Outer Space Games with Zane Carney

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Speaker 6 Guys, guys,

Speaker 7 thanks for joining me out here. I know it was a big pain to get us all out into outer space to record the episode, but I think it's going to pay off because

Speaker 7 you know the famous phrase, in space nobody can hear you scream. Yeah, I just thought we could try it out.

Speaker 2 We're here to

Speaker 7 scream, just like test the levels. I know that like sometimes we peek on the microphone and rant has to then do a lot of editing to the.

Speaker 7 I actually, you know, for somebody who's worked in this industry as long as I have, I don't know what to do.

Speaker 2 I expect you to, I got to be honest, I'm really nauseated. I was just not prepared for the zero G's.

Speaker 1 I am so angry right now.

Speaker 7 Use it. That's great.

Speaker 3 What are you talking about?

Speaker 1 Do you have any idea how much training I had to endure? That centrifugal force machine? All the blood tests I had to do? Yeah.

Speaker 1 The hours and hours and hours it took to get into outer space. And you're telling me that we came up here so that we would scream to see it silent?

Speaker 7 Let's not forget, I did say at this, at the beginning of this, I know it was a big pain. So,

Speaker 7 you kind of can't be mad at me.

Speaker 1 Man, I had to lie to several governments. Like, this was not something that you could just do at the drop of a hat.

Speaker 1 Like, I had to get access to a rocket, which was a rocket that initially the American government wasn't going to allow me.

Speaker 1 I I had to do a favor for a billionaire that I never want to do again.

Speaker 1 I had to suck a dick to get in space.

Speaker 2 You didn't have to say.

Speaker 3 I had to suck a dick to get into space, man.

Speaker 3 We got to work together on it.

Speaker 1 Man, I sucked a dick to get here.

Speaker 5 Look, I mean, no offense.

Speaker 7 We all had to do that.

Speaker 2 Well, I was just going to say, I mean, and I'm stifling vomiting here because I'm just not used to this sensation.

Speaker 7 I've even got to for some.

Speaker 2 Well, here's the thing.

Speaker 7 i didn't have to go through any of this rigmarole i had training what are you talking about what are you talking about what am i talking about you kind of thought it was besides feeling sick i remember you saying that you thought it was kind of easy yeah i just walked up and you know white guy with a crew cut they're like hey you got the right stuff yeah you got the right maybe an astronaut yeah didn't have to jump through any hoops of course they're very upset with uh me participating in this at all um

Speaker 7 but i just wanted to give you guys just an example of what it's going to sound like if i if one of us were to scream.

Speaker 3 Okay, okay, great.

Speaker 7 Okay, here I go. Here's my I'm screaming, okay? Tell me if you can hear it.
Okay.

Speaker 2 Are you going to scream?

Speaker 3 No, I'm screaming. When's the scream coming out? Sorry.

Speaker 7 No, I'm doing it. I've been screaming this whole time.

Speaker 3 Let me just.

Speaker 7 This, Matt,

Speaker 2 you're having a laugh.

Speaker 3 This is a wind-up.

Speaker 1 You are screaming right now, or you aren't screaming.

Speaker 3 My voice hurts so much for screaming.

Speaker 2 Pointedly, you're acting like you're screaming. You're not.
I'll just, I'll show you how it's done. This is how you scream in space.

Speaker 1 Okay. It's working.

Speaker 3 It's working.

Speaker 1 You're both, you both, I can't hear either of you when you're screaming. And that's insane.

Speaker 3 That's the whole exercise.

Speaker 1 I think part of what's going wrong about this experiment is technically we are inside of the tube itself. We're still inside the shuttle.

Speaker 3 Right, yeah, we're gonna be shooting.

Speaker 1 If we want to see what it's like to scream in space, one of us has to go out. You know what?

Speaker 3 I'll do it. Okay, go ahead.

Speaker 3 I'll go outside. You're gonna get out of the tube.

Speaker 1 Let's see if you guys can hear me screaming. Yeah, let's go.

Speaker 2 Matt, strap yourself in. I'll open up the airlock.

Speaker 3 Yeah, she has the most training.

Speaker 3 Oh, my God.

Speaker 3 Heather, if you can scream, scream.

Speaker 2 She really went flying.

Speaker 3 Holy shit. Oh, my God.

Speaker 3 Heather. Heather.

Speaker 8 If you're listening to this message,

Speaker 8 then I died in space.

Speaker 1 I pre-recorded this will

Speaker 9 so that everyone would know what it was that I wanted to bequeath to my family.

Speaker 8 Now, I'm certain that it's gotten out that I sucked a dick to get it.

Speaker 8 So if I died in space, then I sucked a dick so I could die in space.

Speaker 9 Anyway, I leave my house and my stuff to my wife.

Speaker 7 If you're hearing this,

Speaker 8 I watched Heather die in space, and I know that a lot was made about

Speaker 8 the dick sucking that occurred in both who it was to and who did it.

Speaker 8 But let me just say,

Speaker 8 I had to do that too.

Speaker 8 And they still wouldn't let me out of the ship.

Speaker 8 And I didn't get to die.

Speaker 8 My life sucks.

Speaker 8 If you're hearing this,

Speaker 8 you've heard Heather's message and also

Speaker 2 Matt's message referencing Heather's farewell message.

Speaker 2 and you've reached my voicemail.

Speaker 8 Leave a message. I'll hit you back.

Speaker 2 We travel unfathomable distances and hear unrealistic sound effects as we discuss all things space games this week on Get Played.

Speaker 1 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, world's first trillionaire, Heather Ann Campbell,

Speaker 1 along with my fellow host, Tiger Weiger.

Speaker 2 That's me, Tiger Weiger.

Speaker 3 I'm here with our third host, Mr.

Speaker 2 Games Matt Apodaka.

Speaker 3 Hello, everyone.

Speaker 1 Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Premiere Video Game Podcast, where this week we're talking about outer fucking space.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Get on it.

Speaker 7 Get on it. Get with it.
Get with it.

Speaker 1 Get ready. Get ready.

Speaker 2 They say in space, no one can hear you podcast.

Speaker 7 Man.

Speaker 7 Is that true? We got to get there soon.

Speaker 1 How are you guys doing?

Speaker 6 I feel like

Speaker 7 a series of things.

Speaker 1 A world series of things, Matt?

Speaker 3 Well, well, well. Okay, all right.

Speaker 7 That was really, really good.

Speaker 1 I ate the mic for that.

Speaker 7 My boys won.

Speaker 2 Matt is wearing an L.A. Dodgers hat.

Speaker 2 This is the championship hat from last year. This last year's gone back to back.

Speaker 7 To be replaced with the new one

Speaker 7 that is currently on its way to me. Wow.
And

Speaker 6 you go fitted or a snapback?

Speaker 7 This one's a snapback, but I did go fitted for the new one that's coming.

Speaker 2 How'd you measure your head?

Speaker 7 What I did was I, well, okay, so actually if you'll recall when I got married last year,

Speaker 7 I did have a fitted black and white Dodgers hat that I put on. I remember.
It was very like LA sort of themed wedding in a sense. So I was like, I got to toss on

Speaker 7 a fitted hat to match my tuxedo. And I went to like the Dodger store at the Citadel.

Speaker 1 For those of you who don't live in Los Angeles, the Citadel is a sort of giant outlet and non-outlet mall shaped like a castle.

Speaker 1 And during Christmas time, they dress up the entire thing to look like one big gift-wrapped package.

Speaker 2 Yes, and again, because our topic is outer space games, you might have heard of the Citadel and been picturing the hub city in Mass Effect.

Speaker 2 That's not what we're referring to.

Speaker 7 I was not there. I was not running around with Shepard and the gang.

Speaker 7 So get that out of your head. I was not there.

Speaker 7 It is also,

Speaker 7 no matter the time of year, the worst place to be on planet planet Earth.

Speaker 3 It fucking sucks there so bad.

Speaker 7 But it was like, my family lives on the other side of the Citadel, and I live on one side of the Citadel. So we had stopped in on, you know, our way back from visiting them.

Speaker 7 I was like, oh, I'll get a fitted cap here. They measure.

Speaker 3 You're trying to talk about it like it's the Berlin Wall.

Speaker 7 Look, and it's like, it's actually really dangerous for me to go across and visit them from the other side of the Citadel. Isn't it actually not safe for me to do this?

Speaker 7 I've been begging Mr. Gorgachev to tear it down.

Speaker 3 Guys, do you know I

Speaker 1 had, I went to Berlin

Speaker 1 in 2018. Okay.

Speaker 1 First and only time I've ever been to Berlin and purchased a piece of the Berlin Wall from the Berlin Wall store,

Speaker 1 which is on the grounds of where the Berlin Wall used to be. And I have it up on my bookshelf.

Speaker 1 I don't care anything about the Berlin Wall, but having a fucking chunk of it on my bookshelf feels pretty cool.

Speaker 7 How much is it sad?

Speaker 2 How much did it cost?

Speaker 1 It was like $9. Was it packaged? Yeah.
Okay.

Speaker 1 It's in a

Speaker 1 plexiglass,

Speaker 1 like a folded plexiglass chunk that's like a book, if you imagine, like a book like this.

Speaker 3 Yes, yeah.

Speaker 1 And the Berlin Wall piece is wedged in between the plastic, and so it's like got its own little display. That also says Berlin Wall.

Speaker 2 Is it like a chunk that was like knocked out of the wall, or is it like kind of a symmetrical sort of brick?

Speaker 3 A chunk.

Speaker 1 Okay. It's like a, like almost a triangle piece.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I love it. That's cool.

Speaker 7 It's going to be really sad. One day everybody that bought a piece should go and see if they could put it back together.

Speaker 7 It's going to be really sad when that store has to close because they've run out of pieces to sell.

Speaker 3 Well, they will. Yeah, they will eventually run out of it.
Although it was a pretty big wall.

Speaker 7 Yeah. Yeah.
Famously really big. It was a big

Speaker 2 interest may wane over time as people forget, you know,

Speaker 2 about its significance. Well,

Speaker 7 hopefully they don't forget. Yeah.

Speaker 7 And they go and they make a trip to go buy a piece so they can always remember it.

Speaker 7 I was saying that, well, obviously my Dodgers won. That was huge for me.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 Gets, buddy. There's a lot.

Speaker 7 Thank you.

Speaker 2 What a moment for the city of Los Angeles.

Speaker 7 My voice was very bad for two days because I was screaming.

Speaker 7 Very exciting.

Speaker 2 What a gut punch.

Speaker 2 If we have any Toronto Blue Jay fan listeners, what an absolute gut punch.

Speaker 3 What a tough loss.

Speaker 7 I called off the airstrikes. It was okay.

Speaker 7 Everyone in Toronto is doing great.

Speaker 7 It was like an interesting, like, those two last two games were so exciting to watch, games six and seven of this World Series.

Speaker 7 And I feel like a lot of people who sort of know sports better than me, I've been hearing people be like, those are like two of the best baseball games they watched this year and like maybe ever.

Speaker 7 They were so exciting and so fun because there were so many

Speaker 7 improbabilities that occurred. That just like, just, I've never seen a ball get stuck, and I'm sure it probably happens more.

Speaker 7 It probably happens more than you would assume, but I had never seen it before. So that was very interesting to see.

Speaker 2 For people who didn't see it,

Speaker 2 a ball was hit in a late inning, and it got wedged underneath the outfield wall. So it was basically effectively dead if the outfielders choose not to touch it,

Speaker 2 which they opted not to do. And so what that does is that it takes it out of play and it makes it so that the base,

Speaker 2 the hitter advances to second base.

Speaker 7 Yes. And it was like, that was like a consequential moment in that game because it could have.

Speaker 2 A really improbable thing.

Speaker 7 I think you would watch 100 baseball games games and not see happen just truly astounding and then there was just like very like you know it really matters like foot placement is so important like it can be just like a

Speaker 7 like just the smallest amount of space on a base as long as you're like still there uh what when they're sliding in you're out and it was just like it was just thrilling baseball really really loved it um the place that i watched it uh had a tv that was flickering on and off during uh what i would call crucial moments oh man and this bar advertised that they were going to be showing the game and I was about to DoorDash them a $150 TV to make sure this didn't happen again.

Speaker 7 I was fucking furious at these people. But I spilled my Coke Zero before we started.

Speaker 10 Okay.

Speaker 7 It was a big debacle. I was walked in like a big shot for some reason.
And then when I spilled, I was kind of talking tough when I walked in. Okay.

Speaker 7 Maybe you didn't notice it because that's kind of how I always am, but

Speaker 7 I spilled and then I immediately called for Rochelle to help me because

Speaker 3 we face it, we're all lost without her.

Speaker 7 And then I cleaned it up myself, didn't make anybody clean it for me, and I did do a really good job.

Speaker 2 As the spills guy on the podcast, I got one thing to say. Stay out of my territory.

Speaker 3 Oh, no, shit. He fucking does the ice bucket challenge on himself right now.

Speaker 2 We should acknowledge the Grand Theft Auto 6 delay, but we've already delayed the introduction of our guest

Speaker 2 about enough. So

Speaker 2 let's get him in here. A musician from Evan and Zane.
He's also played with Foster the People and Joe Jonas. Zane Carney is back.
Hi, Zane.

Speaker 5 What's up, guys? How you doing?

Speaker 3 Hell yeah. Well, thanks so much for being here.

Speaker 2 Are you like, we've talked about your gaming tastes a lot. Are you a Grand Theft Auto guy at all? Does the Grand Theft Auto 6 delay affect you in any way?

Speaker 5 It does not affect me. I have not played a Grand Theft Auto game ever in my life.

Speaker 3 Ever in your life?

Speaker 3 No. That's wild.

Speaker 1 That's

Speaker 1 that's that. I can't, I'm stuck.

Speaker 5 Sorry, sorry, mom. Or you're welcome, mom.
I know, because I don't think she would would have wanted me to play it when it came out, I think.

Speaker 5 And then I just kept not playing it. And I'm so obsessed with JRPGs and like slower turn-based type experiences that I just didn't get into it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think knowing your taste, I don't think you'd be, the Grand Theft Auto games would really appeal to you.

Speaker 7 But it makes a lot of sense because you're a really good boy.

Speaker 3 I barely even curse.

Speaker 3 I curse a lot.

Speaker 5 I'm working on it. But

Speaker 3 yeah, I don't know. I haven't played them.

Speaker 5 But I had a friend who had music in it, and it was a big deal for him. It helped launch his...
It didn't help launch him.

Speaker 5 He's big now, but he had a song in Grand Theft Auto 4 or 5, and he was like, whoa, it's on the radio in the car there. So I kept an eye on it.

Speaker 5 But the closest thing to a game like that I've played would be maybe like Spider-Man. I only say that because of like, you do different things that they tell you to do and you run around.

Speaker 5 And I like that kind of gameplay, but I haven't done Grand Theft Auto.

Speaker 7 Granth Auto is kind of like Spider-Man if you could kill anybody you wanted.

Speaker 3 I know.

Speaker 3 I know.

Speaker 5 I didn't even get into Fable, which kind of had that element of like, do you want to be good or bad? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 It was recommended by a friend. I didn't play that.

Speaker 5 But Grand Theft Auto VI, I did see the Unreal Engine.

Speaker 3 Is it 5 they're on now?

Speaker 5 The thing with the Matrix, they showed that little preview. Is Grand Theft Auto 6 using that engine?

Speaker 3 I don't know. I'm not sure what I mean.
I don't know.

Speaker 2 I thought Rockstar was using their own bespoke engine, but I could be wrong. I actually should know this.

Speaker 5 Well, regardless, it looks amazing. I've seen gameplay, and

Speaker 2 it's really impressive.

Speaker 1 So my guess is if it's been delayed to

Speaker 7 winter or fall 2026, then technically it's coming out spring 2027 but they can't announce that yes yeah because it's this is now i think the third delay yeah the third major delay it's it's now delayed to a point where it was supposed to come out a year after the first delay so it is i i each delay that comes i become less interested in it if i'm being honest and i i love those games i think they're really really fun uh i'm particularly interested in this entry because i think the world is so so different than

Speaker 7 it was when the last entry was new. So I wonder how the sort of sensibility of the game will shift or lean in.

Speaker 3 It could go either way, honestly.

Speaker 7 This very important inflection point right now, I can only assume that they're delaying it so they could course correct a previous correction.

Speaker 2 They're pointedly delaying it until after the 2026 midterm election.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 7 Wow.

Speaker 7 But I get less interested in the game each delay because I'm just like,

Speaker 7 I don't know. I just can't see myself really being like, but I also talked about this recently.
I'm just like less excited about things in general now, I think.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, that just happens. I mean, I think like I'm just using it more of like a marker for advancing time at this point.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 I wish Rockstar would make a medieval game, a la

Speaker 1 Red Dead Redemption, but

Speaker 1 with the same like gameplay style where you could just be a knight running around.

Speaker 2 You mean like a more casual kind of kingdom come deliverance.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, not first person, third person, riding your horse, visiting castles,

Speaker 1 doing missions.

Speaker 3 But without magic and shit.

Speaker 1 Yeah, with no magic, but it's just like a like it'd just be a re-skinned Red Dead where you can like hunt and like

Speaker 1 you have to like convert peasants and stuff would be awesome.

