14: Melancholic Murder Bug

What's good, Internet?

It is October 7th, 2025, and this is not a fantastical world of magical monsoons and creeping coral.

It's Side Story, a podcast about games and the stories we tell about them, presented by Friends of the table and supported by our patrons, maybe you, at friendsofethetable.cash.

You should go to friendsofthetable.cash and give us a couple of bucks.

We got some clap casts have been going up non-stop over there.

Our outward let's play has had a big dramatic change.

Janine is now playing along with Jack and I in our outward LP using a mod, which is extremely fun.

And she's playing as a

weirdo.

That's all I'll say.

Joining me today.

Friends of the table's got a weirdo in it.

I know it's weird.

Keith, J.

Carberry, and Andrew Lee Swan, welcome back to Side Story.

Hello.

Hi.

Is this the second time you've been on Dre and the fourth, fifth time, Keith?

I was on a lot in a row.

You were.

I don't know how many.

Trey, have you only been on the sports episode?

I feel like I was on another one before that, but I don't remember.

Who could say?

You were not on Tamagotchi episode.

No, you were not on.

Oh, you weren't.

No, Horse Racing.

My horse books is, of course, the sports episode.

What a fool I was for thinking.

The succulent strawberry or Make the Turnip Grow and Pet now.

Yeah, that was.

That was.

Oh, right.

Yeah, Dre was on that.

That's right.

Yeah, I just looked at that.

Dre was on that.

Of course.

Dre was just on.

Talk about Grand Bazaar.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Of course.

Sorry.

And I was on one to talk about the, God, the other, the other farming game that came out this year.

Moon Factory.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, those are

so that, so, so, so, four,

including this is four, three, four, yeah, four, including this one.

And, Keith, you have been on many, so welcome back to both of you.

Hi, how's everybody doing?

Succulent strawberry or make turnip grow and pet cow.

I almost couldn't read it, it was so good.

It's a good one.

I'm very happy about that one.

I didn't know which order to name that in.

I almost made it make turnip grow and pet cow or the succulent strawberry.

You made the right choice.

it's way weirder this way it's way weirder and it's not any better the other way it's not i do think or the succulent strawberry by itself is very strong yeah but it's stronger with a different type of lead in so i like the idea of like the succulent strawberry is your first pick but then Your second because the second title the or colon is always like your backup and make turnip grow and pet cow is just a wild like that's my number two option.

That's my backup going that's my backup there.

Uh, in any case, I don't know what the name for this one's gonna be.

We'll have to see if we can find one as we converse about video games.

Um, Dre, you're on before talking about farms.

There's farms in the game we're playing and talking about today, yeah, one of the two, I guess, um, or one of the many, I guess, but uh, they're not really the focus.

I don't think that they're one of the X's.

It's far, I guess.

If farming is exploitation, that's one of the

X it takes is part of.

We are today talking about Endless Legend 2, the latest game now in Early Access by Amplitude Studios, who are the creators of

Humankind most recently, another 4X game, and then lots of other games under the Endless banner, the Endless Space games, Dungeons of the Endless, and also Endless Dungeons, two different games.

I think Dungeons of the Endless was the older one.

I think that one was maybe better.

And the Endless are like a lore thing.

Yes.

They are.

They are.

Keith, if you, Dre, you and I are both Endless Legend sickos.

Sure.

The first game.

And

Keith, have you played any of the Endless games before?

No, I've played like a decent cross-section of Forex games, but I've never played any of the Endless games.

Okay.

Well, we'll try to, I think, maybe paint a picture of what that first game was and how this game sits next to it.

Because to me, that's one of the most interesting things, just generally about making a video game sequel is like, well, what do you do with the sequel?

And then also, especially with a 4X game, you know, we are a a couple of years out from,

maybe not even a couple.

I think it was just last year, late last year, maybe it was early this year that Civ 7 came out.

Civ 7, right?

Not 8.

I think that was earlier this year.

7 was 225.

It was

February.

Right.

And that was

met with, you know, I think some derision from people.

Really, I felt like seriously.

It took such a big swing, and I actually think

there's something interesting about this game in relation to the the big swing that it took.

Um, and we can get there as we talk more about this.

Especially the film

that I haven't played since two.

Interesting.

Huh.

Yeah.

Um,

why?

Did you, was there, did you just not in the place for it?

Yeah, I just, it just like passed by me, and then I heard that people weren't liking it, and I was like, well, I had recently played a bunch of Civ 6

with my partner, and so I was like, I'm kind of, I'm good on Civ for right now.

Well,

at that point, though, now you're ready for this, and we can talk about this.

Yeah, and I guess that means you are someone who's played some 4X games.

I mean, obviously, you've played some Grand Strategy games because we currently have over on our YouTube, youtube.com/slash friends at the table, uh, you and Jack playing through Crusader Kings 3.

Um, but the 4X game is 4X as a genre is, I'd say, different than Grand Strategy.

There's overlaps, but there's some real um, some real differences in rhythm and focus and

uh turn-based decision-making and stuff.

I guess for people who don't know, the term 4X

comes from actually a preview of the game Master of Orion forever ago.

And the 4Xs are sort of

not just a list of things that you do in games like Civilization and like Endless Legend, but also kind of

the order of operations, the sort of like structure of a 4X game is follows in the 4X's.

They are explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate.

They are strategy games in which a number of powerful factions come into conflict, spread out territory.

Generally speaking, we'll talk about the ways in which Endless Legend is a game that plays with ideas

around modifying these 4Xs, let's say,

exploits the natural resources and the diplomatic resources

available to them, and then eventually succeeds in conquering the world either through military conquest, military extermination, or through a different sort of win condition.

You know, famously in the Civilization series, you might look at something like, we've built all of the wonders of the world, or we've built a rocket ship that will take our culture beyond the stars.

And so we have succeeded through a technological victory.

You know, these games often have things like cultural victories, where you're able to build a big enough

coalition of of folks who control enough of the map even if they're not literally all one empire or something that they've basically taken over the world um and i'd say that that's in contrast to something like a grand strategy game which tends not to have explicit it might have points you know at the end of a run um but rarely is it as simple as you know will the bourbons get the technological victory um 4x games are often a little more board gamey than that um though they unlike board games can be very complex, leveraging the power of computers to do very intense calculations and

managing a billion numbers at once.

Like, for instance, how much of that special glass do you get per turn?

I'd say Endless Legend as a series is marked by being very clearly science fantasy.

This takes place in the same universe as the rest of the Endless games.

You know, this is a planet in the same galaxy as the Endless Space Games, or I guess the same universe as the Endless Space Games.

I don't know if they're intergalactic or not.

And things like the Endless, this kind of,

I don't know, like super ancient race style sci-fi thing pop up.

But even more than that, things like dust, a special currency, are across all of these games.

And there's like a sense of sci-fi, even in their fantasy game factions and stuff.

And I say the other big thing that really marks all of these games is asymmetry.

The thing that makes the endless games the endless games, to me, is that

you have factions that break the rules

in big ways instead of little ways.

I think in a lot of Forex games, you might have a group that gets bonus to science.

There's a bunch of ways that you can model that.

In an endless game, you might have a group that literally can't make money.

All they can do is investigate, or I guess I'm thinking of a specific Endless Legend 1 faction, which is like they couldn't get science.

They actually couldn't do research.

They could only get money, and they could steal research from other factions, or they could spend money to instantly get research.

But they couldn't.

But they couldn't, like, do every turn.

Our scientists are researching this technology.

Like, they literally couldn't do it.

And they kind of play historically with all of that stuff.

Everything from how many cities can you build?

Maybe it's it's only one.

Maybe you build cities that move around.

Maybe you build cities that really sprawl really far.

Maybe you build really tall cities, etc.

And so, like, every little bit of the game has historically been something that they're willing to play with, like that.

I think that's a pretty fair, high-level

thing about what this game or what these games from Amplitude have been.

And I guess the last thing for both of them is Endless Legend 1 and Endless Legend 2, big on climate stuff.

Endless Legend 1, huge focus on at launch, winter showing a kind of winter-summer thing where you never knew how far away winter was exactly and could come and like grind everything to a halt.

But eventually also things like volcanic storms and other sorts of natural

occurrences.

And then this one, and maybe it's its kind of big, interesting development,

has this cycle of kind of clear skies and monsoons.

And then after the monsoon season, the tides shrink away revealing more of the map um and bringing distant continents closer together uh dre you're the one who's probably played the most of this have i have i missed anything about what makes endless legend 2 endless legend 2 um

i think kind of building off what you just said another big thing is that endless legend 1 was basically about the end of a planet And a lot of like the faction stories were about like either stopping the destruction of the planet or just getting off of the planet.

And Endless Legend 2 is about a planet waking up.

Like it has been destroyed forever ago, but you are here now and the planet is waking up.

And what other stuff is waking up?

Who knows?

Yeah, maybe there's some stuff under the water that will give you clues as to stuff that's going on.

How much timer have you put into this tray?

Here, let me go look on Steam and I can just tell you.

Actually, that's less than I thought.

17 hours.

Okay, but that's still, you've played through, presumably, the tutorial.

Did we all play through that tutorial?

Yes.

Whatever the hell those guys are called.

It's a

kin.

The kin, right?

Yeah.

Who are like human.

They're humans.

They're militaristic humans with giant robots and some religion.

Yeah, they have a weird theocracy, it seems like.

That's right.

But it's kind of in shambles because

their

god king is like missing or something

there's a sort of messianic thing happening there yeah yeah yeah austin i don't know if you know this i can't tell if they are supposed to be like the latest play on like the vaulters i i feel like they are taking the place of the vaults but maybe they're from the same culture i it is hard to know tell me about what a vaulter is

So a vaulter is a faction that was in Endless Legend 1 and in the Endless Space games.

Yeah.

Basically, Basically, like the Vaults in Endless Legend 1 were one of the groups that were their story ending was to get off the planet and go to the stars.

Gotcha.

And then they were then also kind of like the default human or one of the default human race, like faction choices in Endless Space.

Oh, and they start as starfarers.

In Endless Space One, they had previously crash-landed.

They kind of crash-landed and then built a Fallout vault, you know, know,

and like lived inside of that for eons.

And now we're coming out.

They're sort of like, what if space marines crash-landed on a planet?

And then, like,

you know, a thousand years later, they were like, oh, shit, it's time to, we got to get off this planet because the planet's going to blow up.

We got to go to the surface and figure out how to do this.

And I, you know, they're not, they weren't simply space marines aesthetically.

They had other stuff going on, but they were like the humanoid faction who

you know, machine guns and power armor and event and like the most sci-fi, traditional sci-fi, kind of military sci-fi stuff in that game.

So yeah, I don't know, Dre, if the kin are literally the Vaulters, but they definitely are the humanoid faction in Endless Legend 2 who have guns and mechs.

But they do have theocracy.

They do have one other thing going on.

