Summer Games Fest 2023 with Albro Lundy

Okay, let's see here.

Heather just sent me a new trailer for a for a brand new game premiering at Summer Games Fest.

Why don't I hmm, I'll just watch this while I wait for her to get here.

Neo turn-based action-fighting FPS with real-time online scavenger gameplay and announcing crossover events with Leptoon 9 and Levi's.

Or shift your perspective in world premiere time shift warrior fighting styles, which let you control the Excalibat Zenerator and drive five fully operational Thundercraft vehicles in a top-down 3D third-person racing dating sim.

What is this?

Breaknecks and break hearts as as you try to find the right words to get a car naked and fuck it.

Two player simultaneous street action brings you an unparalleled magic system.

I don't want to fucking buy a sport to launch epic multi-punch gameplay across a biome that includes wheat, sand, stone, and rice.

Wheat?

We've been fighting this war for a hundred years.

Now it's our chance to turn the tide.

I don't know who you are, so stay the fuck out of my way.

Head underwater where you're an immortal rift dolphin before crashing against the genosphere.

Who is Chammel

Genosphere like Levi genes?

Only you can discover the truth in free-to-play unlockable mode, Chammel Briggs, Crush Mindquake from Craft Macaroni and Cheese.

Never stop, never surrender.

Now I'm gonna eat this shelf I crafted.

Garlack's the Unbidden, Battle War, Demon's Raw Machine, Skatefort, Slam Blood Cyberfault, Hell's Maiden, The Loftoning, Dark Blood Synapse, Time, Virus, Turismo Christ, Bregadeth 2, only on PlayStation 5,

Xbox, Steam,

Nintendo Switch, and Mobile, and PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Samsung Game Hub,

Google Game,

Apple Arcade Vision Pro, and coming to Sony Q in fall 2027, premiering on, introducing, Game Chest from Netflix, only available at Amazon Extreme, Break the World, Rise the Next.

Fuck you, my head is a gun.

So like the car fucking was barely part of it.

We board the hype train and ride it to Summer Games Fest Station as we cover the upcoming year in gaming this week on Get Played.

Welcome to Get Played, your one-stop show for good games, bad games, and every game in between.

It's time to get played.

I'm your host, Heather Ann Campbell, along with my fellow host, Matt Apadaka.

Hello, everyone.

Hello,

everyone.

And welcome back to Get Played, the premiere video game podcast.

What's happening?

I, you know,

I just want to say, Nick's not here.

Just the elephant in the room, right?

Nick's not here.

Because he thought, hmm.

He's on a little Doughboys tour.

And I know we don't like to cross the streams too much, but it seems like if you have two shows, you gotta make time for both, right?

Not just one.

Yeah, you don't tell mommy you love her and tell daddy to fuck off.

No, no.

So I want to announce today, I haven't cleared this with you.

I don't know if you're going to be okay with this.

Wait, what?

Wait, what?

I'm declaring a war

against Doughboys.

Oh, okay.

Sure.

Except not Mitch, though.

Wait, what?

Mitch is fine.

So only Nick?

Nick only.

But when he's here, it's fine.

But Nick on Doughboys, dead to us.

Dead to us.

Okay, I'm in.

But Mitch, we love Mitch.

We do.

I love Mitch.

I always got the sense that Mitch didn't like me.

No, Mitch loves you.

What is this?

We can't talk.

This is not a podcast about other podcasts.

It is now.

Consider yourselves warned, Doughboys.

You're fucked.

Nick only.

No, Nick's in DC right now because he said he had to finish the job.

So I don't know know what that means.

If you're just tuning in for the first time this week, welcome to Get Played.

We're a video game podcast.

We typically have three hosts, but this week we only have two and a really exciting guest.

But before we get to that guest, Is this how this goes?

He always says these words.

What do you mean?

What are you going to do right now?

I don't know.

Because I'll be honest for you, for like 20 seconds, my brain did turn off.

I'm sweating so bad.

I know.

It's fine.

Okay.

Were you about to get into what are we playing?

Like, my hands are physically leaving water on the table.

That's bad.

There's a lot of electronic equipment on the table.

Also, what is it saying about the show that Nick is the like the social rudder of it?

That's actually fucked.

Yeah, no, when you really think about it, it is, if he's the guy.

He's the guy.

Johnny Convo.

Okay, wait.

So

what normally goes like this?

We've got he, because he does it.

Yeah.

He does it.

Oh, I didn't even prep.

Because like normally you're supposed to.

People ask what's like a thing like you, how do you want to be introduced?

Which I guess we could ask now.

Yeah, well, let's get to it when it's time to introduce.

Well, when do you think that is?

Because I have a take.

I have a radical take.

Okay.

Intro now.

I think it's now.

Okay, great.

Albro, how would you like to be introduced?

As a friend and

kind person.

Okay, great.

We've got a really great guest today.

A friend and kind person.

Please welcome to the show, Albro Lundy.

Hi, guys.

Hello.

Happy Summer Game Fest.

Yeah.

Tis the season.

Can you believe it's finally here?

I couldn't even sleep last night.

Albro, you and I work together.

We do.

When the industry's not on strike.

That's true.

And I know you're a huge gamer.

I mean, I thought I was a gamer.

I like video games.

And then I spent two hours watching game trailers.

And I was like, have I ever played a video game?

Do I know what a video game is?

I'll say,

I don't want to tip too far into the conversation at hand today.

but while I was watching these, I was like, are video games bad?

Well, I had that thought, I had the thought that it's like if every movie trailer for the next year was for the same movie, like it's the same shit.

Yeah.

And it really bummed me out.

Like, I used to be a video game journalist, and I had to go to these events and cover them constantly.

And I eventually, like, it burnt me out so bad from just basically watching the same, like, a guy loads a gun and then you're third person and he's doing cover mechanic and the world is red and gray.

And it just was like, there were like six titles that entire time that we're getting ahead of ourselves.

For sure.

I want to, I want to, I want to do the interview segment with Albro that Nick normally does.

Okay, great.

And I will try very hard to be Albro knows me and knows that this is the hardest thing I've ever done.

This is a blast.

I love that Nick is storming the Capitol right now, but it's here that it's truly falling apart.

All right.

So

you're a big gamer until today, and then you're thinking about giving it up.

I mean,

so

it's fun.

I listened to the last couple of episodes, and I hear Matt sort of sheepishly talk about how he's played 45 hours or 65 hours of Tears of the Kingdom.

Yeah.

I hit 155 last night.

Hell yeah.

I have, like, I have not been sleeping, and I feel, I feel bad about it

because it's, I, like, it's a fucking amazing game.

Yeah.

It's, like, so, so good.

But last night, I true, I beat the game last night because

I need to end this.

Yeah.

I need to finish this moment in time.

I'm creeping up on that as well.

I mean, I, I'm at like

85, like 90 hours or probably at this point.

Uh, and I, I don't want it to be over, but I need it to be over.

Yeah, I, I mean, I have other stuff I got to do.

I, I played the first game, Breath of the Wild, when I finally got my hands on it.

It had been out for a little while.

So kind of like that immediate sort of shiny luster was a little bit worn off.

So I kind of played it how Heather would.

Like I blitzed to all the towers.

I like only focused on stamina.

I was like, I'm going to unhinge my jaw and consume this game whole.

So this time around, I was like, I'm going to.

I'm going to taste every single note that this thing has to offer.

I'm going to ride my horse to every goddamn location.

And while it has been amazing and immersive and like truly just hooking myself up to a dopamine IV for 12 hours at a time,

I now have sort of like spent so much time on the game, like not building mechs like everyone else has, that now I'm starting to feel guilty.

I'm like, what did I spend 155 hours on?

Like, what was I even doing?

And it was like, it was nice when I finally fought.

Ganondorf, spoiler alert, he's the bad guy.

Yeah, no shit.

I was hoping it was going to be Mario.

Shit.

That's the next one.

Mario and Nick Page, the bad guys in Celta 3.

Tears of the Gamer.

But yeah, like that, I hesitate to sort of like, this watching all of these trailers, I was like, oh, there's an entire genre called like lovingly rendered guy in gothic armor that I've never touched in my entire life that was kind of like 50% of what we were watching.

So the fact, like, they call,

one of the things that stood out in this this conference was at one point they said this game is a souls-like or a souls-born-like.

Yes,

which is not the

company that made the game doesn't make those games.

Yeah.

But you would never call the Sonic game a Mario-like.

No.

But I guess it's in the same way that like the term like Metroidvania is like a type of game.

I don't think they would have called it a Metroidvania in the copy.

It was such a weird game.

Yeah, I don't know.

It's interesting.

It felt like almost meta.

You have to differentiate yourself in this field of everyone that looks the exact same.

Like, you have to either wink to the camera or just hope that yours is the best graphics with the biggest team of people that's been killing themselves for two years.

Not yet.

Not to get too far into that again, but I do think they probably had to say that to get people interested in what that game was.

I don't know the name of it.

The Lies of P, right?

The Pinocchio game?

It could have been Lies of P.

It could have been Witchburn.

It could have been I wrote them all down, so we now I'm serious.

I wrote them all down, me too.

Yeah, uh, so we'll be able to go through this.

I guess, beyond um uh, Tears of the Kingdom and like Breath of the Wild, what other games do you typically gravitate toward?

Like, are you like, would you say you're a big fan of Apodaka naturally relieving me of the interviewing duty already?

I said,

I sent a text earlier.

I'll help you.

This, this, this episode has an arc as Matt slowly becomes the social game.

Oh, no, now

I gotta buy a plane ticket to DC real quick.

Heather knows, like, I was raised in a pretty Christian family.

Kind of like everything to do with all media, film, books, television, games, I'm catching up on.

I like have to shed my PG husk at all times.

But so the

vestigial element from that is that I really gravitate towards Nintendo e-games.

I really like stuff with engaging bright colors with sort of like interesting design rather rather than sort of like grounded real-world graphics.

The last couple games I got really lost in were things like Hades.

I really loved Grease or Grizz.

I love the color and music.

Anything I can kind of like sit in the dark with for a couple of hours while being super stoned is kind of perfect.

And then

I really enjoy Smash Bros.

I'm not.

awesome at it.

I feel like saying you're good at Smash Bros is inviting yourself to get hit by lightning, but I really enjoy the game and I really enjoy, I wish I could get more into PvP combat stuff.

I just, everyone's so good and the learning curve is so terrifying each time.

Like if a game is out for two weeks, you're bad at it already.

One of the things that

we're covering Street Fighter VI this month, which is our like big arc game for everybody to play along with us in a segment we call We Play, You Play.

But one of the things that they've added to Street Fighter VI this time is a Smash Bros-like control scheme that strips away all of the like

six-button combo stuff and makes it more accessible.

That's really exciting to me.

The thing I love about Smash is that I get to do that anime thing where like two guys punch each other so hard that they fall in love, where it's like at a certain point,

you play the same Jigglypuff like three times in a row.

Suddenly you're brothers and you know, like you can, you're, you're dancing rather than fighting.

You know, you're like taking turns reading each other's mind.

