I mean, some very dumb video of, I'm sorry, let me just take a moment to say it's not cool to say. Rebels only have one rule. It's not cool to say retarded, and that's a dumb habit. But I'll put up a video of our studio and our cat video. It has just cats. No, no, no. I was going to say I'll put up a video and show it the podcast area looks like, and they're all include the cats since they sit in a tower in the room with us. Can we take the Christmas lights down before you take that video? No, they're like a very sad display of like my attempt at fucking joy. So, and they're appropriate display of your ticket. It is as good as the Charlie Brown Christmas tree, except for, with no Christmas tree. Alright, and during the break, I will teach Anthony how to sit away from the mic and Arthur how to use the mic. And maybe I can play that bone game. We'll be here. I've got boners. Do it. Wow, we made it to the M without a dick joke. Just right to the end. [Music] So, Ryan, you just got boned. Well, I'll ruin the joke, asshole. It's the first time I've looked at the Quake II engine in many, many years, and it holds up pretty well if you do stylized graphics with it. It does squares like nobody's business. Exactly. It made me actually want to play some Quake II deathmatch. No, it didn't. Actually, I don't know, it's a pretty good little game for a few minutes worth of entertainment. It's free, right? Yes. Yeah. I say everyone should download it right now, play it, pause the podcast, and come back and listen so you're all up to speed with us, because it literally takes like five minutes to play it. Right. And like, it's hard to talk about without spoiling everything because it's only five minutes long. Right. So, this is full spoilers on. For gravity bone. Right. Nick, how about you? I'm curious what you thought, because when I was playing the game, I thought it was a game that you would appreciate. That's true. It just is a really unique aesthetic, I think, and it's, I mean, it felt like a PC game, which I don't play many of, so there's that novelty for me. Geez. I'm getting used to like... It was like Dire Straits video. Even getting used to moving around in 3D with like a wazdi mouse thing, like, I never really did that before. Wow. So, even that's new for me. But no, just in general, it's kind of a bizarre game, and I like how it's just kind of like, especially the second level is like this just very, just very chill, like, thing. And the first time I went through it, I didn't even like, take the left to get the camera, so I just saw all the birds, and I was like, "Okay, that's interesting." And then when did a whole loop and got it and did it all again, but then the end is like this ridiculous chase scene out of nowhere that's like totally different than the rest of it, and it's great. Yeah, I totally missed the suitcase too with the camera, so I ended up having to run like around, and I'm like, "What the fuck am I supposed to do?" I was wondering if there was intentional, because when you look at the point where we both missed it, I think it's because it's an arrow facing left that says furnace, but you've already been to the furnace at that point, so the furnace room. So, I mean, looking at that, I was like, "Okay, this is just the path back to where I was. I don't want to go that way. I want to go the new way." So, I was wondering if that was intentional. I'm pretty sure it's not intentional. Yeah, and I think it's just like, you know, level design that went a little wrong. Right. I took a photo of the lady who turns on you. So, like, I mean-- As he's running back, he runs by her, stops, takes a photo, and that runs to the exit, and I thought it was excellent. Yeah, except at the beginning when Ryan first got there, and he looked at his letter that he's holding and said, "Research, snatch," and he's like, "Oh, I'm a pro at this. Sorry, I'm too close to the mic." But there was no crouch button, so it didn't really work out. You can't assign a crouch button. Well, it's weird that there's not one. I did not assign my controls. I used the defaults. I sent them the crouch button, and the crouch button is interesting because it puts you, like, on the fucking floor. Oh, really? It's like a lay down and look at shit. Oh. Now I'm going to be known as the guy who does the sexist bullcrap in my first person. Hey, but it did say, "Research, snatch," on the card, that's what it was. Let me be clear that it's not at all how Ryan is-- it was just, you know, everyone in the room thought it. Ryan just voiced it. I mean, after you, Ryan hit the man all the time. It's really creepy. So we're talking about-- No, Ryan's not the creepy guy in the room. Philip is definitely the creepy guy. That is actually true. That is actually true. It feels true. Where's the creepy points? Phil was the guy when everybody was younger. They had that one friend that everybody's parents liked, and they said, "That Philip is so nice. And when you leave, everyone's like, "What the fuck, Philip is what--" Philip's the most fucked-up person we know. Your parents like that guy? He's totally accurate on this. That is exactly what I was saying. Like, I didn't even-- I had known Philip for, like, a week, and I just made that guess. [LAUGHTER] So in theory, we're talking about gaming narrative. Why is your hand on lightning field? We don't have a whole ton of structure, but I guess, like, Phil, you want to bring this up in the context of Gravity Bone to start, so why-- I mean, what is that-- what part of gaming narrative does that represent you? Well, I wasn't necessarily trying to bring this up in the context of Gravity Bone first, but I do think that Gravity Bone has a really interesting narrative in the way that it sort of tells a story and doesn't have a lot of-- I mean, there's not, like, any cutscenes, basically, except for that one short thing in between levels. And I mean, I guess you have the little cards that tell you what to do, but other than that, there's no real dialogue. And all the gameplay is completely based around the narrative. Yes. That's-- Yeah, I know. Yeah, it's narrative through gameplay. That's the best use of the medium. Yeah. What's up, we're going to agree, and that's it. OK, so that's our second second. I was waiting for Phil to disagree. Well, I don't disagree. Yeah. I don't disagree. I think that when you can have narrative through the gameplay, that is-- it tends to feel better. Right. I guess my main thing is just that I think there's still room for narrative through other ways as well. There is. I think there's still room for, like, RPGs that have long drawn out cutscenes, for example. I just don't think that those necessarily should be the norm. Right. Well, and those aren't the best use of the mediumness. Well, I think-- and I think about narrative through gameplay, and then I think about a game like Mass Effect where the narrative is-- it's largely set, but you can skew the tone of it through the choices of the main character. And an interesting contrast there as well is that Mass Effect is the third-person game, but it still totally sucked me in, and I felt involved in the creation of this narrative, and it's not a first-person game. Well, that's because it's actually difficult for me to be as involved in the creation of the narrative when it's not-- because you're also playing as your shepherd, not just a shepherd. Right. It's true. And the, like, talking parts in that game, the conversations, you know, in terms of visuals, oftentimes rival cutscenes in games that we, you know, we would play, so-- Only you have control over it. Exactly. Which is why I was saying choose your own adventure game, Mass Effect, man, I would love that sort of thing. But, you know, back to Gravity Bone, I think it does some interesting things, especially for something that's so short. It really does pay off in a lot of ways that are just very simple to execute. So I think it's a-- you know, I don't know, did students make this game, or is it-- I don't-- it's just a guy. Just a guy. It's a really good, just a game for just a guy. Just a guy. I mean, you really quickly-- I mean, for me, it's like you really quickly feel like this kind of just spy character, this kind of like, you know, sly bet of a spy, even though there's not-- I mean, in the first level, you can run through the waiters, and there's not really any way to like get caught that I could see, but still like feels, you know, very espionage tone. And I mean, that's the example of like really establishing narrative very quickly. It's like just with the card and just a couple of simple instructions, like you feel like this character. And being in first person, I think certainly helps. There's also the part where like, there's that platforming segment where-- I thought it was a little strange because it was just kind of out of nowhere suddenly you're doing platforming, and I don't like platforming in first person that much, but you're jumping under those flag poles. You're jumping under those little flag poles, and they look like something you can't jump onto, but you always-- like, as long as you actually press the space bar, you actually-- you do always make the jump, and I think it is kind of there to just make you feel like more of a badass, like, oh, I can jump out of these flag poles and run around on that. Like, it's