I think maybe that's a good example of like what the game, how the game has special things.

um they're

oh wow I was just playing as the other really religious faction so now I'm mixing my my mechanics how do you use their special theocratic religion stuff so the kin I have only one

like of the zeal powers unlocked I think is what that is and it is to

use influence to like create a divine population in your in one of your cities

right you take like a regular person and then make them turn them into a glowy-eyed divine guy yeah right it's like it boosts whatever like production population they're in but i think drops like also has an extra like happiness detriment or something yeah because you turn someone's uncle into like a robot who does good research

it i didn't notice it making anyone upset when i was doing that um but i could be wrong uh i think that it does i think that the tooltip at least says that that happens you might have been so happy and content that it wasn't a big deal yeah my cities were all kind of at the 65 75 range and it was just pegged there kind of yeah did any of y'all have any of y'all played as the the

science lizards a little bit no i actually haven't even met them so i uh i got this game yesterday i played for seven hours uh between today and yesterday i started the tutorial i got through the tutorial content and then spent the rest of my time like

trying to fill out the map as the kin.

And I only ever met one other faction.

You met the bugs?

I met the bugs.

I met war with the bugs.

I think that that tutorial is just you and the bugs.

Oh, I think so too.

So I'm pretty sure.

They implied like the tutorial's over.

Now you can play the game like a Crusader Kings style tutorial.

Yeah.

So I didn't realize i was playing a limited version of the

yeah you were playing a one-on-one yeah i finished the tutorial quick enough that i compare to if that's left over from like their beta that they did because that when they released that like early access beta like a month or so ago i see i think that just was the tutorial i think yes i think right now early access should have four um

uh

five i think it's five i think it's five This is four cultures and then six on 1.0.

But that was, this was months ago.

This is a months ago answer that I'm seeing on this.

Okay, no, I'm pretty sure because it's, I think it's, let's see if we can name them.

It's the Sheridan, who are the military theocrats looking for their god or whatever.

Oh, they actually have a real name.

They just call them, they call themselves the kin.

Yeah, it's like the kin of Sheridan or something like that is what I get what they're actually called.

Yeah, totally.

Now I remember.

It is the last lords, who are a follow-up to the broken lords from Endless Legend, who don't have food.

All they have is money.

They're like money.

They're a gold vampire.

They live off the dust.

There is a group called like the

group called like the Talak, who are

the

what is it?

Tahooks, I think.

Tahooks kind of an H.

It has an H.

It does have an H.

The Tahooks, who are

they are lizard, they are lizards who are scientists and like astrologers, but do have a theocratic, or not theocratic, they have like a priest cast.

And so, part of their mechanics are eventually like, do you side with the priests or the scientists more?

And also,

they do

human sacrifice, or I guess lizard sacrifice

to keep people happy.

They like throw big festivals, which devours one of your population, but gives you a huge boost to production and stuff.

Wait, are you explicitly sacrificing someone?

Yeah.

Okay.

I'm pretty sure.

I don't know.

I mean, they're not the only group that has that, to be clear.

Interesting.

Do the bugs have that?

The Last Lords do.

The Last Lords do.

Interesting.

Huh.

Interesting that they would do that with two different factions.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's called.

I'm pretty sure if I'm remembering the tooltip right, that it was like

sacrifice a person to throw a festival.

But maybe you're right maybe it's just flavor or maybe i'm reflavoring it maybe it's just like the festival is so so dangerous that you totally lose a person uh to to death you know um there's other stuff that they're that they have going on too they have i played a bunch of them and they have like um they have like a whole thing with with sometimes you can like do a celestial religious thing that produces someone who is like a religious zealot who like believes stuff different than you and that can be trouble but you could also then send those people to be like missionary it's very weird it's a very interesting complex system uh so that's that's three of the factions uh gold vampires lizard astrologers uh

human theocrats bug people uh who

the big bugs who are big if you've ever played a strategy game with bugs in it that's them basically the necrophage the necrophage their meme their expansion Optionophage or any other kind of phage.

Or the necrophage.

The necrophage.

And they have, like, do they have the we have one city thing in this game that the cultists used to have?

Okay.

But they like spread a disease or they spread like.

So you, because I have played, I have played like a whole campaign of Lost Lords, and I'm like halfway through a playthrough with the necrophage.

You put burrows down, and then

but then the burrow, instead of like doing a camp or whatever the other like factions do, right?

You like start with a city and then like there are ways to expand outwards by building new cities.

Or in this game, first you build a camp or an observatory or some other or a burrow, apparently.

Before this

new to me is

when you build a camp to build a city, you actually have a choice to attach it to a pre-existing city to make a sort of like satellite city

or you can spend more money to have a whole new city.

I thought that was kind of a cool way to like um get sort of half the benefits of a city it doesn't have its own queue for building things but it does get you a bunch more tiles without having to pay uh like huge influence for like buying tiles yeah yeah definitely

so the bugs build burrows yeah so they sorry they build burrows and then you can so those just function as like your little like holes you can crawl in and out of basically

and then you can also spend additional so it costs gold to build a burrow and then you can spend influence to turn that into I think they call it a nest or something.

And then you can attach that to your one city the way that like other cities attach camps.

I see.

Gotcha.

Right, right, right.

Because you still only have the one.

We'll get back to it, but I also just went back and played some Endless Legend 1 as the cultists, who also only have one city.

And their thing is that they like are really focused on converting minor factions to their religion, which turn the minor faction HQs into like a thing that will just pump out free mercenary units for them, which is really neat.

Very interesting, like different take on the one city faction.

H4.

Oh, and you got the peaceful robots, right?

Yeah.

The aspects, right?

The aspects, yes.

The aspects who are diplomats who get like

good,

they're able to stop war more easily.

They're able to like

convince you to chill the fuck out.

I didn't get deep into my campaign with them, so I don't really know what their mechanics are.

Oh, I see.

Sorry, they're the coral ones.

Yeah, they're the coral people.

They're really cool.

I want to like do a playthrough with them next, probably.

Can you explain the coral thing with them?

Or do you have your head around it?

I don't have my head around it at all, but I know a big part of it is that they

there's like a special tile type on the map that only they see that's like a like a a place where you can grow coral.

Yeah, um, and you don't have to like I don't think you have to have possession of like the territory like you don't have to claim it, but you can put coral.

They're also sort of like how you can build bridges and dams, yeah, totally right.

And they're like the diplomat-focused group, so they also have like special treaties where it's like, yeah, man, if you let me put my coral down, like I'll split it, I'll split seas with it with you.

You know, we're we're just chill, man.

Everybody's like coral.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I'm watching, I'm just like, I have a an aspects fact faction spotlight video up.

Um, they seem cool, they seem way cooler than my lame-ass humans who have archers.

Well, yeah, welcome to the endless games, frankly.

Yeah, yeah, they're cool.

They're like, um, they're like robots that have coral growing out of them.

Um, and even the robotic parts feel more like kind of like bronze aged, like

statue, statuary in some way.

You know, it's really cool.

They have a great look.

In fact, I kind of feel like their look

is kind of the look of the game

to me.

This is a game about a world that is flooded and that is the tides are slowly receding after, you know, a sort of deluge, a whole era, a whole eon of deluge, right?

The world has been flooded.

It has been hit by storms.

It has not been safe on the surface and there's just not been much surface.

And the tides are now receding to this other kind of version of the world where distances can be crossed not by boat, but by foot because the water is going away.

And as such, there's a real seabed quality to the aesthetic.

There's a real shoreline quality to the aesthetic.

And I think that there's also just a real high detail.

You know, the difference between like coral is tree-like in some ways, but it's also just very complex.

Lots of complex shapes, lots of complex, the sort of tree branches going in many directions with lots of little nodules.

And then color-wise, you know, this is a game that's very

orange,

very sunsetty.

It's very sunsetty, even not this faction, to be clear.

Like a lot of the world, the landscape looks like this.

And it's to me, that's like one of the big departures from that first game.

Keith, I don't know if you've you've seen any.

You should look up some Endless Legend 1 gameplay really quick just to get the difference.

Uh, but there was a real difference in

I don't know.

I'm gonna,

let's come back to this because I don't want to like shit all over this game, even though it's an early access, and I actually think Amplitude has a great history of like

really taking games through early access.

They were like, they were trendsetters with this, and I think they don't get a lot of credit, but they really did a lot with it.

I'm interested in what you were going to say that

you didn't didn't want to sound like you were shitting on this game because to me, I love the sunsetty look of the game.

I like it a lot, but for me, it's a metaphor for what's not working to me with Endless Legend 2 versus what did work for me with Endless Legend 1.

Okay.

I say Endless Legend 1, I'm looking at it,

it doesn't have as much of a style to the world.

100% true.

You know,

there's desert tiles and tree tiles and mountain tiles.

And it has, there's a sort of rounded organicness to a lot of it, like in two, but it's definitely a lot more minimal.

It is a lot more, well, the landscape is a lot more minimal.

Right.

And the UI is a lot more minimal.

And

there is more minimal.

The factions, the gameplay, the concepts.

There's more factions, but of course, obviously now there's way more because there's been expansions and stuff.

But there's a lot of detail in those factions and the backgrounds literally work as backdrop for that stuff in a way that's like creates a sort of clarity and contrast.

I was showing Janine some pictures of these two games yesterday.

Say again.

I just want to know what you mean by creates a backdrop.

I'm going to share.

Is this what you mean?

I'm going to share you a lot of images in a second.

Okay, that's great.

Because I was watching this where it's like these guys who are standing on little pictures of trees is what I oh, well, see, there's a really, I'll take a look at your image.

Sorry, I have to open up 17 images that I'm going to send you right now.

And

I'll put these in the description also.

But yeah, I mean, yes, Keith, I actually do mean that.

So

you sent a picture of combat in that first game

in which there is some

kind of like hand-drawn style tree icons on the combat map.

Scratched into the grasslands.

That's right.

Yeah.

so so here's a set of images from the first game yeah and then here's a set of images from the second game

copy these and paste these oh well this looks really nice this looks better than this video that i'm watching the first game looks incredible the first so so yeah that first set of images i have are and again they're in the image they're in the the blog post uh or the whatever the the sidestory.show page they should be you should be able to in your podcast player or whatever pod catcher uh but some of those don't show images.

So, if they don't, you can go to scistery.show.

The first one is like a boat coming into a shoreline.

All of the trees here are really small.

These are modeled trees, and it's almost like we're zoomed out more per tile in this image.

So, you can see little roads and stuff around the farmland leading into a castle town, for instance.

There's these big basalt columns on the ridge.

There's these big icy, you know, walls to the north, etc.

The second one is really a busy is a really busy image um like the the this is a bug city or something uh and the the city is really complex with all these hard angles pushing out of it uh it's all it's all kind of a mishmash of browns and yellows um uh but it really pops against the whites and grays of the world around it it really like stands out from that and the third image for the first game is combat uh which is this sort of tilt-shifted uh top-down you know tactical map thing but really flat world like you said the there's the the trees the hand-drawn tree icons instead of trees being in the world yeah there's some foliage and stuff but it's not busy you know my

just looking at these pictures side by side it looks to me like they wanted to bring the game more like they wanted to give you the idea of characters on a map versus pieces on a board that's right yeah

here are two images that janine made after seeing seeing these.

