16: Paradise Honk

Speaker 1 What's good, internet?

Speaker 1 It is November 11th, 2025, and this is not the endless moment at the apex of a coin's flip, high in the air, twisting and turning, its final fate, head or tails, obverse or reverse, yet unknown, eyes clinging to its ridged side, hopeful and afraid and wild, waiting, waiting, waiting for it to fall.

Speaker 1 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 at friendsofthetable.cash. Hopefully, that is you.

Speaker 1 Please go to friendsofthetable.cash and give us money so we can keep doing the things we love to do. Joining me today, Jack and Sylvie.

Speaker 1 hello my favorite side of the coin is the tail oh okay sylvie what's your favorite i guess it's the other one well uh is it the cue side or the upside

Speaker 1 uh i mean

Speaker 1 my build is very q heavy right now or is it eggbug which is also a side of the coin in one of the games we're going to talk about today oh my god we've been threatening to do it we're here to talk about coins i'll talk about some other stuff too but we've been threatening for weeks i've been like we have to talk about these two games we have to talk about these two games in relationship to each other, I think.

Speaker 1 We have to talk about Unfair Flips by Heather Flowers. We have to talk about Q Up by Everybody House Games, which, as far as I can tell, is the Lance Clan.

Speaker 1 Is that, Jack, is that your understanding of this? Are you, are you? My understanding is that it is the Lance Clan plus some

Speaker 1 honorary members.

Speaker 1 Okay, I see. Yes, yes, I gotcha.

Speaker 1 I guess I said this before, but disclosure that Frank Lance, formerly the chair of the NYU Game Center, the head of the NYU Game Center and I, were briefly on like some and some New York State games organization

Speaker 1 groups together. So we have some some I have some previous loyalty and no loyalty greater than to James Lance, who was one of the designers on Invisible Inc.
I am a little biased here.

Speaker 1 And also, you know, I like Heather's games a lot. And so unsurprisingly, we're here to talk about those again.

Speaker 1 Where do we want to jump in on the fall of the autumn of the coin? God.

Speaker 1 Last year,

Speaker 1 Australian Twitch streamer Tom Vawka

Speaker 1 hosted a game on his Twitch channel. This is a game that people have been playing since the invention of the coin.
Ancient Romans, leaning against the

Speaker 1 walls of the Agora, pulled a coin from the pocket and said, Theophilus,

Speaker 1 shall it be heads or tails? And they flipped it. And then the other one said, Can you do it again, my friend?

Speaker 1 Say, if you can flip ten heads in a row, I shall buy you a fine pitcher of wine. Can I tell you, actually, there is a do you know what the name of the Roman coin flip game was?

Speaker 1 No, but it doesn't surprise me that there literally was one. Yeah, 7th century BC, Navia ot caput, which is ship.
What was one of the rules?

Speaker 1 What were the rules? You flip the coin. Oh, so right.

Speaker 1 But they weren't the same.

Speaker 1 They didn't have tails, they had ship. So it was heads or ship.
Yes, and back then, Plato was saying things like, when you say a thing and it is real, that is truth.

Speaker 1 And when you say a thing and it is not, that is false. They had to go through the ground level stuff.
So it's very understandable that their first coin flip game was just flip it.

Speaker 1 Tom Walker has come up with a new innovation, which is he put a Twitch camera on the coin and he said, I'm going to flip this coin until I get 10 heads in a row.

Speaker 1 But if I ever get 11 tails in a row, no, if I ever get 10 tails in a row, I then have to flip 11 heads in a row.

Speaker 1 And very early on, he said that a friend of his had worked out the math and said that if that outcome happened, if he then had to flip 11 heads in a row,

Speaker 1 it would have gotten... immediately so much worse.
This was the first coin stream

Speaker 1 and it was electrifying. What was your favorite kind of like bit of the coin stream, Arsten?

Speaker 1 I don't, I think it's been too long since I've seen it to to genuinely give you one. I watched it when it happened, and that was a year ago, and I have not re-watched it.

Speaker 1 Do you have a favorite moment? And Sylvie, have you seen these? No, I feel like I didn't do the reading. That's okay.
Well, we didn't assign it. You know, we just kind of assumed, I guess.

Speaker 1 I mean, I'm aware of Tom stuff, though. Yeah.

Speaker 1 The broad version that's a... a good way into talking about these games today is that it is remarkable how quickly Tom started developing superstitions.
Sure. Something kind of

Speaker 1 something about the coin, something about the act of flipping the coin, something about the act of people watching, about the kind of growing and snapping tension around where he was on the run of 10 heads.

Speaker 1 Let magical thinking kind of like flow in in the same way that looking at a Ouija board on the shelf of Target is not...

Speaker 1 very frightening, but suddenly when it's one o'clock in the morning and you're 15 years old and all the lights are out and you've lit a candle, you do begin to think, well, no, hold on.

Speaker 1 Maybe ghosts are real. Maybe the Red Duke is at work.
Something like that. Maybe the Red Duke is in one of unfair flips that has been stuck in my head ever since.

Speaker 1 So Tom would be, if I hold it in a certain way, I'm more lucky. If I say certain things, I am more or less lucky.
If I drop the coin, I am very unlucky.

Speaker 1 And I think that this produced something in the air around game designers who are already fascinated by 50% coin flips.

Speaker 1 That's kind of like way down in one of the bones of game design as being an interesting thing.

Speaker 1 And so over the last few months, the summer of the coin began as first Heather Flowers released Unfair Flips and then

Speaker 1 Everybody House? Is that what it's called? I think it's Everybody House. Everybody House game.
Released Q-Up. Yeah.
These two games could not be more different in terms of how they think about a coin.

Speaker 1 They are a heads and tails combination.

Speaker 1 Whoa.

Speaker 1 Like, truly, it feels like both. Oh, it's not just about coins, Jack.
These are both games about games.

Speaker 1 I was gonna say, Quap feels like the carcinization of video games. Like, this is the end point.
When I was playing this, I was like, oh, okay.

Speaker 1 I think you could teach a game. I mean, you could make an argument, maybe.
Maybe you shouldn't teach a course on this, right?

Speaker 1 But, like, you could make, you could write a really good article or a really good essay that is like, unfair flips is games reduced down to some core thing.

Speaker 1 Maybe not the core thing, but some core thing. And Q-Up is games culture and is like the extrapolation from that core thing.

Speaker 1 You can draw the line from one to the other, and what's in between is what we call culture.

Speaker 1 Yes. Not that

Speaker 1 Fairflips doesn't have culture in it. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Like you're always doing some strategic chiseling away of the hard edges to make an argument like that really work, but you can it can be a clarifying lens to think about those two things, these two games in that, in that way.

Speaker 1 And we could explain what those two games are, probably.

Speaker 1 It's one of the first things. I know I didn't do good notes on this one, but one of the best, I have three best practices.
I'm going to pull the curtain back a little bit.

Speaker 1 It's set the stage for the uninitiated, answer what do you do in the game, and highlight the anecdote. And I haven't written this here, but play to find out what happens.
That's the other one.

Speaker 1 You might think that when Austin says uninitiated, he's talking about people who aren't necessarily interested, but he's instead talking about all the weird freaks from Eyes Wide Shut. That's right.

Speaker 1 The uninitiated. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 And so, yeah, what is let's start with Unfair Flips. I think maybe that's the one, it's the one that we have made video of already.
We did two streams of it the day it came out.

Speaker 1 Jackie and I did a stream, and then later the day, I think Art and Keith did a stream.

Speaker 1 Is that right? Yes, it sounds right. Unfair flips, made by Heather Flowers, is a game

Speaker 1 where the goal is to flip a coin 10 times in a row. Why is it unfair? Because at the beginning of the game, you have a 25% chance of getting a heads and a 75% chance of getting a tails.

Speaker 1 They shouldn't make coins like that. They shouldn't, and they kind of don't.

Speaker 1 We went into this when we were streaming it, but obviously, there are definitely coins that probably flip more heads than tails, like, you know, 50.0001%

Speaker 1 time instead of exactly on the 50 or whatever, right? But most coins, I think, do not have a 75% chance of not coming up one side or the other.

Speaker 1 It is an incremental game. It is not an idle game.
It is an incremental game in the sense that there is are slowly unlocking

Speaker 1 kind of upgrades. As you flip the coin, every time you get a heads, you get paid the amount of money that the, we're going to spoil these games.

Speaker 1 We're just going to have to say that we have to like talk about there. We have to talk about the game.
We got to talk about the game. The games have been out.
We have to talk about the games.

Speaker 1 So I'm going to tell you like how the game works. Every time the game, every time the coin flips heads, you get the amount of money that is on, that the coin is.

Speaker 1 So you start with a penny, you get a penny.

Speaker 1 There is a bunch of things you can upgrade. You can upgrade how quick the coin flips.
You can upgrade what coin it is.

Speaker 1 So you can go from, for instance, a penny to a nickel, a nickel to a dime, a dime to a quarter. A quarter to a 50 cent piece? I think so.