just-- there's little things that are embedded in the gameplay like that that sort of make you feel cool. Like, in the first level, and I was trying to jump across some awnings really high up, and then it just fell and died, but I feel like he may be able to, I don't know, do something else on that level. Maybe, I don't know. I don't know. That'd be sweet of it. That secrets. I'd go about to play it again. Yeah. So I guess talking about like, I mean, the context I was thinking of this discussion is like, well, you know, what are our favorite games doing right? How do we most refer to scene narratives hold? And I mean, I talked about this a bit last week in that Prince of Persia stands at times, still one of my favorite examples, and I talk about it a lot because I think no game has really done it better for me where it does have some cutscenes, but it's mostly just the Prince narrating and talking to you while you're playing, which I wish that's how the new Prince of Persia would have done it. I mean, like, I guess in terms of how they do the story and that it works really well, but the story itself, like, I don't remember it at all. Right, right, right. But I remember like, really specific, like, things that he said. Like, there were times when he would make fun of Farah, and I would be like, man, why is this guy? So, you know, he's not being very modern, you know? He's kind of a sexist asshole, asshole, but it was, like Nick said, it's because he's like saying these things as you're like, shimming along ledges, or, you know, you just had a conversation with her in person, and she leaves you, and as you walk away, you get to continue playing the game. I don't know, it wasn't the best narrative ever, but it was just really well done. Just to deliver yourself in a role, like the part where you're solving that giant puzzle of like, shifting shapes and lining things up, I forget the specifics of it, but there's the guy up top the guard, like, yelling things to you while you're doing it. So, just things like that I was really involved in, and then I was trying to think of games that, like, kind of do a similar thing, but not well, and I think Crackdown is an example of that, and I totally love Crackdown. The Crackdown for me kind of fails at, like, it means a very simple story, just like you hunting down different people, but it kind of tries to tell the story through your actions and through this, like, narrator, and just, it doesn't work for some reason than that. It's also buggy, too, like, there are a lot of times where it's like, I can see my house from here and you're like, where? Or down on the ground, really? Like, come on. I think that the thing that I see a lot of is people seem to confuse the idea of narrative with story and the idea of a game's fiction with story, like, there are lots of games that come out that have excellent fictional universes attached to them, Metal Gear being one of them, Metal Gear has a really complicated, interesting fictional universe attached to it, but I don't think that the story in Metal Gear Solid 4 is that good? Right. Like, I think that the Halo series has a really interesting fiction behind it, like, I think the idea of a religious whole, like, civil war in the Covenant is a really interesting idea, but the story of Halo 3 and Halo 2 isn't necessarily that interesting. So, I just think that there are certain times when there are fictional universes that we get invested in. I mean, Gears is another example of something they could have an interesting fiction, but we don't know much about it. So, Gears also, like, I feel like that's like, it's a very, it's a very complete aesthetic at all, like, everything looks right, the, you know, characters make sense in the world, I guess their motivations make sense, but just like, in that it's pretty much the story, it's like the dialogue and, like, the writing and acting all positively flat for me, and it's just like awful and takes away from the game, even if everything else is totally complete. I think in Halo, like you said, it's a great, it's a great world, it's interesting, I don't think they really do as much as they could with that story, but those are two, those are, like, complete opposites for me in terms of just how to do something with that fictionalized world. One of them, the other correlation I would make is like the Star Wars movies, for example, like the Star Wars has a really interesting fiction that everyone loves, but the stories for the prequels aren't great. See, I think that there are very, very few games that actually have, I mean, and that's the thing is we all use different terms for things that are, you know, like when I think of narrative, I'm usually thinking of the technique, the way that the story is being told and plot or story to talk about the actual, you know, that, you know, Johnny went here, then Johnny bought a milkshake and then Johnny did this, you know, the way that Johnny went to go, the way that the director of the game, you know, showed you, Johnny, going to buy the milkshake is the important part to me, not that Johnny went and bought a milkshake. You're also a filmmaker. Yeah, it's, yeah, it's right, so I've had classes on this, I guess is what I'm saying, like that's why I think about it this way. Anyway, to go back to what you were saying, like to me, there are very few fictional universes in video games that I want to get heavily invested in, and I don't know exactly why that is. It's just usually they're not up to the level of quality that I would prefer. So since it's very few, the ones that are really good stand out to me, and I know that the obvious example that I'm going to say is half-life, like I think the half-life to universe is like a legitimately cool sci-fi universe that like, you know, has, seems to have a lot more depth than what they're showing you. And it's not just, it's not just like space marines fighting aliens, there's more to it than that. Right. The characters have character. They all have lives. They've lived through a bunch of crap, and a lot of people complain like, oh, I don't, you know, I didn't get much story out of half-life, but that's, I don't care about the story. I don't care that, you know, Gordon went here and then Gordon went here and Gordon went here. What I care about is like, gleaming these little bits of information about the larger story throughout the course of my adventure. Yes. I think it's the example of being, you know, force fed your story versus having to go and look for it. And I think a lot of people are drawn off by having to go and look for it. And half-life is very much so a game where the story is all around you, if you're willing to put in a little bit of extra effort. And I think the reason why that works in that series in particular is because your rewards are tangible. You know, it's like, is when it comes, when you come out the other side, if you're looking at the little pieces and gleaming the little bits of story from the levels, from the art design, from the little things that characters say, at the end of it, you're able to make, you know, ongoing long conversations about it with people who have also played this game. And you don't get that out of something that's just a universe with some writing put on top of it. See, I don't know that I think that in that respect, that's building Half-Life 2's fiction. Like, if the story isn't in front of you, then it's not story. It's background. It's fiction. It's like the world that they're building. The story, the story of Half-Life, isn't necessarily very strong because it's Gordon goes to point A, Gordon was supposed to go to point C, and the teleporter fucked up, and Gordon went "Yeah, but I think you also care because other things like having memorable characters you actually come out." Well, yeah. And in that case, I think that the narrative in Half-Life 2 is really strong, and a lot of that is because the gameplay in Half-Life 2 is... reinforces the narrative. Like, shooting isn't the most important thing in Half-Life. The most important thing in Half-Life is accomplishing a goal. Like the busiest shooting moment in Half-Life 2, you spend more time setting turrets than you do actual shooting. Yeah, it's a problem-solving thing, which means that everything you're doing is contributing to the way that the story... Which is why the game is, to me, very interesting because it's not just a shoot... it doesn't rely on a single mechanic throughout the course of the game. It's always teaching you new things. Yeah, and I mean, that's why the narrative in a game like Gears fails, because I mean, well, you're looking for Maria, and you're trying to figure out where the locusts are coming from. But I mean, what is... You don't shoot him. You don't have to be here. You don't give a shit about Maria, though. Like, at all. Like, I don't... I don't give a shit about Dom, but I didn't give a shit about Dom for a second. Well, I mean, you're not necessarily... I cared about Dom. Like, Cliff has said in interviews that Dom is the voice of the character, like, if you're confused, then Dom is confused. If you want to know what the fuck is going on, then Dom's going to say, "What the fuck is going on?" And I guess for you, or for them, Dom is supposed to be the representative of the player as far as like, "What if they had a family member