The first game is on the left, and the second game is on the right.

There is a clarity in these images from the first game that,

as Janine explained it to me from taking a look at it, comes from, or seems like it comes from, the breadth, the range of values being used in the palette of the first game.

Value is an art term that

I guess means like the brightness or the kind of brightness and darkness of the colors.

It's not like the overall image brightness, but like, oh, you can have a red that's high brightness and a red that's low brightness and a red that's high brightness is like really in your face and a red that's that's you know low brightness is going to be the kind of darker more subdued color.

And the first game uses both of those and it lets things really pop.

Correct me if you understand this differently than me, Keith, because again, I don't really know what I'm talking about.

also, not an artist.

I just know about the word value.

Yeah, okay, great.

Yeah, okay, awesome.

Perfect.

And in the context of art, I guess.

Totally.

And that goes into a bunch of different things.

That goes into shade and tint and all sorts of other stuff.

You can go read about that.

But the effect of it on these images is that the images from the second game, from NLS Elgendon 2, are muddier and they're more,

I want to say washed out, but I don't necessarily mean that pejoratively.

I think this is an aesthetic choice that they're making to make a game that feels cramped and feels covered with foliage in a way that hides things.

I think that there's a huge difference.

You know, a really good example in gameplay terms.

Sorry, what I'm talking about is there's a metaphor.

This to me is a metaphor for this whole game, right?

Where, like, the first game is really crisp.

It takes a really clean backdrop of, hey, you know, fantasy, right?

You know, like, trees and elves, and maybe there's a lizard person.

And from that very simple canvas, it is able to layer really complex details on top, both in terms of art asset, but also in terms of interesting storytelling mechanisms and fun factions.

And I think the second game is starting at really high complexity, really, you know,

high concept in the sense that it's like, oh, it's a planet that was flooded and now it's unflooding, which I, which I think is

more complicated and more unique than it's a fantasy world that's ending.

You know, how many times have we done a Friends of the Table season about a fantasy world that's ending?

God damn.

Most of them.

Most of the fantasy ones, certainly.

But the result of that, I think, is that I'm finding myself like,

I'm finding friction with the world.

And I'm finding that the

complexity of the ideas is like muddling their own ability to stand out.

And it just feels like the whole game is flavored the same way, if that makes sense.

If if i could talk about the images that you posted for a second like please the thing that is notable to me and i don't know what janine did like like if you were trying to this is obviously this is an insane thing if janine was selling snake oil yeah and was like this is our product this is their product you could get it you could get an image to look really good and look like shit and go like see how they're different you want the one that looks good so i don't know what Janine did to these.

And I assume, I mean, everything that I know about Janine is that she's not trying to trick you about the values of these games.

That is correct.

So, I'm looking at a game, Endless Legends 1 looks completely 100% legible and playable in Grace.

That's right.

Yes.

And Endless Legend 2, assuming that what was done to it wasn't the exact same,

is blown out and unplayable.

You couldn't play this.

Now, that doesn't matter to the game, like, in and of itself that you happen to take all the color out of it correct i'm using this as a this i'm using this as a metaphor for how it feels to me to not to play this game because i'm still enjoying it i mean the the end of the story is i played it i i booted up endless legend one today to be like i wonder if i'm i wonder if i'm just not in the mood for it and i lost three hours instantly instantly instantly instantly i was hit a new i was like let me play this faction i've never played as before i haven't played this game in eight years i i don't remember core mechanics and instantly i was funneled into into the way these games work, right?

I mean, who did you play?

I played the cultists, who are the single city,

the single city group that goes out and makes.

And I was like, oh, wow, it just like it just moved.

And again, this is not, I don't want to show the games.

It's in early access, but I do think this is an interesting dilemma for it because it's clear they didn't just want to make another game that feels like a storybook.

When you zoom out in both of these games, you get this kind of really beautiful hand-drawn map aesthetic, which is, I think, a thing that Civ ended up doing after the first Endless Legend.

But

in the first game, there's such a smoothness to that, and the whole game feels built around that crisp story.

Not storybook.

Storybook sounds,

I think, immature in some way, and that's not what I'm trying to evoke.

It almost looks like paperwork, like diorama.

Yes, yes.

I have shared now.

Here's, I have now adjusted the Endless Legend 2 images contrast and brightness and exposure to give you

right.

So the thing that Janine did was the same exact adjustments on both of these images

such that there was

her goal was to show that there is

less of a range in value between these two images.

The color values in the first game, in these images, which are limited images taken at random, have a wider range, right?

Which again, you can just look at the images in color and see that because they are purples and they're all in the same

area of lightness in the second game.

The second game is way interested, way more interested in shadow, in cloud cover, in storms.

And so I don't think that it's a mistake by any means.

I just, I'm, I'm kind of, I'm curious, Drave, is any of this making sense?

Because I know you're someone who also played a ton of Endless Legend 1.

And I don't want to be the person who's just like, and that's how it is, you know?

No, I mean,

I think you're right.

This is intentional.

I think, like, looking at this, it makes sense to me if they want to make a game that is about this planet is waking up and you don't know like what's going to be under the water and what's going to come next.

I think it makes sense to me for things to be like a little bit more like cluttered or like foggy, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, it's, but it is like really different.

So I think I'm, I agree with you about

that.

how are you feeling

gameplay wise so because that's really my question is like for me this fee the game feels like this

even though it's a studio i like and i've liked all their games that i've played uh i it feels

it it feels like it looks to me you know um and maybe that's maybe that's ui they've already said they're going to change the ui they've gotten a bunch of feedback obviously this is what they do but i i i for you does it feel like a direct, not a direct sequel, but like, um, how is it, how is it stacking up to your expectations of what an endless legend game should feel like?

I was a lot uh a lot less high on this game, or I guess I should just say I was more down on this game

when I was just through my first playthrough with the Lost Lords because I was like, oh, this is this is good, like, this is what I want.

Yeah, um, it and it feels like endless legend 2.

Um, and then I started my mean bug guys playthrough.

And just like the way you move through and interact with the map between those two

factions is just so wildly different.

And they just feel so different

that that made me like way more excited to want to go and play all the other different factions.

Because it's just, I mean, there is like the gameplay focus.

Like the Lost Lords are way, they're like all about dust.

Like that's their main thing.

Um, and I kind of picked them first because it was like, okay, you don't have to worry about food.

That's what you're the first Endless Legend 2.

Yeah, yeah, and you really kind of don't even have to worry, especially on like lower levels, which I was playing on, you don't have to worry about industry and stuff because you're just making so much money at some point that it's like, okay, yeah, I'll just buy five units every turn.

I don't have to worry about like having my production up.

Um,

and they are very much like a like a almost like a feudalist like faction right um

they they are really big on uh settling places and getting the minor villages or the minor faction villages which are one of the coolest things about this game for sure there's a lot of for for the listener there's like over a dozen um minor factions who are who have unique art and stuff but aren't playable so they don't have to because they don't have like big unique mechanics but they have like bonuses and negatives and unique um unique uh, like, uh, uh, soldier characters, unique, you know, units for the map.

Um, and you can recruit them, or you can fight them, or you can, you can uh pacify them, and you can assimilate them basically.

Um, and that's it really makes the world feel lived in and big in a way that's that's cool.

If you've played Civ but haven't played this, it feels a lot like the city-state mechanic, but there's a lot more stuff that you can do, it's not just like a diplomacy-light feature, it feels like a much bigger part of the game, right?

Right.

And so the lords are really big on the minor faction villages because they also do sacrifices.

And the lost lords, they don't, because they don't have food, they don't like auto-generate population.

You have to pay dust because that's basically you using dust to resurrect one of the like lost lords that are that are there.

That's a fun concept.

But the way you can get around that is by taking over the minor faction villages and building, I think they call it a lord's manor in there.

And then you can

click on a little button that pops up and say, Hey, do you want to round up?

That's what they call it.

Round up the minor faction village people and make them move into your big city, boosting your population.

I see.

Every time you do that, there is a risk that they will rebel.

And if they rebel, then it spawns like a five-stack army of those units that are mad at you.

But they're like very slow and steady.

And the bugs are just, you just fucking go.

I realized I was playing them wrong because when you start out, you just get like your little three-starter units.

And I'm like, oh my God, these bugs are so flimsy.

They are so weak.

And then I saw, and I don't know exactly how this works.

I need to go back and check.

But basically, it seemed like every time I won a fight, it would just spawn a new like unit.

Their base unit is called the larva, and then you have to spend a specific resource that the bugs have called corpses.

Right.

In order to like win a fight, you get a corpse, or you anytime you kill someone in a fight, you get a corpse.

Yes, but also, your heroes can level up so that you get more corpses per fight.

And also, your heroes can level up to get a skill that actually, every time you win a fight, it just spawns like a fully formed certain type of unit.

So, it's no longer you having to take the larva and like bunching it up a few levels.

Cool.

So you just fight all the time because it is so much more efficient to fight and have like new units be born than it is to like spend that time like training units.

This is why they're such assholes

on the

PC plays.

Now, I have a question.

This is, this is, maybe this isn't good for the show.

How do you train units?

I thought that you just had to train them by fighting.

Oh, I mean, I I guess I mean produce units.

Oh, okay.

Train

as in build.

Got it.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Build or produce.

My bad.

That is something that I've noticed in the game is like

I have found running my cities to be fairly easy and deciding what to build to be to not have a ton of consequence.

Like none of my cities ever needed food.

None of my cities ever like

were

drastically underproducing

except when they were first built.

I struggled a little bit with influence early on, but then I, you know, I built some stuff.

I had a bunch of influence.

And then I had like

three,

two, I had like two and a half really strong armies,

which were, at my level, I think there were stacks of five because I never unlocked the sixth stack

that you can place.

And like, I was kind of just running around looking for the bug guys who declared war on me to kill them so that I could force them to surrender.

But, like, I wasn't able to even find enough of them to end the war.

So, I had fun like delving into the ruins and doing the ruin fights because

there's like dungeons in this game.

Yeah, those are fun.

Yeah, and so when you enter, when you enter combat, you it becomes a sort of tactical game, um, a sort of bare bones tactics game.

Uh, and you can go into a like a little dungeon and do a little tactics thing.

But I had a hard time like finding, and I, and I'm, it's probably because I was in the tutorial thing and they didn't tell me that I was in a limited version of the game that had not a full set of factions.

But I was running all around looking for stuff to do and not finding it.

Yeah, I think that that makes sense.

Well, though, I will say, even the part of what you're getting at, though, or you kind of started there by being like, when you say training training units, do you mean something other than fighting?

You know, you got to be fighting if what you want to do is level your guys up with any of the factions I've played as.

There's hero units.

There are hero units.

They're hero units with, here's a way in which I think the second game is more muddled.

You all remember what the skill trees in Endless Legend 2 look like for your heroes, right?

This kind of big fan of options.

You know, there's dozens of options for by the time you get them to play level three or or four, you have a ton of options to put points into.