I love that.

That's amazing.

And I totally understand that that element is in stuff like Street Fighter.

I just wasn't in a video game-friendly family, so I didn't have a chance to access that.

But that thrills me.

That gets me really, really excited.

Yeah.

Wait, so you, so I knew, I knew this,

but I know our listeners didn't know that you were from a Christian family.

And now you write on Rick and Morty.

Has there been any like pushback?

They, I, I think it's part of like a gradual arc for my whole whole family.

Um, we are now sort of the

lefty progressive sheep of the family, sort of our collective group.

I have a very gay brother.

So that's all well and good.

And now I kind of just feel like now that I have the green light to consume everything, I very much need to.

But I'm behind the eight ball everywhere.

I write television.

I've seen none of television.

The thing I did during the pandemic was I was playing a lot of Smash Online, but I realized that that was just going to be a time sink.

So I started playing Smash Online while watching Prestige TV.

I like finished the Sopranos and the Wire.

Now I'm almost done with the Americans.

I really like, I feel like the Zoomers are doing 10 things on 10 screens all at once.

I'm doing my best to get there, you know.

I was going to say, like, Smash is like a good game for also maybe doing something else.

Like, you maybe should be paying attention because you don't want to lose.

But like, it's like, oh, it's just Smash.

It's like, you know, I can just start another one pretty quickly.

And it's a nice moment for either thing that I'm consuming where I have to do either like the sitting up in the chair meme to actually engage someone or I have to like stop video gaming so I can pay attention to this really good episode.

Like it's a great feeling for either one.

Yeah.

So that's, that's kind of

taking Adriana.

Yeah.

Has there been like a thing that you have come to very late?

I mean, I know you just named two or three prestige TV shows, but is there like a, for example, Mary just saw Alien two years ago, right?

Is there a movie or a TV show that you came to super late and you're like, there's nobody to talk to about this?

Yes, I want to scream at people about the thing all the time.

Like, I, cause, cause also like one of the things about growing up in a sheltered environment is that you like, you just don't get to horror stuff ever.

You're afraid of it.

And you like create this big like gray area in your head where all the scary stuff lives that like is perfectly designed to freak you out.

And then it turns out like a good horror movie is just an awesome movie.

And that's where most of the cool high concept stuff is.

Like it's hand in hand with fantasy and sci-fi.

And so stuff like Alien and Aliens and the thing

all like brand new to me.

And I'm my mind is blown by it.

You know, like Schraub basically picks like every weekend, he'll show me something that everyone else has seen, but I haven't.

This is a fellow writer, Rob Schraub.

And I like, he just likes to experience his youth again through me.

I'm kind of like, the dinosaurs get loose?

What?

It was a thing like early, early on in me, like working in TV, where like I hadn't seen anything.

So I'd be like, you guys, I got this great idea.

What if someone sent a robot from the future back in time to murder the leader of this?

And everyone would be like, does he know?

Like,

is this a bit?

Like, hey, he becomes his friend later.

So

I feel like it's that for everything.

I'm going to pitch people like, what if a bunch of pals got together and did kart racing?

That's so funny.

Like, that's, I don't have a ton of like, I wasn't raised in like a religious household, but we were like a, like, if it's like rated R, like, you can't do that or whatever.

So there's stuff like that that I have missed like along the way.

Like, I still like feel bad if I like catch a glimpse of like a South Park.

I was like, oh, I'm going to get in big trouble.

I can't, those kids are really bad.

But last year, last year when I had COVID, I watched all of the Evil Dead movies and I was like, this is my personality.

It was like, Bruce Campbell's the greatest movie star on earth.

I love him.

I love these movies.

I don't want to talk about anything else.

And still, if somebody's like, Evil Dead, right?

I'm like, yeah, fuck yeah, Evil Dead, it rules.

Yeah.

I've told these two stories on the show before, I think.

One is that my kindergarten, which is now permanently shut down,

used to show us hard R horror movies at nap time.

Which

I have a, like, I've said it on the, I'm still hunting for this thing that I saw when I was like a child,

which was a woman in a shower with spiders crawling out of her mouth.

And I saw it at school.

And then the other thing is that my parents were really

proactive about showing me R-rated movies because they were like, you know, we want that we would pause, they would pause it and then they would be like, so here's how this effect is done.

So that I was never scared of the things because I'd be like, oh, wow, okay, yeah, I can see where the blood is like squirting out is like a, is like a squib.

Okay.

And my parents weren't in the industry or anything they were just like really interested in like educating me on the process so I wouldn't be afraid the flip side of that is that I it's very hard for me to get scared watching a thing or like playing a game because I'm like got that desensitization filter or screen up the whole time

uh so you've played you play Nintendo games

predominantly because of this Christian upbringing.

And basically kind of any buzzy indie that makes it to the Switch.

You know, I loved Hyper Light Drifter.

You know, like,

I really liked, you know, I mentioned Hades.

I also sunk a bunch of hours into Wizard of Legend, kind of like a very similar roguelike game.

I will say Wizard of Legend sounds like one of these random games we heard about today.

I feel like all these games wanted to be called Wizard of Legend, and they Googled it and they were like, fuck.

But I, yeah, and I like, you know, I like puzzles.

I never got to the portal games, but I feel like I would have really, really liked them.

I never got to like Half-Life and stuff, but I feel like I would really, really like it.

That's the thing with all of these movies and games is that

I get to them and I love them very, very much.

And everything is just exposure therapy.

So stuff I would have been scared.

Like, I'd love to try a Resident Evil game or maybe I'll play Alan Wake because everyone in the chat kept saying Resident Evil

as Alan Wake footage was playing.

But I it's now I'm open to everything.

Like I really want to consume all of it.

I just don't have the time to.

So, I like don't own a PS5.

I don't own the, what's the latest Xbox?

Xbox Series.

I don't have the Xbox Series.

Is that true?

It's called Xbox.

I mean, the branding is Xbox Series, and then it's either 4S or X.

Like, because they're the same console, but one is digital only.

So they call it the Xbox Series.

It's actually weaker, isn't it?

Yeah, a little bit.

Yeah.

What a weird.

When you turn it on, it goes like this.

You could have told me anything.

You could have been like, it's called the Xbox Requiem, and I would have been like, wow, we've been out of gaming for a while.

I'm a perfect mark for you guys today.

If you want someone to leave this room believing something, that's our main goal on this show is to trick and deceive.

So

I'm glad.

I'm good.

Good to know.

How did he get played?

Yeah,

listen and see.

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Matt, I realized something.

What's that?

We did this out of order.

What do you mean?

We're supposed to do the thing where we ask each other what we're playing.

Well, we could do that now.

We haven't really done that, really.

Wait, we talked about it a little bit.

I like the idea that Nick is watching a feed of this right now, being like, no!

No!

Wait, but isn't that the way it goes normally?

It's like, but before we introduce our guests, I want to stop you right.

I'm just going to stop you for a second.

Just because that's how we think it goes doesn't mean that's how it has to go all the time.

You know, Nick's here,

and he's always,

we're like Snow Piercer right now, okay?

We're on the back of the fucking train, okay?

Nick's in the front of the train, Ed Harris, eating his steak, his wagu beef.

We're in the back eating fucking slop.

Let's get to the fucking front of the train and throw his ass off.

You're absolutely right.

You're absolutely right.

Can I be the guy who takes the axe and puts it in the fish?

Yeah, hell yeah

albro uh a lot of times when i'm on twitter people ask about like my writing journey and how i got to a place do you want to talk about how you got to like i know you weren't a sketch comedian you know i wasn't how did you get to where you are like what was your journey did you go to school for writing i was my last quarter at ucla i took three film classes because i was done with all of my poli-sci prereqs um and were you like film i was gonna be i was gonna be a lawyer i i was like all set to talk for the rest of my life, which I'm doing a bad job of not doing, I guess.

But the like,

I took three classes.

I took like intro to stand-up comedy.

I took intro to screenwriting and I took intro to the business of film.

And kind of like all three of those professors, God bless them, at the end of the quarter, they all sort of like took me to the side and they were like, hey, are you interested in this at all?

You, you showed a, you know, both an aptitude and an enthusiasm that says you'd be pretty decent at it.

So I kind of just called it audible.

And so you do, you know, you do your odd PA gigs,

but I was just lucky enough to, I was telling jokes on Twitter.

I was writing scripts in my spare time.

I thought, and now I have my favorite job on my favorite show with my favorite people in the entire world because I wanted to write animation.

There were shows that like I grew up without TV, like without it in the household.

So the only stuff I got to watch was on Toonami when my parents were asleep when we were on vacation.

And so stuff like Samurai Jack was incredibly amazing.

And you get little hints of Dragon Ball Z and I'd be like, oh, what's that?

I want to do that.

And then you get to the entertainment industry and you learn that stuff's all written by the artists, like by people who have an additional skill that you don't have.

And they're all juggling two plates like a genius instead of just one.

So I, but, you know, I still wanted to work in animation.

I still wanted to write animation.

I love immersion so much.

I was just lucky enough to, I reached out to animation writers who were doing the thing.

A couple of them were nice enough to meet with me.

Eventually, I met Mike McMahon, my TV dad, and he hired me on Rick and Morty.

And I've been there for the last five years.

So just luck.

I feel like, you know,

there's a

everyone should say luck when you ask them how they got somewhere, but like me especially, I just luck.

I'm so fortunate to get to do this.

I really love everything.

I feel like I'm my one superpower is I have this fresh enthusiasm for everything because I grew up with none of it.

And so I get to, I get, I get that juice of being just kind of like a teenager who hasn't experienced anything before applied across everything that I could be learning or doing or writing.

Yeah, I mean, you and I and another writer on the show have an anime thread of text messages.

And I feel like that enthusiasm, I used to attribute it just to anime.

I used to be like, oh, Albro's the anime guy.

But now I know that that is for everything.

I'm the battery people get to chuck at stuff.

They like need extra energy.

I'm there.

Like, you haven't been to a sports game with me.

Sports games I treat as sanctioned yelling.

Like I'm just like allowed to express.

And I guess like that's why I eventually gravitated to comedy because everyone, it's free-flowing and everyone has energy.

And I was just excited to meet people who had that same level of enthusiasm for stuff.

I do love anime.

You can have me on that other podcast too when you eventually get to

the show.

Our sister podcast, Get Animated.

I have weekly episodes where we're currently covering the melancholy of Harhi Suzumiya.

That's right.

But you did, you mentioned something that I want to circle back to because you said that you would reach out to people and like ask them like, you know, for like advice or whatever.

When we told Nick that you were going to be on the show last week, he was like, oh, I know Albro.

Tell him I said hi.

So relaying that message.

Second thing he said, we hung out one time and we were baffled by this.

Because Nick doesn't hang out with anybody.

Yeah.

So I wanted to ask you, what was that like?

We got drinks in Mar Vista like seven years years ago.

Wow.

Nick was incredibly generous and kind to meet up with me.

He was a funny guy who also liked sports on the internet.