Speaker 1 A 50 cent piece to a dollar? I think you go from a quarter to a dollar. You just skip 50 cent piece.
No JFK coin.

Speaker 1 Get him out of here. None of that.
He looks like a baby on that coin, and I don't want it.

Speaker 1 He looked like a a baby in real life.

Speaker 1 Not as much as he looks like it on the coin. He looks like a little boy who is

Speaker 1 50 cent piece. He looks like he's on his way.
You have to understand that he's not zoomed in like this in real life. Find one where it looks small, like in your hand.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 All right, I'm going to search JFK 50% piece for far away. In hand.
I'm just leaning back from my computer screen. Yeah, that also works.
That also works.

Speaker 1 He looks like a little boy on his way to play baseball or something. He looks like Don Draper's son Bobby.
The last one, not the first one that got replaced. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 He looks like he's off to go play with a pop gun. He does.
This is what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 Anyway, as you can upgrade the coin, you can upgrade the multiplier that you get in between successful or during a combo.

Speaker 1 So if you do heads twice in a row, you make more than the coin's value on the second one and so on through third, fourth, fifth, which gives you enough money to do the upgrades.

Speaker 1 And then there's a fourth upgrade that I can't quite remember. Speed,

Speaker 1 coin size.

Speaker 1 Percentage chance. It makes the coin.

Speaker 1 Right, percentage chance. The big one, the one I forgot completely.
You can slowly work your way up to where you have at least a 50% chance, maybe more,

Speaker 1 of flipping the coin heads.

Speaker 1 And that's the game. There's also a guy looking at you with like a mask on with a or an animal.
He's drinking milk.

Speaker 1 His name is Gar.

Speaker 1 I I forgot about Gar.

Speaker 1 Austin is not kidding. There's two things that I want to really make sure we stress as we begin to like tease apart the differences between these two games.
One, that's the whole game.

Speaker 1 The camera is set in a fixed position. The amount of stuff going on on the screen is very sparse.

Speaker 1 But it's sparse in the way that electricity flowing out of a socket into your hand accidentally is a sparse sensation.

Speaker 1 There's a text crawl in the middle that tells you, that like records how many, what your results are, and occasionally says stuff like uh you know this game was made by heather flowers and things like did you know people will start making up superstitions even though the all the odds are right in front of you or

Speaker 1 you could win this game right now or maybe you you'll never win the game that's how odds work

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 uh and you have to flip the coin There is a button import that says important flip the coin.

Speaker 1 You can't fail to flip the coin. It will come down one way.
Well

Speaker 1 We've talked about how we've got to spoil this. The game has several endings.

Speaker 1 Once you are in the sort of right position to, once you've flipped nine heads, the game pulls one of four endings to get, only one of which is that you successfully flip the tenth head.

Speaker 1 In one of the endings, you flip the coin, it goes off the top of the screen and never comes back. Yeah, that's good chill.

Speaker 1 This is very annoying.

Speaker 1 But yeah, you click the button, you flip the coin, the coin comes down. This means that the upgrade that is like

Speaker 1 flip the coin faster is

Speaker 1 feels incredible. At first, you don't really notice it,

Speaker 1 but then when you reset the game,

Speaker 1 the coin feels like it's moving glacially slowly, and you're sort of desperate to speed up the flipping.

Speaker 1 And also, you fall into a kind of rhythm, a kind of dance starts to develop, where you can like catch the coin exactly as it falls and flip it back up.

Speaker 1 And it's into these little cracks that the ice water of superstition begins to flow, right? Where you're like, wow, wow, I bounced that coin

Speaker 1 four times perfectly. So the game's going to reward me now.
Surely, with a head, and then you flip a tail and you're like, okay, so that superstition's not true. Also, you say,

Speaker 1 you know, you, you flipped it, or you, you said something, you didn't say the word juggle, but there's a way to get into a rhythm of flipping in this game that is, that feels like juggling a ball or like tossing a ball up and down, unlike flipping a coin in a strange way.

Speaker 1 Because you don't have to, you can like prep. We were talking about this on the stream.

Speaker 1 you can you can click before it comes down and then on the unclick it will flip it back up we call that negative edge in fighting games that's right thank you yes of course yeah uh-huh don't worry we're gonna get into more esports soon we we sure are we really are what is negative edge i know fighting game seven i think i'm using i hope i'm using this term correctly negative edge is a term used wet for when the button registers when you release the button right um and so like for example if you want to do i don't i'm pretty pretty sure this is in some Street Fighters.

Speaker 1 I, my, I mostly remember it from Mortal Kombat. Um,

Speaker 1 but uh, if you say you're holding like your punch button down and you do the input to for a fireball and then you let go of the punch button, that's when your character will throw the fireball or the projectile.

Speaker 1 Um, which is really powerful, actually, in some ways, right?

Speaker 1 If you're good at it, it can be like really, really like crucial for keeping combos up, but it's also like it's one of those things that like if you're not really a die-hard fighting game player, you're never gonna think about right that makes sense.

Speaker 1 But for those who are or if you're a die-hard coin flipper, you might be you know priming your your next flip, you know,

Speaker 1 putting it in the in the uh what what is this what is the what am I what is the phrase I'm thinking of here? This is now an MMO term that I'm trying to think of the

Speaker 1 fucking stack. Yeah, but there's another word for that in MMOs.

Speaker 1 The the buffer. It's called the buffer.
In any case, that is you have to flip the coin. You flip the coin until you get 10 in a row, or you don't.

Speaker 1 And if along the way, you will probably end up feeling some sort of way about

Speaker 1 coin flipping

Speaker 1 as evidenced, I think, by anyone I've ever watched stream this, both. Us, Art and Keith.

Speaker 1 I think Northern Lion and Germa's respective streams are about as good personality tests for those two people as you could imagine. I don't know if you've seen both of those.
Have you all seen

Speaker 1 it? Okay, so Sylvie, can you give me a characterization of Germa's experience of this game? I feel like he just immediately stops believing the numbers.

Speaker 1 If I'm remembering it, he stops believing the numbers. He thinks it's not real.
It's not working. Hey, I think they're fucking with me.
And he just wants to win. What he wants is to win.

Speaker 1 He wants to win, and he's like, this is great. I love it.
It's really funny. I want to win.
He's waiting for the horseman to arrive. His other friends.
That's right. He's waiting for him.

Speaker 1 I'm going to play like

Speaker 1 some other multiplayer game. It wasn't peak, but it was something like that.
Yeah, exactly. And so he's like, well, I'm going to play this beforehand.
It's fun. It's a fun thing to play while we talk.

Speaker 1 And I'm frustrated when I lose. And I want to win.
He also keeps saying things like, well, I'm going to be the best at flipping the coin and I'm going to flip it before they arrive.

Speaker 1 And I'll get it done before they arrive. That's right.
Exactly. Northern Lion

Speaker 1 doesn't advance to 50%.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that sounds right. And when people say, what are you doing? Buy the 50% upgrade, he says, no,

Speaker 1 I'm playing the game this way. He sees it as truer, as more virtuous? I think, well, to be clear, he did, of course, win once or whatever with 50%.

Speaker 1 But now he's not interested in that anymore. Or he then becomes less interested in that.
And he's interested in winning at 45% or 40% or just getting 10 in a row right away.

Speaker 1 He's exploring the space, you know?

Speaker 1 and and the loss is just as good for him i think like for me getting nine in a row and then a miss is a different type of win yeah the action is the juice is what you're saying oh the action that i think is the case that's this whole game this is like this is really clever game design from heather um because you know like you said earlier austin when you were talking about juggling the coin you made the point of saying like you couldn't do that when you were flipping a coin and that's true but what is true about anybody who has ever flipped a coin and anybody who has ever played one of these

Speaker 1 like, like, brutally simple gambling games of just like, you know, whether that is trying to throw objects into a waste paper bin or whether that is trying to bounce a ball on a tennis racket a certain number of times is that the like the embodied

Speaker 1 sort of like liquid play of interaction with the object becomes your whole universe. You know, you like zero in onto a spotlight on the feeling of the coin in your hand, or the feeling of juggling

Speaker 1 the coin with the click, or the feeling of

Speaker 1 how

Speaker 1 glacially slowly it feels to go from coin seven to coin eight, even though it only took four seconds.

Speaker 1 And that kind of like...

Speaker 1 embodied ritualistic kind of like very potent play um is like heather has has distilled it so perfectly in unfair Flips.

Speaker 1 Well, and like you were saying, like

Speaker 1 you can't juggle the coin in real life, but there is always all coins

Speaker 1 have characteristics that shape your interactions with them, that

Speaker 1 enable, pressure, or limit you in different ways. And that is true about video games, right? In Unfair Flips, you juggle the coin.

Speaker 1 In Mario, sometimes you do, like in Mario 64, sometimes you're just running around jumping and sliding because it feels good to do that, right?

Speaker 1 And in time, you're like, oh, I've learned how to do the triple jump and I can use that and I can do it backwards to get up this place I didn't realize I could get up to first, right?