Here is what a skill tree in the first game looked like.

Yeah,

well, at the very beginning of the,

and I'm not sure, I'm not, I'm not sold on the concept of heroes anyway.

Um, like, I'm not sure.

Hold on, what's up?

The heroes in Endless Legend 1 had a bigger skill tree than this.

This is just like

this is the section side of the.

You're right.

You're right.

You're right.

It's a much, but it's still a much

cleaner, cleaner, and it's, there's like, there is, it's not as super overwhelming in terms of what are the options here?

What does building this character even look like?

Even your first early access, there's no guidance in there yet for what a good, you know, how I should be specializing these units.

But even, even your first choice for what to do on your skill tree requires reading

what four different attributes and like six different skills do.

Yes.

Yes.

Which is a lot, which is a lot.

I'm not, I don't, you know, this is a

Star Wars Battlefront one versus Battlefront two thing.

I'm not sold on the idea of heroes in these kinds of games.

You know, a game that is mostly about regular troops that also has, you know, super units who can't die, they can only retreat.

But when the game seems to be so much about the heroes that,

and like having one in your army is very important like entering a fight with and without a hero with like a special healing skill is like kind of a bad idea yeah um uh

and it it it

the your order of operations for exterminate it seems to just tilt the scales towards what is presumably the last x

Yeah, I guess so, but I mean, maybe this is one of the things worth saying.

It's like, Dre, you were just describing how good the game was feeling for you with the necrophage.

This might be one of the risks of the asymmetrical faction design.

Oh, yeah.

Right?

It's like the joy of it is, oh, my God, they feel so different than the diplomat robots, the aspect.

But that doesn't mean, that might mean that it feels better for one side than the other because of the way the game flow is designed.

You know, it might just feel better to do war in this game because you just get into the machines.

That's totally what I mean.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Totally.

Is it bad that the most fun thing to do is the war?

Which is not normally how I feel in a 4X game.

While playing one of these, right?

Yes, totally.

Yeah.

Here is, by the way, the comparison on

the skill trees.

The first game had like a class tree, a common tree, and a faction tree.

And because of that,

really crisp, really clear.

It's still a lot of reading.

You're still mousing over, you know, 20 different things by the end of

leveling up a hero or whatever, right?

But in comparison, I don't think that the layout of the second one,

you know, it, this is not how it interacts literally, but there, the second one feels like looking at the destiny maps instead of looking at, do you know what I mean?

Like, there is an aesthetics first thing here happening here,

um, uh, across a lot of the game that I, that, that is, it's fine.

I don't, I don't mind pursuing it, but like, I think part of what's missing is that Chris, I mean, Keith, even just talking about heroes, I think the reason this game has heroes is because it takes the base canvas, there are a bunch of soldiers who fight, and then it says, ooh, we want to differentiate cool.

Cool guy.

We want one cool guy to pop out, you know, of the grouping.

That's what fantasy is about.

It's about cool guys and then a bunch of armies, or that's what some fantasy is about.

I would say, I wouldn't necessarily say that, like, looking at these two skill trees, that the difference between them is that one of them has aesthetics and one of them doesn't.

No, it's not, you're right.

It's not that.

Yeah.

It is something so much less overwhelming, the one from the first one.

It is, and it has its own aesthetic, which is like,

you know, maybe like a low, like a tiny little monitor that you're looking at that like some commander is looking at being like, which of these things do I need to pick?

The second one is

so video gamey.

Well, yeah, it's built so you can play this game on a controller is what the second one is.

Oh, interesting.

I didn't even consider that that's what

that makes sense.

It's not officially out yet, but people have like hacked into the game and there is like a Steam Deck preset for this game.

That makes sense.

The left one looks like an infographic.

You know what I mean?

The left one looks like a food pyramid.

And the right looks like.

It looks like a flash card.

Or a flash card.

Right.

Exactly.

Oh, here's the right.

The stone.

Like, I.

I very quickly can look at all the icons on the left and be like, oh yeah, tree, owl, stonehenge, or whatever you want to call that.

Little chipmunk, saw bricks.

I don't know why there's the elephant in a circus over there, but there is.

This is the art that they're doing in Severance.

It is.

Whereas, like, I look at the right ones, and I know I'm getting specific, but I really think there's something that I'm trying to get at why it feels so frictive.

A thing I often like, but this is a type of bad friction for me.

Two swords and a gear above them.

I don't know what that means.

Obviously, I'm going to mouse over it.

And then also, also next to that, there's a little picture of a guy missing a brain, which I think is actually the symbol for has a brain.

I actually think the black is supposed to be the brain.

I think that's, I don't remember what the name of the brain skill or attribute was, you know, but that's there too.

And I think all that stuff for me is like, I'm just, and they're going to do a UI pass.

I can't wait for them to do UI pass

because I do like the factions.

And I'm curious what the next two factions are.

They're shipping with six, i think is that right

uh

well they're shipping with six but when they said they were shipping with six they also said that the early access was going to have four and the early access five they had said they were going to ship with eight and then scaled down so i guess

there might be they might have got more progress done on one than they thought because there's already an extra one in the early access.

Okay.

This is all just from stuff I saw like in the last two hours.

So I got you.

Don't trust me totally on that.

I haven't even, and I haven't looked at their, I should have before we did this, but I haven't looked at their like early access timeline that they put out.

They are, they are so good at this stuff.

Like they are so good at this.

If you if you go look at their Steam page, and I'll just link you to like the news page.

There have been updates non-stop, you know,

for everything from combat balance to

how you interact with minor factions, how defense works and stuff, but then also like a huge update on just like, hey, look, we're moving, we're moving the UI around big style.

Like, we're going from we're moving entirely where all of the stuff is when you're in your city view.

Like, right now, the, the, if you're trying to build a new district, um, you're, you have the kind of like uh uh interface for where what type of new district uh you're building.

The districts are another thing that are an example of this for me.

In the first game, you did build new districts sometimes to do things like wonders went into different little district zones.

A city in this game is surrounded by hexes.

This is a hex-based game, and the hexes are all part of the city.

In the first game, you would sometimes build an expansion.

You build a new burrow onto your kind of central city hub or somewhere in your kind of city hexes that would then add additional new hexes onto the grid.

And also, you would sometimes build like a really big deal building that would take up a whole hex.

In this game,

I'm pretty sure CIF6 works exactly like this, but it's been years since I've played it.

You have those hexes that are, that you then fill in with a special sort of district.

So you say, oh, this is going to be like a workshop district.

This is going to be a science district.

And that's going to give like a big boost to those stats in those cities or in those districts of the city.

That's like a huge difference from the first game where

you had the natural income from those places, but you weren't like filling everything with a subtype of building in that same way.

This is apples and oranges.

I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but I do think it's another instance of like, they're giving you more resolution.

They're letting you zoom in closer.

And,

you know, they're letting you

focus what you're building in even more than you were before.

And I think that that's a stylistic change in a big way.

But in any case, they've they've changed that UI so much, or they're going to change the UI so much.

They're going from this kind of like information's at the top, it's at the bottom, it's all over the place, to now what they are, what they are showing off is they are moving it to a big collected set of information all at the bottom and bottom right of the screen that I think is so much more clean and crisp.

So I am not throwing out the idea that this game could find the clarity for me

because so much of a game like this is, is it fun to move through menus?

It's kind of like the great coup of Crusader Kings 3 is like, oh, they figured out how to make the menus really good.

So I'm hoping that they find that stuff.

But I don't know.

Any other big feelings on Endless Legend 2?

I think it's fun.

It is.

Yeah, I also think it's very fun.

And I'm excited to quit the tutorial and try a second action.

Yeah.

I wish that they made it clear that I could just go do that.

Yeah.

I mean, the one...

Oh, go ahead.

No, you go ahead.

I was just going to say the one last

nitpick that I have, I do not like the hero coupling system that they have.

Right.

Can you explain what that is?

Yeah.

So now your heroes have basically like, well, I guess there's three slots.

I've never seen the third one used.

So your first slot on their profile is like, who's their best friend?

And you get bonuses for them being in an army together.

So, basically, having two heroes all the time together.

And then they can also pick a companion,

which is like a

romantic choice question mark.

Is it?

Here's the biggest issue: is that it seems like you get the same kinds of like companion dialogues regardless of your like faction.

So, like, I have seen multiple factions have a hero come to talk to their companion and be like, I

saw the worst atrocity I've ever seen on the battlefield.

And, and my love, I don't know if I should be connected to the world anymore.

And it's like, that works for some people, but when you're the murder bug, you don't feel that way.

Maybe it's a really melancholy murder bug.

Yeah.

And I think it's, it's, it is very much an artifact of early access.

There is just not enough of that writing for it to not feel

repetitive.

I will say I am also kind of struggling with the writing a little bit.

Yeah.

And that is, again, it's an early thing.

I guess this is this is a similar thing.

This is a story about a planet that is going through tidefall.

Capital T

not not capital F, but single word, tide, the tide fall is happening.

And capital T, capital T, the tidefall.

The tide fall, right?

Yeah, thank you.

And

you're meeting these strange rock creatures and rock people who are maybe tied to what came before.

And that's what every story is about so far, right?

Oh, you all run into them.

That was not the case in that first game.

They were all about the end of the world.

And they're all about the difficulty of living through the winter.

But, you know, the dragon people had the thing where like, oh, someone ran away from home and now we're like trying to figure out how to get her back.

And obviously that stuff still exists with these factions.

The thing with the theocrats being like, is our God king out there somewhere?

Should we move on without him or should we prepare for his return is unique.

But like everybody's got to meet the big rock man, you know?

Do you want to know why that is?

Please.

It's there once you get to the end game, there are basically like three like storyline things that you can pick to follow that makes sense and each one associates there's one for the rock man there's one for the lady that's like hey don't kill this big squid yeah be chill

um and then there's one for have you met like the hologram hologram yeah yeah yeah so those are your like your three kind of like win condition that makes sense choices uh in addition to whatever your like faction's unique quest thing is

those things are gonna be there every playthrough unfortunately well and that's what i that's the thing that's so tough right is like like, I think that's a cool story.

I don't want to necessarily do that one.

I don't want to, every time I get the don't kill the weird squid thing, I'm like, are we really doing the weird squid again?

And maybe eventually there will be a ton of other things that fill in for that main scenario.

Yeah.

But I,

ooh, you know, I, it, it genericizes things in a way, you know?

Yeah.

Um, in a way that's, that's funny because I think so much of the game is not about being generic, you know?

Yeah.

I mean, I'm sure that, like,

I don't know anybody who makes this game, but the vibe of this studio is they would hear this podcast and they'd be like, Yeah, no, we feel that way too.

Yeah, almost certainly, right?

Or, or that's at the very least, we know what we want to do.

And if they're not having, if it's if people are bouncing off of these things, we have to figure out how to do the thing we want to do better.

I don't want anyone to be like, you have to make the game Austin wants, you know, or anybody, you should make the game that you want.

Uh, but I, but I do think that knowing where those friction, where there is friction, or where people are, are struggling with the game is useful.