And ever since, I like, so it was very funny when Heather started this podcast because I was like, oh, Weiger, I know that guy.

Yeah, Nick's great.

I know we're all talking about how absentee he is.

Yeah.

Yeah, incredibly cool dude and was very kind to a young version of me.

Okay.

Well, I was hoping for some dirt.

So moving on.

I mean, the truth is, I think that you and I have have the exact same number of nick hangouts

because i got pizza with him once and i know it like i'm like oh the time i got pizza with him

i think i've hung out with nick one time too but it was for doboys

oh man you you dialed back the doboy war but i was excited to kind of be like an ambassador in the capital when the nuke started flying i was like whoa

am i part of podcast history i better dial it back

This is an anti-Nick Doughboy podcast now.

He's also, I think, because, you know, the chances of him actually listening to this episode are extremely low.

Yes.

So.

And everyone, don't, I'm just kidding.

You don't got to tag the Doughboys.

You don't got to tell Mitch.

Wait, I think everybody could just be in on it.

I think if you are a listener or if you are Mitch or if you are going to tell Mitch that this is happening, let him know that everybody is supposed to keep it away from Nick.

Okay, that's good.

Yeah, like we are all in, like, what's about to happen is that everybody is about to go into the second screening of the Blair Witch Project.

And your goal is to not walk out and be like, holy shit, that was real, so that they have a good time.

In the same way, you're all complicit in this game where we're going to declare war on Nick from Dobols.

Yeah,

that's how that's going to go.

But I think now it's time, Heather.

I think you can ask for it now.

What?

The big question.

question.

What was the big question?

You know.

What?

We ask it every single week.

Oh, what are you playing?

Just like that.

That's the question.

Oh, that was so anticlimactic.

Hey, everybody.

It's me.

Holy shit.

That's Joel Miller.

Yeah, it's me, Joel, just stopping by because I found this comic book over there in the corner that Ellie likes to read.

Y'all read this comic book before?

No, but I'm pretty sure the last time you were here, it was the exact same thing you said to us.

Oh, anyway.

He's fascinated by comic books.

His wife's doesn't have a lot of other.

It's not even so much, it's for me.

It's just that I can't make heads or tails of which ones are which.

It's all might as well be in another language.

Please help me relate to my child.

Please don't make fun of the way I speak right to me.

I'm not coming in here saying how you guys talk,

All sounding all normal and all that.

You know, Joel,

somebody plays you on television, Pedro Pascal, and he's one of the front.

He's one of the frontrunners for an Emmy nomination.

Really?

Yeah, they think he did a really good job portraying you.

How do you make you feel?

I think I need a slice of that pie.

I think I get the Emmy too.

If you play me on the TV, if you play a living person on the TV,

they get the trophy too give me the hardware that would be a horrible precedent why because rupert murdoch would have it at me

donald trump would have it at me

the slender man would have it at me

so joel did you come here for with with a question for us

oh no i i just found this comic book and i saw that you guys are in here what the comic book I thought you said something else.

What'd you think I said?

Comic book.

Well, yeah, some of the pages are stuck together.

There we go.

But yeah, I guess I was just wondering.

Oh, hey, look at this.

It's one of them trading cards that Ellie also collects.

Is that true?

Does she collect trading cards?

I think

in the second game, it's trading cards.

That's what Last of Us Part 2 is about.

That's right.

It's all about trading cards.

Ellie gets really into trading cards.

She moves her hyper-obsession into old media, into cards.

The cards are based on the comic book.

Yep, okay, great, great, great.

Zoo, I do have a question for y'all.

Oh.

What are you playing?

Well, Joel, I'll go first.

I'm just going to leave.

Oh, okay.

Bye.

Bye, Joel.

Bye, Joel.

So I wanted to cover this in

the upcoming segment, but I think this is the right place to do it, which is the Fortnite forecast.

So this is the final.

The way you did that as if it was just normal English.

It was ready.

So today, as of this record, is the final day of this current season of Fortnite.

We've seen a lot of things happen this season, a lot of new biomes, a real big

change to the map.

We've had swords came and went.

We had ODM gear came and is going, probably going to go away

in a collaboration with

beyond, no, across the Spider-Verse.

We've had some Spider-Man items.

We've had a Star Wars event, but all of that is going to change with Fortnite Wilds, which releases as of this record in...

24 or 48 hours.

Of some of the weapons that have been shown in this season three trailer,

we have also heard of the lever pistol, the mythic drum shotgun, helicopters.

Fucking, can you imagine flying a helicopter in Fortnite?

I can't.

I can now.

Not before, but now I can't.

Like Kylo Wren carrying

like a

Naruto-skinned AK-47

while flying at

Optimus Prime.

Yeah, crashing into Ariana Grande.

There will be an epic or legendary thermal bolt action sniper and potentially a ropes and chains launcher.

A lot of cool stuff is coming to my favorite game in just a couple of days.

I saw them enter the temple in that trailer and I was like, oh man, what's going to happen in this Indiana Jones pastiche and then Optimus Prime.

Yeah,

they they're like psych bitch.

There was a moment during your preamble where you were like, fuck a car.

Where I was like, oh, she's talking about the Fortnite trailer.

Like, maybe this was in that copy, too.

There was, yeah, no, they showed the trailer.

The trailer just dropped as of Summer Games Fest, which is a weird time to drop a trailer is a day before the thing.

That's a strange hype cycle.

But anyway, yeah, Optimus Prime is like the big collab, but he gets shrunk down to person size, Which I'm all in favor of the collabs that like make sense of the physical space of the like the relationship between these characters.

He should have been fucking big.

I'm cool with it as long as he also turns into an even smaller truck.

Like if he can be rolling around at everyone's knee height, you know, and still shooting.

Yeah, that's the ultimate crouch mechanic.

If that mechanic works, I hope it is across all skins so that like if you're like fucking, I don't know, Wile Coyote or some shit, you turn into a like deformed truck.

But yeah, it's a, it's, uh, it's jungle themed.

Uh, there's temples, there's uh, like bomb flowers and poison flowers, two kinds of llamas.

Uh, if you don't play Fortnite, none of this means anything to you.

Yeah, but imagine Optimus Prime with uh with a dragon ball sickle

chasing down,

I don't know.

Is Walter White in the game?

I don't think so.

Not yet.

No, but they'll add him and ASAC Trader to the game.

My impression of Fortnite is still the PUBG rip-off, like the first moment where it's like, oh, you drop on an island and everyone kills each other until there's one left.

So everything you're describing right now sounds like a total fever drink.

I'd say that's a good idea.

He was in ODM gear.

I was like, what?

Wait,

ODM from Attack on

the game.

What is there to grab onto?

Everything.

You grab onto trees and buildings.

And massive stacks of wood.

Yeah, massive stacks of wood.

And you can attack.

It was honestly, I think, my favorite weapon of the entire season after the sword, which a glitch was discovered very late in the season.

So they suddenly took the swords away from all of us, which was a real bummer.

But you could use ODM

or Spider-Man hands.

You're describing a way cooler game

than a battle royale shooter.

It's so good.

It's so good.

That's awesome.

But yeah, so that I've been playing my last moments of this season of Fortnite.

And I've been also playing Zelda, though I am not nearly as far as you guys, mostly because I'll get fixated on doing something I'm not supposed to do until I actually get told by the game I'm not allowed to do it.

Yeah.

Which I've now received two Red X's and I am extremely proud of it.

But that's pretty good, actually.

I think those are

a rare collectible.

Yeah, I want to watch you solve some of those puzzles.

I remember listening to you talk about just like smashing a conglomerate,

you know,

this utter

puzzle.

Where I like literally just made a ball and climbed it.

You're playing the game like Katamari.

Which is,

I'd say that's the beauty of the game.

It's every game in one.

There's also, I mean, there have been multiple times before I found the paraglider, which is in the starting area,

that I would get to a place that I could not get down from because you're not supposed to collect all of the stuff you can to build a bridge and then tilt it towards the sky.

But if you, if you stagger, like if you put, use minecarts as a, a, a, junction in between like long periods of logs,

you can climb up the logs and then then rest and get your stamina back and then continue to climb up logs.

Incredible.

Which is what I've been, my puzzle solving is

this isn't a puzzle, but let's make it into one.

So that's what I've been playing.

Great.

Albert, what have you been playing?

Besides, I guess, Tears of the Kingdom.

Like only Tears of the Kingdom and nothing else.

I haven't been playing sleep or playing eat or

I guess.

And like what, like, how have you been approaching certain like tasks?

Are you, have you, like, you said you haven't been building mechs, but like, have you had a lot of fun

just like thinking outside the box a little bit?

I really, I really like the genre immersion the game has.

I like, I don't want to spoil anything, but a thought I keep having and that I definitely had during the final

boss fight last night was like, oh my God, I can't believe that this franchise has come to a place where it feels so organic that I'm getting to do every version of movie in it.

Like, I love the moon bounce physics in the water temple.

Like, I love the minecart mayhem of the fire temple.

Like, I love the Mario level that is jumping from ship to ship in the Rito

Wind Temple.

Like, there's so many different games wrapped up in it.

And so, my favorite thing to do is just wear a cool little outfit and go conduct myself like I'm the sheriff of this here town, you know, or

whatever the game requires of me, I'll slip into that skin.

I guess, and then like before Tears of the Kingdom came out, was there anything that you were like, oh, I better say goodbye to this?

Oh, man.

I wish there was.

There's so many cool indies that I haven't gotten around to that I definitely have purchased but not played.

Sure.

But

I was waiting for this game for six years.

I was going to buy a physical copy because I didn't know that I had the memory on my SD card.

And then at like 12.30, I was like, fuck it.

No.

Like, I need to be part of this.

And like, have not, you know, talked to to my family since.

But I know, I'm trying to think of things about the game that I'm doing creatively.

And I think like I'm a little insecure about the fact that I'm able to put so much time into the game without being a chaos agent like Heather is.

But also,

now I'm also, the game invites you to think about what else would be cool because so often you think like they introduce stuff you never thought the game could do.

So like one pitch that I would really love to be added to any DLC.

I keep praying for for it to happen and it doesn't happen to me is I want there to be a lightroot angler fish thing where like I'm walking up to a lightroot and I'm all relaxed because I'm safe now.

And then suddenly all the ground around me rises up.

Like I'm like, now I'm just like rooting for more content, you know?

It's, God, it's such a cool game.

I'm trying to recreate the light cycle from the last one.

But yeah, God, I wish I played it more interestingly.

I just know I love staring at the sunset.

I'm playing it the most normal way possible.

Like, I'm just, I have,

a couple of times as I've been playing it,

I've been like, God, I'm like kind of stuck.

I don't necessarily know.

Some of like the clues that they give you about where to go next can be like a little obtuse sometimes that I'll like look at like a guide just like for the first hint.

Like, I just need to know where to go.

And then I get there and then I'm not looking at it for like, I just, I don't want to really spoil what I was just doing, but I needed help getting somewhere.

I didn't know where to go.

As soon as I went there, I started to follow the path more

just like on my own.