Speaker 7 I kind of wanted them to do I would like them to do their version of cyberpunk.

Speaker 7 I would like them to do a future world because I just think I just like that aesthetic a lot. But

Speaker 1 You're going to love today's episode then, buddy.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 I just remember what we're doing.

Speaker 2 Grand Theft Auto VI, as the previous Grand Theft Auto entries have used and Red Dead Redemption 2, is using Rockstar Advanced Game Engine or Rage, a proprietary game engine developed internally by Rockstar.

Speaker 7 It's a good engine. I gotta say,

Speaker 7 the games that they made with that engine are all really good.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Only one engine allows you to scramble and cook eggs in real time.

Speaker 3 Right, right.

Speaker 1 And that's Rockstar's Rage Engine. Have you ever wanted to look through a menu page by page?

Speaker 2 That's Rockstar.

Speaker 7 Would you like to play a very slow game of actual poker?

Speaker 3 Rockstar's. Rockstar's got you.

Speaker 1 Have you ever wanted to look at gravy and see different textures in the gravy?

Speaker 7 Rockstar.

Speaker 7 The most impressive thing that the engine has has actually done is that horses' balls shrink when it gets cold.

Speaker 3 Real? In the game, they do that.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Oh, they do it. It's not just like one thing, it's like that you can see the horse's balls,

Speaker 7 which you know, of course, you're gonna look. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And then when

Speaker 5 that's where you got to shoot it, maybe that is where we're at, though, graphically, because the fidelity's gotten so good. It's more about is it true to life? Yeah.
So the balls shrink.

Speaker 7 And then you go somewhere cold, they shrink.

Speaker 3 It's mine. I'm a real strong target.
Mine don't do

Speaker 3 that.

Speaker 1 You go someplace hot, the balls get long.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you do.

Speaker 3 That's amazing.

Speaker 7 Toss them over your shoulder.

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Speaker 1 So I've got a question for all the gamers out there. Are you seriously gonna miss out on Alienware's biggest gaming sale of the year? I mean, these are Black Friday prices we're talking about.

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Speaker 2 Zane, we have a lot of video games stuff to discuss, but I did want to bring up that you are a contestant on the voice of Romania.

Speaker 5 I am. That is, that is true.

Speaker 3 How did this happen?

Speaker 5 Man, well, my girlfriend's from Romania, and during the Foster the People tour this year, she's like, hey, this is so random, but like, they're looking for singers for this show.

Speaker 5 Would you ever do this?

Speaker 7 I was like, whoa,

Speaker 5 maybe. I don't know.
And then she's like, let me just reach out to them, reach out to the producers, see if they're interested in having an American on the show. And they were very excited.

Speaker 5 They're like, yeah, an American would be great. We'd love to have an American out here.
And the Foster the People.

Speaker 3 It's fucking right.

Speaker 5 It's insane. I know.
But the Foster People European run ended on June, no, I'm sorry, July 19th in Barcelona. And this started on July 20th in Romania.

Speaker 5 So I was like, I'll just fly there and we'll see what happens. And I was there for a few days and

Speaker 5 they liked me and that was nice. And then I kept singing.
And now I'm currently a contestant. I'm in round two right now.
Wow. Round two airs soon.
Or it already aired, I guess.

Speaker 5 And we'll see how I do.

Speaker 2 Because I know you primarily as a guitarist, but you got some pipes.

Speaker 6 Right.

Speaker 5 I do sing. You check it out.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 Just kidding. No, I

Speaker 3 was pretty good.

Speaker 5 My career, my earnings have come from being a guitar player or like a producer or songwriter.

Speaker 5 But in my old band with my brother Carney, I sang background vocals and wrote songs with him in the band. And then when our band broke up, I played with John Mayer.

Speaker 5 And during that time, John didn't know I was a singer. My brother knew it, but not many people did.
And during that Mayer run, I was like, I'm going to really like branch out as a solo artist.

Speaker 5 So I started releasing music back then. And I I would play at Hotel Cafe in LA or Troubadour or L Rey and do solo shows.

Speaker 5 But the solo career as a singer hasn't yet gotten to the place I would like it to get to. So that's another reason I thought I'd do it.

Speaker 5 It's just a fun opportunity to let people know I'm a real singer.

Speaker 2 Do you speak any of your Romanian and how has the Romanian audience received you thus far?

Speaker 5 Muchumeska mais lessas vorbeska en englesa uncanu vorbesque fluentromona.

Speaker 7 Whoa, okay. I'll take that as a no.

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 5 I tried to say that during the show, but I ate shit sing.

Speaker 5 Because I learned it the night before. But that meant like, thanks for letting me speak in English.
I'm still working on my Romanian.

Speaker 5 But I can say like 200 words, but they don't work together.

Speaker 3 I did Juolingo for a while.

Speaker 5 So like chai is tea and lapta is milk and muchumes, muchumes fermos, muchumes, din soufflette. Different ways of saying thank you.

Speaker 5 But I, I, yeah, I don't speak it well enough to like fully conjugate sentences.

Speaker 5 Um, and when I was watching the episode with my brother at his wedding last week, he like got really drunk in New Orleans.

Speaker 5 I was like, check out my episode on episode two on voice of romania he's like can you translate what they're saying i got like four words i like that was good porte bine very good you know um but i remembered what they translated in my ear they give you an earpiece so i can translate what they're saying and they they were very sweet to me and my my celebrity judge is like the cold play of romania wow names tudor kililla and he's awesome and very sweet very supportive and we'll see how i do this year maybe i'll i don't know i don't know but the audience will find out yeah that's crazy it'd be really crazy if like later we find out

Speaker 7 the voice of Romania.

Speaker 3 There is a chance. I'm still doing it.

Speaker 1 How many vampires are on the judge board? Seven. Seven.

Speaker 3 Yes, and there are only four. It's strange.

Speaker 5 Yeah, no, Romania is, you're right, known for the Transylvanian region, you know, the Count Dracula and the Vlad the Impaler lore. There's a whole, you know, vampiric thing over there.

Speaker 5 But yeah, there's, there's a lot to the culture that's really deep. What made me do that show versus doing the American version, because I was asked asked to do the American version for five seasons.

Speaker 3 I was like, I don't want to do that.

Speaker 5 It was during a time when I thought maybe I had a better chance as a solo artist.

Speaker 3 I was like, yeah, I don't need this.

Speaker 5 But, you know, I'm 40 now. I'm like, yeah, let's do some shows.

Speaker 3 Let me pander.

Speaker 5 But please, someone help me. So

Speaker 5 I decided to do the show. But the real reason is my girlfriend showed me last season's winning performance.
And it was in like 7-4 for a piece of the song.

Speaker 5 And they were doing this really strange scale that's sort of a cousin of the Romanian minor scale.

Speaker 5 And they had a spoken word poet who is like a Romania's great theater actor speaking during the performance.

Speaker 3 Like, this is crazy.

Speaker 5 This is like the sort of stuff in college I got into, like heavy jazz, weird scales, esoteric avant-garde stuff. And I was like, that's the winning performance?

Speaker 5 She's like, yeah, this girl won this year. I'm like, that's cool.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 5 That is not what I've seen. No offense to the American voice, but like it's more.
pop forward. And this felt like I could maybe do guitar solos.

Speaker 5 So the producers are like, we want you to do guitar solos every single performance. We want you to sing whatever you want.

Speaker 5 You know, if you feel like doing a song in 7-4, like, we would support that.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 5 So I feel like this is more my speed.

Speaker 2 For our non-musical audience, 7-4, so like, like, the music is in a time signature. The most common is 4-4

Speaker 2 or sometimes 3-4. And that's basically like 99% of music will be in those two time signatures.
Exactly.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So Twinkle.

Speaker 2 So 7-4 is really unusual.

Speaker 5 7-4 is unusual. Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star will be in 4-4.

Speaker 3 Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

Speaker 5 The meter for that, it was in a box of four beats per bar. Yeah.
Whereas the song in 7-4 was like

Speaker 5 7-1.

Speaker 5 It's a slightly different disjointed red.

Speaker 7 You used to do that on the show.

Speaker 3 That was pretty good.

Speaker 5 But so, yeah, they let me do a bunch of fun stuff, and we'll see how I do. But I was gaming when I was out there.
I was playing Donkey Kong Bonanza non-stop during that day.

Speaker 5 I 100%ed it during those things because it was a very stressful process learning new songs every week. They gave me 40 songs one week to learn and I 40 songs?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And they picked the one like the day before and I was like, wow, how did I get so many songs? So the stress release valve was like trying to get all 700 and whatever bananas, which I did.

Speaker 3 And it was great.

Speaker 5 I'm like you. I know you're more of a completionist.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I am as well.

Speaker 5 I haven't fully finished that game. That last little thing, once you've...

Speaker 5 Is it like spoiler alert?

Speaker 3 Are we in spoiler country? Do you guys still do that? Spoiler? Yeah, I think we're going to do that.

Speaker 2 We do have spoiler country, but I think we're fine with Donkey Time.

Speaker 5 Well, long story short, there was like an extra thing after King King K. Roll and I went, and I haven't beaten that yet.
But I need to do that. Sorry, I did spoil that.
Maybe you can.

Speaker 7 It's okay. No, it's okay.

Speaker 5 Because I was surprised when he came up in the game. I was like, he's in this?

Speaker 3 No way. That was amazing.

Speaker 7 I was also surprised, but then I was also like, why was I surprised?

Speaker 3 I know, I know. Why wouldn't he be? Yeah, that's fair.
That's fair.

Speaker 2 Did you, like, so overall, a positive assessment of Donkey Kong Bonanza, I assume?

Speaker 3 Uh-oh, I loved it.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I wouldn't, I was similar to you guys.

Speaker 5 I know in a previous episode talking about games of the year, like, I don't know if it's the game of the year, but it was one of my more enjoyable gaming experiences this year.

Speaker 5 Top five for me personally.

Speaker 2 I want to come back to that, but first, but before we do that, Matt spilled a Coke Sero earlier. You recently had the first Coke Sero of your life.

Speaker 5 Yeah, three days ago on a flight back from New Orleans.

Speaker 3 Three days ago. Yeah.
What evoked this? Because it happened.

Speaker 5 Because the internet is always right about information and facts. So I saw some guy, I've been scared about like aspartame and like, oh, I want to be healthy and all that.

Speaker 5 And it turns out it's way healthier to drink this stuff than it is to drink full sugar. Sure.
Like they have done studies after studies after studies.

Speaker 5 I was like, it is so the woman on the flight on the Delta flight, you know, represent Delta. Am I right, guys?

Speaker 7 Anyway, she was like, Hey, I'm allegiant to a different airplane. I cannot, Zane, I cannot co-sign that.
I'm happy for you. I'm not doing that.

Speaker 2 I do like the Delta Sky Club.

Speaker 5 I will say, though, Delta One. Have we done it? I'm sorry.
I'm not trying to premise. I just did.

Speaker 2 This is a whole thing that I have an axe to grind here, which is just like the

Speaker 2 Delta Sky Club was like, hey, this is the nice place where you can lounge before you do your flight. Now they have another lounge that's a different level than Delta Scott Clause Club.

Speaker 3 They can pay for it.

Speaker 2 That's an upgrade on top of that. So now the Delta Sky Club is like the shitty lounge on comedians.

Speaker 2 And then if you're, you know, if you're a true elite, you get to go in the Delta One lounge, but that's going to cost you more money.

Speaker 7 I wasn't familiar with Delta One, and now that I know that there's a place where I can comfortably sit, I'll happily join.

Speaker 3 I know, I know.

Speaker 5 But no, but all that to say, the stewardess was like, yeah, would you like to try like a Coke Zero? I'm like, I've heard about it. I'll try it.
It's fantastic.

Speaker 3 It really is. Better than regular Coke, maybe for me? I can't believe I'm saying it.

Speaker 7 It's replaced regular Coke for me simply from the sugar standpoint. But I think we all couldn't agree the healthiest version to not drink it at all.

Speaker 3 Would be water.

Speaker 7 Just to drink like a glass of water or something. But if I didn't have this,

Speaker 3 what would I have?

Speaker 2 I used to drink six RC colas a day. Wow.

Speaker 3 Amazing. Full sugar.

Speaker 5 Was that like in high school or was that like in my 20s?

Speaker 2 Amazing. But I also had an insane metabolism.
I was running a ton. Dude, I had, like, I, I would, I just like, looking back on it, that was like 1,200 calories of sugar every day.

Speaker 7 You'd open all six and just open your mouth and dump all six into your mouth.

Speaker 1 If you want a real, I think the best of the zeros is Dr. Pepper Zero.
Okay. Like, Dr.
Pepper Zero tastes indistinguishable from regular Dr. Pepper Zero.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's good zero soda. Yeah, that is good.
I need to get into that. Wow.
Welcome to Zero. Well, thank you so much.
Metroid Zero something. Okay.

Speaker 3 Zero vision.

Speaker 7 That is good. Okay.

Speaker 1 Godzilla minus zero, zero announced this week.

Speaker 3 Oh, wow. Yeah.
Oh, Octopath Traveler Zero. Oh, there you go.

Speaker 5 I'm so excited. I'm 90 hours into Octopath Traveler 2 right now.
I still haven't beaten it. I haven't gotten all the EX skills.
There's like two EX skills, special ones.

Speaker 5 I've gotten eight of them, not all 16. I love games like that.

Speaker 3 I'm obsessed. I love completing them.

Speaker 5 Oh, yeah, yo.

Speaker 2 What was your... You were talking about this a second ago, the games of

Speaker 2 this year, 2025. What else have you been playing that has really gripped you?

Speaker 5 Well, on the tour, the Foster People tour, we did like a whole American run, then we did a South American run, then we did a European run, and I was like the video game dealer on all three of those.

Speaker 5 Wow. So I'd bring my Xbox Series X and then the Switch 1 before the two would come out.
And Mark Isom and I pretty much 100% a doom eternal.

Speaker 3 And I loved that game.

Speaker 5 I got so into it. I asked him, I was like apologizing when we got back into town for a month.
I'm like, guys, I think I need to finish it. I know we're at 90%, but like, Mark's like, finish this.

Speaker 5 I'm like, if you guys want to come over but we really we were up till 4 a.m in new orleans and then in other cities just like yeah fully playing that game and mark was the best at that game then i played it at home and then i i 100 it myself and i got i got really good at that wow love that game yeah great yeah so that was one that i love this year but that's not from this year i don't think no no no okay and then dark ages i didn't even start i downloaded it but i haven't played it yet but it's such a different game it's like they call it a bullet hell quote unquote game which is so different than doom eternal so i'd i'd be more into more doom eternal type stuff personally than the bullet hell vibe but um yeah what else have i played this year it's been more sparse other than dk bonanza and mario kart world

Speaker 3 it's good i don't right it's good it's fine

Speaker 3 no it doesn't i don't grift anyone no i like it it looks better the sales for eight

Speaker 7 the the last one have like skyrocketed in the last uh post uh switch 2 launch i was reading yeah we've been buying eight like gangbusters yeah and i watch a a lot of that guy Shortcat.

Speaker 5 He makes like videos on. He's like a Mario Kart 8 deluxe streamer who's now like a nine or world streamer.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 And he talks about the different mechanics and how certain things were lost and certain skills

Speaker 5 that don't transfer.

Speaker 5 But I did 100% it so that I could get the game ready for Mark, Isom, and

Speaker 5 Aaron and Mike here from the band. And I was like, yeah, now I have all the characters so they can play them.
But it was just such a tedious process unlocking the characters.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 5 I did not enjoy that. And then we didn't end up playing it because then the tour ended like five days later because it took so freaking long to unlock them.

Speaker 3 So, I'm not happy. I have gripes with Mario Kart World.

Speaker 5 Um, and I will say what I'm most excited about now that I'm back in town because the handheld experience with the Switch 2 is great, it's a little heavier, but most of my playing was on a tour bus this year.

Speaker 5 Now that I'm back at home for the rest of the year, I am excited about finally finishing Tears of the Kingdom as the Switch 2 version, right?

Speaker 5 And then I also haven't finished,

Speaker 5 I mean, when I was a kid, I finished it, but Link's Awakening. It was for me, unplayable in its original form, like going dipping down to 18, 20 frames a second.
I was like, I can't do this.

Speaker 5 Now it's smooth 60. I can actually play that game.
I'm an FPS snob, it turns out. I like get very disturbed when it drops that much.
Oh, it's reasonable.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So there's nothing wrong with liking the thing.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 7 I like

Speaker 7 wanting it to be good.

Speaker 3 I think it's also, like, I'd rather have, I've talked to friends about this.

Speaker 5 Like, if the iPad is janky and not working, it's like pencil and paper worked.

Speaker 3 Like, I just want it to work. Yeah.

Speaker 5 I'm not angry at technology because I'm some modern snob of like, everything should be great and amazing. You know, electronically, it's like, well, if it doesn't work, I don't want it.

Speaker 3 I just like something to work.

Speaker 7 That's me in every public restroom with hand-powered

Speaker 3 me like, why doesn't it fucking work?

Speaker 3 I can't piss.