I hope, you know, yeah, yeah, um, and I think it's, it's a lot of it is just the early access cycle.

This is like how, yes, this is how games get made now, unfortunately, or at least a lot of them do.

Um, fortunately, unfortunately, I don't know, that's probably a very complicated conversation, but yeah, I guess it depends on if you are making a game that could have gotten made a different way, it's an unfortunately, and if you're making a game that couldn't have gotten made another way, then it's a fortunately, yeah.

I, yeah, I'm not dogmatic about this by any means.

I think you're exactly right, you know, yeah, yeah, you get to make the game sometimes.

That part's good.

If I could have launched the game, if I had got an option to finish making the game that I was making at Possibility Space, but we had to launch immediately into early access, I would have taken that option.

Oh, yeah, you know, so uh, oh well, so yeah, and to be clear, I really like Endless Legend 2.

I will put a lot of hours into it, and I'm really excited to see what they do with it.

Yeah, I think I'm going to come back

once it's at 1.0 at this point, which will be six or maybe eight factions or a plus plus custom factions.

And we'll probably have had a huge number of passes on both UI and writing and combat design and everything else because

it is a the core pitch is so good.

You know, we didn't really get into

thematics here, but taking

the climate crisis and

reversing our climate crisis of rising sea levels and being like,

what if there was a world where the sea was sinking and that's actually going to be a dramatic change for all of us?

And also kind of bring us closer together in a way that, and this is the kind of the Civ 7 connection.

CIF 7 has this thing where in the final phase of the game,

you move into continental, actually, the second phase of the game, you go from a single continent to there being multiple continents separated by oceans.

They're literally not something you can reach in the first phase of the first like age of the game in Civ 7.

And then those get added in the age of exploration.

And then

by the final age, the modern age in that game,

you have planes and boats and stuff, and you just have the full world map.

And I think this game is kind of coming at that idea of like, oh,

big eras in history.

One way you could divide up history is how easy is it for different cultures to touch each other?

And it's coming at it with this really fun fantasy premise of like, what if the seas sunk, creating new land bridges between everything?

That's awesome.

It's really flavorful and cool.

Yeah, you should try playing a game on the archipelago like map style, which is just everybody starts on like their own island, and then those islands get connected as like tide fall happens.

That's cool.

Yeah, the one that I played the most, the

I've already forgotten the Tula, the

lizard astrologists.

It was just me and the bug people on one thing until finally I connected with the rest of the group.

And weirdly, I'd already made diplomatic connection with them somehow.

I don't know how.

It might have been through the coral, through the aspects, because they were the first ones who talked to me.

So maybe there was some coral on my side that they had.

I don't, I have no idea.

But I ended up getting all three of the remaining factions and instantly was able to be like, hey, can we trade for maps?

And I could see half of the world that I literally couldn't reach, which was really interesting, you know?

And again, like, that's an amazing like premise and setup for a situation, right?

Which was, I have allies across the sea.

If I can survive two more monsoon cycles, they will come help me with the mean bug people.

But I have to last long enough.

And I am not built for that combat.

Like, I've been building, you know, space telescopes, and the bugs have been building

evil larva that eat corpses and get strong, you know?

So, that's great.

That's awesome.

I want to be able to play that game.

And I hope that they find a version of it that I think is maybe

as sharp as the first one was without sacrificing the complexity and the,

you know, the particularities of this one.

So,

all right let's take a quick break

i've never been able to grasp the meaning of time i don't believe it exists i felt this again and again when alone and out in nature on such occasions time does not exist nor does the future exist Tor Hayerdahl October 6th, 1914, April 18th, 2002.

He said it both times.

Yeah.

Putting the times where he lived and died too is really an own on the guy who says time doesn't exist, actually.

Oh, yeah, buddy?

Yeah.

You're out in nature at all anymore?

No?

I feel this one, though.

I don't.

You get hungry over time.

Yeah, this is just netarow.

This is just netarow pilled.

Time exists.

You know, I understand that the

engines.

Yeah, but on the occasion that you are out camping, you wake up and the sun moves in the sky.

And over the course of the day, you get tired and hungry.

Sometimes a mosquito is in your face and then it isn't.

And you can understand that those are two separate instances.

That's all time is.

If what he said was, the rhythms of the day feel different in nature than in the hubbub of the city, we would all be like, yes, absolutely, buddy.

Are there, did modernity change the way time feels phenomenologically and the way that we are forced to move through it?

100%.

But it doesn't stop existing because you're in a tent.

But it's all experiential and your experience of an hour and then a different hour can be totally different.

100% different.

Of course it is.

Which

is he hasn't been able to grasp the meaning of time.

What does it actually mean?

I don't believe it exists.

He doesn't believe it exists.

That's why I said I kind of get

it.

okay well i didn't say okay i get not being able to grasp it i get on such occasions time does not exist nor does the future exist it does even on those occasions

but he can't grasp it but the future does exist even in those moments where you're like oh

wow i really am relaxed by the lake

look this and i'm not this guy

why are you mad at me about it i'm mad at him i'm mad at people who say shit like this this isn't useful You know what I think?

No, this is Time.is's fault for putting it in front of your face.

I'm mad at Time.is.

That's fair.

Who knows how, or when, or where, or why he said this?

He seems to have maybe said it on one of his many expeditions to the Ita Easter Island or while figuring out his theory of Polynesian origins.

Oh,

a North American

adventurer and ethnographer.

Uh-huh.

You don't like to have a name and racism category in your Wikipedia page.

No.

Oh, I feel like I've heard about this guy before.

Oh, he's a guy who thinks that white people got there and then got dark skin.

Crazy.

That seems to be it.

Imagine caring enough about that to have a whole theory about about it.

Oh, no, actually, sorry, the core of the Kantiki theory is that a white race came from the Middle East to the Americas and then on to Polynesia to teach the dark-skinned people the arts of civilization.

That's psychotic.

That is like

racial hygiene, racial cleansing, and race wars.

His theory holds that blonde and red-headed, blue-eyed, dynastic race of masons and miners migrated around the world, civilizing the dark-skinned races.

And this is why Tom McDonald is an evil website.

That's right.

Because they'll put this guy on there as if he's a guy who writes who worked for hallmark yeah

yeah

um hey this guy

has an archive named after him that's on the unesco world register list i'm sure he did some stuff that was useful to someone somewhere enough

but boy yeah i mean for a long time

all of history was made by racists that's right yeah Yeah.

Anyone who discovered anything was racist.

A lot of people preserving things were racist.

It's true.

Sometimes they were preserving them like in their little personal collection

or through the state, you know?

Anyway, we don't have to talk about this guy.

We can talk about 4X games, which have no

political

content.

Yeah, 100%.

All right, let's do a clap.

Let's do a clap.

20?

Yeah.

You know what's a good game?

Civ Rev.

Anybody ever play Civ Rev?

Civ Rev was great.

Civ Rev is like

it's the ultimate in simplicity.

You know, do you want to tell me about Civ Rev?

Yeah, Civ Rev was a console-exclusive civilization game.

And I was thinking about it a little bit because my main memory of it is like stacking units, which not every Civ game can do.

Am I going?

I'm right about that.

No, not every Civ game.

That's one of the big things that has changed.

It's one of the big things that Civ

Rev had is like this

unit stacking thing for combat, which is why I was thinking about it when I was playing Endless Legends

too.

But it was like a very simple, it was a moderately simplified Civ game that you could play on a controller.

And it was even more cartoony than Civ.

And

it was much faster than Civ.

And it just felt like everything came quicker

in ways that, in positives and negatives.

It wasn't as complex.

The games were faster.

The units were faster.

The eras moved quicker.

But it was just a blast.

What a blast of a game, Civ Rev.

It was excellent.

That's real, like, early Xbox Live Marketplace.

Not early, but like that era of Xbox Live Marketplace, Xbox 360 era.

That was a box game.

Was that a box game?

That was not a downloadable game?

Maybe I downloaded it.

It may have been downloadable.

I have a box of it.

Oh, you notice the demo was released on Xbox Live Marketplace in the PlayStation Store.

And I think I probably played that demo for 50 hours, you know?

Classic.

They released a strategy game.

What if you just played the demo?

Dre,

what is your longest played demo?

Oh,

great question.

That's a really good question.

Great question.

I mean, it's probably like whenever they fucking did the like Halo 2 or Halo 3 like multiplayer demo.

That's probably the honest answer.

That's a good answer.

That's a good answer.

I have two, and I could not tell you because of how much time separated them which one was which.

My first one was that I had the first level of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 on a Dreamcast demo disc.

Am I going crazy that it was Dreamcast?

Yeah, it was Dreamcast.

That sounds right.

And so I must have played that for dozens of hours.

It was either one or two levels of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2.

And then

very weirdly, the other one was there was

like an online only Shadowrun game for the 360.

I played a, yeah, I know, yeah, the first-person shooter.

The first person shooter.

I'm a defender of that game.

So I never owned the game, but I must have played 45 hours of the demo, which was just like matchmaking on one level.

Yeah, it was like one level's worth of matchmaking, and you just play it over and over and over again with like rant with a

sometimes with real people, sometimes with bots.

I remember it gave me the greatest username of all time when it auto assigned me a username which was nine dollar bagel which at the time was outrageous and and now is not even that crazy incredible but i've had nine dollar bagel as like a secondary um

uh username like for 20 years now uh the first person shooter demo is like an all-timer way to spend time playing video game demos.

I think, you know, the Unreal Tournament, I don't want to say 2K4

demo is something I probably played 40 hours of in college.

You mentioned the Halo 2 one already.

You know one, Keith, that you have some affinity towards that I played a ton of.

Are you familiar with what was the package for Zone of the Enders?

The Kidokijima mech game?

No.

No.

Metal Year Solid 2's tanker level.

The whole tanker level.

Oh, wow.

The whole tanker level.

The whole tanker level.

Oh my god.

The whole intro to that game.

Right before the turn.

Right before the turn.

Which is part of why the turn hits so hard, Keith.

It's because people are...

We were playing it on

Zone of the Enders.

We're playing Zone of the Enders.

I mean, I was playing Zone of the Enders big.

I was a Zone of the Enders guy in a way that I think very few people were a Zone of the Enders guy.

But yeah, people were playing all of Metal Gear Solid 2's opening hours, like the whole way through the protagonist switch with no idea that that would be coming at at all no way to know it you know

um great great demo that yeah and you know think about all the stuff in that game which was like

you know i'm sure you and kyle talked about this during the mgs2 let's play run button yeah on run button uh youtube.com slash run button go watch i guess is that a patreon one only still uh no no all the metal gear is public it's public okay go watch it it's a great let's play uh stuff like shooting the ice bucket and letting the ice melt was a huge thing that everyone was like, holy shit, did you know you could do that?

Did you know you could stick people up?

Did you know that you could, all of that stuff was like hours and hours and hours of testing and finding out weird things on that on that tanker.

So that was a good one.

Shout out to

Game Demos.

When I worked at GameStop very weirdly, a big like Zone of the Enders collector's edition showed up and I just simply took it.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, good.