Speaker 1 In XCOM, you know,

Speaker 1 you are not necessarily doing like input play in that way, but you are being like,

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 I am going to count on the 90% shot. And

Speaker 1 I'm going to hit the shot.

Speaker 1 Maybe I should get closer. Maybe I should do a high position.
I'm going to roll the dice. I'm going to hit the 90% shot.

Speaker 1 And in that way, this is what I mean when I say one way to read this game is games reduced into a very simplistic, reductive, reduct, not reductive, bad, reduction like, you know, you've cooked a steak and you're making a reduction of the juices, you know?

Speaker 1 Here it is, an essence of the thing in a way that

Speaker 1 retains somehow, I think this is what it really is. What it retains is the play.

Speaker 1 the way that there is like play in a fishing line. You know what I mean? Play in

Speaker 1 the mechanical sense,

Speaker 1 not just in the video game-y sense. The tension, the restlessness,

Speaker 1 the tension, the slack, your ability to play with the tension and the slack. So it's dialed down.
It doesn't play itself, right? It doesn't,

Speaker 1 it's not a video. You don't click it and then watch it.
And I still think that that's interactive. And I probably, I'm the type of weirdo who's like, you can play by watching a video.

Speaker 1 There are ways to do that depending on what the video is and blah, blah blah blah but i you know i do also think that there is something important about the idea that is like there are places to touch the game and in the way you touch it you know you get you have enough money to upgrade any of the four things what do you upgrade first

Speaker 1 do you upgrade in the middle of one that we hit on our stream really quickly jack the superstition if we're on a run the superstition of do you buy an upgrade in the middle of a five run heads up combo like or do you feel like that's gonna break the flow flow somehow?

Speaker 1 Which, of course, it isn't. That's not how it works.
Right.

Speaker 1 But tell

Speaker 1 the person who wakes up in the middle of the night after having seen a horror movie that the monster from It Follows isn't real. You know?

Speaker 1 Right, right. Yep, 100%.
To extend your metaphor,

Speaker 1 Heather has put this beautiful sort of a consomme or sort of a jus on, has cooked it down.

Speaker 1 There's like a beautiful little, like a perfect sort of bone broth at the bottom, and you sip it and you go, mmm, yes,

Speaker 1 that's food. Meanwhile, on the other side of town,

Speaker 1 the soup has been cooking in the pot for so long that it has evaporated completely.

Speaker 1 Strange Martian shapes are emerging on the burned bottom of the pot, and then with a womph, the kitchen catches fire, and then the kitchen burns down, and now there's kind of like a shape on the ground in the ash.

Speaker 1 This is Q-Up.

Speaker 1 Sylvie, the first thing you said about this game

Speaker 1 when we were just like talking about it loosely, right?

Speaker 1 I believe you said, this game is pretty funny. It's pretty funny.
Q-Up is the future of esports, the future of mind gaming.

Speaker 1 You guys have a lot of yomi to play. You really do.

Speaker 1 So, Q-Up is

Speaker 1 like, it is a

Speaker 1 based uh team-based uh coin flipping game uh yeah yeah you know fitting with our theme this week uh where you're point you're trying to raise your q score as much as you can to

Speaker 1 get up the leaderboards and

Speaker 1 uh it starts off with it's just oh yeah if you win you get a certain number and if you lose you lose a certain number but very quickly they give you the skill nodes and things go weird um you go to hell you go to to hell.

Speaker 1 They describe this game as one part hyper capitalist or one part demented capitalism simulator. And you think that's the writing in the game.
It's not. It's the playing of the game.
It's the systems.

Speaker 1 And the writing is in there too, right? Oh, it is. Yeah.
The writing is quite fun.

Speaker 1 That's what I was initially referring to. You get these like in-universe emails from the people who are running the

Speaker 1 in-universe game

Speaker 1 studio.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And accidentally get hired by them really.

Speaker 1 You get

Speaker 1 forcibly hired.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like

Speaker 1 there is a running gag of Bob, the lead dev, emailing you, and his signature has the O and his signature is a smiley face, but it's either frowning or eventually it's smiling.

Speaker 1 He has a big blow-up at one point that I thought was really funny.

Speaker 1 The game itself is like...

Speaker 1 it's a clicker.

Speaker 1 It's like an idol game more than anything. It's a multiplayer idol from Clicker.

Speaker 1 The thing that I think it is pulling from explicitly is like Valorant and League. Yes.
Valorant and League and Overwatch visually. Hyper polished, hyper corporate,

Speaker 1 like quote unquote trendy hero shooter or like hero multiplayer game.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, you start by being able to choose between Mercy the Cow Cassidy. is that his name now?

Speaker 1 And then like pro gamer are your three starting hero classes. I picked Mercy because I wanted to be a girl.
That was not the correct first choice. Oh, I like play.
That's who I've played.

Speaker 1 That's who I play as. I play as whatever her name is.
Sylvie and I are gamblers, which means that we are either playing Q Up better than you have ever seen in your life, or

Speaker 1 we're like rank one. I'm playing the medic because when I lose, I win.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But I bet the highs are not as high as the gambler. The gambler is fun as hell because I'm either winning 40 million a flip or I'm losing 40 million a flip.

Speaker 1 And again, capitalism simulator. Yeah, I have to explain.
Yeah, you're right. 100%.
Right. You were the day trader of QA.

Speaker 1 You do not flip the coin. You have no idea.

Speaker 1 Importantly, so you zoom in, you are at...

Speaker 1 you are facing

Speaker 1 an altar, a coin altar, or in like a coin tunnel, giant coin.

Speaker 1 One side, side, there's a banner that says cue.

Speaker 1 For people who don't understand this, queuing is a thing you do in multiplayer games when you go into the queue waiting to get into the next match. That is the pun that queue up is making.

Speaker 1 You're queuing up for the next match. So one side of the team, one team is the Q side, one team is the up side.
One of the coin side says Q, one of the coin side says up. The coin flips.

Speaker 1 It flips heads or tails. Whichever team, I'm going to zoom out in complexity here.
So start here. Whichever team gets three successes, three of their side first wins.
Jackie, you already said it.

Speaker 1 You do not flip the coin. The coin flips itself, and you either have gotten a success or a failure.

Speaker 1 When it's a success, you, by the way by default, get a little experience points and a little bit of gold.

Speaker 1 As you level up,

Speaker 1 you begin to get skill points with that experience

Speaker 1 and new skills. As you slot those skills, different things can trigger when the coin flips.

Speaker 1 So I'll give you just a super, super, super simple one.

Speaker 1 You know, sometimes the coin flips and you lose. And so when that happens, you can have a thing that says, oh, when you lose, you get money.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Awesome. So that way, even when I lost, I won, sort of, because I can take that money and go to the shop and start which you obviously the shop you first have to use gems to access it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, uh, gems are a different meta-currency. None of this is real money stuff.
This is all just like in-game, fake real money stuff.

Speaker 1 Um, but you then open up the uh the shop and you can start getting a build between your skills and your gear.

Speaker 1 You start getting things that say, like, um, you know, every time your team wins, get more money or more XP.

Speaker 1 Every time you get a coin flip, so one that I have one that a couple things that do this, every time the coin flips against you,

Speaker 1 trigger an adjoint an adjoining node where another skill is placed.

Speaker 1 Because you have a whole web of different skill nodes, many of which, though not all, you can move around, most of which you can move around. There's a few like pillars that are stuck in places.

Speaker 1 That's your class, that's like your core abilities. And then every character also has like a single core

Speaker 1 thing. So the medic one that I know is every time you lose, you get a counter that goes up and that adds to your total score multiplier when you succeed.

Speaker 1 So it's like you're cat, like when you're losing, you're getting like a multiplier that will then cash out in a huge way.

Speaker 1 In a way that I will say the numbers in this game remind me a lot of like Bilatro numbers and that what you're trying to get is both a big base number.

Speaker 1 You want a thing that says when the coin does blank, add blank, add big number to your score. And you want a thing that says, take that score and multiply it a bunch.

Speaker 1 And you need both of those numbers to go up.

Speaker 1 Ideally, you know it seems like multiplier is really important but like you need both of them to go up as high as you can because that's how you get the big maintenance multiplier is the fun double-edged sword of the game because you will be in negative cue points and then your multiplier will multiply

Speaker 1 how does that happen tell me about the gambler and why you're saying it feels like uh yeah so the gambler the main skill and i think this is the first

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 one of the starting ones or like a very early one is uh raise the stakes triggers on flip. I pulled the skill sheet up so I could like look at it and get the wording properly.

Speaker 1 If win, plus 200q for each skill triggered this flip. If loss, minus 100 for each skill triggered this flip.
After 100 triggers, the numbers become plus 1000 and minus 500.

Speaker 1 On any node triggered, 15% chance to trigger this.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 basically, in a game, you could trigger that a bunch and lose

Speaker 1 every time.

Speaker 1 That's right. And then if you also lose the game, you don't get the winning bonus to that.
So you're getting,

Speaker 1 I mean, like, I'm getting upwards of like 100 and

Speaker 1 200 malt on my stuff right now.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Not to brag, but I'm in Diamond 1.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 1 Now, see, this sounds good, but

Speaker 1 it sounds good. The thing about playing the gambler that is just so funny is that you'll be in Diamond 1.
Yes.