in this situation?" That's their emotional investment, whereas Marcus is the driving force of the gameplay. Also, if you were like Matt, and you carried around the promo picture of Maria in his wallet for months before the game came out, then you might have carried about Maria. It's true. Maria's a very long, for me to only share a weird hairline. I was going to say it's voluminous. I think she uses Pantene Provie. This podcast is sponsored by Pantene Provie. And Lemonade. Lemonade. Um... Sorry. But yeah, you know one of the games that actually I like the way that they've always integrated the story is all the Blizzard RTS games, because it always surprises people when I tell them that I play Blizzard RTS games, and like the first game RTS I ever played with was Company Heroes. And that's because like, the narrative in Company Heroes is okay, but I mean it's kind of like I already know what's going to happen, right? It's World War II. It's history. Whereas like StarCraft, you know, they create these relationships in universes, and they actually do have characters that are totally badass. Blizzard's like the games are the only RTS games that I play 100% for the story. And there's a lot of, I mean, when you're playing through Blizzard's RTS games, there's a lot of victory conditions that are, that are different. Yeah, and what I like is that you'll get like a story before you go into the game, like in the briefing. You'll get story like maybe in a cutscene in between levels, and then on top of that, they do like the in graphics like storyline, and I think with the sprites and stuff. The important things about those is that that's how they introduce new units and stuff too. So there's actual game, you know, it's like Half-Life, where the story is built to also teach you some new things about the gameplay, teach you how to use those new units, and it's pretty much every unit like StarCraft has a character in the story that's tied to that unit. Right. Sort of defines that unit's personality, I guess. Yeah, I think Blizzard somehow they've made like the narrative the way they do introduce those like new units and stuff. It is like Blizzard RTS games, like the only ones that I would ever read a book on like the history of like a Tauran warrior, like I actually care about. And I think that in some way World of Warcraft is a testament to that. Well, and I mean, I think it took them longer with World of Warcraft, like the original World of Warcraft, I don't think had interesting story elements, but with, I mean, we've talked about this a lot of Mad Night, but with Wrath of the Lich King, and I'm kind of working on a piece for this for the site, but with Wrath of the Lich King, they really did finally make like story worthwhile in an MMO like where you're actually, there are quest lines where I'm excited to find out what happens. I was gonna say, I mean, World of Warcraft made come off as comparatively bland when it first came out with its narrative, but like even compared to other MMOs, it was like, it was like the most in-depth narrative of all time, like the fact that you had to like talk to a character and he might escort him and he'd sit there and talk to you and tell you what's happened to him. Exactly, even just having quests and not just mashing on mobs, like in every quest there was story if you wanted to find it, if you wanted to like go into a bookstore, buy a book and read a hundred pages in a fucking in-game book, no thank you. It's like, you know, these like, I think that the people of Blizzard, they do, those are maybe some of the best crafters of narrative in a long time. And I think this goes back to something that we were talking about like a week ago or something where I think the problem with a lot of game stories is they start with a mechanic and then they go into, well, these are our ideas for characters and then they say, okay, so we need a story to fit these characters in this mechanic, whereas after the initial installment of all Blizzard's games, I mean Diablo didn't really have much of a story. The original Warcraft didn't really have much of a story. They've started all their subsequent sequels with a really strong story and then fit the gameplay mechanics around that enough to fit the story while not sacrificing gameplay. Well, Blizzard is also the best company at borrowing/stealing from every pop culture source available to them. And so it makes their story elements immediately accessible to people that aren't even fans of the deep parts of the lore. I do have friends, too, though, who will say like, I don't like playing World of Warcraft. I prefer other MMOs just because World of Warcraft has all these pop culture references and it pulls me out of the universe, but that happens to me, too. I do, these are like the friends that are like playing ultra and playing songs and being like, listen to my beautiful lute songs. Not crazy, but... Oh, go ahead. I was going to take us in a totally different direction. And I'm different. Alright, so I was thinking then about which games should have good stories or good narratives, have the potential for a very good fiction, larger fictions in their world, but totally don't deliver in the game. And I think... I was going to say I'm looking at this Mirror's Edge bag right here. And that's the first game that comes to mind for me because I love the world. I love the gameplay mechanics. I think the main character is actually pretty cool and some of the side characters could be cool. But I think that over the course of that game, I was not into that story one bit. I think a big problem Mirror's Edge 2 is... Well, you know about Mirror's Edge 2? Tell me about it. Seriously. It's a decision to do a lot of it through the cutscenes, which are those animated till the different, like, by far, the best moments in Mirror's Edge for me are the best cutscenes at least, story, really, the things where, like, you know, one when you, well, spoiler is mine only, I guess. When you first go and meet your sister where the guy was killed in the building and you get for a hug and everything, like... Do you like that you're into First Person Hug? I am. I thought that was done pretty well. I like First Person Hug. I like the physicality of that cutscene, though. I mean, like, it definitely makes you feel more like you're the character. Yeah, and it's good for First Person Hugging. You literally walk in the room and then the scene takes over and at the end, you know, it gives you back control and suddenly you have to, you know, you got to take off again. And then also later in the game, that little kind of, like, boss moment where the guy picks you up and throws you, like, that was really brief, but I like that. Like, that's how to do... I think that's how, like, you think it's right with First Person Hugging. To me, the dialogue just doesn't deliver in either of those two cutscenes and so it ends up, like we've said, it's, it falls a little flat for me and... The thing that's really sad about Mirror's Edge is they actually got a legit writer to write that game. Like, they... Rihanna Pratchett is the other thing. Yeah, that's right. Like, Terry Pratchett's daughter. Yeah. I think regardless of, like, of how much you get into the dialogue, though, I think even if the head's still never taken it out of First Person and, you know, you interact with all those characters in First Person, it would be that much stronger because I think that's like a game element that you should take advantage of. I think part of Mirror's Edge, part of Mirror's Edge, like, the reason why they didn't do something like that is because it's clearly... I think it's a AAA marketing budget behind a game that didn't have a AAA budget to develop. Maybe not the size of a team. Yeah, maybe not the size of a team that would be necessary to animate full, you know, in-game cutscenes. So... I don't know. Most of the cutscenes didn't have that much action. I mean, it was the part where you're, like, talking to the guy in the parking lot. It's pretty much like a set of conversations. Right. So... Yeah, but in that situation, those cutscenes were being developed at the same time the game was. Like, they had a separate team created, though. Yeah, sure. And those... And I can tell you from experience that those kinds of cutscenes, those limited animation cutscenes, are a lot easier to do than in-game 3D. I don't want you to go down with just the reasons why. I'm just saying. I feel like the idea of this first-person hugging game was actually picturing, like, Nick's dream game. And it would be a Disney game, and it'd be, like, it'd be, like, a cast member, that at Colin Disneyland. And so you'd just get to pick, like, you'd get to be, like, one of the chipmunks and run up and hug people. And, like, you'd have to, like, do, like, little mini games to comfort the children who are, like, scared, or, you know, deal with things like that. No, because there's a weird line. Yeah, comforting. Comforting starts to look like something else. I got molested by Chipmunk when I went to Disneyland for years. That's disgusting. He came out and just started. Who years last year? Who years last year? There's a reason, though, while, like, first-person hugging and first-person, like, vomiting, and all those are, like, you know, we all know what dances are from. We all remember