2025.10.14: That Auto Aim Life

At a new American.

Hey!

We're recording the podcast!

Get up!

Good morning to you, wherever you are, because it is morning somewhere for October 14, 2025.

My name is Bertie Burns, sitting right over there.

She doesn't look tired at all.

It's asking Bertie trying to ask her.

It was a long night.

I practiced the Victorian sleeping methods last night.

What's the right way to tell someone they look tired?

Ooh, that's a tough one.

That's a tough one.

Because when you say you look tired, what you're kind of implying is like, you look like shit, right?

Yeah, 100%.

And so then it's like, but you want to acknowledge, like, if someone doesn't feel well, but if someone doesn't feel well, they also

don't look their best.

It's also potentially the start of that conversation of like, are you okay?

It's like, yeah, I'm fine.

And then, are you okay?

Are you okay?

Are you okay?

And you're like, I'm not anymore.

I was.

And now I'm not.

I knew it.

Like, I could tell.

Yeah.

Like, well, it's like, are you mad?

Are you mad?

Are you mad?

I'm going to be mad.

I knew it.

I knew you were mad.

Yeah.

So

I was up.

Well, I wasn't up late.

I was up very early.

I was taking my dad to the airport.

He's been staying with us for the last six months.

And he is.

Maximum allowable time.

Yeah.

So

he is headed off home to do all of his like normal home stuff.

And we're very sad about it because you know, it's been so nice having him here.

And he formed like the most amazing team with the kids.

My camera roll is full of like pictures of Evie sitting on the kitchen table while he brushes her hair and puts in as many pretty little clips as she wants, which is a lot.

I learned a lot.

He raised two girls and knows how to do young girls' hair.

And I was like, I was like a student, like watching the master.

I was like, okay, okay, okay.

Yeah.

And so the kids are devastated, but

he's safely off home.

And I've got my second round of sleep,

which is, by the way, I believe not officially sanctioned by the Apple Sleep app.

So

you can't worry about that.

Sleep or sleep.

Even if sleep is unrecorded, it still counts as sleep.

No, I actually feel okay.

I feel okay.

Yeah.

But I do want to warn everyone

that the podcast is probably going to be late like every day from now on.

Like all of the on-time podcasts that we've had have been brought to you by grandpa.

right by all the work that he's been putting in he's been like the superstar of this year i i i told him when he was leaving i said uh you know i would not have been able to get done a tenth of what i got done with if he if he hadn't been here so he's been been the superstar unsung hero of 2025.

well we're singing them now yes we are singing them now

so what's going on with you i uh i have a couple of notes here a couple things i'd like to talk about before we release you back to the world of naps i guess um i've got dumb stuff that i'm mad about is that is that a thing well i got a a dumb thing I'm mad about.

Great.

Perfect.

This is our theme for the day.

I am really mad at Apple.

Why?

Because they are rebranding Apple TV Plus.

They're dropping the plus and just being Apple TV.

And it seems like...

It seems like this is going down the HBO Max to Max, back to HBO Max.

No one will ever beat that.

They're going to throw in like an Apple Go somewhere just to really confuse people.

But it just seems like one of those, it's really dumb.

First of all, I mean, I guess no one was already calling it Apple TV Plus.

Would you ever refer to it as Apple TV Plus?

I can throw some fuel on the fire here for you.

Okay, go ahead.

Well, I'm also mad because on the iPhone, the app is not called Apple TV.

It's just called TV.

Right, it's just called TV because it's already on your Apple device.

But it's got an Apple emoji in front of it.

You're just still going to look it up.

What they need to do.

Yeah, it's true.

What they need to do is they need to add the ability to have some sort of emojis in app titles because then they can be like, look, it's Apple TV.

But because you can't rename it yourself, you're just stuck calling it TV.

Why don't I just call it what it really is?

Call it the severance app because that's what it is for me.

No,

that was Ted Lasso.

That was Foundation is on there.

There's actually, there's a lot of, that was Shmigadoon was on Apple.

What?

These are all past tense, right?