Speaker 1 And you'll be on a real hot streak and then and because you'll cue which is the core mechanic right for the gambler there's a hot streak there's a literal tilt on the tilt meter of course up on wins and down on losses your degree number is your current distance from the center of the tilt meter in either direction um incredible i think it's like three or four to get to the end of it um

Speaker 1 if you fuck it up you lose everything

Speaker 1 but what's great is that because you still have this skill web set up it's real easy cub easy go territory Because you'll be like, I'll just go right back in, flip three more coins, and if I win, I am now suddenly in diamond tier again.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 in our Discord, I think I posted the duality of coin flip, which was me getting plus 40 million on one game, and then minus 47 million on another.

Speaker 1 Some fun highlights of other characters. Oh, it's also worth saying that...

Speaker 1 This game makes me feel nauseous to play because so much is happening.

Speaker 1 I think this is... I can't tell whether I like this game or not as far as I'm concerned that is not necessarily contingent on like critical feelings that I have about it so much as the

Speaker 1 feeling in my like craw you know yeah the kind of nausea that I get when I play this game of like watching the numbers move watching the colours watching things sweep in and out suddenly losing vast amounts of money suddenly screeching around in like a hairpin turn and gaining so much money that it's meaningless that I can't really do anything with.

Speaker 1 Another way that it makes me feel nauseous is that the game is very interested in you not really understanding what's happening at any given moment.

Speaker 1 Usually in games like this there would be like mouse over stuff where you could hover over something and double check it.

Speaker 1 And that's in this game, but every single thing you hover over seemingly deliberately fails to explain. Like, you learn A and B and you're like, right, I gotta go and check C and you'll hover over it.

Speaker 1 It just simply will not tell you.

Speaker 1 Or

Speaker 1 clear off your screen so quick or it's flashing and jumping and it's saying plus 17x plus 17x plus 1700 Q plus 8200 Q 8200Q EMT stimulant panic stimulant adrenaline focus panic angel make it rain and it's like all of the abilities are triggering at once constantly there's that in a way that is meant to be overwhelming yeah but also it is gameable people are playing cracking it yeah it's just it is it is it is sickening like you said There's a soft sway to the camera in the coin tunnel that

Speaker 1 it looks like a tunnel from the space station in Prey, you know, like

Speaker 1 or like or like one of the imagined spaces in Nier Automata.

Speaker 1 Like it has this kind of sickly gray techno tunnel vibe, and the camera is slowly moving around it, and everything is blasting you in the UI, yellow and blue, as bright as possible.

Speaker 1 And it's telling you you got new gems, and that you got an email, and that you now have 7,000 coins and now you're at gold five and oh you have challenges so you should you're you have a challenge see eight gam gamblers in your matches lose one match zero to three well it's a good thing I did that because I got 6,000 XP from that see 10 Q sides win nine flips you got to get these X P rewards but remember you can only get so much X P before you level up and leveling leveling up is you can only have so much money your wallet can only hold so much so much money until you spend the gems to get a bigger wallet and also you get an email from the CEO of the company being like why are you mad at me it's a game that happens to to you oh it does this is how it you just flip the coin you don't flip the coin yeah like to keep coming back to this i when i played the demo for this i almost emailed frank lance and said you have to let me flip the coin like this is very important

Speaker 1 you know it's important that you don't though i do think there is i do think that there's an argument for flipping the coin which is i think this is a game this is a game about esports right this is a game about being in an esport uh competitively but also just like grinding the ladder going out and playing Overwatch or Valorant and like trying to rank up.

Speaker 1 It's not so much an esports game, but like going to the Dota International and being on a big stage. As far as I know, they do have some good jokes about that, though.
They do, right?

Speaker 1 But the experience of it is like sitting at your desk and, you know, grinding to try to get to Diamond, right?

Speaker 1 And I do think it would be really funny. if they let me hit, if it was my turn to flip the coin.
And it doesn't matter. It It doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 And I don't get to flip the coin every time, but one in eight times I get to flip the coin.

Speaker 1 And if I don't flip the coin, it, you know, it does like the countdown until it just auto flips it the way that all the other UI elements will like eventually come off your screen.

Speaker 1 But like everyone else is like, I want people, I want to get the feeling of the team being like, holy shit, you got a headshot, even though I didn't, even though I just flipped the coin and it happened to come up the way.

Speaker 1 Or I kind of want the feeling of me getting the one that's good for me, but not the rest of the team. But I understand that it's not doing that.

Speaker 1 I think it's very powerful that you don't get to flip the coin. And I'm sure there are tons of conversations about this inside Everybody House games.
And I'm not going to say but.

Speaker 1 I think that that's, I think that they've arrived at a place that is good. But I do, I said, but.
I'm going to just drop it. We're going to move back to talking about the game.
There's a

Speaker 1 in the Tim Robinson show, I think you should leave, there's a sketch where he is at work playing a weird game where he just feeds eggs to a living egg. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 he's buying gems with eggs. He runs out of eggs at one point and buys more eggs with real money and they give him 80 eggs.

Speaker 1 And then he feeds the egg an egg and he's like, oh, that one egg was 40 eggs because now his stuff is now back down to 40.

Speaker 1 And then at the end, the egg pulls down its trousers and shows him its butthole. And he looks at the screen with this expression of like, I didn't know it did that.

Speaker 1 Uh-huh. That is Q-Up.
Yeah, if I finished this game and the the gambler pulled down his pants and showed me his butthole, I would not be surprised.

Speaker 1 There are multiple characters that you have to unlock.

Speaker 1 Gentle listener, I'm gonna be real with you. I do not know what some of those characters do.
I've read the tooltips. Yeah,

Speaker 1 one of them seems like she can throw games and does it well or badly. It's really funny.
The troll is real, like, seems really funny because, like, a mechanic is getting banned.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 one of the characters does well or badly based on whether or not he sees other heroes in the opposing team. Yeah, it's the meta.
So he's the meta. He's playing the meta.
Yeah. He's like

Speaker 1 the pro. Yeah.

Speaker 1 The whale seems to be playing some sort of gacha mechanic outside of the game and is getting better or worse based on that.

Speaker 1 It's absurd. The game is.
I will say, I have one real complaint about the...

Speaker 1 the thing that you're describing, which is like, you're opening it up to a thing that I wish it did one thing better, which is

Speaker 1 there are in the top left of the interface on your kind of main screen, there are links to like news articles, and none of them are written.

Speaker 1 All of them link to a website that says, like, gamer clicks on fake link.

Speaker 1 Experiences humorous content, and then it's Laura Mipsum. I wish you'd written, y'all should have written that's my big complaint too.
Come on, because the writing is really good.

Speaker 1 Send us the writing is good, yeah. $80 each, and we'll get you three.
That's right.

Speaker 1 I'll write three of them. Here is actually, so

Speaker 1 the game, I don't think I am quite as fond of the writing as you two.

Speaker 1 I think the game is walking in very interesting and very dicey territory here, which is that it is operating with the kind of broad pastiche in its writing that was very popular maybe about a decade ago

Speaker 1 with the sort of like frog fractions game within a game and also like the game about achievements style satirical games. These were big...
Oh, sorry, go on.

Speaker 1 I think it was more like six years ago because Hypnospace Outlaw is 2019, Jack. And this is Hypnospace Outlaw core to me.

Speaker 1 When did the like Achievement Unlocker games come out where it was all about doing the

Speaker 1 elephant games? That is,

Speaker 1 I think, 10 years ago. The elephant games.
I missed it. Yeah,

Speaker 1 those are from over at least 10 years ago, I'm pretty sure.

Speaker 1 Sorry, I don't mean this is when it started. I mean, this was still in in vogue as of 2019.
Oh, it was still in vogue. Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 1 So I'm talking about Achievement Unlocked, which is part of the super influential Elephant Games platformers.

Speaker 1 This game came out in 2008 that was right in the like video games have lots of achievements in era. Right, right.

Speaker 1 And it was like a...

Speaker 1 a cleverly made but pretty broad satire of games where you know you unlock an achievement by pushing right you unlock an achievement by jumping you unlock an achievement by closing the achievements menu and in a very sort of like frog fractions, sorry, if you're not familiar, Frog Fractions is a metafictional game that initially sets out to be, it's by Twinbeard Games.

Speaker 1 When did Frog Fractions come out? Frog Fractions has been eaten since the beginning of time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, 22. Yeah, that sounds

Speaker 1 good.

Speaker 1 That like initially masquerades as

Speaker 1 a like math learning game, but gradually in a sort of, in a way that I think got picked up by Daniel Mullins and the sort of like inscription style of game like reveals itself to be a broader thing.