that. Like, there's not that much done with first-person, and I think, I mean, those, you know, might not be done that well on Mary's Edge, but it's still memorable. It's still something a little bit different than you spend most of the time doing in first-person games. Yeah, I mean, I think the point, though, like, kind of what Ryan was saying at the beginning when we, of that, was that the, the, the Mary's Edge universe is so cool. And like, right in the beginning, when you first, when you first see the way that it's presented to you and those, like, first little cutscenes and gameplay, you think, "Oh, man, this is on, this is on a different level." And like, you're waiting for something to, to kind of almost give you this blade runner vibe to it, you know, where there's, you know. I'll tell you what, like the, the first time I go into an elevator and an elevator ride that's longer than a Mass Effect elevator ride and, you know, and the, like, news post on the, on the, the wall that's in the elevator is like, you know, fucking your phone is turned on. It was really? Oh my God. I'd like to point out Ryan's phone zone, too. It's totally on. But no one can. Yeah, let's hope this does not show up and the, uh, do you recognize the theme song? Beyond Good Naval, huh? Yeah. It's like a game that has excellent story and narrative. Totally. Sorry. Sorry. You've finished. Yeah. No, let me let you. Yeah. So there's like, you know, like five sentences worth of dialogue or not even dialogue. I have a text written on this thing. It scrolls over and over again. It's awful. I mean, it like, in most cases is so directly related to what's going on. I mean, talk about showing versus telling. I mean, there's ones that's like runners, a threat to humanity. Are they going to, you know, keep your children away from the runner? The center, centerizes the idea of like a propaganda, a propaganda in a police state, which is essentially what the whole world is. Oh, I get it. It's just totally, you know, it's like hitting you on the fucking side of the head, rather than, you know, being subtle about it. But how many people do you think played the game and never even understood that that was what the society was? I mean, you have to understand, like, there's a point where you have to wonder at your audience and you have to wonder, okay, well, so how, how subtle can I be to tell this story? And I think that, you know, the general consensus of video game makers is that you can't be subtle because everyone's making games that, you know, can be digestible for the mass audiences. I think they're trying to make games where they can break even and not lose a ton of money on the marketing budget. I don't know. I think if you're risking something pretty big, even conceptually with There's Edge, you can feel free to, like, play down, obviously, the narrative a bit. But I was going to say about it is it's weird that there's, I don't know if you guys found that one point in the end, this is one computer, and this little room tucked away, that is a whole big thing written on the screen about an employee who's, like, pissed off at the company. I think it's, like, the box company. You go to a box factory. Yeah. And it's this whole thing about how he's playing some, like, MMO or something, and then how he's going to, like, quit. And it's just a whole long thing written. It's funny. And it's, well, I don't know. It's, like, well, it's weird that that's tucked away. But like you said, the, on the, on the elevator, like, the text repeats after, like, one go around. Or at least, you know, I don't know. And the, like, Mass Effect has, like, news, or radio programming that plays on some of the elevator rides. And it's a little, you know, slapping you upside the heads with exactly what's going on, the things that you've just done in the game. But at least it's done with a little bit more panache and, you know. And Mass Effect just has so much story there if you want it, like, in addition to the story that's there while you're playing the game. So not to derail our conversation again, but going back to, like, first person, you know, affection. I was thinking about, I was thinking, but no, no, no, no, this is for real. It's that I think about another part that Nick probably really liked, which was, like, in the darkness when you're, like, cuddling with your girlfriend, first person cuddling and, like, they're given affection. Oh, yeah. That seems great. I was actually going to bring up the darkness. I wrote down a bunch of games. I forgot about home, of course, for working, but that was like one of the systems I wrote down because that does that so well on that. And then, I mean, okay, this is a huge spoiler. Have you guys all played the darkness? I don't even want to spoil it for you. Is it? Are you talking about the part where you watch? You watch something. Well, let's just say, okay, I think the statute of limitations for. Yeah. You can talk about it. And to everyone listening, big spoilers. So shortly after that scene, one of the earlier in the story, you see your girlfriend get shot in front of you. And it's like, no bullshit. It just happens. It's right in front of you. That's a pretty emotional scene. Yeah. And it's really well done, especially after that little couch cuddling and watching a movie. Yeah. That scene made me wish that I liked the game more. Like, the actual gameplay I really didn't enjoy, but, you know, the narrative moments and some of the walking through the subway stuff. I can have your grandma. Yeah. It just, it does some things really, really right. Yeah. In terms of, like, an immersive world, like, I think that's probably like my favorite game in terms of just, like, that. Oh, I think that's the first time anyone has ever said that about that game. I got it. I got this time. I think, you know, we're kind of running into a theme here and these first-person experiences seem to automatically affect us more just because they're in first person. So for me, it's really interesting when you have a game like Beyond Good and Evil or a game like Eco that I feel is just as effective to me as some of these first-person experiences. Yeah, I see. I don't think it has to, I mean, I think first-person is one way to do it and I think it's about doing ballsy shit. But I think my point is that-- But I think my point is that-- Yeah. And I think just my point is that it's easier to be immersive in first-person. And I think if you're doing something in third-person and you're able to overcome the fact that you're in third-person and be just as immersive as a first-person game, then you're doing something extra right. I think it's easier to fall off the edge into parody and ridiculousness in first-person though. Like that hug and Mir's edge, if they hadn't animated it just so, it would have seemed completely stupid. I'm sure that some people thought that it was. I'm sure that some people in the darkness, when they saw Jenny get capped by your uncle, like, we're like, okay, whatever. So when am I going to be able to eat some dude's heart? They do have a first-person hug in Half Life 2, Episode 1, and I like that hug a little bit better, in terms of the ending. And also, with a delivery, I feel like it comes really-- it's really fast. You can-- I mean, I just think if we're going to give a shout-out to your Alex deserves like the-- Whatever, Half Life doesn't need your shout-out. Yeah, Alex is fine until she's the fucking Damsel in Distress character. They totally, like, robbed that character of a bunch of her enema in the episode 2, and that really bothered me. They brought her back. I know they brought her back, but still, it was like, okay, Alex, is this strong female character, Alex is the fucking Damsel in Distress for the first half of episode 2. So it's interesting. Yeah. Okay. You're going to base that there. No, I think-- I'll argue about Half Life 2. Who cares about it? We'll talk about Half Life later. So it's interesting that Matt, those two games, he brought up, like, Aiko, Eko, however. Eko. Eko. So that's, you know, that and Shadow of the Colossus are both, like, you know, really, really just minimal story and story elements and everything. It's all about, like, immediately being immersed in this world, and like, that's one of the best things about them, I think, is the minimalism and, like, the long discussions we've had on backlog and everywhere else about, like, you know, what does everything mean in Shadow of the Colossus in a different experience, in a particular way. Whereas Beyond Good Knee Bolts, like, you're playing as this, you know, very developed character, but all that development happens through, like, your relationship to the world and how everyone around you treats you and talks to you, and as you progress in the game, how, like, you fighting back against this, like, this government, like, you know, you see your reactions, you see people on the street, like, picketing, and you see your effects on the world. And those are two, like, drastically different ways, but yeah, they're both their person. And I think, and I think, like, the effect on the world is a part where, that's a part where a lot of games fall short. You know, it's like, I think Oblivion is a good example of this, where it's a hero of Kavach. Yeah. I'm the hero of Kavach, for the entire game, and I can go