And now I'm at a spot where I'm like, I can't believe I fucking got here by myself.

This is like such an amazing, cool thing that I'm doing.

It's a story thing that comes later in the story.

I think I know what you're talking about.

I was looking for someone.

As it was happening, I was like, I can't believe I get to do this in a Zelda.

It's unbelievable.

I can't believe I get to do this in a Zelda.

It's such a cool thing.

I'm really loving that.

Are you guys talking about trying to build a launcher that gets the horse onto Great Sky Island?

No, we are talking.

No,

it's a part where you have to make a big robot that shoots flames out of his dick.

Honestly, I would love to see Heather quests incorporated into the game.

Like if a guy walks up to me, he's like, oh,

and the text is like, please launch my horse to Sky Eye.

Now I want NPCs to beg me to break the physics of their work.

Rid me of this horse.

They do always talk to you like that, though.

Like they make a noise like they're like about to like fart before they talk to you.

But I'm playing that still, obviously, and I'll be playing it still for a while.

But the main thing that I'm really playing right now is Diablo 4.

And the thing about Diablo is it's just clicking.

It's just all clicking.

It is just clicking.

And it's, that's all it needs to be.

It's so fun.

You just go around, you click.

Click, click, click.

That's all you do.

That sounds like my worst enemy.

But you have different things that you can do, right?

So, like, you have the one click B, this one attack, and then you have this other button on your keyboard.

Maybe that's your like flamethrower if you're a sorcerer like me.

And you just hold that fucker down.

That's just the two.

You have two buttons?

Well, no, I have like five.

Okay.

That's just, I gave you a second example.

Yeah, you made it sound like it was.

Like Minesweeper.

No, no, this

got so many buttons.

You don't even believe it.

Okay.

Okay.

Oh, okay.

I'm back on board.

Nah, it's got a lot of buttons.

But I've been playing that.

I squatted up with some of the fine folks in the Discord.

And boy, was that a fucking blast.

Man.

Our Discord has, I mean, I play with them when I play Fortnite all the time, and they are just the best group.

And if you're not on the Discord and you want to play with us hosts,

just discord.gg slash get played.

That's right.

And that's

where we did it.

that's where all the cool listeners are.

So if you're

no, it's true.

It's true.

I'm going to go ahead and say this.

You want to be there and you're cool, join in.

If you're not cool, or for some reason you don't like us, don't go in there.

We don't want you in there.

If you listen to the show for some reason, you're like, well, I like when they talk about the games, but I hate when they do everything else.

We don't want to hear it.

This is an absolutely true story.

One time I was in Japan and I had my cell phone with me, but I was

following somebody around in the city and having a good time.

And then they locked me on a roof of a skyscraper because they were a crazy person.

That's a true story.

And my cell phone didn't have wireless access.

So this next ad is specifically something that I could have used in the past.

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Why don't we get into the task in hand?

Yeah, what a perfect opportunity to transition.

Exactly.

I was done talking about the other thing.

See, you were talking about

the summer of Discord, and now it's time to talk about the Summer Games Fest.

That's exactly what I'm talking about.

Guys, I made a list of all the games covered in the Summer Games Fest.

And I can read it all as a straight list.

And then, or we can just go through one by one and see if we have anything that we remember about these incredible game trailers that were dropped this afternoon.

We can, I think that's a good way to do it.

Great.

Let's go do it.

Prince of Persia.

Look.

That's my fucking God.

They like, I was already sort of like, okay, like, what are we, what is this even going to be?

Right out the gate, they fucking dropped their fucking mat nip.

And I was like, let's go.

This is it for me.

I'm happy now.

Whatever else they show, it could be all bullshit the rest of the time.

But this Prince of Persia is back to its sort of like its roots, kind of.

Like it's a two, like not 2D, but it's a side-scrolling sort of like platformer game.

And that's, that's interesting to me because I've never played one of those before.

Do you have any experience with the Prince of Persia?

I watched, I watched this trailer and I wrote down Prince of Persia Metroid Van.

It looks cool.

I don't know.

I'll be checking that out.

It seems like

I really loved,

I've recently been

a Metroid guy.

So that style of game is

right up my alley.

So I'm excited to see my guy

in a familiar but different setting for me.

I have Prince of Persia on my macintosh classic oh which is the

oh oh

this is text from zelda

uh that was my first introduction introduction to prince of persia okay and it plays really poorly yeah and it's not enjoyable funny that it's like i mean the sands of time is probably like the thing that made it like a playstation 2 yeah like it made it like a you know if you could call it a household name, a house, like a,

a, a, a good franchise.

I feel like Jake Gyllenhaal made it a household name.

Well, because people were talking about it in a different way

in those, in the way that like, hey, maybe this was not cool.

Like immediately.

But

I, uh, yeah,

I'm a big fan of the franchise.

Uh, so I'm excited to check this one out for sure.

Cool.

All right.

Up next was Mortal.

These are, by the way, if you're, you're like, what the fuck is a Summer Games Fest?

E3 used to be a big conference that would happen in the summer, and they would demo all the new games, and

games journalists would get to play previews, and that got scaled down and then destroyed itself.

So now there's like these solitary events, like the Summer Games Fest that just announces all of the upcoming shit.

So that's what we're talking about.

We're not just randomly choosing games.

These were things

on a YouTube.

And these are, it's hosted by Jeff Kiley, who's like a, like.

He was a journalist, right?

And he started like the whole, I don't know if what his.

I don't know.

I don't know.

But after they showed prince of persia they showed mortal kombat one and ed boone came out to talk about it i believe when i was a kid ed boone came to my school to talk to us about making a video game and uh showed us drawings of mortal kombat before it came out have you only gone to the coolest schools of all time

at my kindergarten they showed us r-rated movies every day uh and then somebody came by and explained how to make a video game or or i was like a government test subject.

Yeah.

Yeah, you're like

in the like Black Widow Project.

But I grew up in Chicago, so it, like, I was like, who was the guy who came in and showed us the drawings of the forearmed guy?

And it was like, we have a video game company.

I must, must, anyway, I don't know.

But yeah, I watched Mortal Kombat 1.

This was my first exposure to Mortal Kombat 1 footage.

I haven't really played much of the Latter-day Mortal Kombat games.

I knew enough to know that now when you punch somebody, you go inside his body and you see his ribs explode.

Yes, that was nasty when they were showing that.

That was sickening.

It was, there was a point where Raiden did a fatality where he cut somebody in half and then used his electricity to grab the halves that were cut in half and then pull them together with electric force and smash them into bits.

And I felt like the second half of the fatality was boring because I was like,

no, the the cool thing is the cut in half.

The second part is just salsa.

But yeah, I was, uh, I, I, there's something about the frame, the like limited frames of animation in Mortal Kombat games where it's like suddenly your leg is extended for a kick.

And it was neat seeing that incorporated in a 3D Mortal Kombat game.

I guess I've never really actually focused on the new stuff as much, but I liked, I like that it looked, okay, that's enough, right?

Unless you have to do it.

It's like pretty good.

I mean, I wrote down Mortal Kombat New 52

because I was trying to, I was like, oh, I recognize them, but they, yeah, they're different now.

I feel like.

Those guys are brothers now.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Cool.

They're siblings.

I really liked that you can, I think this was the game where they were talking about how now you get like a buddy that you can sort of like tap in.

I thought it's really cool that Mortal Kombat lets your barfriend shank them

in the heat of battle.

I think it's cool that Ed Boone is still like the guy for Mortal Kombat.

Because that doesn't always happen where the guy who started it gets to do it.

If it does, they might end up in prison for insider trading.

Yeah, that should also be.

And so

Yujinaka, who created Sonic the Hedgehog, there was a Sonic Superstars trailer that debuted, but Yujinaka is in jail currently.

He's been sentenced to jail for two and a half years for insider trading.

Anyway, what were you going to say?

And inventing Sonic?

Yeah, inventing Sonic.

Well, that's the big thing.

They're like,

you get arrested for a crime, but the real crime was what he did, you know, many years ago, which was actually invent Sonic.

They talked about how excited they were that Jean-Claude Van Damme voices a character.

Yeah.

And I was like, just make Jean-Claude Van Damme a fucking kid like that.

If you're like starting your universe all over again, like get him in there.

And I was like, you know what?

Maybe people can't do that.

And then the next fucking thing they showed was that Nick Cage is a a playable character.

Well, first we saw Path of Exile 2.

Okay.

And then after that,

after that, we saw some...

I couldn't figure out if this was...

A Street Fighter VI crossover with another game or if this was a mode coming to Street Fighter VI where Ryu is a robot fighting dinosaurs.

So it was the former.

It is a Street Fighter collab for this other game called Exoprimal.

Okay.

Which, to me, sucks.

The other thing is better.

If dinosaurs and robots are coming to Street Fighter, that's good.

Yeah.

But Street Fighter going to dinosaurs and robots is bad.

Yeah.

Or not interesting to me.

I don't care.

I'm not going to play Exopal.

I was bummed out because the,

and we'll get into this when we cover it, but the World Tour mode is so

crazy anyway.

I was like, oh, they're going to just put dinosaurs in there.

Dinosaurs.

Who cares?

All right.

So then we saw Nicholas Cage in Dead by daylight.

He came out on stage wearing a very nice suit.

Let's take one step back for a second.

They show him in the trailer.

The audience is laughing.

They can't believe this.

They think it's so crazy.

Jeff is like,

please welcome Nicholas Cage.

Those laughs.

Turn to applause because everyone's excited to see the guy that they were laughing at.

Yeah.

I think that audience should have been ashamed of themselves.

How dare they?

Yeah, it's stupid.

Who cares?

You didn't know he was there.

And then I felt like Nick Cage came out sort of feeling that laugh a little bit and used it.

Yeah.

Cause he brought so much enthusiasm.

I love him.

He feels like he's permanently locked in Caster Troy from face-off.

Yeah.

Like he's like, he was wearing like a shiny suit.

He was extremely smooth.

Like most of these, if you drop a celebrity into a thing, unless it's Kiana Reeves,

like it is awkwardness.

It is just like,

so you guys like video games?

Well,

you're going to love me,

Brian Cox from Succession in Fortnite.

The Roy's are coming to Fortnite.

Imagine that squad.

Holy shit.

Fucking sniping as Cousin Greg.

Oh, my God.

The fucking

gojo guy.

Oh my God.

Okay.

Anyway.

Nick Cage was so polished on that stage that I was surprised when he got sort of like ushered off really quickly because I was like, no, you let the man cook.

Yeah.

Let him cook.

Keep him out here.

And he was doing, he was like, it was all so clean that I was like, well, he can't be like going overtime.

Like, none of this feels like a run-on.

And then they were like, come on, man, get out of here.

He also had what I would consider genuine enthusiasm for the thing he was doing.

He was like, I'm excited to be in this.

Like I'm someone close to my family really likes this game.

So like I thought, oh, cool.

Like I'll go do that.

You know, I'll go be in this game.

Joel?

Hey, sorry.

Oh, I think he said that I loved so much was from the scream to the grunt.

You know, I'm with you.