Speaker 1 And in that way, the elephant games in 2008, once you'd unlocked all the easy achievements, you were then in this sort of weird like mechanical puzzle about

Speaker 1 trying to find weird ways to wring out these last 40% of the achievements. And I think that

Speaker 1 there is a kind of malicious kitchen burning down like abandon that Q-Up is bringing to this that I think kind of helps lift it up. But I do find it's sort of like central satirical

Speaker 1 presentation to be reminding me of that era of internet humor. That makes sense.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think the particulars of this feel

Speaker 1 distinctly focused on

Speaker 1 a thing that has been, you know, the live service competitive game is the most popular game in the world right now by way of Fortnite.

Speaker 1 I think probably still. I think that that's still the case in terms of maybe that's not the case exactly anymore, but it has been for the last five years.

Speaker 1 I, you know, I'm not counting something like Roblox, which is a whole platform. Not that Fortnite doesn't have platform, you know, capacities, but, and I think that there is something about the

Speaker 1 particulars of the things happening in the email that I think it's not all hits for me, but I'm

Speaker 1 I am always finding myself going like, ah, yeah, okay. I, yep, I have seen this, you know, here is your email

Speaker 1 from, from someone who is like giving you feedback by way of an auto messenger tied to, you know, they have filled in a mad libs about whether or not you were a good teammate, you know, that stuff like that one was really good.

Speaker 1 I liked that one. Works that stuff like that really works for me.

Speaker 1 Some of the like, you know, I made the hypnospace comparison and like some of it is like hypnospace stuff again, where it's like, did you know that companies are run by stupid people you know um and and that stuff i think is like i could take it or leave it and i but i what i really think is when i clicked on the button that said here's a news article and it didn't exist i realized that some of that stuff was not going to scratch my itch because if they weren't going to go far enough to like do the fake interview with the coin flipper with a thumb who was recovering from the thumb yeah the thumb thing then like you're not you're not doing pardon the phrase but you're not doing doing interesting world building.

Speaker 1 You are just kind of putting out headlines and like caching it on the joke, which is fine. But it's like,

Speaker 1 I'm with you that there's a limit to how far this stuff goes.

Speaker 1 But I still think that the overall effect of the sheen of the game brings me along with it a little further. I think it helps with the nausea for me.

Speaker 1 And by helps, I mean helps increase the nausea, which is what I reduce it, which is what I want. I think, yeah, I think it's like that

Speaker 1 to your point about it drawing from that kind of live service stuff. I think that that is also part of that well of gamer satire.
I shared in the side story chat

Speaker 1 a kind of image that you will have seen hundreds of, which is the quote-unquote what if Ubisoft made Silksong type image.

Speaker 1 You see these a lot with like what if Ubisoft made Bloodborne, and they just pile in all the like there's a mini map, there's tips, there's the daily missions update, all the UIs on the screen.

Speaker 1 And I think to its hmm this kind of satire needs to go further for me in order to be funny and well notably this isn't the only thing that Ubisoft does uh there's something that's not caught here in the Ubisoft model that is so important to what those games are which is at some point in development those games over and over again have uh sort of big ideas that then an editorial board comes in and sands down.

Speaker 1 They insist, for instance, that everybody in Watch Dogs needs to have a pistol.

Speaker 1 They change out systems in games like Far Cry or Assassin's Creed, dropping stuff out or pulling back on narrative directions that were there early on.

Speaker 1 I've talked to developers at Ubisoft as far back as Far Cry 4

Speaker 1 about how the editorial board has come in to reshape the game, not to be overfilled with information the way that this kind of fake Silksong image is, but actually to be like devoid of meaning so that it will be more like Pablum that is easier to go, that is, they think easier for players to swallow down.

Speaker 1 And I think that that is like, that is the thing that needs the, you know, for all of its, for all of its issues, the Assassin's Creed series started to hit on that with the black flag

Speaker 1 abstract game development stuff, right? There's a lot of that behind the emails in this game, honestly. And that's what I mean.

Speaker 1 And that's the thing that I think that this game does capture that images like this miss. Yes.
Is the tinkering behind the scenes, the

Speaker 1 not tinkering is the long word, the meddling behind the scenes that like

Speaker 1 is the thing that actually drains the life away from a game, you know? This game came pre-sanded down. Like this game feels like, you know what I mean? Like

Speaker 1 that's

Speaker 1 it.

Speaker 1 This is maybe a bit of a tangent. I don't know.

Speaker 1 The thing that I immediately started thinking of when I played this was another game that's over a decade decade old that has aged quite poorly, is Dive Kick, which was kind of trying to do this for fighting games, right?

Speaker 1 Totally. It distilled the, like, I remember like a really old preview where some, I think it probably was Dave Lang because he was the

Speaker 1 Iron Galaxy stuff,

Speaker 1 mentioned something about the most exciting part of a fighting game is at the end when it's a one, both players are one hit away from dying, so that's the entire game.

Speaker 1 And this is doing that for Overwatch, Valorant, et cetera, by

Speaker 1 taking away the actual shooting and stuff and just letting you enjoy the meters filling up. Because that's what a lot of people are there for.

Speaker 1 Well, and that is the thing that is the great critique of it. And it's part of why I've seen a handful of esports people being like, this game is being mean to esports.
Good.

Speaker 1 Is,

Speaker 1 you know.

Speaker 1 None of I want to be 100% clear about something because I don't know that we were super clear before.

Speaker 1 None of the abilities you get, none of the skill points you put into anything changes the likelihood of you winning or losing a match.

Speaker 1 You in this game, it is the opposite of unfair flips. It has been drained of the ability to address the probability that the coin will flip heads or tails.

Speaker 1 The thing you are changing is how you are rewarded when a coin is flipped heads or tails with dozens of skills that trigger in different scenarios based on who is in the match, based on how many flips have been in one direction or another, based on meters that are filling up and being spent, based on luck as different skills are triggering, etc.

Speaker 1 And it's just like so important to understand that the thing that they've done is said,

Speaker 1 you know, one way to read this game is the contemporary competitive game, the online multiplayer game, is

Speaker 1 they are being built by companies that have little interest in, or have more interest in this sort of meta progression, hooking you with the numbers going up in terms of your character and account level, and less in what is what makes the moment-to-moment play fun or or engaging or interesting in some way it's like battle pass game design taken to its end point exactly yeah exactly a hundred percent down to you know oh there's new items in the shop this week yeah you know

Speaker 1 so funny

Speaker 1 item that just gives me 12 000 the shop has my favorite joke in the game which is the 0% chance gotcha that you can spend 50 gold on

Speaker 1 the whale gotcha yeah it's literally for, it's like, yeah, it says 0%. You can spend 50 gold on it.
It's the box you can't open because the key doesn't fit. The key doesn't fit.

Speaker 1 Extremely funny in the recent,

Speaker 1 the context of the recent Counter-Strike 2 stuff.

Speaker 1 Valve rebalancing it. Yeah.
Valve totally rebalanced. They made it so that keys could unlock.
There were types of things

Speaker 1 in Counter-Strike 2. I want to say knives and...

Speaker 1 Ooh, I don't think it was gloves. It was something.

Speaker 1 Knives were the big one knives were the big one that you could only get through uh a very a thing that you couldn't unlock with basic keys i want to say and now you can get them now they're in regular crates and so that market just completely tanks overnight destroy the market with no lead time no notion that it would be coming uh and so yeah this game has uh this is i don't think this this is in the demo before this happened so i know that it wasn't uh planned oh but there is a there is a crate uh that you can that you have a key next to it's like the the key doesn't fit the crate sorry weirdly enough like them writing jokes around the pre-crash counter-strike games like or counter-strike items market uh works even better now like because of that because there's like you get like um

Speaker 1 One of the emails you'll get is like, here's some stuff from when we were developing the game.

Speaker 1 We used to have a marketplace. Wasn't that wacky?

Speaker 1 And like, you'll see just like notes where it's like, we can't do this or something like that. I'm, you know, I don't have it right in front of me right now, but um, I was also right.

Speaker 1 It's not, it was knives and gloves. There were, there were, uh, uh, covert tier cosmos.
So there were extra tier items.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Uh, yeah, so that's it. That's the not, it was knives and gloves.
Those you can now get. You can convert five lower tier items to one random higher tier item.

Speaker 1 Um, and that is completely, completely destroyed the marketplace there. So the like gonzo horror of

Speaker 1 what happens when a coin is flipped in Q-Up is just spectacular.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It it's

Speaker 1 it's um

Speaker 1 it's so horrible and it's so intense.

Speaker 1 Austin was describing it earlier, like, you know, that thing pops up and it says that that triggered four times, and you quickly move your mouse over it to learn what it is, and then it disappeared.

Speaker 1 And that is happening all the time, and you always feel like you're just close to understanding. If only it was on the screen for four more seconds, I'd get it.
But it's gone.

Speaker 1 Have either of you put a console in this game? What? No.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I've linked a screenshot that starts with Combat Start. All one word is merciful and does not kill Eco Fragger Baiter.

Speaker 1 Racketee Mensch is merciful and does not kill Yaoi Gagarin. That's me.
Your team loses the toss. Toss Q, minus 2 million.
Toss number three was on the way.

Speaker 1 But like, they show you everything activating. It's really overwhelming.