back there after I've destroyed all the Oblivion gates, and you're, like, still the same guy standing there in the middle of the city where I left. And you're, like, dude, I'm the fucking archmage, and you're calling me the hero of Kavach, like, come on, like, I'm so many other things besides that. I mean, like, I loved, I loved Oblivion, like, I played that game so fucking much. But not because of its fucking story. But not because I felt like I had an effect on the world, because I felt like anybody cared that I was actually there. The little persistence, like, even piling a pile of shit in your house and coming back and seeing the pile, like, seriously, that, like, that was really cool in Oblivion because you don't see it out. So there isn't persistence, like, you said, there's just, you don't, you don't have this mark on the world. There's persistence times. There's no progression in your relationships with the NPC. There are no relationships. I mean, there are some things in that game where you feel like you make an effect on people, and not all of the times that I felt like I made a difference in Oblivion, where times where I felt like a total prick, like, okay, I'm gonna go kill the last unicorn, like, because that's what the Daedra Shine told me I needed to do to get its rewarder. I'm gonna fuck over this town of Catpeople and make it Rain Flaming Dogs. I don't know if you ever did that. No, I didn't. It was pretty fucking awesome. What? Yeah, there's a part of it. Okay, I've played Oblivion for, like, 140 hours. I've never seen the unicorn, and I've never seen Flaming Dogs. So basically, if you really want, if you really like Oblivion, what you should do is you should go through all the Daedra quests, which are the sort of semi-demons. One of them, the Catpeople one is the Mad God. What's his name? Who was the base of the expansion? I can't believe I can't remember his name right now. I'm talking about it. But no one else can. Sure. I feel a little better, yeah. I wouldn't worry about the fact that you can't remember it. So anyway, he sends you to this town, basically your job is to infiltrate it and make everyone think that the world is ending, like, by fulfilling very specific parts of their prophecy. So first, you need to get, like, this amazingly rancid piece of cheese out of its secret holding place and set it out so that the place is plagued with giant rats. And I don't remember what the second part was. I think you have to poison all their sheep. Poison their crops or something like that. Yeah, and then the final thing is you have to perform a ritual, and then he makes it rain Flaming Dogs in town. Nice. And it's awesome. And it's awesome. And it's awesome. And it's like my perpetual need to get back to it game. Yeah. And then there's another one who's the beast god where you have to go find the last unicorn and kill it, who's guarded by minattires. And that fucking unicorn is a bad motherfucker, like, he definitely-- Wow. --he jack my shit up a couple times. The unicorn was my mount at some point in that game. Oh, see, I hadn't actually had any assassin skill requests. Well, you mentioned very briefly shivering aisles, and, like, shivering aisles is awesome. It's totally the best part of oblivion. It does a lot better with story in there. It does a lot better with story. And, in fact, you actually do kind of have an effect on the world of that one. Yeah, as soon as you're in that room, it turns into butterflies. Because it's, like, such a very focused small town, the main city that you're in. Right. And, like, you kill people in that town that will never come back or, like, having, you know, when you're, like, having effects on, like, the good and the bad sides of the madness and stuff, I don't know. See, that's the thing is I don't care about traditional story and oblivion, but I want it to allow me to make the story I want to make. My character, because it's all about your relationship with the world, because there isn't much of one. It's up to you to be like, "Okay, I'm this guy who reacts this way when people treat me a certain way, and, like, that's who I am, and so I'm going to make my own character." And that's, like, and that's an example, again, of where, for me, GTA 4, GTA 4, that's, like, where it falls flat, you know, it's in the beginning, like, the narrative was so strong, and I was so sucked in, and I almost bought into the hype of people saying, you know, this is gaming's godfather, and I was like, you know what? If the shit holds up, maybe it is. But then it just goes down, down, down, down, right, until the end of the game, where I'm just like, wow, not only is this not my Nico in this supposedly open-world sandbox game, it is in terms of gameplay, but it's not in terms of narrative or care. Right, that's the thing is, it's like, not only is it not my Nico, but Rockstar's Nico sucks, and I totally don't want him in my game. Wow. And there's a couple, like, there's a couple of black or white choices you can make in the game, but in general, it's like, you're just playing various, like, shades of how evil you want to be. It's like, you're kind of, you know, you can't be good to people in JPI. Which is fine, but even the evil, even the evil isn't interesting. Sorry. You weren't allowed to speak. It's fine. It's fine. I was just gonna say it reminds me of Shawn Elliott a long time ago did that post talking, or at least was talking, I don't remember if he was supposed to, if he was talking about it, or he was kind of talking about how, yeah, it's like you said, it's like you're introduced to him, and he's like the character you can sympathize with the most out of all the other games. And then all of a sudden, you start playing him and you're, and he's kind of just like, like a, like a, like, he has like the tendencies of like a serial killer, he's like pathological and like the way that he like, thinks about humans, like it's like, he seems like he's really carrying an affectionate one moment, but then when you play the game and he's ready to take any job to just kill someone, oh, it's just money, whatever, I just want money in the type of thing. Right. That doesn't sound quite right for him. No, it seems like that, that, that kind of dichotomy could make a really interesting character, but it never comes to fruition for me, and it's like, and I'm not sure why. I don't think anybody wants to play a tortured protagonist outside of JRPGs though, like, I think that there's a work case. Yeah, I disagree though, because like, I mean, I would want to play that character, but I don't know that I want to be a wood. You feel that for the first, like, maybe, maybe like five to ten hours of the game. You do feel like a lot of time to feel sympathetic for a character, but you do feel like he's a really interesting, like, I don't know, okay, so does they go and ruin it. Does the narrative experience in GTA fall apart because of all the shit that takes place between what you care about and the ending? I'll tell you, like, for me, it falls apart, and I know this is the place that it falls apart from Matt because we've talked about this a lot, but the reason I'm mentioning it is because I also think it delivers here, and that's what makes it especially bad. So there's a mission kind of late in the game where you do this job where you have to basically pretend to go test drive this girl's car, and the girl is the daughter of like a mob boss. And so you go to her house and you pick up that you, you know, test drive the car and you start driving it, and she's sitting in the passenger seat. Now, Nico hits the girl in this section, which is what really drives me crazy. Like you have no agency at this point, Nico will beat this girl and call her a bitch and like just basically totally destroy her, what's the reason that it really pisses me off though is because that scene is really rad. There's parts in it where you're driving along, and I play in first person, yeah, and she grabs the wheel away from you, and the car actually like turns, and you have to fight against her driving with you, and I think like that's a really cool scene. And that was something where I, you know, the narrative was totally, you know, touching gameplay one to one, but I still didn't get to, I didn't get to, I wouldn't have hit the girl. I wouldn't have liked. You didn't like the character anymore. You're right. The character is not my character at that point. Well, and even more was later in that same, in that same mission, like you have to go and take a picture of her, and he doesn't go and say like look at the camera. He goes up to her and slaps her to make her look at the camera, and I'm like, all right, well, at this point, you know, you can fucking kill Nico off, and I just don't even care. I'm just going to finish this game just because I've gotten so far into it. But like the, and it, that was an example of like it, since it ruined all sympathy that I ever had for Nico, it meant that when Kate or when, you know, Niko, or when, you know, roll and get through it. Don't use spoil any part of the ending. Oh, okay. It really, it really, I'll say it makes an ending where you're supposed to be sympathetic. It makes you just not care. Do you have to do the car mission that you're talking about? Is it like absolute? Yes. Yes. It's a story mission. Yeah. One of the