Oh, I like that.

He called,

I wrote down a couple of things that he wrote too.

Well, first of all, I was like, his plugs look incredible.

His hair looks so good.

He looked amazing.

I thought his outfit was great.

He looks amazing.

He looks good.

Yeah.

And I also wrote down that he's maybe my favorite lunatic.

I love it.

I just love him.

Which is funny because I also wrote down, is he insane now?

Question mark.

He owns dinosaur bones, Ted.

What do you think?

I would too.

Yeah, I guess if you're someone like him who's just like, well, I guess I'm just going to do post-game side quests now.

Like, I've sort of done everything.

Yeah, I'll go be in a video game now.

I don't care.

He wrote down, or he said,

well, so I wrote down, down oh my god oh my fucking god they've round up nick cage haha ha ha ha

and he's like thanks for inviting me to your really cool club i thought that was a burn

and then uh

he called uh dead by daylight a museum

a museum of horror which i was like this guy gives a shit about what he's talking about yeah this rules he rules he also was like satako was in this and i like satako yeah and i was like what

like that's not a real guy dude this ghost ghost you're talking about ain't real.

It's like, oh, he's in there.

I started that segment going, like, ah, we're going to put Nick Cage in every video game now.

And I ended that segment going, put Nick Cage in every video game now.

Yeah, he was great.

I was so happy to see him.

And that was the one like celebrity presentation of the whole thing, kind of.

Like, there's some guys that are in the games, but nobody, nobody, Nick Cage caliber.

Keanu is in Fortnite as John Wick.

I propose to Epic Games that you put in four Nick Cage characters in Fortnite so that you can play as a squad of Nick's.

The guy from

Family Man, the guy from Weatherman, the guy from The Wicker Man, the guy from Mandy, but only after he's drunk a mason jar full of Last Jesus.

The Nicholas Cage Man universe.

All right.

After that, we saw a preview for The Witcher Season 3 on Netflix, which I thought Henry Cavill wasn't in it anymore.

I thought he was gone.

They made a big title.

I'm so fucking confused.

I wrote down, I don't watch this show, but I'd like to.

And then when the trailer was over, I wrote, never mind.

Yeah,

I really like fantasy, but it was hard for me to get excited about The Witcher because I didn't know the game world.

And I feel like I have to stop doing that because if I had denied myself access to The Last of Us because I hadn't played the game,

then I would have robbed myself of a cool experience.

Yeah.

After the Witcher season three, we were shown Witchfire.

Yeah, I don't know.

That's

this is now we're in the stretch of the show, in this of the showcase here, where everything they show is the same and

like bullshit, like just like nonsense.

Wait, wait, wait, because the next after Witchfire was Crossfire.

Yeah, that's basically the same thing.

You see how they booked it, right?

Yeah.

Witcher, Witchfire, Crossfire.

yeah they're doing a they're doing a large yeah

but crossfire was for psvr too and i was excited to use because uh so the only thing i want to do in vr is use two pistols yes and have them aimed in different places you got that's it but i but but i i apparently i should be able to do that in a game that you've already played There's a game, I can't remember what it's called, so it's,

but I was listening to somebody on a podcast recently, and they were like, we need need to figure out a different kind of game for VR that isn't two guns.

Like, all VR games are that.

Oh, is it?

Yeah.

So it is sort of just like, or it's like Beat Saber.

Like, those are like the two types of like VR games.

The only game that I've played extensively in VR is the one where I punched my own ground on accident, which I think I've told the story of.

I think you should.

Yeah.

There's a medieval game.

Where you're in an arena and people come in and you can fight them with a sword if you have it.

But I usually throw my sword at them and then rush them and punch them because the punching

works.

And I got somebody knocked down and then I leaned over them and punched them as hard as I could and cracked my own fist against my garage floor.

The game that I'm thinking of is

Pistol Whip.

Check out Pistol Whip because you'll like it.

Okay.

Yeah.

Up next was Remnant 2.

Yeah, like like this, like

the thing about

this stretch in the show, I suddenly started to feel so bad for everyone who worked on these games because I was like, how would it not run together?

Like you would feel so bummed out as the same voice said over and over, like new abilities, new world, new friends.

And simultaneously, all the gameplay looked so similar.

Yeah.

Everything has a like, and I haven't played the Souls games, but I now have kind of, from watching gameplay videos online, a grasp of what they look like.

They all kind of look like they're starting to ape that now in like a really dedicated way.

Like,

um, it was, it was a, a bummer.

I also thought that there was something funny about Witchfire, which was just that, like, the copy in the ad is like, it's time to burn some witches.

Is it?

We've done that already.

That time was a couple of hundred years ago,

and we were wrong.

After that, we saw a new Sonic the Hedgehog game, which was Sonic Superstars, which is a 2D Sonic game.

And then they were like, and you can play as all his Sonic friends.

And I was like, fuck.

Playing as Big the Cat in 2D is going to be grit, and you can't do it.

It's Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy Rose.

Only his best friends, it sounds like.

Yeah.

It's horse shit.

It's horse shit.

They all turned into jellyfish at one point, though, so you could pretend that jellyfish is Big the Cat.

cat.

Yes.

No SBO.

No, yeah, no SBO.

No shadow.

There was an ominous dog that showed up at the end of that trailer.

Ominous dog.

Yeah.

No, that's his name.

Ominous dog.

I really wanted to be excited about Sonic 2D, and I wasn't.

That's my takeaway from it.

I was like, oh, man.

I feel nothing.

They're doing too many different types of things.

I think they're sort of like, everybody loves Sonic so much.

And like, it's true, like, people, there are a lot of big fans of Sonic, but like, they're pumping out too much Sonic stuff right now.

They got to scale it back.

Later on, there's a crash announcement.

Yes.

And I'm like,

we

hold on.

Too many?

We don't need all this crash.

I love crash.

He's my guy.

I'm not playing this.

After Sonic, we saw saw an anime game, which I have written down here as anime game, but I did not catch the name of it.

Oh, you're talking of.

Perhaps could you be speaking of Honkai Starrail?

So, yeah, I don't even know what platform that's on.

I don't even, yeah, I don't even know.

Did it seem like it was an expansion for an existing game?

I don't know.

It did.

I was surprised when the name at the end of it wasn't something I knew already.

Yeah, it was like an expansion for like Genshin Investigation.

Genshin Effects.

Yeah, absolutely.

Then the next game was

Robot Pinocchio.

Lies of P.

Lies.

The thing about lies of P

is

that I think they just missed a big point.

We aren't making up this game.

It's real.

And it's a souls-like game where I believe you play Pinocchio.

Yeah, like full metal alchemist, metal-armed Pinocchio.

And so this is what I wanted to bring up.

They're making his arm weird.

Sweetie, it's his nose.

You fucked up.

Maybe his power is lying.

Oh.

Like, maybe you equip lies and then, like, you can look at people, say a lie, and like your nose will impale the person.

Oh, interesting.

When the title, I so I thought I misheard the title.

And then when it came up at the end and it said lies of P,

I was like, you, nobody said that out loud.

Yeah, that's, that's a bummer.

But also, like,

I can sort of go along with like the idea of not calling it like

Pinocchio the game or something because like it's like, okay, well, like, this is like a, oh, it's a game for kids.

I know the story of Pinocchio.

They're trying to go a different way or something.

What if, like, because the one thing I will say is that this game, out of a whole bunch of games that very much blended together, I thought this one had the coolest art.

Like, it had really interesting, really cool-looking art.

And I was like, oh, what if his lies are the reason we're in a post-apocalyptic wasteland?

Yeah, that's like he lied so bad.

I think it should have been called Kill Nokio.

Like, just one, like, yeah, coming this fall.

Kill Nokio.

All right.

After that was Akira Toriyama's Sandland, which looks like Dragon Quest.

It looks nice.

Looks cool.

I liked the way this looked.

Yeah.

I liked Sandland.

My one note.

I wish it was Sandlerland.

If you're at Epic and you play and you're in charge of Fortnite, we also would like a Adam Sandler pack.

Yeah, absolutely.

Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, Click,

Uncut Gems.

And Uncut Jems.

And the Rain Over Me guy at the bonus.

If you saw a squad of the Uncut Gems gems guys running at you, you'd be like, fuck.

This is how I win.

They announced an Annapurna showcase, which Annapurna made stray, which we've covered on this show.

Yes.

Then

there was a game called Throne and Liberty, which I have no notes on.

No.

I was just stressed out like see, I was thrown in Liberty.

After that, I have, fuck, I missed one.

What was that called?

I think it's called Warhaven.

It's funny because I think I could just say anything.

Warhaven, nothing, nothing, no excitement.

Okay.

No,

there's not, there's a couple of things coming up that I'm stoked about.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

Then we saw Party Animals.

Yeah.

The trailer of which was people playing the game already.

Yeah, it was like people on Twitch laughing while they played the game, which honestly, look, it's not my kind of game, but what a great way of selling.

Have you guys seen the newest trailer for Gran Turismo, the movie?

Yes.

It's a real classic style Hollywood trailer where it's the guys who made the movie sitting on chairs, a la like

Citizen Kane, you know, like, we're about to make a movie and perhaps you'd like to be invited.

And like that kind of thing.

Except it was like these guys who were like, hey, we know the premise of our movie seems ridiculous.

So here's the guy who did it.

Yes.

Here's the real guy who played the game so much that he became a racer.

Yes.

And then here's the guy playing him, the actor.

And the actor's like, you are so fucking cool.

Yeah.

But like, that's what this felt like.

It was like, hey, this might not be your kind of game, but we're going to show people enjoying themselves playing it.

These fuckers are having fun.

So maybe you want to give it a second shot.

Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know.

It looks like Fall Guys, but with little animals.

Yeah.

So it's like, yeah, all right.

All right, great, cool.

This is a type of game now.

yeah yeah dying light

no no idea no memory it did not imprint crash team rumble aforementioned too much crash i don't think we need crash doing all the stuff that like mario does too you know what i mean i don't i don't know if we need like a crash mario party uh then we saw alan wake 2 which uh Earlier Albert said that the chat was blowing up with Resident Evil, Resident Evil, because it looks like Resident Evil 4.

It looks so much like Resident Evil that I'm like interested interested in playing it.

Because I have not played the original Alan Wake.

People say it's good.

It has its fans.

Doesn't it have a famous author behind it?

Is that?

I think it's Alan Wake.

Is it?

Well, there was a guy.

The game is Alan Wake, and then a guy came out to present it who was Sam Lake.

Oh, yeah.

Sam Lake, who is the physical model of Max Payne.

Ice cold.

I'm still not over it.

Well, yeah, no, so I didn't play Alan Wake one either.

I remembered having really good flashlight looks.

Yeah, that's what I'm sort of interested in.

I was like, oh, they got a nice flashlight.

And the new one,

I don't want to spoil it.

If you haven't seen the trailer, the flashlight's back.

Let's just say they got some more batteries.

With more flashlights.

Yeah.

And it looks, I'll say it looks better.

High beam.

Fog light.