Speaker 1 But there's also really...

Speaker 1 I had no idea. Yeah, it's really just hit the tilde key or the

Speaker 1 I did and it says by opening the console, you've accepted the terms.

Speaker 1 It's really good. It's really good.
I wasn't, I hit it by accident and I was like, oh, that's, that's like really well thought out.

Speaker 1 In the same way that Heather dialed into the kind of like potent embodiment of flipping the coin and of that like brute gambling, the like 10 heads gambling,

Speaker 1 there is some stuff kind of like churning away under here uh that you were gesturing at earlier austin with the like what if you know the the esport has been reduced down to all this stuff where it's like right this is existing in the same in the same world where we are being fed algorithmically um uh like authored uh feeds that we alight on like a bird for no longer than two seconds before moving on to the next one and you get the uh reading a

Speaker 1 watching a YouTube summary of a movie is the same thing as watching a movie or reading a Wikipedia page is the same.

Speaker 1 Rather than there being some sort of like

Speaker 1 experiential difference between those two, there is something going on, sort of like bubbling away in this game, where the central joke of the premise is that the game says that a really thrilling multiplayer match should be a 50-50 chance.

Speaker 1 So why don't we just flip a coin?

Speaker 1 Totally. And I feel like that is very much in conversation with the way that people's attention, even outside games, is being guided, is being sort of like authored at this point.

Speaker 1 This is a game that is about that stuff.

Speaker 1 Did either of you see Connor Malley, the comedian, on Seth Meyers a few weeks ago? He's fucking funny on that show.

Speaker 1 He he

Speaker 1 Seth Meyers is like, so what do you watch anything right now? What are you up to?

Speaker 1 Connor is like, yeah, I've I've been mostly watching YouTube shorts about guns. I've been watching billions on YouTube shorts just 60 seconds at a time.

Speaker 1 And Seth Barre's like, Why wouldn't you just watch the thing? He's like, My life is so busy.

Speaker 1 I just, I just, you know, I just want, and Seth Byron is like, Well, how many, how many uh episodes of billions are you watching like this per day?

Speaker 1 And he's like, Well, this is, you know, as many, how many, how many minutes are in a day, brother?

Speaker 1 And Seth Barris is like, So, you're too busy to watch a full episode, and Connor like cuts him off, and he says, like, why the fuck do you care?

Speaker 1 Which is so,

Speaker 1 and I do kind of think that is this game's position about the algorithmic, the

Speaker 1 hook, the hook that gets in you when the number goes up, when you have the 60-second bite. You know,

Speaker 1 I would say, I have to admit, there was a moment where I was like, I wish these matches were even faster so I could have more of them per minute, which is like, the machine is working on you.

Speaker 1 Get out of there. There is a faster speed setting, too.
You get turbo, yeah.

Speaker 1 I don't have turbo. I should have got turbo.

Speaker 1 That game moves. Does it is that a thing you buy in the shop? I think it is a thing you get with gems, yeah.

Speaker 1 It's either a gem thing or a just like a linear progression thing. I can't remember.
That's very funny. Well, there it is, right? Like,

Speaker 1 what if faster? What if faster? What if faster? And I just, you know, we already mentioned this, but the character design sheen is unbelievable in this game.

Speaker 1 Also, when I say sheen, I really mean like this particular

Speaker 1 cartoon aesthetic,

Speaker 1 very palatable. It's anime-ish.
It's, it's, you know,

Speaker 1 it looks like the hero portraits from games like Overwatch and Valorant

Speaker 1 through a filter that makes them even wider in their,

Speaker 1 you know, kind of aesthetic, even, even, even more widely palatable, like you said.

Speaker 1 And I think that that is, in a way, like you could look at one of these character designs and be like, oh, I see. I see what they're doing here.

Speaker 1 But I think to its credit, then it starts making you sick. Instead of just being, they could have made a game that went down smooth and just replicated the.

Speaker 1 I think part of what's happening, part of why it's sickening is there is a time crunch happening that is sickening. It's taking, you know,

Speaker 1 if you and if we all went to a restaurant that had the finest cut of whatever it is we want and it was served to us slowly and nicely, oh, wow now i'm doing it's like if you did that but then i had to do a hot dog eating contest with it it would lose a lot of its joy and flavor it'd be awful it would be awful and so i think part of what's working with q up for me is like oh look at all this stuff that's meant to go down smooth keep drinking you know yeah

Speaker 1 smoke the whole pack yeah smoke the whole pack smoke the whole pack yeah exactly uh and i think that that is like yeah i think that that makes it a pretty effective critique even even without all of the

Speaker 1 the writing and all of that that. I think just the machine running, the mechanical sounds.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. Two things about the speed.
I was watching the visit earlier, and I was cold. It's cold in Michigan.
It's snow.

Speaker 1 And I got up to make a hot water bottle. And while the kettle was boiling, I knew I would have to get up again, so I didn't want to go back and start the visit again.

Speaker 1 So I went into my office, I started to queue up, and I played a round of Q-Up because I was just like, well, okay, here we go.

Speaker 1 It'll do it.

Speaker 1 the hooks are in me. The other thing is: have either of you seen Brendan Keogh's automatic flips? No, I have seen this.
I have

Speaker 1 a question. Yeah, this is a joke by the game designer, Brendan Keogh, game designer and academic.

Speaker 1 This is a version of Heather Flower's Unfair Flips. That actually, let me just post it in here.
Sylvie, if you could just

Speaker 1 give this a quick play and report what has happened. Okay.

Speaker 1 Click to play. It's booting up.

Speaker 1 I click flip. Oh, it's just going.
It's just flipping.

Speaker 1 Okay. The coin does not land.
The coin just flips in the air forever.

Speaker 1 Why does it so it plays unfair flips at?

Speaker 1 Oh, I had $100 and I lost it. Oh, hey, I won.
It took 874 flips. Yep.
There you go.

Speaker 1 Yep, sorted. Done.

Speaker 1 Just sort of like wiping my hands clean.

Speaker 1 And there's something fun happening here for B-Rate: where just as Q-Up abstracts out all the joy and tension and thrill of what could presumably be sort of like a first-person shooter multiplayer match or whatever,

Speaker 1 Automatic Flips by Brendan Keogh

Speaker 1 bypasses all of those same thrilling feelings about slowly playing unfair flips. You know, it queue ups unfair flips.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it really does. Well,

Speaker 1 it queue ups

Speaker 1 it it only it only partly queue ups unfair flips i think it would queue up unfair flips if it also had really shiny character design or uh you know high intensity music playing or or you go the other way and you make it like mole really mobile gamey right where like it's an auto-playing mobile game where you gotta pull ssr gar

Speaker 1 exactly if i had to if i could pull an sss garcha game

Speaker 1 exactly a Garcha game. You're welcome.
Wow. Heather, you're free to use it.

Speaker 1 Heather,

Speaker 1 Godspeed.

Speaker 1 Don't do evil things with your super, super rare gar, please.

Speaker 1 But yeah, I think that it's unfair. It's queue up in the sense that you're not clicking the button to flip, but I don't think it's queue up in that it's not like

Speaker 1 hateful.

Speaker 1 In the same, maybe it is. Maybe removing the button on unfair flips is a little hateful.
Hateful positive, hateful, hateful, you know, sharp is really what I mean. Not hateful, but, you know,

Speaker 1 sharp like a knife. So.
Yeah, hateful, hateful, like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, not like triumph of the will.

Speaker 1 That's right. Yes.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's someone's dating profile for sure. Oh, my God.
Oh, don't date me.

Speaker 1 Oh, sorry.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 all right. Any other thoughts on this before we take a quick break? And y'all come back to talk a little bit more with me about video games.
I'm so excited. They make coin games.
Do it again.

Speaker 1 Do another. game.
Do it again.

Speaker 1 What's the next coin game that you think you would like to see? I just want them to add accidentally landing on the side to queue up. Make it up.
21% chance.

Speaker 1 That would be so funny.

Speaker 1 I want to see them do a coin game that involves physically shipping coins to people.

Speaker 1 I want to go to a Walmart and buy a box that it rattles and I open it up. Now, I'm not talking about gacha.
I don't want the game to be what coin is in the box.

Speaker 1 I want the physical coin to be able to get a bunch of people. You don't want laboo coins you want you want a coin peripheral you want a coin peripheral

Speaker 1 you want the coin play date the coin date

Speaker 1 the coin date a console that you play by flipping it it costs four thousand dollars and i dropped it down a storm drink and for some stupid reason i bought the pizza case for it the pizza box case for it

Speaker 1 all right i'll i'll take us out on this

Speaker 1 we believe that we invent symbols the truth is is they invent us. We are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.

Speaker 1 When soldiers take their oath, they are given a coin, an acemi stamped with the profile of the altarch.

Speaker 1 Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life. They are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms.

Speaker 1 I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them.

Speaker 1 And in fact, to believe so is to believe in the most debased debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge.

Speaker 1 Rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.

Speaker 1 We'll be right back.