What are you currently watching on Apple TV?

Hold on.

There's a good one.

Slow Horses is on there.

Oh, is it really?

Yeah, I need to watch Slow Horses.

I do.

I need to watch that.

But

just overall, this branding, rebranding smacks of like some manager came in and decided they're like, I need to make my mark.

Yep.

And this is fun and whatever.

But

this is what I'm going to do.

Like, I'm going to change this.

This is going to be my stamp.

And so now we're going to rebrand this whole thing just to take the plus off.

What?

Were they worried it was going to be confused with Disney?

No, no one was doing that.

So it's just the most unnecessary rebrand.

Like, it's okay if people don't colloquially call it Apple TV Plus, if they don't refer to it, like by the correct spelling and like capitalization.

You don't have to, right?

You could, the plus wasn't hurting anyone.

Logo rebrands are a big deal.

I think it is, though, part of the marketing now because it gets you talking about the thing.

Otherwise, what's the reason?

It just seems like a lot of hassle.

Changing the name of an actual device and a product can also lead to huge amounts of work for trademark and copyright and everything else, and packaging, got to sunset it, everything like that.

You know what I mean?

So, it's like it's not a simple thing when they do it, but they seem to do it on a regular basis.

Like, oh, it's just for funsies.

Like, well, yeah, let's do it.

Funsies.

There is a show coming out on Apple TV.

Plus, that I actually want to put on your radar.

I'm not sure if it's there yet, but it is.

Is it the Laser Team series adapted from the hit motion picture?

No, it's a show called Pluribus, and it's a Vince Gilligan show, which I think

you would like, right?

And it's the premise of it is like there's a lady, she's a writer, and she seems to be the only person in town who's immune to like some new disease that goes around that makes people happy.

Oh, that's good for a writer.

So

that's interesting.

Okay.

Okay.

You know, but it just, it seems like one of those things that you would like because the twist on reality is fairly simple, right?

There's like one thing that changes.

People got a thing that just made them content and like satisfied and happy with their life.

Yeah.

Except for like one person.

I'm trying to think, though, when was the last time I liked something that was written about a writer?

Like I liked misery.

Alan Wake.

That was good.

Alan Wake.

I never played Alan Wake.

Here's my impression of Alan Wake.

You're in the rain and you have a flashlight.

Is that the one where the kid dies too, or is that a different one?

Well, you're in Alan Wake, you're a writer.

Like, that's the whole thing.

And I think it's like you're like writing anyway.

Um, that's right.

What's the other one with the dice hard ring?

What's the 13th floor?

Is that was that a movie where like someone goes and stays in like a haunted hotel room or something for their is that what that's about?

I don't know.

I must be avoiding all these.

Do you ever see the uh, I'm not gonna get the name right, I don't think.

I think it's called Stranger Than Fiction.

It's a Will Farrell movie.

That's that's a great premise.

Is that is that one of the like first Will Farrell movies that was him almost like against type?

Like, it's a funny movie, but it's it's way more serious than a lot of the other stuff that he's put out himself.

It was the comedian makes the like serious art house drama, like that kind of thing.

Yeah.

God, that was so good.

And that's the basically like the author.

And then there's some, there's self-awareness with her character that she's writing.

And she like goes back and re like revises.

Emma Thompson plays the author and then Will Farrell realizes he's the fictional lead in her novel and can hear her narrating his life and stuff.

Yeah.

And

it's a very fun premise.

Actually, matt matt had a script years ago that was pretty similar and when we saw it i was like it's one of the things you worry about like oh my god this is this idea is similar but no that that movie is like 20 years old at this point no it's besides everything is execution anyway yeah um and you know what i'm hearing by the way is you just listing off properties about writers that you like true true that's true yeah so anyway that that's one to check out what's your dumb thing my

thing that i'm mad about is i want a game that i can play people are giving me me shit about Hades that I don't understand.

Like, that's what Hades is all about.

Okay, fair, but that means I just don't like the game, right?

But I'm still mad about it.

That's not the right game for me.