missions in there that ruined it for me was, uh, this is closer to the middle, I think, or maybe right around that area, but you do a big, uh, bank robbery. Oh, that's the best mission in the game. I mean, the mission of that mission. The mission of that mission. Yeah. It's like that's what the game is. Awesome. Yeah. The game is another case where the gameplay is awesome. The mission is awesome, but it doesn't feel like there's any reason for Nico to be doing it other than to get money, and he's just killing tons of innocent people. And it just doesn't, like, again, it was just a case of like, all sympathy I had for him was just draining away at that point. Yeah. And around that point in the game where the character is no longer the same character, you know, you know, it's not about his relationship with Roman and being this new guy in town, like all that stuff is gone. And at this point, he's just a killing machine. He might as well be the guy from GTA 3. Yeah, exactly. See, that sucks because I was definitely thinking of starting GTA 4 next because of the story. I still think he should play. He's like, well, okay, I don't, I didn't like GTA 3. I didn't like Vice City. I didn't like San Andreas. And we talked about it a little bit over the weekend. It's a lot of it is because of the controls and the gameplay mechanics. See, I think the game, that's the reason you should play for it. And also, like, I wasn't interested in the story. It's like I wasn't interested in the game where there was no moral repercussions or no, there was no consequence to doing some of the horrible shit that you did. And I mean, the reason that I was interested in Grand Theft Auto 4 is because the character is someone who was, I don't know if he was a war criminal, but he was definitely someone who had, who had seen and done some very fucked up shit and wanted to, and wanted to get away from that and was being dragged back in. Which I think is an interesting hook for a character and he's not like your stereotypical gangster. Right. The Eastern European, like, former soldier, like, Russian Defia and U.S. thing is not something that's explored very much, like, which is why I like Eastern promises because you don't get a lot of movies like that, but, uh, but I mean, when you tell me shit like that, like, that's like, I don't want to invest 25 hours in a character and watch him grow and then see him do a complete U-turn or not even a U-turn, but just slowly turn the corner into something that I don't even recognize. I think I just figured out, you know, why, why I don't like Nico is because at the beginning, he feels like a real character. He feels like something out of Eastern promises and he's well written and well after all that kind of stuff. By the end of the game, he's just a game character. Yeah, totally. He's a GTA character. Right. You just want to make a knife fight. All right. I'll tell you what, though. I would take a naked bath fight and a fucking if I wish that there was any moment in a game that was as harrowing as that scene in Eastern promises and there just hasn't been. There's think if you're if you're not by the penis, if you don't, if you so if it requires a penis flabbing around, I will deal with it. I want a scene that harrowing game. I have been very rarely as surprised by game gameplay mechanics and animation and all that stuff coming together as I was when I first started playing GTA 4. And for that reason, I feel like it's definitely worth playing. I mean, I'm just driving. But does that make it that much more disappointing when that shit devolves toward the end? It does. But it's hard to. I mean, there are some people that can, you know, that were like Matt after we got to this point in the game that we've just described you, Matt didn't like like it anymore. You know, like he was mad at he was mad at that game. You know, I think that's, am I wrong here? No, that's exactly right. And I on the other hand, like I was mad at the game at that point. But I still like would put it up, you know, at the top of my list of games played at the end of the year because what it actually achieves in terms of the actual gameplay was just brilliant to me in certain, in certain places. Like I understand what people don't like about it. The fact that certain missions are, you know, ways scripted and not open it in like two way in parts. Yeah, it's like some of the GTA-ness of it is lost, but I mean, they're like just the first time you do a hand-to-hand battle with, you know, like where they're teaching you the tutorial for hand-to-hand combat, the like way the animation works, where it doesn't look like punch-punch kick, punch-punch kick. You know how like in Metal Gear, like it's punch-punch kick and it's that same punch-punch kick every fucking time in GTA, like it animates differently, he'll do a different move every once in a while. You, even though you have cool combos, like it looks more cinematic and real, the driving feels that way too. The first time in that battle, or in the tutorial where you learn hand-to-hand combat, you fight these two guys on a basketball court, then there's a car chase, which is very scripted and I understand people don't like that, where like there's, you end up like going off the road because this truck comes in the street and you end up at this like warehouse down by the docks, then you climb up these stairs and into the top floor of this warehouse. And the first time I was doing this, I like got it, got to that part, punched the guy a few times, pulled out my knife, slashed him, did a super sweet combo. The camera angle changed, like, amid the gameplay, he would fell backwards through the glass and into the water for a second camera angle change and everything, I was like wow, that was like me controlling a cutscene, that was fucking awesome. And then I walked upstairs to see what Matt was doing and he was playing the same part and it didn't do the camera angle changes, the guy didn't go out of the window, you know, he ended up like dying there on the floor before falling out and I was like wow, that was totally different than what it was like when I played it and it was like ten times more cinematic when I did, but it was all by chance, it didn't have to go down that way. And so the fact that it can deliver those type of moments to me was something that was totally new that I hadn't seen before and I really, really liked it. So two games, I want to make sure we touch on, I mean it's interesting to me that this year, it's like kind of seems like the overall agreement was that Metal Gear 4 was like the best game this year, you know, if you're just taking kind of general consensus. And the previous year though, the two best games pretty much were Bioshock and Portal, both of which we haven't mentioned but also are a great example of, you know, just story talking to the gameplay, adding to this world that they develop and I mean I think Bioshock the last couple hours kind of go downhill after like the big twist. I think it's more like a video game toward the end and less like the narrative experience that it is for the rest of the game. Yeah. I actually kind of felt Bioshock felt like a video game like throughout almost all the game. Me too. You know, like part that I felt like had like a really interesting narrative to me wasn't even like the main story or anything like specifically what you were doing like those killings for that Sander Koengai. That was like the only part that I felt like was like totally really interesting way. The narrative in Bioshock, I mean I guess like coming back to the way we were talking about different terms to use but Bioshock's interesting I guess more because of the narrative, because of the way the story is told then because of the story itself. The story itself is like the world is really interesting but the story maybe not. Yeah. I mean the way it's totally narratively. The way it's totally narratively is really interesting. Well, on-chain revolution in Bioshock sort of. I mean a big part of it is the setting. You come to this place where something you know something went wrong and you're trying to figure out why and you're picking up these tapes a lot of which are just you know optional on the way that are kind of all your tapes fleshing it out as you're playing and you're figuring out what happened here. So a lot of it is you know they do a good job of initially making this like instantly compelling. You know it's like we talk about it. It's there if you want it. I mean you don't have to read those tapes or anything like that or anything. I think what Bioshock does. I mean can we talk about Bioshock spoilers? Yeah, yes. I mean every podcast. Let's try to spoil it. Okay, so once you realize once you kill what's his name, how do I forget his name? Once you encounter Andrew Ryan and you realize what you are and how you've been manipulated and how all the conventions of games are the conventions that they've laid on you to funnel you toward this choice that was never really a choice. Like I thought that was that was what was interesting about the story in Bioshock that and I mean I I really hate Iron Rand and the whole the whole taking a piss out of objectivism and Iron Rand throughout that whole game was just like patting me on the head and giving me a massage the whole time I was playing I also think