Speaker 7 It used to be able to do this. It was fine.
And now I won't make piss anymore.

Speaker 5 No, like, you know, like, you go to like a sink or like a, you know, towel dispenser or soap dispenser and you can't fucking get oh i got traction that's mostly like these things used to have handles or buttons or something what the why why right give me tactility yeah yeah you know zoe kravitz had had one of those subway take videos where she made a good point she's like bluetooth only works 40 of the time it doesn't really work like yeah if you're like have trying to vibe out and have a nice date night and you have to connect your bluetooth to the headset but it's on the car and she's like it doesn't really work put it back in the oven it's not fully cooked yet yeah so i'm like i feel that way with having to wave my hand in front of you yeah i relate okay so 60 FPS.

Speaker 1 One of the things I learned about Bluetooth is that you need to have a visual connection to the object, roughly. Oh, or something.
It works,

Speaker 1 or maybe it's sound. It works on a wavelength that it shouldn't work on.

Speaker 5 Like it has to bounce.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's something about Bluetooth right now. It's like a bat.
And

Speaker 1 I'm paraphrasing it incorrectly. But it was like, when I learned how Bluetooth worked, I was like, what the fuck is this?

Speaker 3 This is what we decided?

Speaker 1 It's like, it's like string between two cans technology.

Speaker 3 Amazing. Yeah.

Speaker 7 You mentioned Mario Karta.

Speaker 2 We previously talked about your Mario Tennis obsession. Are you still playing Mario Tennis at all?

Speaker 5 I'm excited about the new Mario Tennis for Switch 2.

Speaker 3 Okay, okay.

Speaker 6 That looks good.

Speaker 7 And I'm particularly very excited. for baby mode.

Speaker 7 There's like a thing you get turned into babies. Yeah.
It looks fun.

Speaker 1 I'm excited about that. There's also another Mario Tennis coming to the Switch 2 this

Speaker 1 winter, which is Virtual Boy Mario Tennis will finally be released. Wow.
What are you holding your face? You know who I am. You know what the show is.

Speaker 3 I know, but...

Speaker 5 You're so not excited about it.

Speaker 7 I just for, I just like, it must be just interesting to be the one person that's excited about something.

Speaker 3 Two people. I'm excited.

Speaker 5 No, because like the Mac, the circuit board stuff you do, like we have a lot of overlap. The Sega stuff, the retro era, I happen to be on a very similar wavelength.

Speaker 5 I am very excited about Virtual Boy stuff. I bought a Virtual Boy as a kid.
I got neck problems from it and it hurt my eyes, but I'm still excited to finally be able to play it.

Speaker 6 I wish they would do something with it, though.

Speaker 5 Like, I'd be curious to have them colorize it or something. Because, I mean, it'll be playable, but I'd be curious.

Speaker 1 Well, you can on the emulators now, you can color it. Like, if you have a 3DS, you can download the Virtual Boy emulator, play the games in 3D, and also add color.
Amazing.

Speaker 3 Really?

Speaker 5 Okay, I need to jailbreak my 3DS. Yes.

Speaker 3 That's what I mean.

Speaker 1 It is ferociously nice.

Speaker 3 Okay, amazing.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 as always, it is the easiest thing to do in the world to jailbreak a 3ds

Speaker 5 it's like almost they want they almost want you to do it kind of it is it'll take you 20 minutes well to this day i still play my 3ds i brought it here in studio but like i was playing luigi's mansion on halloween on a double decker bus tour in new orleans oh cool and i took a ray-ban meta video of me doing it to be like this happened i did this um and i still prefer like i'm playing shovel night again on the 3ds just because i love that i love the 3ds experience i really do so now that i know the virtual voice possible i legitimately tonight i'm going to jailbreak it Hell yeah.

Speaker 3 That's amazing.

Speaker 1 Same, do you have the new Gen 3 meta glasses or just the Gen 2s?

Speaker 5 I have the ones. I actually took a video at an FTP gig, which I have not put any of these videos up, but I have the craziest videos on my meta glasses from like 75,000 people at like Lollapalooza.

Speaker 5 And I'm like playing keyboard, then having a guitar, tech, hand me a guitar, and I'm playing. Like, why have I not put these up yet? I need to put them up.

Speaker 5 So point is, I did that during the tour, meaning Gen 3 had not come out yet.

Speaker 5 And then I bought the new, not new, I lost a pair, and I bought whatever generation that was four days before they announced Gen 3. But I bought them in Canada while we were on tour.

Speaker 5 I'm like, I can't return these. Yeah, though.
But I have the, I think they're older. They're like, you know, just the last generation.

Speaker 1 I was thinking about booking an appointment to, because you can't, the craziest thing about the meta, the new meta glasses is that you cannot purchase them unless you take a 20-minute demo.

Speaker 1 Like, you can't just walk into like the Ray-Ban store and buy them. Yeah.
You have to book an appointment in order to buy the fucking glasses. Gotcha.
And I was like, that's fascinating because

Speaker 1 what could they possibly do in 20 minutes that's going to either convince or unconvince some dummy like me who's come in to be like, I want a screen in my eyeballs.

Speaker 7 I bet you they maybe get like people who are just like, oh yeah, that would be interesting and then just like can't

Speaker 7 figure out how they fucking right because it's a wristband.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 7 I keep accidentally taking video of me jacking myself off.

Speaker 3 I can't oopsie.

Speaker 3 In fairness, I don't have those.

Speaker 5 I have just the regular ones to take videos, they're just sunglasses. Okay, yeah, but I did see that announcement.
That was crazy. Yep, but yeah, so I love the 3DS experience.

Speaker 5 And there's that one game that came out for Virtual Boy because, weren't there only like 19 games or 21 or something?

Speaker 3 Very small library. Small library.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's okay.

Speaker 5 But there was one game where like you're on a walking plank thing and you drop down. I forget the name of it.
People are going to, in the whatever, under this video or whatever.

Speaker 7 The other Virtual Boy person is going to be so upset. Yeah.

Speaker 3 The other

Speaker 5 I'm excited. I am.
I love that stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's good stuff.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Zane,

Speaker 2 my final question for you, and actually I'll be for everybody, is a question we ask every week on the podcast. What are you playing?

Speaker 3 What are you playing? Hi, it's me the Resident Evil Merchant. I love you and my friends and our guests ask what they're playing.
And you know what?

Speaker 3 I've liked listening to the conversation as it's been happening. I felt really relaxed.
I think you guys should record this show.

Speaker 7 Oh, no, we've been recording this whole time.

Speaker 2 This is, yeah, this is the.

Speaker 2 You've been on, I'd say, probably hundreds of episodes at this point. Yeah.

Speaker 2 At least dozens, if not hundreds.

Speaker 2 You're a fixture of a podcast that is recorded every week and released to an audience of thousands.

Speaker 3 When did that start?

Speaker 6 This is, I mean, this podcast.

Speaker 3 I don't remember

Speaker 2 when you originally joined us, but we've been doing this for

Speaker 2 the podcast in general has been going since 2019.

Speaker 3 I don't have any cape recorders.

Speaker 7 Fun fact the first episode actually though recorded

Speaker 7 at the end of 2018. It's been a while.

Speaker 3 What is

Speaker 3 what? What?

Speaker 3 Huh? What? What is what? What? No, what did you say?

Speaker 7 I said that we recorded the first episode in 2018.

Speaker 3 Of what? Of this show.

Speaker 2 Of this podcast.

Speaker 3 This show. This is scripted.

Speaker 2 This show that you're saying.

Speaker 2 It is scripted.

Speaker 2 Don't tell anyone.

Speaker 3 That's a whole story.

Speaker 7 I was saying no because I was reading my lines, And this is actually part of my lines.

Speaker 3 No, wait, wait, wait. Well, it's really interesting to know.
I'll have to

Speaker 3 look it up online.

Speaker 3 Hey, if you're fine. Toss us a sub.
What? Toss us a sub. Of what?

Speaker 2 Subscribe to the podcast.

Speaker 7 Difficult to know what you mean, though, because you could have been talking about meatball.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I thought you were talking about a sandwich. I got my ass at Jersey Mike's.

Speaker 7 Toss me a sub.

Speaker 3 You got a Weiger.

Speaker 7 You fucking jump for it like a dolphin.

Speaker 3 I think this is great. It's great to know it.
I think, hey, if you're out there,

Speaker 3 this is the Get Blade podcast.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 7 If you're out there, it is critical.

Speaker 3 Manupadunga, what are you playing?

Speaker 7 Thank you so much. You're welcome.

Speaker 3 Thank you, R.E.M.

Speaker 7 I'm basically at like the last thing in Pokemon Legends ZA.

Speaker 7 And I'm excited to finish it. I will say, since last week, I have been having a bit more fun with it.
I do think that the loop is a little bit tiresome, but I've grown attached to my team.

Speaker 7 You know, I like the characters.

Speaker 7 I do think that the story is kind of just blah, but it's gotten more interesting at the end, I think.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 I think overall

Speaker 7 I will have had fun with it, but I don't think it was like it's not a banger. It's just kind of like not

Speaker 3 what I was looking for.

Speaker 1 What was the was it Arceus that was the most recent Pokemon banger for you?

Speaker 7 I think so.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 7 Like, it's just tough because you, you know, I feel like

Speaker 7 I sound,

Speaker 7 you know, like I only like the old stuff.

Speaker 7 But, like, I liked all the way through the 3DS

Speaker 7 stuff. And then, like, the Switch.
I kind of think in the same way that people make the argument that Sonic should have never made the jump to 3D. I kind of think Pokemon's the same thing, actually.

Speaker 3 I think that we would have all...

Speaker 7 Nobody nobody would be mad

Speaker 7 if Pokemon had just stayed

Speaker 7 the way it was just in like the sort of you know top-down 2d

Speaker 7 sprite based game because imagine it in the octopath traveler style that'd be really fun

Speaker 7 this new stuff

Speaker 7 these new guys

Speaker 7 the way they look I then you know actually the Pokemon models are not that bad the models are actually pretty good

Speaker 7 and you can have a bunch, you know, you can have them walking around with you. And their movements and their attack moves actually look pretty good.

Speaker 7 But I'm just not like super stoked on it. There's DLC coming out for it pretty soon that costs $30.

Speaker 3 $30?

Speaker 7 And I'm just like, this is not...

Speaker 7 This, this needs to come out a year from now for me to be interested in it. Because the fact that it's coming out

Speaker 7 weeks after the game just means that they just didn't put it in the game on purpose. Right.
And I'm like, that's that fucking sucks.

Speaker 7 But, you know, I probably will play it at some point. I'm just not very interested in it.

Speaker 7 The things I actually am excited to talk about sort of will probably crest with what you're probably going to be talking about, Heather.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 7 Oh, I do want to really quick. I played through the entirety of Inside again.

Speaker 3 Just really quick.

Speaker 3 What provoked that?

Speaker 7 I was a guest on my buddy Connor McCabe's podcast, actually.

Speaker 7 He has a show called Call Me Buy Your Game, where they do episodes where they talk about like they did like a what they do a co-op episode where they had a bunch of people on to discuss one game and this is on their patreon uh super npc radio um and uh i was just like he had asked me to do it i had played it enough times in my life where i could have spoken about it forever yeah uh and i was like ah you know what it's just like three and a half hours i'll just like do it in two sittings and that's basically exactly what i did uh some of it just truly muscle memory it's just like some of those puzzles are so just like uh stuck in my brain It's truly so fun to replay a game you love.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And I don't do it enough, even knowing that sensation is so satisfying.
It was, it's such a joy.

Speaker 7 It was really wonderful. And I just, I love the, you know, I won't spoil it, but I love getting to the end of that game so much.
Yes.

Speaker 7 Because even knowing that it's coming, it's just like, it's just very delicious. It's very,

Speaker 7 it's just a really fun time to get, you know, to get through. And it's like, yeah, very short game.
So I did that. But,

Speaker 7 you know,

Speaker 7 you're sort of the Fortnite captain.

Speaker 2 You're like the, you're, you're, you're, you're, you cover the Fortnite beat.

Speaker 7 Yeah. And, you know, we've talked in the past.
We've all sort of danced with it a little bit.

Speaker 7 And there's been, you know, collabs here and there that have been of interest to all of us in some degree, but has not ever really fully got us in there. Yeah.
Yep. This new season is The Simpsons.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 you know what? I might just be John Wick because,

Speaker 7 yeah, I'm thinking I'm back.

Speaker 7 The Simpsons got me, you know, I didn't get the John Wick skin, but I got

Speaker 7 I've been playing.

Speaker 1 It is a great game when you can be John Wick executing Marge Simpson.

Speaker 3 Yes, so I have been playing

Speaker 7 this new season, and I've now, I, you know, I got the,

Speaker 7 you know, I've got the Bart bundle. I've been playing around as Bart.

Speaker 7 I've unlocked Marge at this point. I think I'm level 11 right now, so I'm on my way to unlocking Evil Marge or Witch Marge.

Speaker 2 And you have, correct me if I'm wrong, two Simpsons tattoos?

Speaker 7 Just the one. Oh, okay.
Just the one, which is the moth, the incomplete mother tattoo. Right.

Speaker 7 And it.

Speaker 3 Why did I think you had rat boy? You had rat boy on you.

Speaker 7 You know, because I had a rat boy t-shirt that I was rocking for a while. That's what it was.

Speaker 3 Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 7 I actually missed that t-shirt. I think about that t-shirt a lot.
I'm like, where did that t-shirt go?

Speaker 2 Oh, maybe commemorate it with the tattoo.

Speaker 3 Maybe I should get a tattoo of rat boy.

Speaker 7 I certainly have stupider tattoos.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 3 Don't say that about the Keyblade.

Speaker 7 No, yeah, no, no, I was not talking about the Keyblade.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 7 You can't see it, Zane. I have a ghost holding a slice of pizza.

Speaker 3 Amazing.

Speaker 7 But, you know, is it a stupid tattoo, stupid, or is it a fun time that you had one time?

Speaker 3 It's usually the latter.

Speaker 7 The new season of Fortnite's fucking great. It's really fun.

Speaker 7 I love Springfield.

Speaker 3 Yep.

Speaker 7 And I have, like, it's not really set up the way I know Springfield, but I feel like when I'm in areas of Springfield that I am sort of familiar with, I'm like, oh, yeah, this is, I'm kind of there.

Speaker 7 It's, it's, it's, and I love Simpsons video games, and there hasn't been a Simpsons video game in a long time.

Speaker 2 So, so you can't, like, the, the, the play space, you're gonna, like, where you can see, like, a lard lad donuts, a Krusty Loose Studios, it's all the, you know, the Springfield Elementary.

Speaker 2 It's all kind of there.

Speaker 3 Yeah, not everything.

Speaker 7 Not every land. Studio, but like, you can get, you know, there's a Krusty Burger, there's a quickie mart.
There's the, the, uh, you know, the power plant somewhere and stuff.

Speaker 7 Burns Manor.

Speaker 1 Homer's neighborhood is there with all the appropriate houses. I don't think the elementary school is in the game because, you know.
Oh, right.

Speaker 3 That would be bad artists.

Speaker 2 I probably don't want that happening.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it's probably too expensive to put it in.

Speaker 5 Too expensive.

Speaker 1 But there's, you know,

Speaker 3 City Hall.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 all of the POIs, like, I have a very cursory knowledge of The Simpsons, but I also am like, oh, wow. I kind of know this.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 7 I love playing as Marge because the characters don't really blink that much. So like these, in particular, the Simpsons characters have pretty big eyes.
So they're just kind of like.

Speaker 5 Do they have a skin for Bart? That's... What was that NES game where it's like a mutant thing?

Speaker 3 Bart versus

Speaker 3 the space mutants. We talked about that in our old format.

Speaker 5 Accidentally, outer space.

Speaker 2 I didn't even think of that.

Speaker 3 This guy's got space on the freaking bread.

Speaker 5 That was an accident. Wait, but do they have that skin? Because that would make sense.

Speaker 7 No, he's got like

Speaker 7 because everybody's hitbox has to be the same, which I think they should change. I think it kind of like it's more fair.
It would kind of be more fun if everybody had slightly different hitboxes.

Speaker 2 It'd be better to see what the meta was if you had, like, you know, like you got like Kenny from South Park and he was actually as small as he is and, you know, like relative to, you know, there is

Speaker 3 the truth is that like the

Speaker 1 really intense hardcore online community has determined that there are slightly different hitboxes. And there's certainly

Speaker 1 skins that you can play as that blend into the environment a lot more than other skins. They're like superhero skins.

Speaker 1 They suck.

Speaker 1 What I found in this season, because it is all cell-shaded, is that if you are a cell-shaded character, you blend in far more into the environment

Speaker 1 than if you're one of like the three-dimensional rendered characters.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I'm remembering something I wanted to ask you.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 7 Because maybe I just am Fortnite ignorant and I don't know.

Speaker 7 Because there are tasks, there are quests that you can do. But it's a battle royale game.
So the, you know, people are like out.

Speaker 7 If you get seen trying to complete quests, people are like trying to kill you still. Yes.
I think there should be an etiquette where you see me breaking stuff.