It's like, and this game, by the way, is like, I can't take anything away from it.

It's a fun game to play.

I do go back to it, even though I'm terrible at it and I get mad at it.

Which brings me to another point, another thing I'm mad about, which is, so I thought, I'm going to try this.

I'm going to install and play.

Battlefield 6, because I'm pretty sure the last Battlefield,

if you're not familiar with video games, it's called Battlefield 6.

It is not the sixth one.

That would be what you would assume hearing the word six in there.

It's like, what, the 30th Battlefield game at this point?

There's, hold on.

There's, there was like, I mean, it started with like 1942.

I think 1942, by the way, is the last one I played.

2042 or something.

There's the bad company games.

There is a lot of Battlefield games.

Let me see.

Here's the list of Battlefield video games.

Maybe the last time I played Battlefield, it was Battlefield 1942 on Wake Island,

the demo.

Wake Island, by the way, was was a writer.

Did you know that?

I loved that demo.

That demo, because we downloaded it during a LAN party, and then we all went out and bought Battlefield, like for that LAN party.

We spent the entire time just playing that.

Trevor, a lot of people, but Trevor, I think, was the lead behind it.

I wasn't at Rishiki at the time.

He produced a Minecraft show called Block Island.

I think they did two of them.

And it was like a survivor-style show.

I loved it.

Loved the concept because years ago on Drunk Gamers, I did a thing, which was a direct survivor.

We called it like Drunk Gamers Survivor.

And I ran these games, but everyone had to be able to download and play the game because it was the community that was playing it.

And Battlefield 1942, the Wake Island demo was one of the games.

First one we played because there was like 12 people on each side.

So you had to have a massive game that could support that.

So I think that's pretty much the last time I played the Battlefield

series, Battlefield 1942.

Okay, so here I've got Battlefield 1942, Battlefield Vietnam, Battlefield 2.

There's a bunch in here that I am going to...

Here we go, Expansion packs.

Battlefield 2 Modern Combat.

Battlefield 2142.

Battlefield Bad Company.

Battlefield Heroes 1943.

Battlefield Bad Company underrated, by the way.

Bad Company 2.

And then there was, oh, God, Battlefield Online.

Yeah, go ahead.

Bring it with your hand up.

What was the point at which they did the re-were where they just put out the game and called it the same name again?

Where they say, this is Battlefield.

Battlefield 4.

Oh, my God.

Was that Battlefield 1 when they just said suddenly they...

Yeah, I think so.

That was the one where...

Do you remember where I got the contact secondary high from

Wiz Khalifa and Snoop Dogg?

Eddie 3.

Eddie 3.

And you came back to our broadcast and you just laid down with

a jar full of red vines.

Yeah, I remember that.

I remember that.

That was insane.

But Battlefield 6 has been putting up some pretty big numbers with players on Steam and such.

So you're mad about it?

Okay, so going back to the original thing, I thought, okay, I'll try Battlefield 6.

Why not?

I'm hearing good things about it, but I'm also hearing horrible things about it.

But the horrible things seem to be from that group of people who really love the game a lot, but they kind of hate play it.

The whole group of people that's like, this is the worst game ever, 2,100 hours played, you know, on Steam.

So I went to go download the Steam.

I've heard weird things about trying to get it through EA Play.

So I thought, I can either get it on the Xbox or I can get it on Steam.

I'll get it on Steam because,

you know, I just want to be able to drop into it and play like while I'm editing or something want to take a little break.

And it won't take forever, I don't think, to play a game.

But then I go to install it and then it wants to install its anti-cheat, which is a kernel-level access

anti-cheat software.

I think it's called Javelin or whatever.

Immediately, I'm just like, no, I'm not installing this.

I'm not going to give some anti-cheat software access to the highest level of administration on my computer.

I'm not going to do that because I use this computer for everything.

Right.

Like, there are some things that I'm willing willing to put up with.

Colonel level, anti-cheat, not one of them.

And I did a little bit of research, and everyone's like, yeah, it's like, it's not great, but, you know, it actually works.