You just took it.

You just took it.

You just brought that home with you.

That was fine.

You just brought that home, yeah.

So I have a big, uh, I have like a big concept art book, and you know, um, I don't think it came with a steel book.

Really,

the special thing about it is the big concept art book, which rules.

So, this is only the interest two, presumably, um,

maybe

what year was it?

I looked through the book more than uh, it was not new when it was.

Oh, I see,

yeah, it was, yeah, so that's why I can't remember.

It's like in the other room in a, in a, in my games storage, like

box but sure that makes sense yeah um

all right i was gonna do a whole other second segment we went really long on this first one what if we just did our quick check-ins on some stuff um before we wrap up keith you've been you've been streaming a run button you've been streaming something else and and archiving that over on the run button page yeah so right now this is only on the patreon uh we did uh but it will be public on the youtube but contentburger.biz and then youtube.com slash run button me and kyle streamed all of

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, which was that like a year old at this point, or was it maybe earlier this year?

A year to 18 months, I think is right.

Yeah.

But it was something that was on my list, and then one day I was like, I'm going to stream this.

And I was like, Kyle, do you want to stream this with me?

Kyle said yes.

And then we just like played the whole thing in a month, which is way

faster.

A run button payments.

That's funny was done in a month.

Yes.

Damn.

We're trying to do it again with Silent Hill F now.

I believe we're trying to do back-to-back one-month games.

That's good because I need to see how that game goes because I want to, but I'm not going to watch it.

Silent Hill F?

Yeah, I got to watch that.

I want to watch you play that game.

Look,

as a Silent Hill hater,

Silent Hill F, two hours in, looking pretty good.

Looking pretty good compared to other Silent Hill games.

So I'm excited to see if they can do it for me.

For me.

No promises yet, but there was some conversation about a Silent Hill F-focused podcast coming soon from Side Story.

Allie, of course, huge Silent Hill fan.

Jack, huge Silent Hill fan.

Keith, big Silent Hill hater.

Great kind of IMO.

But yeah, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes.

What's the laser eyes?

What's the highest?

Have either of you played this?

I've watched some, but I have not played it.

Well, the reason why it's fun to talk about Silent Hill is because

it, to me, is like the sort of thing that Silent Hill games should be

it is like walking around a spooky place you have confusing and otherworldly mysteries happening to you you know a confused character who doesn't quite know what's going on

and you're just solving puzzles it is like it is a combat-less game but it's still kind of scary and very intense um

and um you know it it does the puzzle thing in such a good way like obviously everyone's got a different brain, but for me, these puzzles were just hard enough to be fun without almost ever stymieing me.

We just got through it very smoothly.

It was really exciting.

And then, like, your reward for the puzzle.

And I think this is the perfect way to have a puzzle game.

Your reward for the puzzle was weird, interesting story stuff.

Yeah, that sounds great.

That was so much fun to keep getting more of.

it has a really great aesthetic it's this kind of grayscale black and white uh fixed camera angles almost like a resident evil game or something like that like a classic resident evil game and um yeah in a in a in a bad game this could have ended up really bugging me about because it's not a bad game and it's a really good game they have this like uh out of time um

uh vibe to the whole thing and like obviously you're playing a game that came out in 2023 or whatever and then within the game there's like three other games called lorelai and the laser eyes that you have to play to get like there's like a there's like an early or like a uh a super early like vector graphics monochrome thing presumably made on the uh the the game has a supercomputer in it that is very crucial to the plot.

And so you're playing through this like weird vector graphics version of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes.

There is a

Game Boy version of Loreline the Laser Eyes that is like just kind of a time waster.

And then there's like a 1991

sort of PS1-esque version of the game that you, that is like also crucial to play through to get clues for the game.

And I'm like,

I was so into getting clues for the game I was playing by playing a game that my character was in.

It was really fun.

That's really, that really, I could feel while I was doing it, like, this could have been annoying, but instead it rolls.

That sounds very good.

I'm excited to watch.

I will probably just watch you play that now that you've played it all.

I can go watch it all.

Yeah,

there's no multiple endings.

There's no, you know, there's no like alternate paths.

There's really just like, you know, there's a start and an end.

And it was really good.

I didn't love the ending.

It was kind of a, it was kind of a,

but the whole thing was so good, I don't even care.

Yeah.

Amazing.

Trey, you got anything else you want to shout out?

I have been playing, gosh, what is it called?

I got to make sure I'm saying it right.

Star Ocean, the second story, type R?

Type R.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was just like on a steam sale or something.

And I was like, yeah, I haven't played a JRPG in a while.

It is, it's a JRPG from the PlayStation 1.

It really is.

I played the demo for that and have, it's been in and out of my

cart many times, I would say.

Star Oceans, speaking of science fantasy, it's like, it is a, what if there were some places that had spaceships and what if there were some places that didn't and someone from a spaceship went to a place that didn't have a spaceship and now has to do fight some monsters with a priestess.

Or you're the priestess.

Yeah, a priestess.

Or you're the priestess.

In a JRPG?

In a JRPG.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So really fun character design.

I really love the

drawings of the characters in Star Ocean Second Story R.

Yeah, it's fun you know it's it is not groundbreaking i mean obviously it's a game from what the 90s yeah early 2000s um i think that remake looks great though the remake looks really good uh they added like a you can just hold down the right trigger to like fast forward through stuff um

they've added stuff to it that i think they also added like a literal like there's like skills that you level up in the game and one of the skills is basically helps to eliminate random encounters more or less oh interesting yeah um So, they have definitely done a good job of like modernizing it and making it

play faster.

That being said, I think once I beat it, I'm definitely not going back to unlock all 98 endings or whatever there are.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff.

That's the opposite of Lore Alive.

That's right.

Yeah, 100%.

Is this

like this, like

to me, this is the game on a Switch remake aesthetic of like super 3D

or 2D HD or whatever.

2D HD.

That's what this is?

Okay.

I guess so.

Yeah, I guess I would.

It's not explicitly that.

It's not that company, right?

It's not Nintendo, so I think only Nintendo or Major Square does that.

It's Square who does that.

Square Software's.

But yes, it does have the Switch.

Many games coming out on the Switch do look like this.

I'm very excited for that new Octopath, Octopath Traveler Zero, which looks like that.

And is a.

they've done it.

They made a mobile game that people really liked, and it shouldn't have been a mobile game.

And so they decided, what if we just made a real version of this game that didn't have a gotcha and takes all the story stuff?

Yeah, Octopath Zero is coming out later this year.

Because the first Octopath was like kind of mixed, right?

Yeah, the first one was mixed.

There's things I like about it still.

I think specifically people really wanted a game where this is, I know, revolutionary.

The people in the party talked to one another.

Um, you know, Octopath's big pitch was that you had eight characters, and they each had their own story, and you did their stories, and so you know, you had someone who was trying to get revenge, and you had someone who was trying to like find their missing dad, and you had someone who, you know, it was like that type of thing.

And you would go around the world map to the different towns, and in the different towns, you would get an update for you, like you would go do that one person's quest.

And that meant that you got like a lot of time with the individual characters, but your other party members were just like chill.

They were just there, you know, like you're like confronting your nemesis, and you know, one of your characters confronting their nemesis, and then the other character is just like in the party while your character, while character A is doing that.

And there's no like, hey, that must have been really hard for you to confront your nemesis.

We were like the wrong way in video games because that is such a crucial part of like being a human.

And like games could have gone the way where that actually much less development-intensive way of experiencing a game could have been like bigger and more important to video games.

Right, things that just aren't.

Yeah, writing, writing, yeah, writing voice acting.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't even need the voice.

The voice acting is great.

I would love there is good voice acting in the Octopath games.

But I'm just granting the money.

The cost of voice acting exists.

But it's still, it's not the same thing as like we need better graphics, we need better maps.

Yeah.

for for what it's worth there were always some things in octopath one that were um

that did have there were some like

little little conversations as you moved around the world you'd get like a little scene of a couple people talking to one another but there it wasn't like the stories weren't interknit like in that way um and then there was at the end of octopath one a big super boss fight against the devil or whatever uh and they and everybody came together in that moment right but that was like 80 hours in the second game has more overlap between the characters, more instances of the characters talking to one another.

And I think it's just like a really good JRPG.

And I think that made people, and people knew what it was.

I think it's the other thing.

Anybody going who played Octopath 1, who went to Octopath 2, was like, are they going to even talk to each other this time?

Ha ha ha ha ha.

And even though they didn't, they still had this thing where like you're not, you're not like talking about

this moment of the quest that you're on together there were still more opportunities for inner relationships between the party um and then uh and occupied traveler 2 is different than the ios one that is correct the ios one has a bunch of characters that's called like

champions of the continent of the continent yes and now occupy traveler zero is coming out and that is going to be part of the

traveler champions of the continent content the story elements of it the writing from it that people have really loved um uh and uh, now, but like a regular

standalone single-player JRPG.

So I'm excited for that.

Um, we'll stay on JRPGs for a second.

I've continued to play Tales, hmm, hmm, not

tales, trails, trails, trails of trails,

hmm, I'm always gonna do the tales in the trails of cold steel, trails,

trails in the sky, first chapter, the one with Estelle and John.

The Legend of Heroes, The Legend of Heroes, Trails in the Sky, Kiseki.

Yeah, that's right.

And I've now played a bunch of that.

I have played a bunch of it.

I'm out of the prologue.

It only took me a dozen hours or whatever.

I'm enjoying it.

2004.

This is no, I'm playing, sorry, I'm playing Trails in the Sky first chapter, the new remake of that game.

I talked about it in the last episode.

We don't have to go too deep onto it, but I get it.

This is what I want to say: is, yeah, I get it.

I get why people like these characters.

I get why people like this world.

I get why people like to talk to NPCs over and over again and find out that they're like lost their cat or going through relationship trouble.

And yeah, fun.

Yeah, I like it.

I'm not sure if I want to put another dozen hours into it.

I think I probably have to put another four dozen hours into it to like beat it.

It's huge, at least at the rate I'm going.

I'm sure if I like stopped caring about talking to all the NPCs, I could do it.

But like, that seems to be why people play these games.

So,

yeah.

There are so many remakes.

I can't.

Not only can I not keep up with them, I can't even pretend to keep up with them.

The idea that there's a remake of Legend of Heroes, Trails of the Sky.

I mean, I, if you that one's 24 years old,

yeah, I never would have guessed that that was out there somewhere, sure, yeah.

Well, it is, you know, the other folks are playing Final Fantasy Tactics, the Eve Elise Chronicles, yeah, there's lots of remakes, you're not wrong, you're not wrong, yeah.

Um, and then and then the last thing is people should go watch um

you, Keith, and Art, and then also me and Jack played unfair flips on Twitch, uh, on our Twitch channel, twitch.tv/slash friends at the table.

Those will go over on YouTube.

I've been taken by a coin-flipping fervor.

The world has been.

There's also,

you can go watch us stream that, and we might do a coin-focused

episode at some point because I also played some Q-Up.