Speaker 7 I have to break 50 things at the Krusty Burger or something. Nope.
You come and kill me. I got to now come.
I got to do it again. Yeah, maybe, yeah.

Speaker 2 Like, lay off for a second. Lay off for a second.

Speaker 7 Give me a fucking break.

Speaker 3 Absolutely not.

Speaker 7 I just think it's rude. Or there should be a mode that's like

Speaker 3 free play. Well, you can just go on free play.

Speaker 1 There are versions of the game where, like, you can go on. on

Speaker 1 there are versions, I think, where you can just do quests.

Speaker 1 Like the save the world mode, I think is what it is.

Speaker 1 But I think the fun of the game is I'm just trying to pick up this fucking garbage while people are hitting me with a car or shooting me in the head.

Speaker 7 Freaking Hatsune Miko fucking sniped me.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 5 But the hitboxes are not different than how does Marge's hair work.

Speaker 5 They shrink her down to the hitbox or her hair is not shootable?

Speaker 1 Her hair isn't shootable.

Speaker 7 Yeah, okay, yeah. No, no damage to the hair.

Speaker 2 But that's kind of reflected in the Simpsons canon. We've seen her hair, like for instance, her entire hair get it get chopped off and then reattached with a stick.

Speaker 5 So also hair doesn't hurt if you

Speaker 5 don't

Speaker 5 have nerve endings.

Speaker 7 Yeah, Zane, I don't know how to tell you this.

Speaker 3 Hair doesn't hurt. Why have I been keeping my hair short the past years? What are you doing?

Speaker 2 You know, they should put in the Simpsons Fortnite, they should put in a Maude Flanders skin so you can kill her repeatedly in front of Ned.

Speaker 3 Oh,

Speaker 3 keep tormenting him.

Speaker 7 You've got to watch The Simpsons. There's so many good ones.

Speaker 2 Okay. Ranch, you played a little bit of this new Fortnite season, yes?

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah.
It's fun.

Speaker 3 I kind of like how it looks more than regular Fortnite. Wow.

Speaker 2 Are you using any of The Simpsons skins?

Speaker 1 No. What's your skin currently?

Speaker 3 Still Eminem?

Speaker 1 It's not Eminem anymore.

Speaker 3 It is just a generic anime, girl. Got it.

Speaker 7 I didn't, I have the Otani skin, but I purposely moved off of it because I didn't want to put a fucking target on my back. I didn't want anyone to be mad at me this week.

Speaker 3 I was like, extra. Wow.
I actually did buy the Otani skin. Yeah, it's so good.

Speaker 7 There's like a Tim in his Dodder uniform, and then there's one where it's samurai Otani. Wow.

Speaker 2 I'm so fucking dumb. When I was briefly playing Fortnite, I bought the Giannis skin and then just never used it.
I just wanted to have it.

Speaker 3 I was like, he's cool.

Speaker 7 It is fun to have.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it is fun to have. Yeah.
Heather, what are you playing?

Speaker 1 Well, I have been playing The Simpsons Fortnite. I find this season to be

Speaker 1 a far more granular, position-based game.

Speaker 1 There's a lot less mobility than in previous seasons.

Speaker 1 And I think of a tighter, as of right now, as of record, a tighter weapon set,

Speaker 1 no snipers.

Speaker 1 Like, it just feels like a more...

Speaker 1 grindy game than previous seasons of Fortnite, which have felt a little bit more liberated.

Speaker 1 Like this is a game currently where if you don't have position, you can get get wiped out very rapidly and not really have any means of recouping those losses. So I've been playing that.

Speaker 1 I've also been playing Ghost of Yote.

Speaker 1 I want to know how you guys would feel about me showing a clip to you guys.

Speaker 3 I would love to see a clip. I would love to see a clip.

Speaker 1 You would love to see a clip. I don't think we should play it for, I think we should edit out the part where, you know, you sit through three minutes of a clip.

Speaker 3 Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 7 I don't know if I got three minutes for being honest.

Speaker 7 I'm interested in seeing the clip, but like three minutes is kind of like, it's almost a moment.

Speaker 2 Kind of kind of pushing it, yeah, on the cusp. Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 3 I'll do, I'll commit three minutes to it.

Speaker 7 I'll do it, but I just kind of like,

Speaker 7 is it really is it a full three?

Speaker 1 It is a full three, and you will love it.

Speaker 3 Okay,

Speaker 2 if I get if I get a text, I might check my phone.

Speaker 3 That's fine. Okay, I might have to get up and go to the bathroom.

Speaker 3 I actually have to pee.

Speaker 3 But I genuinely also want to watch this.

Speaker 5 I'm torn. I know it's a good one.

Speaker 1 No, go, go pee.

Speaker 3 Let's here's what we'll do.

Speaker 2 We'll watch this clip and then we'll come back and we'll talk about it.

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Speaker 1 All right, so as I've spoken about on the show previously, I have created my own difficulty level where I cannot take.

Speaker 1 more than two hits at this point from anybody on screen. Any character, whether they are the weakest character or the strongest character, if I get hit twice, I'm dead.

Speaker 1 Most characters can kill me in one hit. Weakest characters have to take two.
In return,

Speaker 1 I can kill everybody else in one to two hits, except for bosses.

Speaker 1 The game has become a management of space and resources at top speed. Yeah.

Speaker 1 This clip that I'm going to show you starts with a couple versions of me dying so that you get a sense of how rapidly it can happen.

Speaker 1 But then I finally conquer an area that took me more than an hour of, I've also set it up so that parries don't exist. Only perfect parries exist.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 1 So anyway, here is a clip that will cut out of the actual podcast and I'll never actually release online

Speaker 3 of me

Speaker 1 fighting against the spider.

Speaker 3 Oh shit. Hell yeah.

Speaker 1 This is a fight where you fight the boss while also fighting an army of people at the same time.

Speaker 7 I'm watching this like I'm watching a movie, like, and I'm enjoying it the same amount.

Speaker 5 You're so good at this that it almost seems like they don't know how to play.

Speaker 5 Like them not getting a chance to hit you because you're sniping in right before they can.

Speaker 3 Whoa.

Speaker 5 Is that the boss? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Okay, got it. Oh.

Speaker 7 You're killing them in such a way that, like, if I got killed like that, it'd be like, I deserve this.

Speaker 3 Whoa, dude.

Speaker 1 There it was, my final perfect parry.

Speaker 2 Wow. Jeez.

Speaker 1 It took me an hour

Speaker 3 of losing that fight to finally get that fight.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 1 And it felt like I had achieved something real in my life. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Congratulations. Thank you very much.

Speaker 6 What a fun way to play.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So for our, you know, we had a little bit of a time gap there, but we all just witnessed what I would describe as three minutes of mastery.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 That was really, really rad to watch. It was really good.
Just seeing you wreck like a whole bunch of underlings and then take out the heavy it was like watching the attract mode like

Speaker 5 man this guy's fucking good you're like you must be so like mentally or like brainwise healthy because how do you do that like my i my brain is slowed down i can't it's crazy well with this game specifically

Speaker 1 Early in the, when I, when I was like, I'm, I'm chasing this feeling, this feeling of like, of like riding on a razor-thin line the entire time.

Speaker 1 I also beat for our audience, uh, Takezo, who's the uh, like the optional boss. Uh, I beat him, uh, in this mode that I have invented, where with him, one hit killed me.

Speaker 1 And also, I'm now in an area where everybody can shoot guns and uh anybody can shoot me from anywhere in the map and kill me.

Speaker 1 So, anytime I hear somebody loading their gun, I have to run and dodge without knowing what I'm dodging.

Speaker 3 Oh my God.

Speaker 1 It is the most thrilling experience that I've had in games except for Fortnite

Speaker 1 in so long.

Speaker 1 But every,

Speaker 1 what you saw, though, is, again,

Speaker 1 an hour of me being like, son of a bitch.

Speaker 5 You like turned it into like Ninja Gaiden style. One hit, it kills you and one hit.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's so

Speaker 1 fucking fun.

Speaker 1 But yeah, I'm, I've now unlocked all of the shrines. My entire growth map is completely unlocked.
Nice.

Speaker 7 I um

Speaker 1 I've unlocked I think all the areas because the map guy quit like I got a message that was like there are no more maps.

Speaker 3 Whoa.

Speaker 1 And it wasn't like I was talking to him. It was somewhere somewhere else.

Speaker 7 He don't got no more maps. He's got no more maps.

Speaker 1 And I think I might I must be in the end game now because I'm not like there's only I've only killed three of the Yote six, but I would have to assume that the final three are in rapid succession right after one another.

Speaker 3 Sure, yeah.

Speaker 1 But yeah, that was, that felt like I did something,

Speaker 1 that I did something

Speaker 3 in my life.

Speaker 5 Did you ever get into Super Smash Bros.?

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 5 Because whenever I play that game, I play as Little Mac because I suck at that game and I can just do the taps. And I don't do parries.
I don't do blocks.

Speaker 5 But you were using all buttons, it seemed, on the controller versus I'll tap A and run away.

Speaker 3 You could play professionally probably. Smash.

Speaker 1 I don't like the floatiness of Smash. Okay.
But I did used to play Street Fighter all the time.

Speaker 5 Oh, did you play Street Fighter VI?

Speaker 6 Very, very briefly.

Speaker 5 I was really into that for like six months. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Who's your main?

Speaker 5 Dalsim. Okay.
Oh, nice. And I was really pretty good with him.

Speaker 5 I frustrated some people because in Street Fighter VI, when the game starts, you can move your face, you know, and do little goofy things.

Speaker 5 And I'd play the same people and they'd do faces that I think... if I understood the language of the game, meant like, you're an a-hole and I hate you.

Speaker 3 All right.

Speaker 5 I was a little bit cheap, but I, man, I was really into that game, and now it's on Switch 2, so I should get it.

Speaker 5 But my best friend and I bought the game and played it together a bunch, and I'm like, it's on the Xbox already. I don't really feel like buying a second time.
Yeah, yeah. But I did love that game.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Zane, what are you playing?

Speaker 5 Ooh, I am playing Octopath Traveler 2 right now. I'm, there's a, it's, there are a lot of branch storylines in that game.
So like, I forget what they're called. I think cross paths.

Speaker 5 So like some of my characters have like their level 31 story, but then there's a cross path story with two characters that are level 15. I should probably take care of those first.

Speaker 5 And I've already put 90 hours in that game. A handsome amount of that was like, I pressed pause and left, you know, and so it's probably more like 60 hours.

Speaker 5 But so I want to beat that before Octopath Traveler Zero comes out. I want to finish Metroid Prime Remastered before, is it Beyond? Is that what they're calling?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Metropolitan 4 Beyond. So I want to finish that.

Speaker 5 I played Luigi's Mansion Dark Moon on the 3DS for a hot second on Halloween.

Speaker 3 Why not, man? Why not?

Speaker 5 I'm in New Orleans on Halloween dressed like David S.

Speaker 3 Pumpkins. That was my character.

Speaker 5 Dash, actually. Dash Anderson was the one who was like, are you David S.
Pumpkins? I guess so.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 5 that's good. Yeah.
But

Speaker 5 no, so I've been playing that. I guess I kind of want to beat that.

Speaker 5 Although I know they released Luigi's Mansion 2, quote unquote, on the day before Halloween, I think, on Switch, Nintendo Switch Online.

Speaker 3 That's right. Yeah.

Speaker 5 But like, I have it on 3DS and I prefer the 3D experience. So I'll play it there, even though it's lower res.

Speaker 5 What else am I properly playing? I don't know.

Speaker 5 I mean, in preparation for like the Outer Space theme episode, I didn't play a lot of these games, but I did watch gameplay of different games from like more of the retro era that we'll talk about.

Speaker 2 You've given us a pretty comprehensive list of stuff you've been playing. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I don't have anything to do with it. It doesn't seem like for me any good, Dad.

Speaker 7 It doesn't seem like you're playing enough games, actually.

Speaker 5 The truth is, I don't play as many games these. No, actually, I always say that.

Speaker 3 It's not true.

Speaker 5 I play too much, man. I always pretend like I'm not playing as much as watching videos, watching Wolf Den videos, watching like, you know, Spawn Wave videos, watching RGT4085, whatever his name is.

Speaker 5 I watch a lot of like retro gaming and handheld videos online. Yeah, but I actually did, I, you know, 100% doom eternal this year, and I am like about to be Doctor Path Traveler too.

Speaker 5 So there are a handful of games.

Speaker 2 700 bananas.

Speaker 5 I got all seven.

Speaker 3 Exactly. So I guess I did play a lot of games this year.

Speaker 3 I'm allowed to be in this room. That's right.

Speaker 5 That's my fear that I'm like, I'm not really gaming enough. No.

Speaker 3 But I guess I need to get your quota this year, bud.

Speaker 2 Dispose of your imposter syndrome. There you go.

Speaker 3 That's what it comes to. It comes for us all.

Speaker 5 Why do I not have that when it comes to jazz guitar, but I have that when it comes to gaming? What is that psychologically?

Speaker 1 Well, I think that there's like a gatekeepiness to gaming that.

Speaker 1 Oh, you're not a real gamer. Whereas I feel like in my limited exposure to the music world, yeah, there are still gatekeepy guys, but mostly it's like, oh, wow, how's it going?

Speaker 1 Like, you know, there's like an like a, like a please come into this arena and share your stuff and

Speaker 1 I'll show you what I have. And there's, of course, always going to be jerks and assholes and show-offy type guys, but it feels more like broadly inclusive.
I think you're right.

Speaker 5 Also, everyone's looking to like co-write and collaborate. So there is more of what you're saying.
And in the jazz space, most people think of it as a very snooty, esoteric thing.

Speaker 5 But if you can hang and play a gig, people are very welcoming. Unfortunately, they can be rude if they feel like you can't hang.
It's very athletic in that way.

Speaker 5 But once you're part of the community, which I'm lucky to be a part of, it's like, what's up, let's hang, let's go shit, let's go jam.

Speaker 5 Yeah, when it comes to gaming, I'm like, you guys were talking Fortnite. I'm going, I've never played Fortnite.
I've not once played it.

Speaker 5 And the season, the way you're describing it, I'm like, I've never played a game with seasons. And Grant, that's auto six.
I'm like, oh, I'm out of touch.

Speaker 5 But with the stuff I'm into, I am very obsessively untouched.

Speaker 7 Yeah, you're very, and you got some stuff too that you're playing chunky ones. You're not playing like that.

Speaker 3 Oh, that's true. That's true.

Speaker 5 And that's maybe the one area where... At least from listening to the podcast and loving it so much, I do feel like I relate to you, Heather, with like the retro stuff and the Apple Mac series stuff.

Speaker 5 But we do deviate because you can get into like the more hardcore, fast-paced stuff. I tend to go very slow-paced, text-based.
But

Speaker 1 I think gaming is, I mean, like, I don't play Call of Duty, and there are people who are like, well, if you don't play Call of Duty, you're not like gaming.

Speaker 1 Like, you know, like there's, there's always going to be a type of person who

Speaker 1 uses their hobby as their identity. Right.
And thus they have to protect it because any attack on their hobby is an attack on who they think they are.

Speaker 1 So, like, I think that's part of why gaming becomes like this

Speaker 1 gatekeepy arena is because so many people have become the thing that they like instead of becoming themselves and then liking a thing. Yeah, totally.

Speaker 1 Speaking of,

Speaker 1 Weiger, what are you playing?

Speaker 3 Thank you so much for asking.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's funny that we're having this conversation because what I've been going through lately is like, do I still like video games? You know, you ever have those moments?

Speaker 2 I feel like what happens with any hobby and maybe you've had this as a mute, those moments as a musician where you're just kind of like, oh, what am I doing? You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 And like, I kind of have those,

Speaker 2 it's just, it's just the, the, I've had this happen with video games before. I've had those moments of exasperation where I'm kind of like, like, what am I doing here?

Speaker 2 You know, am I, am I, am I liking this? Do I understand

Speaker 2 too much what this is doing to my brain and my body, you know, to really

Speaker 2 extract joy from it anymore? And then sometimes I go away from it. And then what's happened in the past, I've gone away from it, and then I've come back to it.

Speaker 2 The thing is, having a podcast about video games, it's like it's a little bit harder to take a full sort of breather from this thing that is

Speaker 2 once you monetize your hobby, you kind of got a it's a little bit compulsory to indulge in it.

Speaker 1 Let's do a Star Wars podcast for six episodes.

Speaker 3 Let's just get to take a fucking break. Well, let me say this.

Speaker 2 I decided to play some Deep Rock Galactic Survivor, which was a game that I played a lot of in early access, and I played some more when the 1.0 release came out back in September.

Speaker 2 And just I was hanging with our buddy John Gabris,

Speaker 2 the best guest in podcasting. He's put a lot of hours in this game.
I was was like, you know what? I should go back to that and spend some more time with this space game,

Speaker 2 which is an auto-shooter vampire survivor-like set in the Deep Rock Galactic universe. Now, I've never played Deep Rock Galactic, the OG game.

Speaker 2 This is my whole familiarity with the IP, but I do like it. It's maybe a little quippy for me, but I still think it's a lot of fun.
It's a cool, colorful,

Speaker 2 joyful aesthetic. and sensibility.