Speaker 1 We are back to talk about the killer. The killer is

Speaker 1 killing the killer.

Speaker 1 You got to be careful. The killer will get you.
Wendy Williams warned me. I've seen the killer get you many times.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 so or actually i haven't i've seen the killer almost get you a few times chased a lot

Speaker 1 so you get chased a lot yeah we actually get attacked by the killer much less than you we get attacked by killers but that's true but that is a very different thing than the killer sometimes the killer sometimes killers get chased by the killer also yeah that's good then we're cheering the killer yay the killer this is chainsaw massacre hate and not

Speaker 1 uh child of the wheel hate are we cheering leather favor sorry

Speaker 1 I guess I'm not. I'm not cheering Leather move.
Have I said this before that, like, that is the one that gets me? I can't do it. Movie Seventh.
It's so fucking horrible.

Speaker 1 It's so upsetting. It's so horrible.

Speaker 1 It's why Resident Evil 6 was such a nightmare for the first six hours. Seven, seven.
Six is the one. Resident Evil Six is a nightmare for a lot of other reasons.
For different reasons.

Speaker 1 I kind of like that.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 seven really got me. I was really hard to do that.
I think, Jack, you maybe once saw me play some in VR, which was a true nightmare. I wouldn't do that.
I would not do that.

Speaker 1 I love horror, and I love horror that makes me feel like I'm going to die, but you could not make me play a VR horror game. I'll see me very scary.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 If anyone wants to make me do that, send me a VR headset. There you go.
Anthology of The Killer by the Catamites. It's a game that y'all have streamed all of.
Over on our Twitch, our Twitch page.

Speaker 1 And also now, I think all of it's up on YouTube, right? I believe so. It should be.

Speaker 1 You should go watch it and

Speaker 1 check it out. But first, you should listen to us right now talking about it.

Speaker 1 Here's what I understand about it. And tell me if I'm wrong, based on what I've seen.
I haven't seen all of it.

Speaker 1 I'm familiar with it generally, just like I'm familiar with the work of the Katamites, who is

Speaker 1 a long-running independent game designer and artist

Speaker 1 whose work, I guess, I probably first hit with Space Fuel. I think that's a lot of people's first exposure, though.
That might be

Speaker 1 That one I remember getting really big back like 10, 12 years ago. Like, I remember Space Funeral kind of coming up when stuff like Off was really popular on Tumblr.

Speaker 1 But again, this is just been my own personal,

Speaker 1 like, this is how it felt to me versus how it actually was.

Speaker 1 Totally. It is a collection of nine games.
Nine. Anthology of the Killer.
That are all named things like Voice of the Killer and Hands of the Killer. Drool of the Killer.

Speaker 1 Drool of the Killer, of course. Yes.

Speaker 1 The water one.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 these are games in which... I'm just going to let you explain this because I think I will butcher it.
Not a pun.

Speaker 1 It is.

Speaker 1 So it was nine games released between 2020 and 2024.

Speaker 1 in collaboration with the musician Tommy Tone and the artist Alex Deegan.

Speaker 1 Most of the art in the game is by the Katamites, but Alex drew these incredible

Speaker 1 posters and sort of strange art style cutaways. Occasionally the game will kind of shift its focus and style and Alex's art will come in.

Speaker 1 How would you describe the art and the style for someone who hasn't seen it? Okay, so the style of...

Speaker 1 The Katamite style is, it is, these are 3D games featuring 2D, sort of sometimes called billboard sprites. These are like flat sprites that rotate as you rotate around them.

Speaker 1 I compared it to Paper Mario a lot when they were streaming, which I think is a pretty good visual just comparison for people trying to picture it. It's very colorful.

Speaker 1 It is very ootre in its violence. Blood is bright red and spurts in a way that is both ludicrously gory and also kind of inoffensive.

Speaker 1 There are all sorts of weird knickknacks and kitsch objects all over the place. There are brightly colored, um, scrolling like wallpapers and carpets.

Speaker 1 The 3D levels are often lit with like dynamic lights. So there'll be these sort of like very quote-unquote realistic looking red washes or blue washes over otherwise

Speaker 1 sort of straightforward textures.

Speaker 1 It looks like a visual collage in a lot of ways. And then into that, Alex Deegan's art is this very cool, very straightforward

Speaker 1 2D line work. Is that the best way to describe it, Sylvie? I think so, yeah.
That sounds right to me.

Speaker 1 The thing that I'm kind of mostly thinking about the main art of the Katamites right now, trying to figure out how to describe that, which is like,

Speaker 1 there's almost something squigglevision-y about... some of the characters and stuff, the franchise.
The movies, Dr. Cats.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It feels like a

Speaker 1 cartoon, a children's cartoon that children shouldn't watch,

Speaker 1 is the best way I'd describe the sort of the BB art style.

Speaker 1 BB the main character. Right.

Speaker 1 And these these nine, so eight, eight games were released on Game Jolt and itch.io, and then in 2024, they were kind of packaged together as the anthology of the killer with the ninth game, which also includes a playable wrapper to launch the games in which you play in first person as somebody arriving at an art show

Speaker 1 where

Speaker 1 people are sipping martinis and talking about the various games talking about their disappointments excitements and you sort of go through this art show and enter doors and that boots these individual games each game takes about

Speaker 1 40 minutes to play the shorter ones are maybe 15 minutes yeah there's a range i definitely think from what i've seen from from y'all y'all streaming it. Some of them are 15, 20 for sure.

Speaker 1 They definitely get longer as you go through them, too.

Speaker 1 And as Sylvie said, you follow BB, who is a...

Speaker 1 She has a zine. She has a zine about the killer?

Speaker 1 Well, about all sorts of things, really.

Speaker 1 She's a plucky go-getter zinester who lives in a mysterious city that has a

Speaker 1 interesting relationship to murder.

Speaker 1 The way I described it on Blue Sky is that the people in this city sort of view murder the same way we might view wasps, where it's sort of like, well, that's clearly a problem,

Speaker 1 and we don't much like it, but also this is just sort of something that happens.

Speaker 1 People will regularly talk about nasty murders, finding torsos in bins.

Speaker 1 BB, it becomes a running joke that BB seems to have spent most of her life being chased by one killer or another, blundering from one chase into another.

Speaker 1 And over the course of these nine very different games, BB sort of like delves into local zine culture, immersive theater,

Speaker 1 music, academic.

Speaker 1 This is the other thing.

Speaker 1 I think the Wasps thing is true, but it feels more like, you know, when you're in a city and like a new invasive species has arrived? Yeah.

Speaker 1 And there's like newspaper articles about it and like someone does like an immersive theater experience about it because like that's everyone's heard about it this year. That's the thing.

Speaker 1 Everyone, you're right. That it's not,

Speaker 1 you know, BBZ is not about the killer, but like the academic, there is an academic who is evil who is about the killer. There is a band that is or a new music scene that is about crime and killing.

Speaker 1 It's like it's become

Speaker 1 the weepster. I was turning over the name.
It's taken over as a cultural fad in a way that people are, not that people are happy about it necessarily, but that it is part of of

Speaker 1 the cultural

Speaker 1 expression of the moment in a way that is everywhere.

Speaker 1 And most of what you do in this game is you walk around these elaborate, exciting sets and you

Speaker 1 read dialogue from BB and from other people. You are occasionally chased.

Speaker 1 Occasional sort of like capital G, capital M game mechanics start to appear. There are the occasional odd boss fight or telephone tree

Speaker 1 like exploration. It turned into a platformer at one point.
It turned into a platformer at one point. There's a it feels like jazz in a lot of ways.
Like when you go and see live jazz,

Speaker 1 over the course of the evening, you will be engaging with the music in a whole variety of different ways. Some of those ways are things like, isn't it great when the drummer plays loud?

Speaker 1 Some of those ways are like, oh, I really hope they play the jazz standard that I like.

Speaker 1 Some of those ways are like, there's a beautiful sort of intimacy visible in the eyes between the bassist and the pianist. And sometimes it's just like, it's great when he plays sick jazz.

Speaker 1 And that kind of like improvisational breadth of what is appealing in the game kind of shifts across the nine. Sometimes you're playing because they're scary.

Speaker 1 Sometimes you're playing because there's a genuine mystery that you're trying to figure out what's going on. Sometimes you just like seeing BB like bop around.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 The big draw for these games, and I'm curious if it's similar for you, Sylvie,

Speaker 1 is that the writing is astonishing. Yes.
These games are just unbelievably well written.

Speaker 1 The Katamites is playing with a kind of disaffected or ironic tone that could so easily become like tooth-rottingly twee or so glib and disaffected that it cuts itself loose from any kind of meaning or emotion and goes drifting off.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 over the whole thing, the tone is kept like perfectly in control.

Speaker 1 I think about when I played Disco Elysium and came away from it just with so much sort of like pleasure in the writing, you know, just like watching the words of Disco Elysium was such a joy.

Speaker 1 I had a very similar feeling playing Anthology. The writing is just spectacular.
It is such a well-realized voice that the Katamites has

Speaker 1 in their writing that like really comes through, like shines in Anthology of the Killer.