The game from

the Lances.

They made Universal Paperclips.

What's the actual name of the company?

Everybody house games.

They made Universal Paperclips and Babel Royale and Mercury Prime, Frank hillary and james lance uh frank used to be the head of the nyu game center and back when that was the case and i was at waypoint i guess disclosure i did some work with the nyu game center not just giving a talk there but i did some like new york state games initiative you know uh uh brain trust how do we make how do we make it better to make games in new york type stuff did you figure it out no no

no uh here's i don't make games in new york anymore uh

I mean, I guess I do.

Realis is coming soon.

And James Lance, of course, big disclosure on this, James was one of the designers of Invisible Inc, one of my favorite games of all time.

So anything I say about any game James Lance ever makes is going to have to come with qualifications of, yo, that's the fucking guy made Invisible Inc, you know?

But QUP is like the inverse of Unfair Flips.

Unflare flips is really

just a game about flipping a coin with bad odds.

We'll go deeper.

I want to have a bigger conversation with this at some point, but not today.

QUP is like a skewering of esports and esports culture and microtransactions and macrotransactions and

tech talk and all that stuff.

The difference between them is really funny.

It's so funny.

It's really like, it's really like a bunch of smart people.

It's funny and then also the way they're different is funny.

100%.

They're like puzzle pieces and together they give you a pretty good understanding of what the contemporary state of video games is, I think.

It won't be until someone remakes both of them that you really will understand.

That's right.

That's right.

So that's my coin check-in.

And lastly, I want to play Phantasy Star Online more.

Jack and I just streamed Phantasy Star Online

for the Dreamcast stream.

So we had a great best game.

It's one of the best games of all time.

Are we all PSO people?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

This is my first online game ever was PSO.

I had, of course, I was a Dreamcast freak as early early as possible.

I got a Dreamcast when I was seven years old.

It's the console of my heart.

Yep.

And I played dozens and dozens of hours of Phantasy Star Online.

It was my first time connecting the internet to a box.

Wow.

This is Phantasy Star Online.

Beautiful.

Dre, you're also a PSO kid?

Yeah, I actually never played online, but I just played the shit out of it single player and then like local co-op multiplayer too.

Yeah.

I did mostly play offline, but I did play online.

Yeah, I mean it it's a great single player game.

It's a great co-op game.

We played on the Jack and I played on the Affinia server, which is super easy to set up.

I would play more of that any day.

A game like that makes me go,

what if I just didn't do anything for the next week?

I just did all of Phantasy Star Online.

What if I just beat Phantasy Star Online again, which I haven't done in 20 years or whatever.

Here's how perfect that game looks, by the way, just the aesthetic of that game.

When Phantasy Star Online 2 came out, what, 12, 13 years later, people were looking at it and being like, this looks literally like Phantasy Star Online, almost in a derogatory way, not seeing it for the compliment that it is to both games.

Right, right.

In other words, people were saying this looks old, but that's outrageous because it doesn't.

Right.

It's just that Phantasy Star Online 1 looked so good that something made 12 years later,

that's what it looked like in their brains still.

This happens on Run Button frequently, but I'm about to upload

to our Patreon and then in a day or two to the YouTube.

We went back and played Silent Hill 1 for about two hours because we're doing our Silent Hill 2 remake, Let's Play, where we're also replaying our Let's Play of Silent Hill 2.

And then during that, we were like, well, we got to make sure that we're right that we do prefer Silent Hill 1 to Silent Hill 2.

So we went back to play Silent Hill 2 for, or one, for two hours.

And in those two hours, talked for 45 minutes about the Dreamcast.

Yeah.

And the best console of all time.

The best console of all time.

And one of the things that's so amazing about the Dreamcast is: this is a point that Kyle made, is how it's sort of perennially people's like when people are trying to skew a game for not looking good enough, they'll say it looks like a Dreamcast game.

Because like even in 2013, 2015, 2017, 2020, when a game kind of looks bad, they'll be like, this looks like how the Dreamcast looked in 2000.

Why would they wait?

But the Dreamcast looks good.

Well, that's the thing.

But in 2018, when something looks like the Dreamcast, you go, this looks like shit.

This looks like a Dreamcast game.

Right, right.

Sort of being like, the Dreamcast was like, the games are so well made that

they're like people in the future.

They look like bad games from 2018.

Yeah, like if I imagine, this is the thing.

I should look at it.

What does Soul Caliber for the Dreamcast look like?

It's unbelievable.

Yeah, it's like this game looks unbelievable.

Yeah, this looks great.

This game looks great.

This is what video games are supposed to look like.

This is what we should have gotten here.

Yeah, and then writing.

You get something that looks like Soul Caliber.

You look at something that looks like Fancy Star Online.

You put some writing in it.

I'm good to go.

You know?

Yeah, you know, I think part of the thing with PSO, I think PSO one has the thing I'm talking about with Endless Legend, where it's just crisp.

It's just

it's just there's Raghole, the planet below, and it's green and filled with weird monsters, and you're up in the space station, and everything's glowing, but not too much, and the music is just a great game.

It's just a great game, it's great.

If either of you ever want to play more of it, please let me know.

And if anybody has thoughts on like a game like PSO that I maybe haven't tried, let me know.

Oh my god.

I've been waiting for an answer to that question for my whole life.

Yeah, I know.

I know folks are going to suggest like Atlas A-T-L-Y-S-S, which is a cool game, but it's a mouse and keyboard game.

And it's like a, it's a little more twitchy than PSO.

I think part of the brilliance of PSO in relation to something like Diablo, which is such like an APM click-click fest, is that there was a slower rhythm to PSO

that

is a lean, it's kind of a lean back game, even though it can get kind of intense.

You know what?

Maybe you'll disagree with me on this, and the vibes are totally different.

Alpha Protocol.

I think I've never played that game.

Play-wise, maybe, but not like

shooting wise.

Shooting-wise, yeah, but I'm shooting.

But I'm not.

Alpha Protocol is like a

spy game, right?

That's a spy game.

That's a spy game.

Yeah, yeah.

It is, it

is.

I made that game.

I played that game.

I'm not, you know, I know, I know, I know.

The thing is that the colors are all wrong, and the spy thing adds a totally different flavor.

Totally,

there's not, there's, there's something about running around at an alpha protocol level that isn't totally dissimilar from running around in PSOs.

There is a deliberateness.

It is a third-person shooter, but with a sort of deliberateness that is not everywhere else

in the genre.

It's not exactly a third-person shooter because you're rolling your race when you fire the gun.

You are rolling the rice when you're fired the gun.

It's extremely important to PSO.

It is.

It is.

And it works with PSO.

It literally does.

I was just talking to somebody about this.

I was explaining that I like it when dice roll in games

and I like it in KOTOR.

I conceptually like it in Morrowind, but I like it the most in PSO.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

Let us know if you have any thoughts.

Don't say destiny.

I know a lot of people thought destiny for a long time, but it doesn't.

The rhythms are different.

The vibes are different.

You can tell because I fucking hate Destiny.

I hate it.

You know, I hate it with all of me.

We're getting games like Bomb Rush Hyperfunk

as like the Jet Set radio follow-up.

And I don't know if y'all saw this.

There's a Bomb Rush Cyberfunk follow-up coming already.

Called.

Oh my God, what is it called?

It's just called Hyperfunk.

And

it is multiplayer.

It's that game, but it is yeah, uh-huh.

It's multiplayer, and it has like

it's like

the vibe that I'm getting is it's a little bit like skate in that it's sort of like a hang out in the world and fuck around and do tricks to challenge other people to do your runs, like that style of thing.

Uh, it looks and sounds great, so I'm hyped for that.

But we need one of these for PSO.

We need someone someone who's like, I want to figure out what that really was and push it within its, within the kind of core ideas and constraints of what it is.

You know what I mean?

And I have that for Suitor 2 as well.

Is it Cube World, Austin?

Oh, wow.

Maybe, maybe, because Cube World, I mean, maybe.

Maybe it's Cube World.

Maybe.

I will say this.

Cube World's its own whole thing.

It is its own whole thing.

But I will say, I think part of what I liked about Cube World is some of the stuff I liked about PSO.

I think there is an overlap but they're very different things cube world's big open world you know like different yeah pso

different pso different that's the criticism you signed up to listen to here

this is what cube world does cube world

it's it was really fun to run around in especially in a group yep it wasn't annoying to do the combat and it was the first time and there's a very few times since that i looked at a thing made of voxels and went oh my god it's beautiful.

Yeah.

The way that the way that the boxes are stacked is beautiful.

We should do a Q World episode at some point.

It's just probably lost to time, but my reaction upon seeing like the rolling hills of Cube World for the first time live on stream is like, that's what Cube World is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Q World is like the summer that we streamed that game, Dre, with with Janine and someone else who I won't talk about.

Oh, you were there too sometimes, and sometimes I wasn't there and you were there instead of me, but it was with it was with other stream friends people.

Sure, yeah.

And, you know, I was just never going to get that back.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's growing up.

That's what Blink 32 was talking about.

That's because time is real.

That's not in the episode, but maybe it'll have to be now.

Or it could just be, it could just be just be for us.

Just make that quote the the episode title.

I'll make the whole quote.

Yeah.

All right.

No, I think I'm going to make melancholic murder bug or whatever you said earlier or whatever we said earlier about the sad the murder bug who I whatever that's going to be the episode title probably so yeah uh

all right well on that note please go leave us a review if you've enjoyed this episode we would love you went to any of your I mean we would love mostly if you went to the Apple podcast uh platform and left a a review because that's the one that seemingly matters the most to us uh we are still at a 4.9 out of 5 over there um

uh i will i will read just one bit of tj gunther's review for us tj gunther says i could not take grendel that's the subject shout outs to being honest and then says this is my favorite farming sim podcast so thank you tj we will be sure to give you more farming thoughts soon i guess we did today you could farm in in endless legend like we said.

By the way, that's my last request after all those other games.

Give me a game that's like this, but

again,

I need a fucking farming game that's any good.

Play this new Rune Factor

Harvest.

Nope.

New

Story of Seasons, Grand Bazaar.

Okay.

That's the one that seems sort of on my radar.

Fantastic.

Dre, you really like that.

Yeah, I need to get back to it.

I never like, there's not finishing those games, but I didn't see it like through like the end of the first year in the storyline.

So I should go back to that.

Yeah,

yeah,

it seems great.

Janine is in love with it.

I know a bunch of other people who are playing it and having a great time.

So

I think it has the side story seal of seal of approval.

So

which actually, no, it doesn't because you have to pay us for the side story seal of approval.

The way you have to pay big companies for their seals.

Did you know that, by the way?

Did you know that that Nintendo Seal of Quality?

No, no, no, no.

Like, do you know how, like, you know how, like, a big tech company, I'm sorry, a big tech media outlet, like, but maybe not explicitly, CNET, for instance,

will go to like CES and be like,

oh, this is the smart refrigerator of the year.

You know how they do that?

And then you'll see the smart, you'll be in a Best Buy or whatever, and you'll see a smart refrigerator, and it'll have the Smart Refrigerator of the Show award.