Speaker 2 And so I just was like, this game is pure gameplay, and I'm just going to see what this does to me.

Speaker 2 And I did vacillate a bit between a flow state and existential angst, but I overall had a nice time with my hours I put into Deep Rock Galactic Survivor this past week.

Speaker 2 I'm going to keep going with it. I've discussed this game before on the podcast, and I may have even put it on my best of list last year as an early access game or a couple years ago.

Speaker 2 But basically what distinguishes it primarily from Vampire Survivor and other of these games is that it has terrain mining.

Speaker 2 So you have like, you're not just have these endless mobs of baddies that are pursuing you, all with their own attack patterns, and some of them are spewing projectiles, and some are giant bosses and what have you, but you also have a way to...

Speaker 2 kite them to you know the base effectively erect defensive walls against them

Speaker 2 it's a much more active bit of movement other than just like you know moving in in different directions yeah You actually can like, like, like I kind of channel them into certain avenues and get them clustered where you need them to both defend yourself and ensure the maximum

Speaker 2 impact from your particular loadout.

Speaker 2 And it also just gives it a bit more depth beyond just hyper-optimizing said loadout, which is like kind of one of the things, one of the issues with survivor likes is that a lot of times it's just like, okay, I figured out the best synergies.

Speaker 2 I figured out the best abilities. I figured out what I'm going to prioritize when I have that roguelike element of being able to choose what my next upgrade is going to be.

Speaker 2 And so I'm just going to target everything towards that. And I kind of feel like I can always push myself toward a win state.

Speaker 2 I will say some of the secondary objectives do start to feel a little bit samey, but I think that's okay

Speaker 2 because it's just like a nice evolution of this.

Speaker 2 pretty straightforward, but also like really innovative

Speaker 2 new subgenre that's come about in the past few years. And yeah, I just really, really enjoy this game.
I just think

Speaker 2 it's super fun. And

Speaker 2 kind of what we were talking about, Matt,

Speaker 2 with

Speaker 2 Ball Pit, which is the X is Unspoken,

Speaker 2 is the, is that it's just like...

Speaker 2 It's just the purest form of a video game. You know what I mean? It's kind of just like, like it's effectively, and hey, I talked about another game that was like this.

Speaker 2 It's effectively a glorified slot machine. You know, like, like it's so simple in terms of just, you know, the incremental progress you're making.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it's like one step up from a clicker, from a true idol game.

Speaker 2 But it's like the sweet spot for me right now. And I just think it's a really, really nifty design.

Speaker 7 It is really great. I played it a little bit in early access too, but

Speaker 7 I haven't revisited in 1.0. Here's the digital.

Speaker 2 This is the other thing. This is another dumb dog brain thing for me.
I got it because I already had it on Steam, but I was like, it's on Game Pass. Whatever.

Speaker 2 I'm paying like 50 bucks a month for Game Pass or whatever the fuck it is now.

Speaker 2 Paying the absurd amount that it costs for a subscription, which is what we knew this was happening.

Speaker 7 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 6 We knew that

Speaker 2 it was going to go from the best value in gaming to something where we're all taking it on the chin. What are you going to do?

Speaker 2 That's capitalism. Anyway, so I got the,

Speaker 2 I just got it off of Game Pass because for some reason, again, dumb dog brain, Game Pass achievements feel more tangible to me than Steam achievements.

Speaker 2 So I was like, okay, well, I can knock all these out while I'm playing this game. I was going to, I'm going to, you know, whatever.
I felt like a fresh save anyway.

Speaker 2 So, but yeah, that's that's what I've been playing.

Speaker 7 It's a great one. Yeah.
But you kind of touched on it already, Nick. That game kind of takes place in outer space.

Speaker 2 Let's talk outer space games. Zane, part of the impetus for this is you have a music video for is anybody else out here your song that's set in space?

Speaker 5 yes i wrote i wrote this song uh a couple years ago and i had this image of like an astronaut in space floating by himself and then maybe some more stuff happens in the video and i was like let me write a song based on that experience in my mind and this really sad song came about which i released last year the weekend we played austin city limits with uh when i was playing with foster the people so i released it and i was like oh i'll get this music video done and it's been a year i haven't released it yet because i haven't finished it yet because it was much harder to make than i thought because it's in outer space and i had to fly out there yeah you you had to get out there.

Speaker 7 It's really hard to get out there.

Speaker 5 No, I just, yeah, we had a few ways of trying to make it happen with like CG and then with a video and then filming in a place and it got very expensive and we're almost done.

Speaker 5 One of the beautiful things of doing the voice of Romania is I met an amazing CG artist, amazing video guy out there. So he's helped me finish it.
Thank God. And we're getting there.

Speaker 5 But I don't know if the video is going to come out in two weeks, in a month, in two months, but it will be, I think, before the year ends. So yeah, I was texting him.

Speaker 3 He's He's like, what's going on in your life?

Speaker 5 I'm like, I got this weird video. He's like, let's do an outer space episode.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 Which is awesome because a lot of my favorite games actually, at least one of them took place out there in space.

Speaker 7 I was going to ask you, in general, do you like outer space as just like an idea, as a concept?

Speaker 5 I'm obsessed with astrophysics. When I was like a kid, my dad used to, I'd like take showers.
I was like, you know, four years old. And he's like, oh, well, keep, you know, keep you safe.

Speaker 5 So let me like read you some books while you're in there. So he'd sit like on the closed toilet.
Sounds very strange.

Speaker 5 Anyway, he would sit there and go like, yeah, this is this book by this guy stephen hawking let's talk about it so we'd talk about you know the brief history of time is that right yeah yeah and then he's like this guy carl sagan we should talk about cosmos and from a very young age he was like philosophizing about physics and astrophysics in particular and then i became a big fan of bill and nye and then neil degrasse tyson and then so yeah i'm really really into space stuff and I'm hoping one day that intersects somehow with music.

Speaker 5 There's a brilliant pianist named Dan Teffer, who my girlfriend's friends with. And he did a whole thing on the vibration of Jupiter.
And then he made a song that was in that vibration, in that key.

Speaker 5 Whoa. Yeah, he's a PhD in astrophysics and a jazz piano player.
He's a genius.

Speaker 2 Do you have a favorite space thing? It could be like a planet. It could be like

Speaker 2 a concept.

Speaker 5 I talk to Dash about this a lot. We talk about PBS space-time videos.

Speaker 5 There was one video I saw maybe a year ago, and it was about like, if we were to get to interstellar travel, how fast would we have to go and what's possible?

Speaker 5 And basically, like, how close can we get to the speed of light? And what would the challenges be if we were at 0.9 C or 0.95 C or, you know, close to C, which is, you know, the speed of light.

Speaker 5 And it turns out like there are way more challenges if you can go that fast.

Speaker 5 Like one little molecule could hit and go through your brain and like, you know, destroy the ship just because you're traveling so fast. Yeah, right.
One piece of dust.

Speaker 3 The holdover maneuver. Really? From.

Speaker 2 You said the holdover maneuver.

Speaker 1 I think you're talking about the holdover maneuver from The Last Jedi.

Speaker 7 But I said it bad, and now everyone's thinking about Paul Giamatti.

Speaker 2 We're thinking about with

Speaker 3 the prosthetic eye.

Speaker 2 A good movie, but no, you mean holdo.

Speaker 3 The holdover.

Speaker 3 The holdo maneuver.

Speaker 2 You had an extra ver because of maneuver.

Speaker 5 Is it a thing? I don't know Star Wars One, though. Is this a thing where he has to watch out for a piece of wood?

Speaker 7 Well, Laura Dern

Speaker 7 does this basically suicide mission where she helps everybody escape by

Speaker 7 taking her ship into hyperspace through another through a star destroyer. Yeah.
Okay.

Speaker 7 And it is really cool and it's done really effectively, but some people, depending on who you ask, don't like it.

Speaker 2 I do think there was an opportunity to give it to Admiral Akbar because he kind of gets an ignoble death. But I think it being the holdo maneuver is cool.
I do like it conceptually in the movie.

Speaker 2 I don't like in episode nine.

Speaker 3 No, no, we can't. I just like it.
We do six weeks of Star Destroyer. We're talking outer space.
We're only six weeks. We're talking outer space.
We're talking outer space.

Speaker 2 We're talking outer space so we can. This is this is on this is on topic.

Speaker 2 Rise of Skywalker,

Speaker 3 they're like, like holdo maneuver? Oh, that's a million-to-one shot.

Speaker 2 Like, that's like they dismiss it like that instead of like, you got to come up with a better justification than that.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 2 it's like, it violates like the code. Like, like, just maybe give me an ethical argument or something like that.

Speaker 3 We're not going to sacrifice.

Speaker 2 Our ships are too, too, too valuable to sacrifice.

Speaker 2 We can't sacrifice crew members or something.

Speaker 7 Yeah, even if somebody was just like, what are we going to do?

Speaker 3 Fucking crash all our ships into each other?

Speaker 3 That's crazy.

Speaker 7 They've got more ships than us.

Speaker 3 They got Exegal with apparently this unlimited

Speaker 3 group of shipbuilders. Well, they.

Speaker 7 Zane, if you want to go pee again,

Speaker 1 they could have done it just by saying the calculations required to enter hyperspace in a way in which you don't immediately disappear in front of the ships is an almost incalculable problem.

Speaker 3 Yes, yeah. You know, because in theory,

Speaker 1 when you go in a hyperspace, all of this shit around you disappears.

Speaker 3 Yes. Right, right.
So, like,

Speaker 1 they could have justified it by saying that she was a mathematical genius and nobody's been able to do that calculation before or since.

Speaker 2 They just didn't give a shit. Or it's because they were writing the movie as the cam was rolling, apparently.

Speaker 1 You know, who does give a shit right now? Is the legacy of Vader comics are doing everything in their power to connect episode eight to episode nine.

Speaker 1 Charles Soule, I think is his name,

Speaker 1 is doing this run where he's basically following Kylo Wren's character growth after eight to make nine make sense.

Speaker 1 And so much cool shit is happening in that comic series that I'm like, fuck, wasn't this the fucking movie? God damn it. Right.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Right. But yes, what you were saying about

Speaker 2 the light speed, that's fascinating. Yeah.

Speaker 5 How do you solve that? And also one part of the video that said amazing, I I forget his name, but he's like an Australian astrophysic physicist.

Speaker 5 He's like, well, even getting to the speed of light, we could use nuclear propellants and we could keep using them, but then you might get nuclear poisoning.

Speaker 5 So you need to have a certain amount of water between you and the nuclear propellant. Wow.
And then if you get there, then the dust will destroy you.

Speaker 5 And then there are so many other challenges of like, you know, food and shelter. I don't know.
There's a bunch.

Speaker 1 Star Trek does it where it's not propellant, but they're warping space around the ship. Like, so that

Speaker 3 the stuff can't hit you, which is why why it's called warp drive.

Speaker 1 Like, they're, they're creating, like, a distortion

Speaker 1 in space. Got it.
Kind of like the way that, like, you know, gravity distorts space.

Speaker 3 Yes, yeah, that's kind of the dooms.

Speaker 2 That's the space can solve as well. They're kind of they're folding space.

Speaker 7 Okay.

Speaker 7 Also, my suit has all my piss and shit in it.

Speaker 3 Amen, brother.

Speaker 3 Now we're talking.

Speaker 7 I think that's one of my favorite space things.

Speaker 3 Just like the

Speaker 7 rules that you just got to come up with, like, to just like, so you don't have to piss or shit.

Speaker 2 Yes. Well, you're talking about the the fremen still suits yeah

Speaker 2 well they they don't talk about the processing urine in feces in the the the nill nou movies but they do touch on that it's in the books and the david lynch film

Speaker 7 it's pretty nasty to me uh matt you're fan you're on the record as saying space is better than old you stand by that you know it's interesting because a few years ago i did say this and i meant like basically like

Speaker 7 at the time i think i was comparing like outer space to like the old west or something it's just like those two places obviously so different from each other uh but i've at that time thought one to be superior um i think i have since then changed my stance on this and said that the ocean is the best of all of ocean is different than space and old and ocean is actually supreme to me um

Speaker 7 i i feel like i can't in good conscience be

Speaker 7 a space guy like uh like i think space is the best now because like all the worst guys on earth are like we got to get to fucking space

Speaker 7 but I am interested in it. I think it is interesting and like it's cool.
It is a cool place. I like that nobody can hear you scream because you know if I'm up there I'm gonna be doing that.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 Get me to put me back down.

Speaker 3 I'm gonna be saying

Speaker 7 I would actually want somebody to hear me.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I want help.

Speaker 7 Get me out of here.

Speaker 7 But right now, I think it's the ocean for me, if I'm being honest. I like the ocean because it's just so

Speaker 7 they know less about it than they do space.

Speaker 5 I know. It's very

Speaker 2 staggering. Well, let's talk about

Speaker 2 some games. I mean, like, Zane, like you mentioned one of your favorite games is a space game.

Speaker 2 What is it?

Speaker 5 It's a little bit obscure, but Bucky O'Hare for the NES. Okay.

Speaker 3 Remember that? Remember Bucky O'Hare.

Speaker 2 It's in a cartoon.

Speaker 1 Bucky O'Hare.

Speaker 5 I have a very special memory with that game because we went out for my brother's. I'm a younger brother.
I went out for Reeves' birthday.

Speaker 5 I think he was seven.

Speaker 5 Fern Gully came out, whatever year that was. Huge.
Yeah. And we went out for this birthday, and I was the younger brother.

Speaker 3 Huge, huge.

Speaker 7 Actually, famously, very little.

Speaker 3 But the impact. The impact.
Huge.

Speaker 7 We don't have Avatar without it.

Speaker 2 Amen.

Speaker 3 Good point.

Speaker 5 No, but so we

Speaker 5 went out to see that. And I wasn't really invited to the party because I was like the five-year-old brother.

Speaker 5 And then we got back to the house. And Reeves is the best.
I love. I just got back from his wedding.
We're like so close. We were in a band together.
We were like so, so, so close.

Speaker 5 But back then, when you're five and seven, it's like, you know, he's forging his own identity. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So he was like, I don't want to stay at the party. you know.

Speaker 5 And I was like, oh man, come on, let me eat some of the ice cream from your truck thing.

Speaker 3 And like, let me hang out.

Speaker 5 So I was watching from far away at his birthday party while he played Bucky O'Hare. And I was like, I can beat this.
I can do this. And they were struggling on one of the levels.

Speaker 5 And someone said, Doesn't your younger brother play games a lot?

Speaker 3 I was like, I'll play that level.

Speaker 5 And I came in. I became the coolest kid at that party.
Had to get 100% of that game with their, you know, help, sort of. But I did most of it.

Speaker 3 And he was like, that's right, that's my brother.

Speaker 5 So now I was the cool, like, secret weapon.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 5 So that was a good memory. And I was tough as hell.

Speaker 5 And like, and we also, I think the gentili brothers they created the power glove and we have a power glove that's from them they gave it to us whoa and i'm pretty sure they created bucky oh too or they were involved in the show somehow so like that game it's an outer space you go to different planets very star fox-esque each planet uses a different character they have different powers it's i'm like that's my kind of game um and i love the nes here because i i discovered gaming as a three-year-old beating ducktales without like the name i was just like all about that game

Speaker 5 yeah exactly

Speaker 5 and so yeah bucky bucky oh hair is one one of the, like, it sticks out as a space game that I loved.

Speaker 2 How did you end up getting a power glove from the creators?

Speaker 5 So my dad wrote, my dad was a pretty well-to-do jingle writer in the 80s in New York City. So he wrote, Anything goes with Play-Doh, like that little jingle.
He wrote that. Oh, wow.

Speaker 5 And then he wrote Hands Across America, Hands Across Atlanta.

Speaker 5 He wrote that song.

Speaker 3 He worked with Michael Bolton.

Speaker 5 He was like very involved. And I think he may have written the music for, what was the Stretch Armstrong? I think he wrote the music for that commercial.

Speaker 5 And the Gentili brothers created Stretch Armstrong and they created the power glove. So he was like, Yeah, I'm friends with them.
I write for them. They're like, Here's this toy for your NES.

Speaker 5 You can use it. So I had that power glove from them, which is pretty cool.

Speaker 3 That's awesome.

Speaker 5 That was sort of not a useful tool for the NES, but it's cool to have.

Speaker 2 It is cool.

Speaker 3 It was fun in the movie.

Speaker 7 They had an interesting niche, it seemed like. They're like, what's going to like, they had that Stretch Armstrong.

Speaker 7 Let's get fucking freaky with it.

Speaker 3 The power glove was very cool and didn't work. That's the whole point.

Speaker 2 I know, but it was awesome. It was like a cool thing to exist.

Speaker 5 The concept was cool. Yeah, it was in the wizard.
It seemed like it could turn the car, but it didn't really. No.

Speaker 5 But I wonder who those guys are. I should reach out to them.
But yeah, so that was there. That was the Bucky O'Hare thing.

Speaker 5 But there was another game that was like, I think to this day, still a top five game of all time for me, which was Beyond Good and Evil.

Speaker 3 Okay, yeah.