It seems like this one is more like...

like Twin Peaks inspired kind of.

I think it's like sort of like a weird world kind of.

So I'm interested.

It looked the the

reason I looked at the chat at all was because this trailer didn't play for a second.

There was a black screen and I saw one comment I was very happy with was which was Helen wake up.

But it looked cool.

I thought that game looked interesting.

That's the type of Resident Evil thing I think I'm going to try on for size.

Yeah.

The next game name is not fake.

It's Warhammer Space Marine 2.

Yeah.

Who's interested?

And here's, I feel bad about this because I feel like there there are a lot of people listening who are like, I like, I'm excited about Remnant 2.

I loved Remnant.

And I just am like, I've never heard of that.

Yeah.

But that's fine.

And, you know, we're a video game podcast.

We should know all the video games.

Well, yeah, I mean, here's, yeah, if you, we should not, no, we shouldn't.

We shouldn't know all the video games.

That's not what you listen.

This isn't a news show.

I need to know that they know all the games.

We are, we are barely competent idiots who talk tangentially about video games.

After this, we saw,

Yes, Your Grace Snowfall.

And I know that I think Nick, I think Nick likes Yes, Your Grace, or pitched it at one point for us to do in the old format as like a weird game.

It's, it's a, it, it, it's like 8-bit graphics over a fully lush, yeah, modern background.

Yes.

I dug, I dug the look.

It seems like the gameplay has a fascinating amount of like grounded governance to it, where one of the mechanics is shake a peasant's hand.

Like that was, that was in the trailer.

Yeah, that does sound like a nick game.

You guys, there's like five buttons you have to press to get him to drink a cup of water.

This guy has to sigh.

Yeah,

I was not dismissive of, yes, you're Grace Snowfall.

I just thought that the name was funny.

After this, we saw John Carpenter's Toxic Commando.

Are you excited about John Carpenter game?

If he's excited about it.

Is he?

I don't know that well, he likes video games a lot now.

Like I hear he's mostly a video game playing guy these days.

Yes, and this is the only reason why I would even be excited about like a zombie shooting game is because he's doing it.

Like that's interesting.

I was like, oh, like maybe there's like some angle that he hasn't found satisfying yet that he was like, I'll do it myself.

Like I'll get in there and I'll pitch this game or whatever.

The one mechanic I liked was driving through zombies.

We need that more.

When I saw like Toxic Commando, is that

I saw Toxic Commando, and then I saw a car hitting a body, and I was like, my God, it's a video game built

entirely around that one guy from RoboCop.

All the bad guys are glowing green, like former barrel of acid guys that turn into goop when you hit them.

That guy makes the worst sound.

Can we pull that clip up?

Can we just see

that clip?

Because he makes, I swear, it's been a long time since I've seen it, but I swear before he gets hit, he goes,

I so I was a little let down when it was when it was just zombies, yeah.

I, so I was like, oh, a little less zombie, a little more toxic.

Uh, but John Carpenter, I'm excited, I'm still excited.

Yeah, okay, I think it's this.

I've never seen it before.

Oh, no,

okay,

now I gotcha.

We've seen a guy get hit by toxic waste.

He's melting.

Grabbing another guy.

Don't touch me, man.

Oh, yes.

Yes.

You could see why I was excited for a video game built around that concept.

Yeah, no.

And I guess as somebody who

had never seen something like that before for so long,

it must have been so thrilling.

Having seen a lot of things like that, I'm thinking about maybe going to church.

I hadn't seen that clip in so long, and it is so much longer than I remembered it being.

I remembered him making one noise, he makes a noise for like 50 seconds.

Yeah, you understood it.

He's in a lot, a lot of pain,

A lot of pain.

And then that guy, don't touch me, man.

I guess I'll have to watch that at some point.

I can also imagine a chemical that aggressive,

like that is at street level, right on a road.

Oh, my God.

Okay.

Then we saw Baldur's Gate 3.

And I know that that's a Nick game.

Yeah, that's a Nick game.

Nick's excited about that.

The trailer starts with someone going, I've now taken the Baldur sword and I will rule the Baldur Gates and the Baldur people.

And I was really stoked on the idea that that game just has the word Baldur before it.

For every single nick.

I got to get in my Baldur car and Kose hide in my Balder wife.

Excuse me, sir.

Do you have five Balder apples?

Balder son, come here.

I'd like to tell you something.

After that, we saw Spider-Man 2 exclusively for the PlayStation 5, where you can play as Peter or Miles.

Yes.

Love that Miles is just like

one and one now.

One and one.

He's Spider-Man.

And I think

we talked about this on Get Animate.

He's going to usurp.

Peter, the main Spider-Man throne at some point.

Because he's just so beloved and has such a great history now that he's just going to be the guy.

Yeah.

Which is awesome.

I like, there's a couple takeaways.

They showed the box art like and like that was like an exciting thing.

You know, it's just going to be on my shelf.

Cool.

They mentioned that Venom is not Eddie Brock, which is usually who he is in the classic story.

And then they dropped the release date.

Which was October 20th of this year.

Yeah.

Which I'm very excited about.

Yeah.

It's going to be a big spider year.

Yeah.

It's the year of the spider.

It is.

They talked about the main villain being Craven.

That's which I love.

Craven's my guy.

He's an interesting villain.

There's a lot of theories going around about who the venom is, and you know, could be maybe it gets on Craven.

Oh, okay.

Is that bad?

I don't know.

Well, think about it.

I don't know, Heather.

Is that bad?

Think about this.

Craven the Hunter, this fucking big, tough hunter guy,

gets a hold of the alien symbiote.

He's twice as strong now.

That's well, that's the other thing I have written down: in quotes, who is Venom, and then not in quotes, LOL.

Yeah, like it's like, we got to know who this is.

Because when they were like, it's not any bronch, it's not that who is venom, and everyone knows we are venom.

I was like, yeah, who is Venom?

You know, there's a big, there's a big one coming up.

Yes.

We're going to get to it.

I feel like there's a couple of these that we can just.

Well, we have to talk about PAL World, which was next.

PAL World.

Pal World.

PAL World.

Pal World.

PAL World is Pokemon with guns.

I'm all in on Pal World.

That's it.

There's nothing else.

If you haven't seen a trailer for PAL World, look, it's Pokemon with guns.

It's what Jeff said before the trailer.

And then the first part of the trailer is Pokemon.

And the second part of the trailer is Pokemon with guns.

Yes.

And it sounds like it's like hyperbole or like it's just like a thing to say to like make it like understandable

for a typical audience.

These look like they're pokemon they like they look like they're just pokemon they look like

the actual pokemon but they're holding real not like soft guns no these are regular guns tactile missiles yeah if you were like i want to see chikorita hold an ar-15 this is the game for you

I don't like guns in the real world, but in a video game, I love them.

And in a Pokemon video game, I super love them.

And this is a Pokemon Pokemon video game.

I like all the comments were lawsuit, lawsuit, lawsuit, because I saw like Puplip and Latios.

I saw actual Pokemon-looking Pokemon.

It was pretty nuts.

And I got to say, I was listening to the audience after that trailer aired.

And literally somebody said, what the fuck?

The audience had like a hot mic.

It was like a little too hot.

Because I think maybe they wanted to juice the applause or something.

Like, let's get this mic nice and hot.

What the fuck?

I heard an audible, audible what the fuck.

It was so funny.

Um, and I gotta say, um,

well, the next game was this Lord of the Rings game.

They was like, this looks like shit.

I, yeah, I wrote, I'm bored now.

Yeah, and then the next one, I wrote Armor Game Question Mark.

Yeah, but then

we got to a big moment,

which was a mobile Final Fantasy VII game called Ever Crisis,

which has this tagline, we still don't know Sephiroth.

I screamed.

I was like, what the fuck are you talking about?

We know everything about this guy.

He's in a hundred games.

He's in remakes of his own games.

He's in everything.

He starts this game by answering a cell phone or no, calling somebody on a cell phone.

Yeah.

Which one of the things I love about the sort of anachronistic technology of the Final Fantasy VII world is that when Advent Children came out, they did a huge cell phone collaboration.

And so you could buy the cell phone that was in Final Fantasy Advent Children.

Yes.

Unfortunately, that means that in order for that to make sense, all of the phones have to be that era of phones so that if you watch it chronologically, you can see the same flip phone like kind of appear throughout all the Final Fantasy VII games.

Yeah.

And fucking Sephiroth has a flip phone.

We don't really know Sephiroth.

This is the game where you like see him go back to his studio apartment.

He's like sad.

He's like calling his mom.

He's got like

nobody knows me.

He's eating the chip crumbs in the bag.

Then.

Oh, but wait, there was a moment here because, like, there's like he throws to like a commercial kind of, or he's like, speaking of Final Fantasy.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And everyone's like, ooh.

And he's like, no, no, no, no, no, no.

DoorDash has your back.

And Jason Schreier pointed this out, and he said that was definitely an all-time Jeff Keely press conference moment.

Because it was just, it was just exactly the wrong thing to say to the wrong people at the wrong time.

Perfect.

I've never seen someone apologize for the ad before and after.

So funny.

What does that mean?

Speaking of Final Fantasy.

I don't know.

It was a bad segue.

Was he trying to say, I bet your Final Fantasy is a DoorDash?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Who knows?

So then we saw another thing, and I didn't write it down.

And then we saw Like a Dragon, the man who erased his name.

All-time great title.

Fuck.

That rules.

So, yeah, Like a Dragon is a Yakuza spin-off.

Yes.

So it's Yakuza.

Like a Dragon.

Yes.

The man who erased his name.

Yes.

Got it.

Well, it's not so much as it's a spin-off.

I think in Japan, the Yakuza games are called Like a Dragon, but in the States, they're called Yakuza because it makes more sense to the Western audience.

I have been schooled.

I think with the last release, they pivoted completely back to

Like a Dragon.

And now every Yakuza game going forward will be called Like a Dragon.

So this is just another tale in that.

Fuck.

Okay.

After this, I have Submarine Man.

Yeah, Under the Waves.

Kind of a spooky-seeming ocean kind of game.

The ocean's kind of like a new,

there are a lot of ocean games now.

And I'm starting to see it as a trend.

And, you know, I don't hate it because I think the ocean is a lot scarier than, you know, outer space or even just the regular ground, you know.

But ocean,

watch yourselves because it seems like it's coming.

There's a lot of them.

kind of a lot of ocean stuff

i i know this isn't the podcast where we would normally discuss this sort of thing, but have you guys seen the

whistleblower from the Navy who two days ago, like a decorated Navy guy,

who was the head of the

investigative division of the UAP phenomenon, who just flat out said, we have a ship intact and the government is hiding it from Congress.

Yeah, I did hear about this and that it's not man-made, they said, or something like that.

Yeah, it has no like

they that they can't even figure it out at the subatomic level, yeah.

And also, this is like the podcast where we would talk about something like that.

Well, but I say it because all the new stuff I've been seeing on this, like, yeah, in the in this area of like UFOs are real and nobody gives a shit is that they all dock in the water.