And, you know, the hackers and the cheaters can't get around it.

Sidebar, if you cheat in a multiplayer video game, what is wrong in your life?

Like, what do you get out of that?

How is that enjoyable?

Honestly, I think for some people, like, the breaking the thing is the fun part.

I get what you mean.

I get what you mean.

Because you play some like games where it's like, there's always people like flying around the top of the arena or whatever and dropping shit on you.

And there's some people like when we would play way back in the day, like Halo 2 Community Nights with the Rooster Teeth audience.

There were always people that all they wanted to do was just do exploits, like

sword sniping and all this, or they'd have a modded Xbox and do all this stuff.

It's like, how is this fun?

But there's some people that's.

all they want to do.

And they put an extraordinary amount of effort as well into like finding and using these exploits and getting really good at the exploits instead of like getting good at the game.

Jano Jedi, when he was younger, he was like that.

He wanted to find glitches in games.

Maybe it's a control thing.

I don't know what it is.

Like you got to break the matrix or whatever.

But then the rest of us have got to install all this shit on our computers to get around you guys.

You know what I mean?

It's just like, I just don't get what people get out of it.

And yes, when I read about it and did the research, everyone's like, yeah, I've had this for years.

It's, yeah, it's not great, but it's not a problem.

It's like, it's not a problem yet.

You know what I mean?

It's like, I don't want to be part of the group that they find out, oh, there's this huge exploit.

And everyone who ever installed this particular anti-cheat, you know, everything on the computer was compromised.

Yes.

And they didn't know it because it had the highest level of access to their processor.

So did you install it?

No, I just, I immediately dropped out.

And then I was like, okay, now I got to get a refund for this thing on Steam and maybe I can play it on Xbox.

But if I'm being honest with myself, honest, this is the other thing that I'm kind of dumb.

Okay.

I should probably be playing this on Xbox anyway, because do you remember when I would bitch about Fortnite and I said if they ever made a version of Fortnite that didn't have building, I would play it?

And then they put that out and you did play it.

And I did and I enjoyed it.

It was good as your word.

I did and I would play it on the Xbox and it was great and Fortnite was a fun, great game, even though I still give it an enormous amount of shit.

Well, buddy, you can get in playing that again if you want.

Get those K-pop Demon Hunter skins they got out.

You know they got their own mode now.

Really?

Oh, yeah.

Big on Fortnite.

They have Laboo Boos too.

Can I get like a Laboo Boo backpack or something like that?

That's probably going to be like a separate integration.

Is that over now?

Is Labooboos, Boos?

Are they done?

I mean, I don't know.

I guess if we want to know, we should probably ask Becca, but she's been a little bit busy building like the world's most elaborate Halloween decorations for her yard.

Oh, that's true.

Yeah.

She would be the person to ask.

Or we'd ever reached like peak laboo boo where people were dividing them up in divorce court.

The courts were busy with other stuff.

Government shutdown kept that from happening.

So what I learned was I would play Fortnite on the Xbox, and it was fine.

I would get like top five or whatever, right?

Feeling pretty good.

Totally respectable.

I basically the first half is all bots from what I can figure.

But then I went and played on PC one day because I was on my PC.

I said, oh, this is free.

I'll just download it and put it on my PC.

Downloaded and put it on my PC.

I was fucking terrible

at mouse and keyboard Fortnite.

You're saying the auto wave was doing some heavy lifting?

I might be doing some heavy lifting for a guy at my level of Twitch skills.

So maybe I should be playing Battlefield 6 on the Xbox anyway.

And who cares, right?

It's like I'm not going to build a separate PC to install this stuff on a high-performance PC.

I need my high-performance PC to be for my editing and stuff like that.

I'm not going to, yeah.

You need to know you can rely on it.

I'll just play it on Xbox.

Yeah.

Well, if you're on Xbox, I also recommend hopping back into Brutal Legend, the Xbox 360 game, if you ever played it.

Oh, did you read that?

Yeah, I did.

What is that?