that most people don't like the end of the game but I thought it was fine with the little sisters all living happily ever after. Well there's that if you do it that way, there's that but then there's like the the big daddy factory part which I don't know why people I mean that I thought it was fine like it was I actually and I like the I think it's called Apollo Square the part where I think I just like that environment I think it looks really cool but that's the portion of the game where your plasmids are constantly cycling and you know I think a lot of people didn't like that part of the game either and it was something that I thought was cool. I don't know why there's this whole like after the twist the game is bad. I don't think it's bad I just I feel like the the big daddy thing didn't have much of a payoff because there is no sacrifice on your part to become a big daddy like as soon as you you leave Rapture you're a person again like if it had ended if the good ending or if either I could be I think I got the bad I think the ending is a different story completely like the final boss battle totally weak to me and the ending though I don't even remember if I got the good or bad ending because it doesn't matter it was it was a fucking tech and ending you know like the it's it's like three three minutes of like little cutscene that had nothing to I mean it totally doesn't pay off in the end I guess I'm actually like again the plot not interesting but I thought that the actual gameplay and level design leading up into those final moments and I think it'll be a shock is successful in that way in the same way that portal successful in that way although not quite as much I mean the gameplay is very dependent on the world that you're in and it doesn't feel like oh well I'm in this world and I do this in the meantime let's shoot some dudes it's all okay I'm in the world and this is these are very specific problems that are unique to this world that I have to fix with these parts of this world yeah it was it was amazing playing with some of the levels in the still alive portal the one that came out in exfillet and not having glad us there and that whole like narrative isn't oh no it's just puzzles and it's I mean I'm sure it would be a really cool game we don't like a few scores but that would ding a couple points off there but since I've played portal it's really hard to be in and out like wow this is just this really like the bleak place I don't want to be anymore or as like let us it's weird but it was very welcoming like having to play the they you know the people who did the the fan flash portal uh-huh they they did you know levels inspired by those and they remixed the Gladys voices and like you know actually those were based on the flash levels that's what I'm saying okay yeah like well the well there was a PC PC version of like portal the flash version or whatever that was you know for the PC version of portal and yeah they remixed all the Gladys voices and like even though it's like oh I remember when she said this in the other game you know it's still like it added exactly that element that was missing yeah I don't know portals understanding I mean there's yeah we should wrap it up but there's like all the you know find little clues along the way and even the first I mean the first time because I reviewed it and this was you know I like didn't have anything it's world whatsoever I knew nothing about it going into it except for little like bits we could see like a trailer before just kind of the mechanics they're going to find those little clues about the cake and all that little like you know kind of hidden rooms like all that is totally well done and really like it's all about mood as well between those and plan us and you know something weird is going on but you're not sure what one oh good I was just gonna say so what conclusions ever reached about narrative and video ops like my my one thing is that two years ago I was at GDC and I went to a talk that Warren Specter gave on story and it was excellent but the the one the one main point that he made that I totally agree with is he's he said you know there's been there was talk for a long time of like the games even need story why are we even bothering with this and he was like that debate is over it's done yes you need story and it's like story is critically important to many games out there and it's and it's a worthwhile pursuit I think without a story it's almost more like a toy than a game and I mean which is fine but the just but to say that like there isn't any place for story in games is completely undervaluing the medium and its potential and I think that it's you know there are tons of different ways to do story in games some to me work better than others to me but you know you can't you don't you can't build a game for one person so obviously it's worth it for people to try all these different different ways and beyond good and evil I think is is interesting because we said oh it's not in first person it does have cutscenes and I think to me it it has a lot of dialogue that the first there that the main character actually says it has a lot of places where it could have tripped itself up but it somehow delivers on all that and it I think it's a stronger narrative game than most other games because it tries all these hard things that most people fuck up and it doesn't fuck it up I kind of wish we had had time to talk about braid but it just never came up talk about it I mean no how long have we been going not as long as we talk about the games we've been playing so well we can talk about braid some other time we'll we'll probably return to this I'm sure we can talk about this again argue more what do we wish we argue about well I don't know feeling I don't know so I don't know that makes me sad orange aid is totally better than lemonade China we take a break yeah we'll take a break and we'll come back and read some letters. We're gonna read some letters and I just want to let people know we've been reading letters from a recently closed magazine the last few weeks we are going to actually start up but I think an email address where you can send letters for the show for now if you want to send letters to the show just sent a pea caller at eat dash sleep dash game dot com all right all right Matt you have a letter why don't you read this I do do recently closed magazine I feel that the sonic the hedgehog games have strayed pretty far from what made them great games to explain let's take a look at the first st h game it was a solid platform or where the objective was to feed the evil doctor egg man then in the second game tails was introduced and you could collect the chaos emeralds this is in my opinion where the games began to step away from the original since then the game since some type of emeralds and the secret rings in them wait what wait it's it's all common side on the right of this yeah the first game has chaos emeralds also since most of the games have more than one playable character the games feel a little annoying due to the fact that sonic has only super speed while other characters have cool powers and are usually near as fast as sonic so I believe that sonic and the secret rings was an excellent idea even though I have never even played it I am hoping that another such game is released and that they keep the other characters from having too many advantages over sonic PS can you show a pick of the original sonic the hedgehog video games case as I am a fan of good case art p s s that's wrong what system was knuckles chaotic's released on sincerely blah blah blah s but in housing I was gonna say that to me is like two steps away from being like and please check out my fucking GV art of sonic boning tales or you can get back to me at Anthony it's sake dot com yeah alright hit us alright I got one here dear magazine oh my god I can't wait for mushroom kingdom hearts my favorite games ever mashed into one awesome thing I need all the information I can possibly receive on this game this is my ultimate dream come true once I have this game my life will be complete oh my god I can't wait and I just want to point out every single sentence in here has either one or three exclamation points including it is signed Kevin with three exclamation points I wish he had occasionally like accidentally wrote in one instead of like I opened like I mean we didn't bring them all but I opened like three different emails from people who have been fooled by the kingdom mushroom hearts thing like those really got pulled in enough to write a lot to reassess his life goal to sex with all right all right so mine if you look at it at first glance it doesn't look like a letter at all it actually says invoice it does up in the corner it looks very well made so it's from a give me what is mine incorporated which is is gw gm wm where it says gm wm comma where what is mine is given back all right so this is from kyloo huai and so the bill too is give me what is mine in why and then the ship to is give me what is mine all right so the ship date is now ship VSC UPS USPS and then FOB I don't know what that is FOB it says you well I know what it means is a derogatory term yeah and then it says that terms double recently closed magazine or give me twenty four dollars item one canceled gfw price twenty four