They dock in the water because you don't get fall damage that way.

That's true.

Yeah, you can't, and, and, but, and they're also like, actually, that movie Signs was a lie.

I can swim all goddamn day.

they made they made a deal with m night they're like yeah tell them we're afraid of water yeah yeah yeah and you know back to the ocean being kind of scary there's so much of it that haven't gone down there they're probably like somebody gets close and like hey turn your ass back around and say you can't go any further than this

after submarine man we saw call of duty season four warzone And it takes place in a new map that looks exactly like Amsterdam, which they're calling Fondel, which is the name of the big park in Amsterdam, Fondel Park, which also means wander or walk, I think.

So it's kind of a weird, you wouldn't call of duty, war zone, walk.

For this one, I wrote down, who gives a shit?

I wanted to log on just to walk around that map.

Yeah.

Because that's where I'm moving to.

Oh, yeah.

All right.

Up next is Porsche Xbox, not for sale.

Yeah, I was like, this was like such a waste of time

because, like, also, they were like kind of ugly.

Like, it was like kind of just like weird.

You can win them in a contest.

There's only like 75 of them or something.

Why?

Why would you spend so?

It was like, look at Porsche.

It's been around for 75 years.

Holy shit, it's awesome.

Here's an Xbox covered in the Porsche colors.

75th anniversary, Porsche.

And then the first thing they said is, this is not for sale.

Are you familiar with the Audi Xbox One?

That looks like it has a Xbox.

What the fuck is that?

What is it?

Can it it drive around?

I can't drive around, but Microsoft, around the time Xbox One was a thing, made an Audi Xbox One.

Similar thing for the Porsche, but that's the.

That is the ugliest fucking thing I've ever seen in my life.

I know.

It's pretty bad.

I like it.

Imagine getting run over by that.

Yeah, exactly.

I want to see that thing scurry around the house.

I want to have to chase after it.

It was a promo for Forza Horizon 3.

It looks like a car, but it's a computer.

Yeah.

Wow, it's ugly.

Carputer.

It's incredible.

All right.

Then we saw Fay Farm.

Yeah, and that's just like a farming scene.

Yeah, it's a farming game.

Then we saw Marvel Snap.

I loved this guy.

Very enthusiastic guy.

Because at least he was like doing something.

He was like, I'm excited to talk about this game that I work on.

And even Jeff was like, you have a lot of enthusiasm.

I was like, that's kind of what you want.

You want some boring guy coming out and like, here's my Marvel Snap game.

Okay.

After this, I have King Arthur Legends Rise.

Is that the, what, did I get that name right?

That's right.

And I couldn't believe that that's what it was called.

Like, every story about King Arthur is how he does it, how he becomes him.

I was like, finally, someone's going to tell this story.

Yeah, good.

Oh, good.

That sword stuck in that rock, huh?

Interesting.

Then I have, I don't know, I give up.

I don't know what this one is.

Oh, yeah, Wayfinder, I think.

Okay.

Wayfinder.

Wayfinder.

Then we saw Twisted Metal, the TV show trailer.

I had a nice laugh.

I'm excited about seeing that.

And just to see

Mitchie Boy, who they didn't show in

that little preview, Will Arnett

introducing the clip, and it was a clip of Sweet Tooth voiced by Will Arnett and Anthony Mackey's character.

But

there's an image of Mitch

as Stu

in, I think, Rolling Stone or something, and he looks great.

Imagine being Rolling Stone.

I'd love it.

Can you imagine?

I can only dream.

The paper of note?

That was, I ran out of my ability to focus on this at this point and started writing jokes.

Okay, so you probably don't have to do that.

Not like WGA jokes.

No, not like, not like just wrote,

just like funny things to say to your friend.

Yeah.

You know how you prepare to go to a party?

The way that you guys have notes for the thing.

I started taking my notes.

Precisely.

Oh, my God.

But I also didn't help your attention span because this chunk of the show was all space games then in a row.

Yeah, like Lisfanga.

Wait, Lisfanga?

I think that's what it's called.

Okay.

And then Immortals of Avium.

Oh my God.

Which was they showed like they brought out an actor from the game and he

every character in the game has like a crazy name, like a space like sci-fi fantasy name.

And then his name is Jack.

And I was just like, okay, like, this is just another one of those types of games where it's it's like a guy who's like,

you know, he's maybe a little sarcastic and like everyone else is like, I'm serious because I'm in this world.

And he's like, whatever you say, man.

Like, it's all just like the same kind of bullshit.

I also, we didn't talk about this

back at Lies.

If I could just go back to Lies of P for a second.

They don't show any talking.

They don't, they just kind of show vibes and like the mood of the game and stuff.

And then he's basically like, can you believe all this?

I can't wait.

He talks like Timothy Chalamet.

Yeah, he does.

But then he talks like, whoa,

not like quite like Mr.

Me Seeks, but like,

kind of like, you know, not far off.

But then, Heather, this was the big one where you talked.

The next was Fortnite, Fortnite Wild.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I did lock onto my screen for Fortnite.

Yeah.

I was like, oh man.

No, you sent a text that you grabbed it so hard that it shattered.

Can't wait.

But then the last thing that they did, they're like, okay.

Oh, so Fortnite was before the final game.

Yes.

I did.

Okay.

So I only missed like two or three games.

Yes.

And so then the final game that the, then Jeff Kiley's like, guys,

the rumors were true, which I guess there were rumors about this showcase

going around like this is what they're going to talk about.

And they show Final Fantasy.

And then everyone's like, oh, I guess.

I guess DoorDash did have our back.

Right, right.

And, you know, I haven't played Remake One, but people were really excited about the footage that they were showing for remake two, basically, Final Fantasy VII Remake Rebirth.

I've seen, or I've played all the way through remake one, right?

And I found it baffling because the charm of Final Fantasy VII is not its photorealism.

Yeah.

I enjoyed it, but it's it's really a weird game to play.

And it's a game about spoilers, spoilers after i mean it's been years yeah it's been years it's a game about how sephiroth knows that they're in a remake yes which is crazy it's uh

evangelian rebuild it's yeah yeah uh so it's the matrix four so the big reveal in this trailer seems to be that sephiroth

is altering the timeline of the game so that there are more surprises and he reveals that he killed Tifa.

Well, here's the thing:

we still don't know a lot about Sephiroth, so we don't know why he's doing this.

Actually, he's like, I killed Tifa, who's that lady?

Which is a weird thing to say.

Yes.

And then the other big reveal of this trailer was that it comes on two Blu-rays.

That was my favorite hot mic audience participation: that title card came up and someone goes, on two discs.

A lot of people, because I bought that first one digitally and I just like never finished it

but I guess the first one also has two discs but one of them is like an install disc because it's so big and like it it's like an install so it's like not gonna be hugely disappointing yeah it's on two discs and the first one is just like install the game that to me on two discs sounds like it's game on both discs well yeah because

original final fantasy came on three discs and that was a selling point yeah of final fantasy 7 that's why i was curious about including that in this trailer is, are they saying on two discs, like, get excited?

Or are they saying

on two discs?

Because when two discs show up, you won't be like, why?

Well, the wise are two.

They've also said, because I've been like sort of vaguely following the interviews about this game and the upcoming release hype cycle, that it is open world.

And the first one was very tunnel, like very like, oh, you got to go to Aerith.

Aerith's Aerithis' house.

And so you're going to run down this like corridor to get there.

And that was kind of the way the whole game progressed.

So they showed a lot of like loving glory shots of Cloud and the rest of them wandering around in a field to make you feel like, oh, wow, they can really wander around in that field.

Don't go too far.

Don't go too far.

You got to do the story.

Yeah.

But that was, that was basically it.

Was like, I mean,

I'll say that I'm excited for, I'll get that game.

I'll play the first one and then, you know, do that.

But was there anything in this showcase at all that you're like video games are back?

Let's see.

Let me look at my list.

Okay, okay.

Prince Persian, Micrograph,

why'd you not have to read Marvelous Nap toast?

No.

Albro, as somebody who like only plays like a particular type of game, I mean, Pokemon with guns was probably a big selling point.

I, I mean, I would never get around to playing it though because I know what it is.

Like, yeah, I, you know, am I just going to hold down the trigger for several hours as an adorable thing?

You know,

I don't know.

I made a list of the ones that I thought were cool, you know, but also that I, they all seem like things I'll never get around to playing.

Yeah.

Um, and mostly that, like, the thing that did stick with me the most was Pal Worlds, just because

it's such a shocker.

Yeah.

Pal World is good.

I mean, I

they sort of shot their wad with me for with the first game being Prince of Persia.

I'm like, well, I'm going to, that's it.

That, that was it for me for the entire presentation.

But I just think presentations like this, like a couple weeks ago, there was the Sony state of play, and that is more, that's less of a like audience thing and more like a like, here's just a bunch of stuff that we did, like, like it or not.

In the same way, like, the Apple one that was just a couple of days ago, uh, is just like, here you go, like, here's what we're working on type of thing.

And this is like,

he has these like relationships with developers or whatever, and then they have like, oh, we'll send you this trailer or whatever.

Like, that's just kind of all it is.

But, cause his next thing is in the game awards, which is like in the fall, I think, or something, before the, or around the end of the year.

Aren't there going to be like

Nintendo directs and stuff?

Oh, yeah.

Like, that's like Nintendo doesn't participate in these things because they're like, well, we just do our own thing and sort of make our own schedule.

We'll go six months without telling you anything and then be like, surprise, we've been holding on to Metroid Prime for three years.

And it's out today if you want it.

They'll also have directs come and go without revealing anything really cool.

Exactly.

Like everyone's like, oh, new Tears of the Kingdom stuff.

Absolutely not.

Kirby's a car.

No.

Which, granted.

Hey, no, don't get it drunk.

That was a soft game of the year.

That was it.

That was great stuff.

But

guys, why don't we get into,

I feel like

Nick does such a good job of this part.

transitioning from one thing to the next thing.

What is the thing?

We're transitioning.

We just have a couple questions in the question block.

Actually, see, it was a trick.

Heather and I rehearsed that for three hours.

And this is just a question and answer sort of thing.

We got all from our Discord, discord.gg/slash get played.

This one's from Hired Goons.

Hi, Hired Goons.

The pinball community in LA has been growing in the past few years and has become an obsession of mine, eclipsing video games.

Any of y'all fuck with pinball at any point in your lives?

I fuck with pinball heavy.

Oh, hell yeah.

Do you have a favorite, do you have a favorite like pinball board?

My dad

very randomly during our childhood had a client pay him in a pinball machine instead of money.

Wow.

And it was like, it was like a Xenon warrior princess thing.

So it was also the raciest thing any of us little Christian kids had seen.

And when you hit the ball with the bumpers, a noise would play like, uh, ah.

So after like three weeks of pinball, and this, you know, I'm a kid who doesn't get to play a lot of games.

So like this flashing lights is enough to hook me.

Yeah.

My mom is like, get that out of our house.

I don't want you to cheat on out of our house.