Speaker 5 Everyone's been talking about Beyond Good and Evil 2 for like 20 years, 15 years, but that was like a full tilt, like the Pokemon snap sort of mechanic mixed with an insane story that was genuinely amazing, mixed with like weird characters like that pig guy.

Speaker 5 And then the combat was great. And just, yeah, I loved that game.
And that's another top five. That's another space game I love.
It truly is a top five game of all time for me. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 All Star Wars games take place in space. All Gundam games take place in space, but you don't think of them as space games.

Speaker 1 You think of space games as Halo, the outer worlds, like games where space is forward instead of like,

Speaker 1 you know, lightsaber forward or giant robot forward.

Speaker 1 And so it's, when, when we were talking about this episode, I was like, oh no, I don't know if I like any space games. But the truth is, so many, so many games are space games.

Speaker 1 They're just not necessarily about traveling from planet to planet.

Speaker 7 Yeah, yeah. Like, I mean, because like in

Speaker 7 the more recent Star Wars games, like the Jedi games or even in Outlaws, there's traversal. I think that sort of separates it from like you know like

Speaker 7 some like pedant could be like red dead redemption 2 is a space game because it takes place on a planet and it's like

Speaker 7 and then you know my hands clasp around this this person's neck yeah and i

Speaker 7 uh you know uh choke myself out for saying it but you know i think the thing that really separates uh a game That or that gives it the qualification of it being a space game is that if you leave the planet at all and go somewhere else, that counts.

Speaker 7 So for me, I'm thinking of like a ratchet and clank. Ratchet and Clank is great space games because not only are there just aliens everywhere,

Speaker 7 you're often traveling to different planets and they, you know, all have different biomes. And I think that's like, that's kind of a funny planet rule.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Like.
Biomes?

Speaker 7 Just like, yeah, like this planet is like, the whole planet is forest. It's just this.
Or like, oh, this is the ice planet. Like, like the desert one.
And like, you know.

Speaker 7 It's weird because we live on a planet where all those things are and where it has all of it and we're like yeah yeah yeah but other planets are just volcanoes yeah yeah right this planet cantobite is casino you're like great that's kind of cool right and that's why i brought beyond good and evil too because it takes place on a different planet i'm like well that's an outer space it's yeah existing on that yeah it totally counts i think so too gummy ship is that a space game it's kind of tough to think about so we're talking about kingdom hearts here so like you travel through the different worlds the different disney worlds via a gummy ship.

Speaker 7 And I just like can't, I actually don't know what that space that you're in is.

Speaker 1 Aren't there stars going past you?

Speaker 7 There are stars, but I don't know if it's outer space because

Speaker 7 if you think about this, the Pirates of the Caribbean planet.

Speaker 7 Are they planets? They're called worlds, right?

Speaker 7 I would almost think of them as pocket dimensions rather than planets because like if you think too much, then you're like, okay, Toy Story is on Earth, presumably.

Speaker 7 So I guess then you would be in space. It's all too complicated.

Speaker 2 I think the amount of actual outer space games where it's kind of inarguable and unambiguous is vast enough where we can focus on those.

Speaker 2 Because I think, yeah, if we start asking, like, you know, is Madden

Speaker 3 a space game?

Speaker 2 We're going to be here all day.

Speaker 3 Yeah. But we,

Speaker 3 and it is.

Speaker 2 One I will shout out because this is a big one, and we've already mentioned it, but Mass Effect. I mean, like the Mass Effect franchise, I got really into with the remaster.

Speaker 2 And I just like, for me, a big part of the, of a game, a space game feeling satisfying is that feeling of like, I'm in space, but I'm also going to different worlds, to distant worlds.

Speaker 2 I'm exploring alien biomes.

Speaker 2 And particularly with Mass Effect 2, they really hit on the that feeling of like, you're on the Normandy, you've got your, your ship that has its crew, um, that is kind of like an environment in and of itself.

Speaker 2 It really feels like you're traveling from world to world, and it, it really feels like, you know, you're harvesting resources from different planets.

Speaker 2 And then when you go to a different world, it is a relatively confined play space. It doesn't have that sort of feeling of like, and look, I've never played No Man's Sky.

Speaker 2 My understanding is that No Man's Sky has gotten to a place where it's like rad and really well refined now.

Speaker 2 And, you know, this is the game that's been iterated upon and improved upon with its updates. And I know that people love that game.
But the complaints about...

Speaker 2 No man's sky and its early going was that the in the 1.0 version was that there were a lot of like sort of empty sort of feeling spaces.

Speaker 2 And I think that does happen sometimes with procedurally generated worlds. Is they just kind of feel like, okay, this is kind of a

Speaker 2 vast wasteland. Whereas with Mass Effect, it's got these, you know, much more curated, more confined levels that get the feeling of like, I'm in an alien biome.

Speaker 2 I'm in, I'm, I'm, I'm on some alien sort of civilization, but I'm also,

Speaker 2 you know, just not exploring this, this, again, a planet-sized, um,

Speaker 2 a planet-sized biome but yeah i i i really love the mass effect games

Speaker 2 i still have not played them which is insane because i'm so into rpgs and i love space and i was talking to a friend about it today like i need to like finally dive into those games yeah especially now that they're remasters yeah i think the remaster absolutely it's like it's all super playable and they feel like contemporary games i honestly think One's a little clunky because part of the what what one has is it has like a lot of these levels where you have a um this land tank.

Speaker 1 i forget the name of the craft that that lands this that lands on planets and that is the sort of thing where it's just it's it's a little bit cumbersome to pilot uh they they dispensed on that it they dispensed that in in two and so i think if you just started with mass effect two honestly that might be the yeah i should do that more refined version i want to shout out a game that i've shouted out on this uh podcast before as one of my favorite space games which is star wars squadrons specifically in virtual reality if you have the vr helmet there is a sense of depth and scale when you're in space that feels truly like if you fell out of the windshield or cockpit of your ship, you would fall forever.

Speaker 1 And having that sense of height and depth in all directions while also flying around and shooting stuff in space, so fucking good. Sick.

Speaker 5 I love that game. I need to get a VR situation.

Speaker 7 My friend just lent me his PlayStation VR, my friend Patrick. Okay.

Speaker 7 And I have squadrons. I might have to do it, but I'm afraid that if I fall,

Speaker 3 I will fall. Dude, it is so good.

Speaker 2 I'm scared, actually.

Speaker 1 It is so good. Like, you look down in the, you're in the cockpit, and you look at the cockpit, and it's like, holy shit, I'm in Star Wars.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and it's not like when you're doing Vader Immortal or any of the other Star Wars experiences, because those are still somewhat like removed and cinematic in some way. Yeah.

Speaker 1 This is just you're in a fuck, you're in a bomber or a ship.

Speaker 7 Do you think I can get Hans' famous dice?

Speaker 2 Yeah, Hans's dice might be

Speaker 2 up there.

Speaker 3 You might be able to grab them.

Speaker 7 Wow. Maybe toss them and see what I get.
Hopefully not snake eyes.

Speaker 2 That's the other thing with Rise of Skywalker.

Speaker 3 Where are the dice?

Speaker 7 That's kind of my least favorite thing.

Speaker 7 If I had to make a list, where are the dice is number one? I'd like to see them at least dangling from someone's neck.

Speaker 2 Billy D. Williams shows up, could have referenced the dice.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 7 He could say something like, anybody see those dice?

Speaker 2 I miss Han and his dice.

Speaker 7 I missed Han and his dice. Wow.

Speaker 2 I got to shout out

Speaker 2 a couple of games that got me into space games. You know, I always like, I love science fiction and space and science in general as a kid, as did Uzane.
But

Speaker 2 for me specifically, from an interactive standpoint, one of the big ones, and this is like a huge franchise that endures, that we already touched on, but Metroid was just like, again, just like the feeling of being in a spacesuit and exploring this alien world, the Metroid Metroid games.

Speaker 2 And from the first one, that was like kind of the first time I ever played a 2D game, like

Speaker 2 a platformer that felt like it was like an open world game.

Speaker 3 Like

Speaker 2 obviously the progenitor of the whole Metroidvania genre, but like I just like, I honestly couldn't even wrap my head around what was happening.

Speaker 2 It was like, I can go back, like I can just explore this whole space

Speaker 2 just in 2D where I'm so used to just like scrolling from left to right because that's how platformers used to be structured way back in the day.

Speaker 2 And, or used to be that limited.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 another game that I'll shout out is Master of Orion. Now,

Speaker 2 this became something of a franchise.

Speaker 2 But this is very much in the 4X sort of

Speaker 2 turn-based strategy genre.

Speaker 2 These 4X space games. But Master of Orion was the first one that got me into it.
Later, Sidmeyer's Alpha Centauri. I spent some more time on.

Speaker 2 But I've never really gotten any more contemporary franchises like Stellaris or Galactic Civilizations, but Master of Ryan back in the day really, really gripped me.

Speaker 2 Basically, you pick some sort of some species,

Speaker 2 some largely alien species, and then you're just setting up

Speaker 2 like a civilization game, except you're conquering various planets. And when you're taking territory, you can take over an alien civilization's planet.

Speaker 2 There's all sorts of

Speaker 2 elements of like researching not just like, you know,

Speaker 2 in the civilization games You're researching like the wheel and the printing press historical technologies here.

Speaker 2 You have like future technologies that you're like with plasma rays and shit and that's really satisfying really yeah yeah yeah

Speaker 3 so it's it's really

Speaker 2 I

Speaker 2 that game I like I like I just like got me thinking about space in a different sort of way. So those are two franchises that are two individual games that I think of as standing out in my memory.

Speaker 2 Cool.

Speaker 3 Matt, how about yourself?

Speaker 7 Has anyone messed with Destiny ever?

Speaker 3 No,

Speaker 3 not me. I never really got into Destiny.

Speaker 5 My friend orchestrates all the music for me.

Speaker 3 Really? Oh, cool.

Speaker 7 When I bought my PlayStation 4,

Speaker 7 it came with Destiny, and I like had money for the PlayStation 4, but like no games. So like, I, or it came with a choice.
It came with like NBA 2K, you know, whatever year it was when I bought it,

Speaker 7 2013 or something.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 it came with either that,

Speaker 7 Destiny, and, or Plants vs. Zombies.
And I was like, I guess I'm going to pick Destiny. I don't really know what this is or whatever.
And to this day,

Speaker 7 I have, well, first of all, I have no memories of it, really. But to this day, when you look at like my most played on PlayStation, it is still in

Speaker 3 the top with

Speaker 6 hundreds of hours.

Speaker 3 That's wild.

Speaker 7 Wow. More than...

Speaker 7 More than 100.

Speaker 7 I think less than 300. Somewhere in there, it's like I played it so much, and I like could not tell you a single thing about it.
And I don't know what it was. I think maybe it was a similar, like,

Speaker 7 I must have played it and then paused it and left and came back, you know,

Speaker 7 300 hours later. Right.

Speaker 5 Just jamming out to the music.

Speaker 7 Yeah, yeah. The music's,

Speaker 7 I do remember like that, like, being great. And like, I liked the

Speaker 7 gunplay, it was really satisfying to me. I liked that, but like, couldn't tell you a single thing about the story or if there are notable characters at all.

Speaker 7 But

Speaker 7 it's a franchise that I would like to know more about, actually, because I feel like people are like, Destiny 2 is so fucking good and fun.

Speaker 7 But I haven't ever really messed with it beyond those hundreds of hours that I played it before.

Speaker 2 I was recently thinking specifically of all the time I put into Diablo 3.

Speaker 2 Not two, which is my favorite and which I played

Speaker 2 the most of,

Speaker 2 and not four, which I played more recently and really enjoyed, but three, which got got refined with an update and got to be a lot more playable, but started off in kind of a weird form,

Speaker 2 half-baked sort of form.

Speaker 2 And I was just thinking about, like, yeah, how

Speaker 2 little I remember about that. Yeah.
Like, I was just like, man, I spent a lot of my life playing Diablo 3, and it's like not even the primary Diablo in my memory. You know what I mean?

Speaker 7 I wish that

Speaker 7 these companies or us as a society

Speaker 7 not so

Speaker 7 interested in time spent with things because like now everything has to show you like Nintendo just like put out they just put out a store app which is like a separate

Speaker 7 They have four apps that all do different things, but they just put out like a sort of like eShop app and with that you have your purchase history of every game that you own in your library and so like right now you can get in this app and it'll tell you how much time you spent with as far back as 3ds games.

Speaker 7 So I was going through this and looking through all this and this is how I learned that I bought Hollow Knight like a year after it came out, but then it sat in my backlog for seven years until I played it this year.

Speaker 7 But I was going through it and like this like

Speaker 7 I knew that I had when Animal Crossing came out that I was playing that for a work shift a day basically.

Speaker 3 But I learned

Speaker 7 that I had a 10-hour day in Tears of the Kingdom two years ago. Wow.
That I just like don't remember doing.

Speaker 7 I just kind of sat, you know, you know, had a day-night cycle happen behind me while I was playing Tears of the Kingdom.

Speaker 7 But it's it's just a fascinating, it's just it's a weird part of this this hobby that I kind of wish went away.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I want to toggle that shit off.

Speaker 3 I don't need to

Speaker 3 tell me that.

Speaker 5 Especially when I look at my Mario tennis aces

Speaker 5 1600 hours later or something insane like that.

Speaker 6 I could have, no, I could be a real tennis player.

Speaker 3 I could

Speaker 7 like you do stuff like that, and then like in the same way that like I used to love playing, you know, we've talked about Guitar Hero in the past. Like,

Speaker 7 that time spent, I could have, like, actually learned to play an instrument probably. I could be, or I could be on, I could be on freaking

Speaker 7 the voice of Romania.

Speaker 3 Yes, you could.

Speaker 2 That'll fuck you up. And I definitely have those thought patterns a lot.
And it's really unhealthy because the time was going to pass regardless.

Speaker 3 Absolutely.

Speaker 5 And also people back in the day would play cards or bridge.

Speaker 5 That's part of being human, I think, is playing.

Speaker 7 And it's about time that you enjoy it, too. Like,

Speaker 7 I enjoyed the time that I had had doing the other thing. You know, I probably, like, I've tried to learn how to play an instrument.

Speaker 7 And I wish I would, it's one of those things where you kind of just wish you were good at something like immediately.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 7 It's like, you know, when you're an adult trying to learn something, it's, it's, it's hard. But

Speaker 5 like me trying to learn Romanian, not good.

Speaker 7 Here's the thing.

Speaker 3 You're doing pretty good at it. Pretty good.
I can say that once, and it's fast.

Speaker 7 Destiny, a big one for me.

Speaker 7 Weirdly, I got very into Among Us.

Speaker 3 Oh, no.

Speaker 7 When Among Us was new, weirdly, everybody was very into it. But like, you know, if you get blasted out because you got, you know, people tried, people thought you were sus.

Speaker 3 Remember that?

Speaker 7 Oh, yeah, I do. We were calling you people sus because you're, you know, you seemed a little sus.

Speaker 2 That's fun.

Speaker 7 If you got identified as sus and you got sent out into space and you were actually not the imposter, they're just been floating into space and everyone would feel bad.

Speaker 2 Very much a space game. Yeah.

Speaker 3 You're absolutely right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I just downloaded this app that you just talked about. It's horrifying.

Speaker 1 I don't play a lot of Nintendo games.

Speaker 7 No, you don't.

Speaker 1 I'm not a Nintendo main. I have three games over 100 hours.
Two of the three are Breath of the Wild on different platforms.

Speaker 3 That's amazing.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 1 Disco Elysium is in my top 10.

Speaker 1 But yeah, I'm not.

Speaker 7 Don't look at it. It's

Speaker 1 I don't play a ton of We Fit You

Speaker 1 only

Speaker 1 got one minute.

Speaker 7 It's interesting interesting how it's very granular actually though, too.

Speaker 1 Uh I watched the Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time 3D E3 video for longer than I played

Speaker 1 We Fit You

Speaker 3 Yeah

Speaker 1 That doesn't make any sense. Oh, no, this is the We Fit You info app.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah. You're like, I don't get this.

Speaker 7 Halo, obviously, you'd mentioned it earlier. Yeah, sure.
I've only played some of the first Halo, which is getting now a like a full remake

Speaker 7 Of the of the campaign

Speaker 2 Mentioned it before but playing through the entire Halo one campaign With my friend one of my favorite gaming memories.

Speaker 5 Oh, that's amazing you get that no that was I we we were never a PlayStation household We went straight from Nintendo and Sega straight to Xbox and I played Cameo which was actually a great platform.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. I liked it a lot

Speaker 5 into Halo and that was like a big moment. That was a great game.
That surprise, is it spoiler alert? 30 years later?

Speaker 5 You know, like when you discover it's, you're sort of fighting these, what are they called again? Flood. Thank you.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 When the flood comes up, and that's, you know, who you were fighting in the end, that was the actual enemy. That was a big moment.
I loved Halo, the campaign. I played the remake.

Speaker 7 I can't wait to play the remake. And it's interesting that I'll probably be playing it on a PlayStation.
Like, right.

Speaker 3 Like,

Speaker 7 that's really crazy.