So technically, it happened yesterday, but we're probably still in kind of like the afterglow window, right?

Where

so so uh Tim Schaefer from Double Fine said he was going to hop into this game, Brutal Legend, and he was going to help people get an achievement.

Brutal Legend is one of those games that came out early enough in the Xbox 360 lifecycle that a lot of developers were still sort of experimenting with different ways of doing Xbox achievements and figuring out like how to do them well.

And, you know, there's a lot of of missteps early on with like achievements that are impossible to get, or like games that you couldn't possibly play the game without getting every single achievement.

And there was one in Brutal Legend.

It was a viral achievement.

And you got it by playing the game in multiplayer against someone who has the achievement and it would unlock for you.

It's like the STD of Xbox Achievement.

That's a good way to put it.

And so

Tim Schaefer,

one of the developers working on the game, I told Fun, obviously he's got the achievement.

He was one of the seeds, right?

So he's seeding the STD in the achievement world.

He said he's going to hop on

hop on Brutal Legend for the 13th of October yesterday to celebrate October 13th.

Oh, is that what it was for?

I guess so.

I wondered what it was.

And so

he'd be on in multiplayer and then people could get the achievement off him.

But now that people have got the achievement off him, you can get the achievement off them.

Yes.

Right.

So we're in sort of that window

just after the event where there's probably still elevated interest in playing the game online.

There's probably still, you know, people around that you can get in a match with that have the achievement.

And so you can get it.

If you've ever, if this is like the one achievement that you were never able to get in your life and it's been really haunting you, this is the time, buddy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Your time.

And also it's a fun game.

And almost certainly.

that will drop off very quickly.

Yes.

It's not player count.

It's not going to last long.

You know, that's the thing about like early achievements.

They really couldn't figure out early on exactly what they should be, but the audience figured it out.

I think what it was, even like your company that you worked for, Ubisoft.

Indeed.

They made one that was, I mean, it was literally an achievement where if you got to number one on the global leaderboard, then you unlock that achievement.

No one's doing that.

Yeah.

So like basically, that was a Ghost Recon game.

So basically no one has Ghost Recon 100%,

right?

And there's, there's some in that direction.

There's also like there was the game King Kong, where if you beat the game, you got every achievement.

It was like, it was like an achievement per level.

It's like everyone was

figuring it out sort of together.

And the way you figure a lot of it out was like, hey, not like that.

Right.

Which is interesting because 100% of a game is something that developers understand because that's the scope of their project that they work on.

But maybe they didn't realize initially that there would be this whole completionist streak, which I'm one of them.

Like if I get an achievement, I try to get all the achievements, unlock everything.

In fact, I wish Xbox had a like a diamond achievement or whatever it's called on PlayStation, where you have a 100% of the initially released trophies.

Platinum trophies.

Platinum trophy.

Thank you.

That's what it is.

Yeah.

I mean, they've got their like diamond achievements that are the rare achievements, but I don't know if there's like a congratulations, you did everything in this game.

No, there's not.

Even Steam has that, you know, for completed games now.

Yeah, but you know, so I like where we settled into with achievements where they became sort of incentives for playing games in different ways.

So, you might not be able to unlock every achievement on this playthrough, but play it again this way and you can do it.

I like a dishonored was a good one for that, where it's like, you know, go through and play it like this, or go through and don't let anyone see you and don't kill anyone the whole time.

Yeah.

You know, or you had, I think Mass Effect was

just thinking about multiple playthroughs because you'd have to, you know, go through the game with mostly this team up or mostly this team up.

And you couldn't complete it all in one.

um but you could complete it right you could if you spent enough time doing it it wasn't like some of the i think nba one of the nba games had one that was like play online at the same time as a thousand other people that's completely beyond our control it's like i can't do anything about that what are we gonna do like go and and set up like a an event on facebook ironically though that led to those kinds of things which is why i know about it so ironically it did lead to more like promotion of the game itself and people talking about it because even years later, probably when it didn't even matter, they were trying to do things like that in order to unlock that achievement.