But I was recently, I went to Vegas with Steve Levy, one of our buds over at Rick and Morty, and he took me to the Museum of Pinball.

Oh, cool.

And

I like fell so in love with just how many games there are for all these movies that like you wouldn't think would have a pinball machine.

Like I played the Johnny mnemonic pinball.

Oh, it's so good.

And that's like, they're all great.

It's a level of craftsmanship that I feel goes really unappreciated.

And when a game is awesome, it's truly awesome.

I sort of think it's like the vinyl of video games, kind of.

Because it's like, there's a lot of like, you know, people talk about like vinyl, the warmth, this, like, the, the tactile nature of it.

It's like what really makes it great.

And like, I do feel that way about pinball, like, machines, because I'm like, oh, like, this is a pain in the ass to keep up.

Like, to make it, to make it work still is like hard.

And like hearing somebody getting paid in a pinball machine, I'm like, well, they're not cheap.

Like, that's like those, they're kind of expensive.

Like, I just, I, anytime I can play pinball, I'm having a blast.

It's always fun.

Even if you only play for like 10 minutes or whatever.

And I can get so sucked down when I, the machine I fell in love with when we were at the Museum of Pinball was the Lord of the Rings pinball machine.

And so I returned home and I've been trying to convince my parents to

get it because they're huge Lord of the Rings fans.

So I was like, oh man, if this is kind of like a retiree splurge that could happen.

Wow.

My little brother hopped on it.

He's been looking for a machine.

But my favorite thing is that he goes, if you look up Lord of the Rings pinball machine on Twitter, it's all people talking about it.

Like it's a girl they met at a wedding and had the perfect night with and then never saw Ever again for the rest of their life.

Like all these tweets that are like, I'm just thinking about Lord of the Rings pinball again.

This is really beautiful.

That's so funny.

I really like the Adams family pinball machine.

I think that's an excellent machine.

I really like the gimmick of the Jurassic Park pinball machine,

which has your ball can get trapped and then you'll hear the T-Rex is loose.

And a T-Rex head will like slowly grind machinery.

It'll be

and bite the ball and then eat it.

And then I think that's how you...

become multi-bald

is my brother is obsessed with that machine yeah he's lobbying hard for that instead of learning the ring good machine Adam's family is a good machine and then there's one that I've talked about on this show which is a machine that was a tornado-based machine that had a spinning disc in the middle that was magnetized so that if it was activated, the ball would get sucked into a tornado and then like flip out into some random direction.

And when that was happening, they also had a giant fan on the back of the machine that could blow the wind at you.

That's amazing.

I feel like the people that like then make these things are like, how do we make this like more interesting than just like a ball going around?

What do we add to it?

That's That's like the Terminator one has just a gun that you fire in order to

this next one's from Kuato.

I think this is like an interesting.

I think this is the question: open your mind.

Open your mind.

What is your line for gore when it comes to games like Mortal Kombat or those new Tomb Raider games?

I feel it feels like we've passed the funny/slash/comedic line, at least to me.

I'll tell you where my line was.

We saw it happen when we watched that fucking Roboclop clip.

that like radicalized me in a negative way.

Uh, I don't have a line currently, uh, but I have been upset by violence in movies, yeah, but I think that's more like the context of what I'm seeing.

Very, very rarely, I'll be like, huh, man.

Like the, um, there's this moment in midsummer

that I was like,

oh, that I don't, like, there's something about just imagining the amount of pain that person is in that upsets me.

Like, the actual thing I'm looking at, it's not like, oh, no, I don't want to see this.

It's more like, oh, I think that's a thing that can happen.

I hate that moment.

I think, like, the thing that makes that moment so brutal for me is that the camera stays there and just forces you to look at it.

And I, a thing that I experienced recently where I found my line, I was truly, I was like, oh, oh, every time it it happened,

was that Love and Death, the new Elizabeth Olson showed up.

No, I haven't seen it yet.

It's like, it's great.

It's really, it's really good.

But like that, I found my line.

And it wasn't with someone ripping someone's spine out, like Mortal Kombat.

It was just how grounded and horrible.

That's like, yeah, like, I feel like you can get kind of close to something like that in like The Last of Us Part 2, for example.

Like, there's like a very, like, very real-looking violence in that game.

And it's like, that's partly or mostly what the game is about, you you know.

But the end of Audition, the movie, also, I was like, hmm, I, yeah, what I'm seeing isn't scary, it's just imagining what I'm seeing is upsetting to me.

Does that make sense?

I think so.

Like, if I thought a lot about

that guy in RoboCop,

it would never leave my mind.

Imagine how much pain his eyeball is in.

Yeah.

This next one's from Callus.

Hi, Callis.

If they made a fighting game out of serial mascots, who would be the best fighter?

I think I have a clear-cut answer.

I do too, but I want to hear yours.

Tony the Tiger.

He's fucking big.

Yeah, he's huge.

And his whole...

He's a tiger.

His persona is built on, like, I can do, like, he plays baseball.

Yeah.

He fucking dunks best.

Works out.

Yeah.

You don't think I can't fucking kill you?

Yeah.

I think that guy goes toe-to-toe with the fruit brute.

Okay, yeah.

And I do feel like the booberry mascot has that kiddie pride turning intangible thing that renders the brawn, you know,

pretty, pretty useless.

I want to think before we move too far off it, the idea of being beaten to death by a tiger, but he's killing you as a man is

with his like tiger abilities.

It's equal, it's also brutal that he's wearing a handkerchief around his neck.

Not only am I killing you, I'm also fancy.

I think my answer would probably be the Trix Rabbit because he seems to be unkillable.

Like, I don't know that he's like particularly good at violence, but I do know that he can't be stopped.

Yeah.

You know, I wouldn't discount the Lucky Charms guy either because he's, you know, obviously made a deal with the devil of some kind because he does have magic.

I think the Cookie Crisp dog has PCP strength.

You know, he is just like locked.

He doesn't feel pain on a chemical level anymore.

Speaking of, the guy from Honeycomb, me want honeycomb?

I'll fuck you up.

Great question.

This one's from Ghost Pumpkin.

Hi, Ghost Pumpkin.

Would you please tell us more about the animals y'all live with?

Because animals are cool.

Albro, do you have any pets?

I don't.

I'm allergic to all of them.

Oh, no.

I do have a squirrel that torments me, though.

What's the vibe of the...

I mean, he sounds like a rude guy, but...

I mean,

tried to grow cannabis on my balcony, and he destroyed my plant.

He sounds just like a party guy.

Well, he's, and he's one of those squirrels, too, that like knows you can't get him.

So when you faint in his direction, he doesn't flinch anymore.

He's like, no, do it.

Like, come on.

I'll be out of here in 10 seconds.

Yeah.

So now we have kind of like a Dennis the Menace relationship where, you know, we acknowledge we're in the same show together.

That's great.

Yeah, but no pets.

We believe that a neighbor is feeding one of our squirrels because this squirrel has gone beyond fearless to follow.

Like it will come right up to your foot and you'll be like, get, no, come on, get away from me.

And will try to enter the house,

which is not squirrel behavior.

No, yeah.

I have a dog.

Her name is Sushi.

And she is adorable.

She's the kind of dog that has eyebrows,

which is great, but she really loves Mary and does not really love me

Tolerate you she does and and she she asks she's extremely communicative And she will ask me for things like when it's dinner time She comes up and like like hey like give me my food, but like and I'm I don't mean this with any sort of like oh

I'm so my dog doesn't love my dog just straight up doesn't love me

it loves Mary yeah like they always pick one.

Hugely loves Mary.

Yeah.

And when,

like, if we're both sitting on the couch and the dog isn't next to Mary, if it is on the opposite side of me, it will be throughout whatever movie we're watching, very slowly inching its way across my body to get to Mary.

Yeah.

Does not love me.

I have two cats and they're my cats.

I've had them since I was 14 years old, basically.

One of them is 18.

Jesus.

Yes.

Defiantly alive.

No, the day he passes off, he'd be like really, really sad.

He's my guy, Sawyer.

And my other guy, Hurley, is I think

13 or something.

And he's a really funny idiot.

He's like a big, dumb guy.

They both love my girlfriend so much more than me, and I've been with them their entire lives.

It's brutal.

It's brutal.

They go, they, they, they'll sort of sit by me when I'm like working from home, but as soon as she comes home, they're like, I'll kill this guy if you want.

The dog, our dog is like, if I give our dog something it likes, it leaves me and shows it to Mary.

Yeah.

Which I'm like, I gave you the thing.

Yeah.

There was a there was a dog in the office when we could have dogs in the office at the old place.

And

he was like,

it's one of my coworkers' dogs.

And he was like really into me for some reason.

A lot of the dogs that would come to the office would be like, Matt seems like a cool guy.

I was like, kind of hang out with Matt.

He kept like chewing on stuff and then being like, hey, I'm like done with this.

But if you want it, you could have it.

And then I was like, bringing you all his stuff.

He was like,

I was chewing on this like Himalayan

salt

stick.

I'm done with this.

You look like you could do some chewing.

And you always just bring me all this stuff.

I thought that was so funny.

But that's it for the question block, guys.

Thanks so much for writing in and being a part of Discord.

Albro, thanks so much for being here.

Thank you guys for having me.

Is there anything you'd like to promote?

A fair deal for writers from the AMPTP.

Nice.

Nice.

And for everyone else, too.

It sounds like we're headed towards a couple more parties.

Joining the party.

It would be nice if everybody got a fair deal.

Yes.

But my guess is what's happened is that they aren't making any money.

It's all fake, it's fiction.

They can't figure out how to profit from the system they've set up.

And it is there,

I think.

The whole, my fear is the entire thing is about to collapse.

Yeah, we're just going to go back to I Love Lucy style.

We'll go back to only three channels.

Start over.

But I hope, yeah, I hope it works out for the best.

It seems like, yeah, like the sag strike's coming.

Yep.

We'll see what happens.

Heather, is there anything you want to promote?

We never promote anything.

I don't need to promote anything.

No, we're good here.

Please listen to our

sister podcast, which is us, not our sister.

It's us.

Our other podcast.

It's not like, yeah, it's us.

My sister and Matt's sister.

All of our sisters go do this.

Yeah, it's like really crazy.

It's called Get Animated, where we are currently covering the melancholy of Harhe Suzumiya, which is a mid-2000s mega hit.

If you liked anime in the mid-2000s, you know about Harahi.

But we're also going to be taking a little bit of a break from Harahe

to cover

the latest Spider-Verse movie in, no, across across the Spider-Verse.

Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse.

Yes.

Into Across Beyond.

Yeah.

Across the Spider-Verse.

Excellent film.

We're covering that, I think, in this upcoming episode.

Yes.

And then we'll be returning to Harahe Suzamia.

Matt, Nick always does the sign-off parts.

Yeah, and

I know that you probably don't don't want to do this because Albro's your friend and you couldn't do this.

I just met Albro and I don't want to do this to him, but it felt like somebody has to.

So I'm unfortunately going to have to say to you, Albro, I'm very, very sorry.

You did get played, and I am sorry.

No!

Fuck!