Speaker 7 But I also, I've talked about, I've evangelized this Halo entry, I think, enough. But Halo Reach, one of my favorite.

Speaker 3 Great.

Speaker 7 It's like maybe the only FPS game that I've loved. I loved it so much.

Speaker 3 It's so good.

Speaker 5 You love the gameplay or you love the actual story?

Speaker 7 I thought the story was fucking great. I thought the gameplay was really great.
More so than, you know, it's also like not, I think that one came out for 360 or something. So it was not as...

Speaker 7 janky to me as the original one. I didn't have any nostalgia for that.
So like it looking old and bad was not like charming to me. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 7 But reach, Reach, not that it looks brand new or anything, Reach just like looked old enough where I was like, I can do this and this is fine. And it's awesome.
It's really great.

Speaker 7 Also, you don't play as Master Chief.

Speaker 1 I played Halo 2 for a significant portion of time on the 360

Speaker 1 with, you know, had a squad back then, and we would get on and we would play for like five or six hours of a day of just like constant loops of the game.

Speaker 1 And it was an extremely positive experience.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But But it also was in the window of time where the unfiltered Xbox

Speaker 1 Edge Lord lobbies where you would hear the worst shit you'd ever heard.

Speaker 1 I don't know if those are still, that's still the case, but at the time it was.

Speaker 7 I think it's gone past the lobbies and it's in all of culture.

Speaker 1 But it used to be that you would, you know, you get in these lobbies and you would just hear people be like, the worst people ever. Yeah.
And now I feel like when I play like

Speaker 1 the Fortnite chat, like proximity chat, you don't hear that language as much.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, you'll still sometimes hear it, but it was just like this window where people were like, oh, I've got a phone and I can call everybody on earth.

Speaker 1 And the only thing I can think of to say is the F-word.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Or worse.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And now, yeah, it's less like that. Nobody has anything to prove, at least in my personal anecdotal experience on Fortnite.

Speaker 7 Now they'll just they're not trying to prove anything. They'll just say it.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Yeah. I just say it because this is a thing I say.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 I was so I Halo 2. I would stay up till 5 or 6 a.m.
My brother would put on the headset for me and make fart noises into it.

Speaker 5 And we were old enough to where we shouldn't have done that, but that's what we did.

Speaker 3 That's pretty guy. I like it now.
It was, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 But there are some other games that I have to shout a couple space games, one of them being Galaga.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah. So

Speaker 5 yes, because I have a Galaga Pac-Man machine in my house, and I do have the, is it the cocktail machine or is it the... It's the fake wooden panel-looking arcade one-up machine.

Speaker 5 I have like five arcade one-up machines in my patio now. I got Pac-Man, Galaga.
My brother bought me Centipede/slash Asteroids for my birthday last year, which is very good.

Speaker 2 Asteroids, also outer space.

Speaker 5 That's right. And then I have NBA Jam, Street Fighter 2 Turbo, and then a Simpsons cabinet that's been modded to have 180 four-player beat-em-up games.

Speaker 3 Nice. Amazing.

Speaker 5 It's a great setup.

Speaker 5 And I read online somewhere, like, if you can get about a million points in Galaga, you're pretty good.

Speaker 5 And there's enough lag on my home system because it's an emulator to where I can't get past like 200, maybe 250,000 points. And then for my birthday this year, I went out with,

Speaker 5 yeah, my family and friends, and I played in a real Galaga machine, like an actual, and I got like to 400,000. Like, I took a video of it.
I was like, it actually matters.

Speaker 3 Like, the latency in a game like that really matters.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 So that's a space game that I love.

Speaker 5 And I got obsessed with like the routing of you don't want to shoot the yellow and blue fly looking guys until they come down because you get more points and when there's two fly yellow and blue guys blocking the big guy at top you want to wait until they're coming down to shoot them then you want to get your ships stolen so you can get two ships so i'm really into the strats for that game so i had to bring that up um but there are a couple others which is maelstrom which is an old mac game it was sort of like asteroid but much nicer graphically and i played that so much on my powerbook 1400 cs in the 90s when i was a child actor whoop whoop what's up i got no trauma i'm good

Speaker 5 um but i played played that game a lot. That's an outer space game.
And then another game that's memorable for me emotionally. There's a few others on here: Star Fox, Vectorman,

Speaker 5 Star Fox. I know that, dude.
Space Ace comes to mind too because of Eva Anderson.

Speaker 7 Oh, sure.

Speaker 5 I played that on Eva and Dash's CDI when I was a kid, and then Dash brought the CDI to my house and beat it. But that was like, you know, big memory.

Speaker 2 Space Ace

Speaker 2 was, if people remember, Dragon's Lair, which we've talked about on the podcast, but it was a laser disc game that was like this fully animated thing with minimal interactivity.

Speaker 2 But in the era when games looked like Galaga in the arcade, you had this thing that looked like a cartoon where if you pressed the stick in a cardinal direction at certain points, it would branch off the path and you'd either

Speaker 2 succeed or fail. It felt like this revelation.

Speaker 5 Yeah. God bless Dom Bluth.
Yeah. I think it was him.

Speaker 5 But the last game that really feels meaningful, because I have like 15 more on here. Yeah.
Is my brother and I played Out of This World of Nintendo.

Speaker 1 You mean this game that I always pulled up?

Speaker 3 No, wait, really? Yeah. Amazing.
Let's talk about it.

Speaker 5 Amazing. Okay, sorry.
I stole it from you. Yeah.

Speaker 3 No, no, no.

Speaker 1 Let's talk about it.

Speaker 5 So I have a memory because my brother never really got into video games. And when we were kids, I have like child actor money.
So I'd buy laptops for family members.

Speaker 5 Like, you can go to college with this computer. And for my brother and sister, I'd always buy them video games that they would not play because it's just not a hobby they were into.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 So I got Reeve, a red Game Boy with a Red Game Boy camera. My sister, Paris, a yellow Game Boy with a yellow Game Boy camera.
And they're like, oh, this is fun for half a day.

Speaker 5 But I was like obsessed, of course. And Out of This World is one of the only games my brother was like, let's finish.
Let's try to beat this.

Speaker 5 So we didn't beat it because it sort of had a Space Ace Dragon's Larian thing of like sort of time-based.

Speaker 3 Sure.

Speaker 5 Like each screen had its own like challenge puzzle to solve kind of. But Reeve loved the graphics and the vibe.
So I'm like, whatever game he's down to play, like this is my hobby.

Speaker 5 We're going to be hanging out. We're going to play this game, even though I'd rather be playing Zelda Linked to the Past with him, you know, which we also did beat.

Speaker 5 But yeah, Out of This World was like, we actually connected. We played that game together.
And that was a good memory personally. And I love the artwork, I love the design, yeah.
Heather,

Speaker 2 just just because it was mentioned earlier, like is it would it be semi-accurate to describe Out of This World as kind of like an early progenitor of like inside?

Speaker 2 It's the same sort of like kind of idea, yeah, yeah, it's similar.

Speaker 1 Ask um, it's uh, it was also an indie game. I mean, it's uh, created and designed by what was his name, Eric, Eric something, Eric, oh god, Eric

Speaker 1 Chahi is that a chahihi chahi,

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 yeah, it came out for PC initially and then was ported to Super Nintendo and eventually like Genesis. It's Sega CD.

Speaker 1 This was a game also similarly for me that has a family memory attached, which is that

Speaker 1 my parents, you know, bought it from me.

Speaker 1 And it was a game where we got it. I got it over Christmas.

Speaker 1 And they were like sitting down with me every night on the couch to pitch different things I could try on each individual screen to be able to get through it.

Speaker 1 And me and my parents beat out of this world together,

Speaker 1 which was so like, it's like one of those, you know, Hallmark style, like

Speaker 1 irreplaceable core memories.

Speaker 1 And they still talk about it. And I still have my copy of the game.

Speaker 1 But yeah, it also, it looked like nothing else on the Super Nintendo.

Speaker 3 Totally, yeah.

Speaker 1 It was cinematic. There were cutscenes.
Yep. And those cutscenes involved full-body animation on a fucking Super Nintendo.
You were like, what?

Speaker 1 How was this magic trick achieved?

Speaker 1 And the way we found out about it was walking through a mall where it was playing on a screen at the proto GameStop, which was called Babbages.

Speaker 1 And yeah, I don't know. It's good times.

Speaker 5 I have a memory with my mom involving gaming that's so much stupider than that. That's so beautiful with her.
Memory I have, it's hilarious.

Speaker 5 I was playing that Disney It was like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. It was for Sega Illusion or Castle of Illusion or something

Speaker 3 of illusion. I think, yeah.

Speaker 5 And my mom was, it was so sweet of her. She was trying to connect with me.
She's like Zane loves video games.

Speaker 5 And at that time, I was, I think part of the reason I was obsessed with video games is I was acting on a TV show. So you don't get as much kid time.

Speaker 5 So I would bring my Sega Nomad to set and play NHL 97 or Garfield or some Sega game, Vectorman.

Speaker 5 That was like how I was staying a kid while doing adult acting type things. And so my mom's like, you know, he's away on set.
Like, I'm going to learn how to play a game and impress him.

Speaker 5 It'll be great. So she's playing this Mickey's game.

Speaker 7 Oh, my God.

Speaker 3 And I come home.

Speaker 5 I was like, look, I've been playing it. And all I noticed was like there were stars around his head, which is an animation I had not discovered yet because I hadn't been hit that much by enemies.

Speaker 3 I was like, that's possible.

Speaker 7 She's like, is that good?

Speaker 3 I'm like, oh, mom. Oh, God.

Speaker 3 It's amazing.

Speaker 5 It was a very sweet memory. But she wasn't, you know, we didn't beat the game.
We lost so badly that Mickey got stars.

Speaker 7 I've told this memory on the podcast before, but I remember waking up in the middle of the night one time and my mom sitting in front of the TV, like the kid in Poltergeist, playing Tomb Raider, just being like, what the fuck?

Speaker 3 Like, this is like, my mom's cool.

Speaker 7 This is crazy. And, like, just going back to sleep.
And then, like, confirmed that memory like years afterward.

Speaker 6 I was like, did I remember you, like, playing that?

Speaker 7 She's like, yeah, like, actually, I don't think she beat it, but like, she, like, got, like, decently into it.

Speaker 6 Wow.

Speaker 7 Um, but has not really touched a game since. She's watched a full playthrough of PT, though.

Speaker 7 I sent that to her because she likes horror and I thought she would think it was interesting. Good God.
She did like it.

Speaker 3 Wow. She did.
Wow. I think it was cool.

Speaker 7 Nick stepped out of the room for a second, but I do want to point out, I think we have to talk about what I think is like the number one space video game of all time.

Speaker 3 Okay, okay, here it is.

Speaker 7 3D pinball for Windows, Space Cadet. It's a pack-in pinball game that came with Windows computers.

Speaker 5 We were all thinking that he said it.

Speaker 7 Look, somebody had to be brave and bring it up. This is, I think, it's possible the game that the most people have ever played.

Speaker 1 More than Minesweeper? Maybe.

Speaker 7 Yeah, Minesweeper up there, probably for sure.

Speaker 7 Tetris, certainly.

Speaker 5 I'm realizing right now, you said this game. I was not a Windows hustle.
I was Mac, so I had not heard of this until just now.

Speaker 3 Oh, okay.

Speaker 5 And I'm realizing my response was like, insane, maybe, because this is like a played game by people.

Speaker 7 Oh yeah, it's like a pinball game.

Speaker 7 I feel like it was like it was, you know, Windows sort of had these like pack-in things. Like Windows 95, of course, came with the Buddy Holly

Speaker 7 Weezer of music video.

Speaker 7 And this pinball game, I don't know if this was on Windows 95. It might have been 90 maybe Windows 97, 98, but it was...

Speaker 1 Windows CE.

Speaker 7 Maybe Windows CE.

Speaker 7 But it was it's just a a very standard pinball game, but the layout is like a, you know, there's like a classic UFO like flying saucer thing. And it's in space.
And I think,

Speaker 7 gosh, if I if I had it, if I had had what we have now with the technology of it telling you how many hours you've played, I think it would like get it would have gotten to

Speaker 7 the end where it couldn't display a bigger number. I played that game so fucking much as a kid because like it was free.

Speaker 3 I did love pinball games. Yeah.

Speaker 5 I also loved pool games as a kid. Like

Speaker 7 figuring out like the physics of that.

Speaker 5 What was that developer? It has like a D in it, and there's like silver and it's a circle. Oh, God.

Speaker 5 It's a developer that was really famous in the Sega Genesis era, but they developed a pool game that I was obsessed with. And I think didn't Sonic have a great pinball game?

Speaker 3 Oh, Pokemon had a great pinball game. Pokemon pinball game is really, really fun to play.

Speaker 7 I've played it on my analog pocket, actually.

Speaker 3 It's alright.

Speaker 7 I think Bully has a

Speaker 3 pool.

Speaker 5 Bully, like the modern rock star game?

Speaker 7 Yeah, I think there's a, I think you can play

Speaker 7 cool in um in in in like the in the dormitories or something.

Speaker 3 Oh, dude, how did I not bring this up yet?

Speaker 5 This sort of involves that, not really, but on this tour I did, I went to the best video game museum I've ever been to in my entire life in Zagreb, Croatia. So, shout out to any listeners in Zagreb.

Speaker 5 Whoa, we'll see you there. It was amazing.
Have you been to a proper video game museum before?

Speaker 3 I have not. Heather has.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I went to one in the Netherlands that was staggering. Like, multiple rooms, multiple floors,

Speaker 1 you know, games both

Speaker 1 organized by kind of cabinet that they were played on,

Speaker 1 era that they came out in, but then also in order to give you sort of the emblematic experience of what the game environment would have been, they had like a fully built 1970s computer room. Amazing.

Speaker 1 A fully built 1980s living room. Yes.
So that you could play an NES in the context in which it was being played at the time. Amazing.

Speaker 5 This is similar in Zagreb. And then there was one in Berlin I went to too.
But man, I want to go to video game museums more often.

Speaker 5 It was like, that's really what I'm into gaming for is the history of it, the preservation of it. I love, of course, I love Octopath Traver.

Speaker 5 Like you said, if Pokemon was back to that, doing HD2D, I would be all in. I can't wait for the upcoming game that's like a Zelda-like that the Octopath developer is making.

Speaker 3 Oh, yes. I forget what that's called.
I don't remember what it is. It took a long, long title.

Speaker 5 The Adventure of Da-da-da-da.

Speaker 5 But I'm definitely going to be playing that.

Speaker 5 so going to a video game museum is like that's i would go to one every month if i had one in my city nick i just brought up yeah i think what i was what was what i called the ultimate space game yeah which is

Speaker 7 uh 3d pinball for windows space cadet

Speaker 7 and everyone in here thought i was insane i didn't say anything

Speaker 2 heather thought i was insane yeah i was a mac household so i didn't know that was a thing so i was confused no yeah i mean there were there i i was less into it, but I am aware of its existence.

Speaker 3 Less into it.

Speaker 2 No, I'm just like, I was like, I was more of a Minesweeper kid.

Speaker 3 I played Minesweeper Solitaire.

Speaker 7 I said, I think it's the game that the most people on earth have played. And Heather goes, More than Minesweeper.
And I was immediately like, oh, damn, you're probably right.

Speaker 2 We're still in it.

Speaker 7 We're still in it. Okay.

Speaker 3 I left.

Speaker 7 You left. I said you were left.
It's fine. I'm back.

Speaker 7 Yeah. I'm thinking I'm back.

Speaker 2 I didn't go number two. I think that's people's assumption is going to be that I left to go.

Speaker 3 No, I'm I've never gone that long. Okay.
Also,

Speaker 1 you picked up dinner.

Speaker 2 That's what I was going to do. Yeah, I went to get dinner.
That's what it was.

Speaker 3 You were out dinner between records.

Speaker 1 And Nick stepped out to, you know, give the man a hug.

Speaker 7 Yeah, Nick said, I got to go make my own dinner. I went number two.

Speaker 3 It's not what happened.

Speaker 3 No anyone saying that.

Speaker 2 I wanted to shout out

Speaker 3 a couple more games real quick.

Speaker 2 One, I'll mention because if we don't mention it, I feel like people will be like, you didn't mention that there's a space game you should have mentioned. And sorry, I'm apologizing what it is.

Speaker 5 Yes, based on that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Mario Galaxy? It's not Mario Galaxy, although that's a good thing.

Speaker 3 That's a good idea.

Speaker 7 Honestly, insane, it hasn't come on.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I was going to, no, the game I was going to talk about was Outer Wilds, as opposed to the Outer Worlds.

Speaker 2 Now, look, I put about 12 hours into Outer Wilds. Everyone was telling me it was a masterpiece, and I was playing it.
I was like, I can really appreciate this game design,

Speaker 2 but it just didn't get its hooks in me. And

Speaker 2 I know I should go back and finish it. And I know it's one of those things that if you finally, you know,

Speaker 2 if you see it through to the end and you don't use guides, as everyone says, then it feels like a magic trick. You experience the prestige.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 I just wasn't as into it enough to

Speaker 2 persist,

Speaker 2 which is probably means I suffered as a result because I didn't get to have this transcendent gaming experience that a lot of people have had.