You know,

they will award that.

They will say that

it's the winner.

But if you want to put the little logo on anything, you have to spend,

hypothetically, maybe not literally CNET.

Maybe that's just one place that exists that covers technology like this.

But there are websites where you have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to then use that logo and

that award, which maybe calls into question the entire process of going to a show like CES and giving awards.

Yeah.

Because suddenly it looks like a revenue stream.

Well, it's not even, it's not even, it's, it's not even just CES.

It's like if you, if you want the list of like the best towels

and you Google best towels.

Oh, that's all affiliate link shit.

If you're going to a website that isn't where people talk about their own towels,

you are getting someone who paid to to be on a website.

It is, it is, you know,

the thing is that it's like the online version of this is even funnier because it's like, you don't need to have, no one had to get on a phone call or send an email to be like, I will pay you $10,000 to say that we have the best towels.

Though that maybe does happen.

What I know happens in those cases is they just get a cut.

They get a cut of the towels that get sold.

They get an affiliate link

link back.

And

if they sell a towel, they get a little commission on that, you know, that's just built that way.

But I do think there's something special about if you want this sticker that says you made the best blender, you have to give us ten thousand dollars.

That to me has a certain sweetness to it of another era, you know.

How else are you going to get so many people in America's test kitchen?

You're right.

Oh, Vitamix wins again.

No, you gotta, you gotta go, go to the Cult Flave people for your, for your

I fucking love them.

Yeah, they're fucking.

I love them.

They just did a big blender review, and they also said fuck Vitamix.

Oh, that's awesome.

That's great to hear.

I'm glad that they said that.

I trust them implicitly

until they start getting big money.

I trust them.

Yeah.

I've never seen your website before.

I don't trust almost anyone.

This is a wild website.

This is a husband and wife who retired very young from doing, I think, tech stuff and then decided what we want to do is be amazing home chefs and review chef gear on TikTok.

And that's what they do.

And they're really likable.

And mostly what they do is review cookbooks.

They'll like make a bunch of recipes from a cookbook and be like, we think that this cookbook

teaches you how to make good food and it isn't that expensive to make things.

And it's not about

the opposite.

They'll be like, these recipes aren't very good and they're really expensive.

Huh.

Yeah, they do great stuff.

Yeah.

I'm looking at their blender review right now, anyway.

Another great media product like us that uh doesn't advertise and doesn't do ads anywhere very intentionally.

It's true, so good to know.

And if you think that's cool, you should go to friendsofthetable.cash.

That is exactly right.

It is the only way we're able to do any of this stuff.

Friendsofthetable.cash.

You should go also watch our archives at youtube.com/slash friends of the table for all of our video game streams.

You should go listen to Media Club Plus, Media Club.plus, where Keith, you are hosting

a mini-season on all of the frightful and terrifying stories brought to us by M.

Night Shyamalan.

I'm actually going to be guesting on something very special soon.

I think

Patreon only or is that?

It is Patreon only.

Okay, well, you're going to have to go to Patreon.

We should.

What are we doing?

People are listening to this.

Tomorrow, is today Tuesday or Monday?

Tuesday.

This will come out on Tuesday.

Okay, so tomorrow,

you will be on

a watch along.

We're all going to be watching together the last airbender movie, the much-hated, reviled last airbender movie.

We almost didn't want to have to watch it for the main feed.

So doing a watch-along seems like a pretty low-impact way of experiencing what I think everybody agrees is probably M.

Night Shamwan's worst movie.

But I haven't seen it.

Maybe it's

really.

I think maybe none of us have seen it.

That's exciting to me.

As the project continues and you start saying things like, I think we need to cover Split and Mr.

Glass, I'm increasingly like, you should just watch them all of it.

If you're going to watch Split,

because there's going to be one you didn't watch by the end of this now?

This is my version of in a recent episode, Jack was like, you should go weekly, which I'm not going to say.

I understand.

I do a bi-weekly week.

We have honed a balance here, Keith.

Your show is every other week and my show is every other week.

And then the show we all make together, Friends of the Table, is every week.

The show that Allie produces and makes is every week.

So Allie has the heaviest lift for sure.

But, and also, that's a four-hour long, that's a whole other thing.

But, but for this, it's like at this point, you're skipping.

I'm looking at the list.

You'd be skipping.

You're watching the happening, right?

Yeah, we just we actually just did that one the other day.

You watched Praying with Anger for Patreon.

I mean, that might never see the light of day.

Oh, really?

Not a good episode?

It wasn't a.

It's really difficult to talk about a movie that I think has fundamental structural issues, including racism,

from a guy who's trying to tell a story about his home where he can sit, where he wants to feel like is his home, but doesn't.

Right.

I see.

So that was tough.

Well, you should do wide awake instead.

Is that the

comedy?

That's the 1998 comedy drama film

about a kid and baseball.

A school kid and his teacher?

Apparently.

I think that that's what that one is.

Dennis Leary is in it.

Oh, thank God.

But I'm looking at this list.

You're doing it.

We're going to do After Earth.

I'm going to be on After Earth.

Well, I'll say this.

Yeah,

I think that

having added Split and Glass, I think those were the only ones that weren't on the list.

It was that

praying with Anger.

And The Last Airbender.

Yeah, so we're going to do Last Airbender on the Patreon.

Maybe we'll do Wide Awake for the Patreon.

I actually always had it listed as a potential Patreon thing.

It's all right there.

Yeah.

It's all right there.

Yeah.

So we might not just end up doing all of them by mistake.

Oops.

Oops.

Oops.

Oops.

Oops.

It's getting harder, by the way.

I don't know if it is actually getting harder to do.

Although Signs of Unbreakable were really my personal low point.

I'm I'm really not enjoying watching the movies, though.

Well, apparently, there's a recovery.

I haven't seen any of the modern stuff, except, well, that's not true.

I've seen Split and Glass, but I haven't seen Old or Knock of the Cabin or Trap.

So I'm really excited for those.

When the last Airbender, you'll be on two in a row.

I'll be in two in a row.

I just want to say here that I am

really happy that I wasn't on the episode for Signs.

I'm going to say this here on this show and not on your show because it would be rude.

I think that dog, or that dog, I think that that movie is dog shit and I would have to restrain myself out of politeness.

I was restraining myself out of politeness.

Oh, I know.

I know.

But yeah.

Yeah, I couldn't believe it.

I couldn't believe how bad that movie was.

It was really shocking to me.

I expected it to be better.

And then I think I would have liked, I don't haven't seen The Village in forever.

I think I probably liked The Village more, but I got into a fight with my girlfriend at the time because I had guessed the ending, or I guessed the twist months in advance.

Months in advance

from the twists.

Wildly.

From the trailer is guessable.

And she was so mad during that movie

that it made me, it took me out of the viewing, you know, in a real way.

So

way more watching.

I was watchable than signs, you know.

Oh, yeah, that's where it's tons of tons of issues with that movie, but like, as a, you know, you got to look at it with your eyes, and Roger Deakins is Roger Deakins.

You've got to look at it from a pre-radio world.

Radio wasn't out yet.

It, what?

Cuba Gooding Jr.

as radio.

Oh, I see.

I thought you were saying like radio didn't exist.

And I was like, is Keith talking about in the

because of the timeline of the movie?

Yeah.

We don't have to get into it.

I won't spoil it.

I don't want to spoil it.

No, no, no, no.

I already got in trouble once for

the village.

I don't want to get in trouble again.

You know, I'm not giving the movie any breaks, but like, I understand the year that it was made in and that we weren't done making that mortal mistake.

Right.

Of

the sort of deeply ableist.

Yeah, I see.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Go listen to Media Club Plus.

It's great.

It's really one of my favorite podcasts, like, easily.

So please go listen to it.

It's a blast.

And of course, season one, also a blast.

Also a blast.

All of Hunter Hunter.

Trey, you were on all that.

So

are you going to come through on a

are you going to guest on a

yes?

No, you're not on the main show right now, right?

No, it's Keith Sylvie Alley Art, right?

Yes.

I have somewhere I have, somewhere I have who wants to be on what episode.

I know I want to be on Cabin in the Woods, and there was another one that I said, yeah,

I can't remember.

Yeah, I had to be better about looking at that further ahead of time.

And I know there's people out there right now being like, just end the podcast.

Why are you going on?

This isn't about video games anymore.

That's why we call the podcast side story so that we can retreat and say, we've always been diversionary.

We've always been about the detour.

We've always been about leaving behind

the main thing and stumbling off elsewhere.

So it's almost the primary thing that my career online has been about.

Yeah, totally.

We over on Shelf by Genre, where Cameron, Councilman, Michael Lett, and I talk about genre fiction.

Michael just had a baby.

Shout outs to little baby Chauncey.

Without michael there cameron and i cannot stay on topic it's a nightmare we are not built for it we are not built for it's like uh i think cameron

friends of the table is a group of people who on the report card it said like look really bright but it's a distraction to others that's right getting the work done but other people can't get the work done with you around.

Yes.

I will say Allie has done a great job

trying to keep us on topic over the last, I feel like I used to be that person on Trends of the Table where I'd be like, all right, let's, please, let's play the game.

And somewhere along the line, that shifted and Allie has become that person who is like, all right, let's clap and play the game.

Which is tough because she also needs that for the clap cast.

She does.

She does.

So that's a hard balance to strike.

It's true.

All right.

Go review the podcast.

Thank you so much for listening.

We will be back soon.

Maybe we'll talk about coins.

Maybe we'll talk about Fantasy Center Online.

Maybe we'll talk about Cube World.

We will see.

There's so much coming out.

There's so much to play.

We'll talk about it soon.

There's so much coming out.

You listed none of it.

None of what's coming out.

Well, because who's going to what do we know we're going to talk about?

I don't know.

I talk about this stuff that I know we've already played, but I don't know.

You know, are you going to go play Digimon story Time Stranger, Keith?

For Run Button, maybe.

You should.

Yeah.

You should.

We haven't decided what the next Digimon thing is going to be.

I hope it's a good one.

Yeah.

Are you going to play Seafarer, the Ship Sim, which seems to be a boat simulation game?

No, but I did just learn about a game called

Caribbean Sail,

which is a, claims to be a 200-hour long RPG.

It's also a sort of reskin of an old

original Xbox Pirates of the Caribbean sequel that never came out, or maybe sort of came out.

and it looks janky and weird and bizarre.

And I'm very interested

checking out Caribbean's, sorry, Caribbean legend.

Caribbean legend.

I'm looking at, okay.

You should look up a thing that looks cool called Caribbean.

You should look up Caribbean sale.

Very different.

I was like, oh, this is a sequel?

I have this on my wish list.

Okay.

I have this on my wish.

That's probably why I got them confused because I also have...

Did I buy this already?

Maybe?

I think I might already own this one, too.

I'm just looking at boat games.

Normal stuff.

I'm just looking at boat games.

Yeah.

All right.

We have to end this podcast.

It has to end.

Yeah.

Thank you for listening.

We'll be back to be continued.