But it's cool that Tim Schaefer went back.

Yeah, you know, and again, it does get us talking about Brutal Legend, which was a cool game that maybe is due for a resurgence.

It was a weird game.

It was, I liked that it was.

It almost seemed like the aesthetic they adopted was like, hey, you've fallen into the world of those like really fantastical metal album covers.

Yeah.

And that was like, it was a very strange premise, but cool.

It also, I think, had a little bit of a hurdle because partway through the game, it goes from like a kind of open world game and you've got your like rocker car and you can go around and collect stuff.

And then at some point, you're like a commander of demon armies.

Yeah, I heard that.

I never got to that point.

It switches almost like to a strategy game.

To an RTS game, yeah.

Yeah.

So, you know, that's a big swing for them.

But, you know, it's a fun game.

I hope people check it out during this sort of like, I don't know, viral orgy of achievementing.

Take it.

Let's move away from all the sexual STD metaphors for this.

We actually have another weird connection with this.

I think it's this game.

It's definitely Double Fine.

One of their art guys at Double Fine

was Scott C.

I don't know.

Is Double Fine still around?

Yeah, yeah.

Scott Campbell.

So, and so do you know recognize the name Scott C?

Wait, Scott C is in like the art on our walls?

So in our house in Austin, when we lived there, we had a bunch of Scott C art.

And this will be a a deep cut for people who have listened to the Rooster Teeth podcast over the years.

Uh, a lot of the art came from we spotted him at a convention and I fell in love with his work.

It's kind of like a cutesy, like sketchy style.

Sketchy sounds like it's like devious.

No, it's just like sketch art, sketchy, and uh, almost like watercolor stuff, too.

And uh, at least the stuff we have.

And he was the guy who years ago

we were buying stuff from him, and I bought a bunch of different pieces from him.

And Jeff Ramsey was with me and gave him cash because it was of the time and he was trying to calculate everything.

He just goes, oh man, math is the worst.

And we love that.

Math is the worst.

I think we said that for years after that.

So yeah, so he's connected in some way to Double Find.

I don't know if he was the art director on

Brutal Legends specifically.

But I always loved that when they talked about the inspiration for the game of like just they would look at the album cover while they listened to the album.

And it was just, you were just enraptured by that.

It's because it was so little media back then.

Like you would read the backs of cereal boxes and catalogs over and over again.

Over and over.

And you would, you, and you would, would you ever, if you're sitting down eating cereal at the table and you're, it's like, you know, get lucky through the maze or whatever.

And you would like pretend that you didn't know the exact route through the maze and try to like trick your brain into doing the puzzle over again like it's fresh, even though you know the exact route because you've done it 18 times.

I don't think I could, from memory, tell you the ingredients of Cheerios

from the 80s.

I'm pretty sure I could.

So I related to that.

The other thing I would do is I would look at concept art books.

Do you ever have those?

Oh, yeah.

Like concept art books that they would put out about like the Star Wars series or something like that.

And then there were just like random sci-fi concept art books in the 80s.

It was really cool.

I bought some.

Yeah, I bought some.

It was like stuff that, you know, those things you see at an early age that really have an impact on your own imagination, like images that are burned into your brain, and you don't even realize until you encounter it years later.

I bought some books on eBay that were the concept art books I looked at when I was a kid, and it's like, I was like, oh, yeah, I bought it because of this image.

And then I started flipping pages, like, holy cow, I didn't even realize how much of this stuff I remember.

Right.

Like, it almost feels like a massage for your brain.

Yeah, a little bit.

Yeah, a little bit.

It's like you're unlocking pathways.

Decades old,

creaking open like a door in a dungeon somewhere.

All right, Ashley, who do we have to thank for today's podcast and sending you off to your nap today?

I want to say a big thank you to Samuel J.

Barnes and Irena Kate.

Thank you both so much for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com/slash morning somewhere and roosterteeth.com.

All right, well, that does it for us today, October 14th, 2025.

We will be back to talk to you tomorrow.

We hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.