Speaker 2 But Outer Wilds, a game that I've played, but that I unfortunately did not connect with as I imagine some of our audience has.

Speaker 2 Another game I was going to shout out is by.

Speaker 5 Can I do a funny version now of what the guess is? Do you pretend I'm funny like you guys?

Speaker 3 A boy in his blob? Pretty good. He's jelly.
Pretty good. He feeds jellybean.
Sorry. See, like you guys have funnier ones.
Continue. I'm done.
I liked it.

Speaker 2 I was going to shout out FTL, which is a roguelike that I put a lot of hours into.

Speaker 2 Totally. And I just like, it's so, you're managed, you're basically managing a ship.
You're basically like,

Speaker 2 it's very much like a Star Trek sort of sim

Speaker 2 where you've got his crew that you're managing. You're exploring a space frontier and you're seeing how far you can survive until you get to the end and you're trying to take out the capital ship.

Speaker 2 And it's really, really satisfying to finish a run. But it's also like fun to fail runs too, because it's just like always there are different events that happen.

Speaker 2 that are unexpectedly beneficial or detrimental. And, you know, just the

Speaker 2 decisions that you have to make, both in terms of which of the various solar systems you're going to explore and then also, you know,

Speaker 2 which route you're going to take to most efficiently get to your destination while also maximizing the number of resources, but not being too greedy is really, really satisfying. So I love FTL.

Speaker 2 Subspace games who also made Into the Breach, which I also love. I'm a big fan of all of their output.
But yeah, FTL, a big one for me.

Speaker 5 I need to play that game. I was talking to a friend about that.
That's one that would be right at my alley.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 7 There's so many space games.

Speaker 2 There's so many space games that there's not enough time to get to them all.

Speaker 1 There's not enough space.

Speaker 2 Now that's

Speaker 2 what I should have said.

Speaker 7 That's really good.

Speaker 2 God damn it.

Speaker 7 I wasn't ever in the ballpark of going to say it, so I actually am not upset that I didn't say it.

Speaker 3 I understand why you're upset.

Speaker 6 Yeah, you were right there.

Speaker 3 I took a word away. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 This is what we were talking about with the word series earlier.

Speaker 1 So, I mean, there's something to that, too.

Speaker 3 You kind of said it.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 1 When we say time, we mean space.

Speaker 2 Oh,

Speaker 2 boy, that's a charitable reading, but it's really not what I was going to say.

Speaker 7 No,

Speaker 7 it should be. The point should be driven home.

Speaker 3 You fucked up so really fucked up, man.

Speaker 3 Wow. Shouldn't have left to go.

Speaker 7 Humiliating. And in front of our guests.

Speaker 2 Shouldn't have left to go number two.

Speaker 7 Should we do a segment? Let's do a segment.

Speaker 3 Let's do a segment.

Speaker 1 Okay, guys, I've prepared

Speaker 7 a little bit of a different type of pixel chart for us. This is our segment pixel chart.
So, as a musician, I figured this might be an interesting thing,

Speaker 7 Zane.

Speaker 7 I've collected here some

Speaker 7 video game music and soundtracks that have appeared on the Billboard charts. And we're just going to see if we can guess where they landed on the charts.
Obviously, they're very different charts.

Speaker 7 So, I'll give you guys just some information about like

Speaker 7 what it is and what chart it charted on. And we can just like see where they landed.

Speaker 2 Dude, I'm confused. So we're guessing a number that it got to?

Speaker 7 Yeah, a number. Okay.

Speaker 6 Where it peaked at, basically.

Speaker 7 Peak placement. I'm going to put my phone in this in landscape mode here so I can see the whole thing.

Speaker 2 Matt is gone 90.

Speaker 3 I've gone

Speaker 7 just like Verizon foretold.

Speaker 2 That's right. People may not remember the defunct streaming service, Go90, exclusive to Verizon mobile devices.

Speaker 7 Yeah, because my phone previously was this way.

Speaker 2 Yes, you were holding it in portrait mode and you turned it into landscape mode. So that's what they would say Go90 to watch the Verizon Go 90 content.
Yes. I had a Go90 series.
Isn't that wild?

Speaker 7 What was it about? You don't have to get into it.

Speaker 2 Esports.

Speaker 3 Oh, really? Yeah.

Speaker 2 With Jason Ritter.

Speaker 3 Oh, cool. I don't think you can watch it anymore.

Speaker 7 Man, that sounds like I would have loved that.

Speaker 3 Me and Maddie Smith did it.

Speaker 2 Andy Maxwell directed some episodes for us. Yeah, did like eight episodes.

Speaker 3 Cool.

Speaker 1 Can you imagine trying to explain to your, to an older person what go 90 meant?

Speaker 7 I can't like explain to my family what this is.

Speaker 7 Okay, so this first release is called Video Games Live, the album.

Speaker 7 And this is a concert album of video game music of various games, some of which are Kingdom Hearts, Warcraft 3, Tetris, and God of War.

Speaker 7 And this placed on the Billboard Classical Crossovers album chart.

Speaker 3 Oh, okay.

Speaker 5 Got it. I I was wondering how that could have charted.
Got it.

Speaker 2 That makes sense. Now, I don't know much about the charts, but I feel like this is going to be popular enough to hit number one.

Speaker 7 It is not number one. Okay.
It's actually, maybe this is like a bad exercise.

Speaker 7 Because I'm like, we're just guessing numbers.

Speaker 7 I'll just tell you.

Speaker 1 I'm going to say it reached 43.

Speaker 7 Maybe I shouldn't answer until everyone has answered.

Speaker 3 It's not one, though.

Speaker 5 Not one, not 43.

Speaker 3 I didn't say, I didn't say that.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 5 Is this like Price's Wright Rules where I win?

Speaker 7 I think it has to to be. Otherwise, this was a waste of everybody's time.

Speaker 7 Zero?

Speaker 3 No, I'm joking.

Speaker 5 I would say

Speaker 3 it is seven.

Speaker 7 Pretty good guess. Zane's the closest.
Really?

Speaker 3 Oh. Wow.

Speaker 7 Peak placement was number 10 on the Billboard Classical Crossover albums.

Speaker 7 There's just a few more.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 7 Interestingly. Halo 2 original soundtrack new music volume 1 charted on the Billboard top 200.

Speaker 5 Yeah, that makes sense because this is 2005-ish, right?

Speaker 3 2004, yeah. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 7 It was the first video game soundtrack to enter the

Speaker 7 U.S. albums chart.

Speaker 6 Wow.

Speaker 2 Where did it peak?

Speaker 1 And it was the top 500 or top 200.

Speaker 7 Wow.

Speaker 5 So that means that that melody,

Speaker 5 whatever that melody was, that was good enough to make it. That's crazy.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 5 Sorry. I love that soundtrack, but still.

Speaker 2 Really,

Speaker 2 really, very, very popular game.

Speaker 2 I'm going to say it went, it was at 114.

Speaker 7 114 from Wise.

Speaker 3 okay

Speaker 5 i'm gonna guess i'm gonna guess like 187.

Speaker 7 oh fuck that's so close to where i was going sorry yep i have to go with 172 that's what my initial guess was okay zane takes it again wow it debuted at 185 wow and it peaked at 162.

Speaker 5 By the way, fun fact, like, I don't know, I'm not good at this part of music. I'm only good at music theory and like playing the instrument.
I'd know nothing about the instrument.

Speaker 7 Also, there's nothing to be good at because this is not really a game.

Speaker 5 but like i don't follow the charts like i would i got made fun of on a lot of tours for not knowing good music that's popular i think this is

Speaker 7 i know weird bad stuff i think this as a segment is just hey isn't this kind of interesting

Speaker 7 i like it i like i'm having fun okay selected tunes from cuphead charted on the billboard jazz albums chart

Speaker 5 interesting because they have that barbershop quartet vibe guys

Speaker 2 where did it where did it place where did it peak um okay uh it it was just jazz.

Speaker 7 Billboard Jazz Albums charts.

Speaker 3 Billboard Jazz Albums.

Speaker 5 What's challenging about this is the Halo one, the reason why it mattered to me that it was 2004 is people still bought items back then. Whereas these charts now are how many streams did you get?

Speaker 5 And that counts as a purchase if it's enough thousands of streams. Yes.
So it's tricky. So it means, like, did this get memeable? Did people put it on their TikTok so that could inflate something?

Speaker 7 And I think YouTube counts also.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 5 So Cuphead, on the jazz charts, I, having been in the jazz space for a while, I think this is pretty high because

Speaker 5 there might be a release by Chick Korea that goes right to number one or by Stanley Clark or goes number one.

Speaker 5 I feel like this could be like three.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's what I was, because, you know, you got contemporary artists like a Kamasi Washington or a Christian McBride, but you've also got, yes, the entire catalog of like if Miles, like a Miles Davis record for some reason is all the way up there.

Speaker 5 That's true. If they do a re-release or a remaster.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so I, so like, it's like, it's, it's hard to gauge, but I think you're right that it probably is pretty high.

Speaker 2 You went which with what number?

Speaker 3 I said three.

Speaker 2 You said three.

Speaker 3 I'll go a little lower.

Speaker 2 I'll say number 12.

Speaker 1 And I'll say 30.

Speaker 7 Zane gets it again.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 7 And this actually has the Guinness World Record for first video game soundtrack to ever hit number one on a U.S. Billboard chart.

Speaker 3 It hit number one. Wow.

Speaker 3 Oh my God.

Speaker 2 Look, it's a great soundtrack.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it is.

Speaker 5 Also, part of my analysis for that is I released a jazz record in 2021 called Alter Ego. Very like snobby, jazzy, whatever stuff.

Speaker 5 And like, it did way better on like Spotify than anything I've ever done because it was in jazz. So the competition was like, it was like...

Speaker 7 Yes.

Speaker 5 To do great in the jazz space, my girlfriend's a super jazz snob, way more so than I am. And her favorite artist, she's like, oh, this guy, Thomas Fujiwar, is like the drummer of New York.

Speaker 5 And he has nine monthly listeners. But he's like, he's the dude.

Speaker 5 So I was like, this would.

Speaker 7 jump above. I feel like 20 years ago, this is like an old reference, but like I think Sting put out like a classical album or something and it was like huge.

Speaker 7 And I remember being a kid and being like, who even cares? This is like old music. And then thinking about it, I was like, oh, it's like probably like the only one of these that like came out.

Speaker 7 And he like he won a bunch of like awards in like the, I don't know why I was paying so much attention to Sting. Oh, yeah, dude.
When I was a kid.

Speaker 5 Because that cool music video where you rotoscoped and you like stopped in midair.

Speaker 7 And I was like just admiring his

Speaker 2 fuck style, of course.

Speaker 3 There you go.

Speaker 3 Tantra.

Speaker 3 Well.

Speaker 6 Okay.

Speaker 7 The Halo 4 original soundtrack has also charted on the Billboard top 200.

Speaker 3 Halo 4? Halo 4.

Speaker 5 Okay, so that's 2010.

Speaker 7 2012.

Speaker 3 Well, okay.

Speaker 7 Where did it crest?

Speaker 1 72.

Speaker 7 72 from Heather.

Speaker 3 I'm going to go.

Speaker 5 Zane's going to go 193.

Speaker 7 193 from Zane.

Speaker 3 Number 4.

Speaker 7 Heather actually takes this one. It placed number 50.

Speaker 3 Wow. Wow.
I did it. Wow.
I guessed the number. I guessed the number.
Good job, Ather.

Speaker 7 And finally, Claire Obscure Expedition 33 soundtrack.

Speaker 7 It's on the Billboard Classical Albums and Classical Albums crossover charts. Two charts.
Where did it place?

Speaker 5 Before we guess, I'm realizing I'm shocked that Final Fantasy has not been part of this because those scores are insane and they're so classical and

Speaker 5 genius pieces of art. But I don't know this game, so this is going to be hard work for me to guess.

Speaker 2 This was a 2025 release that you may have missed because you were touring. But I think as a fan of JRPGs, you'd love this game.

Speaker 3 What's it called? They're obscure

Speaker 1 Expedition 33.

Speaker 7 Honestly,

Speaker 5 is it sort of like Tales of Vesperious shell-shaded graphics, or is it vintage HD2D, or is it more like modern, sort of like regular, like it's more like regular?

Speaker 3 Final Fantasy remake?

Speaker 5 Is it more like that? Yeah, kind of more like that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 7 It has like a French sensibility, and I was just about to point out, some of the characters can wear bandanas around their neck. I do that a lot.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 In fact, in every episode so far on Voche Romanier, which is how you say the voice of Romanian Romanian, I'm wearing goddamn scarves around my neck.

Speaker 3 You're going to love this.

Speaker 5 At one of my best friend's weddings, this is like a decade ago. I hadn't seen his father in 10 years.
And he walked to me. He's like, Zay, and you still doing those scarves and shit?

Speaker 3 And I am, but now they're on my neck.

Speaker 7 You have to download this game immediately.

Speaker 5 Okay, it's French-type stuff, and it's RPG. I'm down with this tonight.

Speaker 3 Okay, yeah.

Speaker 1 I love it tonight. You're not going to bed.

Speaker 3 Amazing.

Speaker 2 I think you really like the combat system, too. It's very engaging.

Speaker 5 Does it have a turn? Okay, but is it, is it, because I love Final Fantasy 13's combat system, where it is turn-based, but there's also like you better, you better act quickly.

Speaker 7 There's like some timed action in the turn-based. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I'm going to guess

Speaker 5 15. I have no idea.

Speaker 7 15 from Zane. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Specifically the classical chart.

Speaker 7 Billboard, classical albums, and classical crossover.

Speaker 2 Number six. Number six.

Speaker 1 23.

Speaker 7 Wise is going to take this one, but Zane's going to be our winner.

Speaker 3 Oh, right.

Speaker 7 It placed number one on both charts.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 3 Jeez.

Speaker 7 This game, it's kind of

Speaker 7 sweeping the nation. Everybody loves this game.

Speaker 3 It's this year, 2025? Yes. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 7 It's kind of a banger. It's crazy.
You're in Romania.

Speaker 5 I was in Romania. I was very stressed out over there.

Speaker 5 And I'll be back there maybe soon. Great.

Speaker 7 Hell yeah. And that's the segment.

Speaker 2 Wow. And that's this week's Get Played.
Our producer is Rochelle Chen. Ranch, Yard underscore, underscore sard.
You streaming Ranch.

Speaker 1 I took a little break, but I'll be back with Silent Hill F eventually.

Speaker 7 Hell yeah.

Speaker 2 Awesome. Check that out over at twitch.tv slash yard underscore underscore sard.
Our music is by Ben Prunty. BenpruntyMusic.com.
Our art is by DuckBrigade Design. DuckBrigade.com.

Speaker 2 Get Played Merch at KinshipGoods.com. And GetAnimate our sister shows over on Patreon.
Matt, what are we watching this week?

Speaker 7 It's present day, present time, and we are watching Serial Experiments Lane. Wow.
Let's fucking go.

Speaker 3 Let's go.

Speaker 2 Classic show, patreon.com slash get played. An esteemed guest, Sane Carney.
Thank you so much for joining us. Anything you would like to plug?

Speaker 5 Thank you so much for having me. I'm going to get back onto Twitch streaming for the rest of the year.
I should be back by the time this episode airs at twitch.tv/slash Zane Carney.

Speaker 3 Oh, awesome.

Speaker 5 Music stuff, maybe a little bit of gaming, but probably mostly music nerding out.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you've done music theory of video games in the past on your channel. It's just really, really cool.
Exactly.

Speaker 5 I'll start with that and then maybe play some Octopath Traveler when it comes out. I don't know.
We'll see.

Speaker 3 There you go.

Speaker 2 And I'm going to say something that I hope you don't hear on The Voice of Romania. Zane, you got played.

Speaker 3 Oh, no.

Speaker 7 Except that they did say it to you there. It'd be kind of cool.
That'd be cool.

Speaker 3 It'd be cool for us at least. Wow.

Speaker 2 You're gut deployed.

Speaker 3 Vampires. Vampires.
Perfect. Perfection.

Speaker 1 That was a headgum podcast.

Speaker 10 What's going on? It's Lamorne Morris.

Speaker 1 And Hannah Simone.

Speaker 10 And we host The Mess Around, a New Girl Rewatch podcast now on Headgum. Now, here's the thing.
Every single week we chat about an episode of New Girl, and we really get into it.

Speaker 10 Like we get up in there. We get up in there.
You know, we reminisce about our times on set. We share behind the scenes tea.
We react to rewatching episodes that we haven't seen in years.

Speaker 10 We talk about how Jake Johnson is dog f ⁇ ing.

Speaker 1 That's not true. We talk about so many memories we have of working with the biggest stars on the planet.
I'm talking Prince, Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo.

Speaker 10 We're just two BFFs having a good old time, okay? Sometimes we even talk to other co-stars like Zoe Deschanel, Jake Johnson, Max Greenfield, and Damon Waynes Jr.

Speaker 5 And your dad, we talk to your dad on this show as well.

Speaker 1 Make sure you subscribe to the mess around wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every single Tuesday.

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