dollars item two hosted stamps used for this letter forty one cents item three this one cents stamp now the postage went up total twenty six ten okay because he added a dollar sixty eight for sales tax right so then it says other comments or special instructions one I paid twenty four dollars for another recently crows magazine and received higher wall for gfw and received only one issue before it shut down item two therefore I demand you double the size of recently closed magazine so I get my money's worth or you send me twenty four dollars there's something that is worth twenty four dollars or more item four more information was sent in my email on seven nineteen two thousand eight five I would remind you monthly until the time comes and you jam the doubled in size or I receive those magazine it's double in size or I receive from you twenty four dollars or something that is worth twenty four dollars or more if you have any questions about this invoice please contact love thank you for your business can we send that guy twenty four dollars seriously I think we should I think we should send that guy twenty four dollars just send us a subscription to the podcast like I give him something else it's not our twenty four dollars I'll see where you go to give me what is mine we just registered the domain and give it to him yep we just send him an invoice for sexual favors yeah I feel bad that this never got read because it's actually like genuinely creative and I feel bad that they'd like 700 please change my address from people in prison didn't get opened that's what I feel bad about oh damn okay we're gonna wrap up the show we have a little bit of business we are going to be starting a backlog type show I don't think we're gonna call it backlog but for people who listen to one up FM and remember a backlog segment a lot of a lot of people have been sleeping comments and writing emails saying they'd like us to do that again and for those who do and for those who never did listen to it what is basically us going back and playing like older games that a lot of us just have to have the time to get to or you know more recent games that we just haven't got time to get to and just discussing it in like yeah in-depth or you know an hour or 45th fashionably late cast but it's the key is that it's done over the course of like four weeks so it is one of the more in-depth talking about games that you will hear on them all the minutes and I believe Matt and Ryan want to be involved we do we do like the the backlog it was my favorite it was the only podcast that I was a part of at old one up it was the first podcast I was a part of yeah well we would love to have you guys of course so we're gonna start it in we're gonna start it not next week but the week after for our episode six and we have a couple games in mind that just we should throw it out there if you're any games you guys want to suggest you know it can be released last fall it can be released like yeah well that's not the other big thing is like before we tried to keep it to games that were at least a year older older now we're kind of opening it up and we want to make this like like Ryan said we want to have the chance to talk really in-depth about a game no matter when it came out so even if it's something more recent like I don't think we should make it older than then PS2 generation because I think it'd be really hard people to track down that's another thing too if it is going to be like original Xbox it's got to be backwards compatible because it's going to be too much virtual console or something maybe right and there are some exceptions you know like good old games if if it turned out that we went to a PC game that you can get on good old games everybody can get that and they can get it really cheap yeah I just I at some point that might make sense to people who knows I hope that we can play games from many different eras you know let's start with a new one or an old one let's move around a bit a bunch so we're not going to do a mixed up we're not going to do a voting for this but in the on e-sleep game dot com with the ashes in between why I fed you on so I guess it's thrilling you go and leave some suggestions for games in the comments like to see us play you know we're just going to kind of decide on something and then any other notes we had about yeah I mean also it's going to be its own show yes it's not going to be on the end of this so we'll probably do is we will for the first episode at least we'll put it in the regular Rebel FM RSS feed so that you'll get it there and then moving on from that we'll start our own RSS feed for it that sounds like a fucking great idea Ryan's idea oh yeah so we had that idea last week I was born with that idea I feel take us out all right so I want to remind everybody please check out eat dash sleep dash game dot com for all the latest episodes of Rebel FM as well as writing for myself Nick Anthony Arthur and others I also want to do a special shout out to the one up years crew Andrew Pfister Shane Battenhaus and Luke Smith John Davison and Garnet Lee for their epic final episode you can check out the three and a half hour long show which is insane halfway through that thing yeah it took me a couple of things for yourself you can check it out at one of yours dot one of dot com loud paper changing okay so I want to know working other people who are listening find you on the internet this week Matt you start us off working people find you on the internet you mean like ours our new site your website your Twitter whatever you want to be a podcast or like Philip and Nick yes I am and my hoarishness can be witnessed on area five dot TV or Twitter dot com slash talking orange it's not a whoring if it's on your own site then it's just six nice myself okay so it's masturbation I'm so confused why not Arthur why don't you tell us where we can find you on the internet I'm in the same place as always I have standards I can because I actually have listened to most of the podcast you guys go on I think there's so much funnier than we are all right Ryan I'm on the same spot area five dot TV or you can find me on Twitter at Twitter dot com slash Ryan O'Donnell R Y A N O D O N N E L L thank you Twitter dot com slash chuff money chuff money dot blogspot dot com or you know you're going to upload your latest tune doing some shitties a game now I mean I recently recorded that song it was a remake of an older song with a different name and it's just for him though no one that one's not for public so you're a stingy man just for Will in Antonio yeah I don't know I'm suttner Twitter dot com slash on suttner I'm going to be on the rumble pack podcast I think we're recording it tomorrow so they'll probably be this week but that's all I got I'm on Twitter dot com slash PCOLER I was actually also on the co-op to cast this week on co-optimus.com with my old buddy Nicholas Pileo see everybody should go listen to that and also I just did this a Prince of Persia write up on Eat Sleep game that you guys can go check out sort of a review type thing we don't know if we're calling him that I think we'll it's just it's an article a Prince of Persia it's a it's a criticism it's a review type it's a subject of write up with the entire game or a beauty no because it's mostly just bitching about one mechanic I think all right let's I guess that could be a show or just like it go give us some feedback on it yes you can subscribe to rebel if I'm on iTunes or the zoom marketplace if you use either please subscribe leave a review stay tuned after the music for information on donations and thanks for listening oh wait are you doing that for youtube channel feel free fuck yes yeah if you go to if you go to area 5 media that's our youtube user and you can subscribe to to all of our videos and that's youtube.com slash users slash area 5 media I think that how it works yeah I have it okay we have a banner for your site that's true you do and I definitely threw all that shit in there nice cuz I don't want them to have to go to your site. Fair enough thank you guys I love you thank the following listeners for donations this week all right Chris F David M. Oliver D. Ruben B. from Norway Joseph T. from California Porter Mason of Porter Mason dot com. Ilya L. Nick M. Matthew S. Jeff R. Brian D. Thomas W. Guy T. Aaron W. Tim B. The Game Galaxy Christopher C. Peter M. Galen R. Hannessy. Liam E. Michael C. Justin J. from Chicago. Ashraf M. John M. from Nevada. Mark V. from Los Angeles. Raymond B. Charles B. Jeffrey S. Andrew W. and Jason K. who's actually an ex-computer game world writer just for the kind of W.K. it did sound like that but it was not thanks to all of you for your contributions to the show if you'd like to donate you can find a PayPal button on eat dash sleep dash game dot com thanks everybody desperately need a printer film instead of writing those all up my hand online paper. Hopefully better. You're sitting back. That was your problem. You're a game here in Duckburg race cars lasers airplanes it's a duck. I got it this one when your room looks kind of weird and you wish that you weren't there. Just close your eyes and make believe. You can be anywhere. Also this goes after the show is over. All of this goes after the show starts. Let's see what other shows have really good theme songs. [BLANK_AUDIO]