Speaker 1 We mentioned Space Funeral. I think you can really see the through line of the sense of humor and like

Speaker 1 the sort of like

Speaker 1 surreal doesn't feel like quite the right word, but I'm not going to use the buzzword dreamlike because that doesn't mean anything. No, I don't think it's very dreamlike at all either.

Speaker 1 I know that that's surreal is much more like a dream.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because like people are talking to you about the killer, like it's like you said, like it's a wasp problem.

Speaker 1 But the tone feels so like lived in that it's like... You never you just kind of like let it

Speaker 1 you don't let it wash over you. You're still laughing at it.
But you don't really go until you're done really question why these people are so

Speaker 1 chill with the like murder university, for example.

Speaker 1 And it's clearly very

Speaker 1 the game is politically connected to what is going on in the world that we live in. This is a game that is very angry and that is a game that is very hopeful

Speaker 1 and it does not

Speaker 1 pull its punches in terms of what it is trying to talk about. We are living in a world that is so violent in so many ways.

Speaker 1 The violence of genocide, the violence of

Speaker 1 housing not being made available to all people, food not being made available to all people. We are told over and over again that there are kinds of violence that are acceptable.

Speaker 1 In fact, we shouldn't really think of as violence, and instead just as like part of how

Speaker 1 capitalist society functions. This is how it goes.

Speaker 1 While at the same time, tabloid newspapers and politicians are telling us that like crime is rising all the time there are murderers on the subway um you you have to watch out um and the city of the the the city that anthology and the of the killer kind of works in and the killer as a sort of expression of not just um

Speaker 1 I said earlier that there are a lot of killers in this game that aren't necessarily the killer. The killers that are chasing you are very often police officers or arts grant manufacturers.

Speaker 1 And the killer itself, the capital T, capital K killer, is instead this sort of like

Speaker 1 just violent wall of fury that is coming down on this city. Like that these people believe they have some connection to or some control over, but it's instead outside their connection and control.

Speaker 1 The way the game is frequently treated like the killer is almost like a divine figure to a lot of these the the lowercase non-proper noun killers um

Speaker 1 yeah who are trying to connect to some sort of um if not holy but sort of righteous violence um but the violence that they are enacting is just the violence of property or the violence of capital or the violence of an oppressor's body over uh an oppressed person um whereas the killer is this like rising sun rising red sun of blood yeah there is a, you know, I

Speaker 1 am always cautious about bringing philosophy brain to stuff, especially something that has, especially something that has like such a good,

Speaker 1 not anti-academic, but one of the lowercase K killers is an academic who can no longer see people as living things

Speaker 1 and whose, you know, dialogue is a... perfect pastiche of uh you know high theory nevertheless the Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin.
There's a lot of Benjamin in this game, actually.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of Benjamin.

Speaker 1 There's the, yes, there's a lot of Benjamin in this game, but I actually think the Arcades Project, you know, Walter Benjamin, a philosopher associated with, but not necessarily technically part of the Frankfurt School,

Speaker 1 where, you know, he was engaged with discussion and debate with figures like Adorno and Horkheimer, was a group of

Speaker 1 philosophers, many of them Jewish, in Frankfurt, Germany, pre-war, and then

Speaker 1 fled Germany during the rise of fascism, Nazism, and Hitler.

Speaker 1 Unfortunately, we've said this now probably on every show we've ever made, but Benjamin takes his own life while fleeing from Nazis, believing that he has no recourse and no escape.

Speaker 1 The terrible historic irony being that just a day later, the path would have opened to him.

Speaker 1 And he is the philosopher who I think probably most gets talked about by way of an essay he wrote called The Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, but is

Speaker 1 a writer and thinker who has written a lot more about history and Marxism and

Speaker 1 modernity. And the Arcades Project is his big swing at trying to capture

Speaker 1 the modern in early 20th century, late 19th century Europe, specifically in Paris. And it is a collection of

Speaker 1 observations and quotes and notes that are strung together in a very, I would say, stream of consciousness, but I want to zoom out from like what we mean when we say that.

Speaker 1 I don't just mean like

Speaker 1 Joycean,

Speaker 1 you know, prose stream of consciousness. I mean sort of like mind map stream of consciousness.
You know, oh, this reminds me of this and this reminds me of this.

Speaker 1 And I can put this quote in here or I can bring this thinker in here in ways that are like,

Speaker 1 I'll say it this way: every paragraph in this book has like a

Speaker 1 sort of like navigational notation where it'll be like G2A, and that one quote will just stand by itself, and you can go look at just that thing.

Speaker 1 And these are observations about things like, you know, the arcade in question in the Arcades Project is a sort of walking mall, the sort of like

Speaker 1 glassed in shopping center of Paris. Shopping center is so demeaning, but you know, that's kind of the bit, right?

Speaker 1 Is that like it's about the way that the department store comes to exist and the way that the comb exists as a symbol of French masculinity and femininity.

Speaker 1 And, you know, where does the French barricade so core to the

Speaker 1 identity of the French Revolution exist in modernity? All stuff like that. There's a lot.

Speaker 1 lot of that I find and I don't know that it's a direct I don't know that it's being directly quoted but in the sort of like interest in the mundane and how it piles up to create the experience of being a phone call center or temp worker under the, under the reign of the killer, it's in there, you know, to say nothing of the killer itself as a force of nature or history, you know, sweeping through everything.

Speaker 1 You know, the writing has high, and on top of all of that, sometimes you find a Bort doll and it's so funny to sell it on eBay to make rent money because it's extremely funny.

Speaker 1 It is unbelievably funny.

Speaker 1 You walk into a room with a bunch of police officers who are partially wearing bear costumes. They've sort of like half taken off their bear costumes.

Speaker 1 And to a man, they are all feeding limbs into meat grinders, chopping up a leg with a hammer. And the lead one of them looks at you and he says, Don't worry, we're cops.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's it's a good fucking game. Um, I think they have great clearance ratings because no one can ever find the bodies.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Um, the main character BB is just a delight.

Speaker 1 If you are interested in these kinds of games, if you are interested in kind of anything that we have been talking about in this section, BB will become a favorite.

Speaker 1 Uh, very early on, you meet her sister whose name is ZZ. ZZ is

Speaker 1 Zizi's favorite thing: going online, buying things on eBay, and flipping them for very slightly more money.

Speaker 1 Later in

Speaker 1 the games, she goes and works for what seems to be a record label, but actually turns out to be a sort of like Heaven's Gate cult on the boardwalk. She doesn't know what's going on.

Speaker 1 The French New Wave is like constantly in the game.

Speaker 1 BB is specifically dressed as a French New Wave character

Speaker 1 and the sort of like artistic, philosophical,

Speaker 1 like sexual or like gender politics of the French New Wave is like bleeding out through the game left and right.

Speaker 1 I think you know importantly and perhaps illustrative of the of what you were saying Austin the academic that has stopped seeing people as

Speaker 1 people and instead as sort of like like ideas and of course you can kill an idea

Speaker 1 well also specifically as the toy you practice killing. My first strangle victim.
My first strangle victim. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And he is not an... You can see them, and they look like BB.
Well, so, firstly, he's not an aberration. He is teaching in a school that believes that.
It's not like the academic went wrong.

Speaker 1 It's like that is the university

Speaker 1 that is expressing this.

Speaker 1 Also, the My First Strangle Victim doll leads to the best joke, or my favorite joke in the early game, which is that your initial horror is that that they have a load of dolls that look like bb whereas bb's horror is that she has accidentally stolen her fashion scents from a my first strangled victim doll

Speaker 1 yes 100

Speaker 1 all-time character

Speaker 1 it's it's a it's a great game um it is sinister and scary and overwhelming and so wildly funny um you know what else it is would probably worth saying this it's six dollars it's six dollars

Speaker 1 six dollars it is worth dollars. Dollars.
Oh my god, Sylvie, remember her like student friends? Oh my god, how could I forget?

Speaker 1 Them all talking about what they were-the programs they were in, them breaking into the museum together. They all break into the museum towards the end.

Speaker 1 There's an amazing bit where they all get like kidnapped one by one as you're like walking by a window and you see them all go by, and then one of them gets like yanked off by a big hook or something.

Speaker 1 Um, it's great.

Speaker 1 Uh, and if you like the Katamites games, there there are loads out there. 10 Beautiful Postcards is also one I really, really love.
Murder Dog. Murder Dog's so funny.

Speaker 1 It's about a dog that kills people. Yeah,

Speaker 1 Murder Dog. Great.

Speaker 1 And they put him in court. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I remember if he gets away with it. I haven't played Murder Dog in ages.
It's Murder Dog

Speaker 1 4. Murder Dog.
4.

Speaker 1 Something, something, something, something. It has a dog.

Speaker 1 4.

Speaker 1 Murder Dog 4, the trial of the Murder Dog. Of course, of course, of course.
There we go.

Speaker 1 I also want to say that,

Speaker 1 oh, motherfucker, I had this tab open so I could refer to it, and then I just closed it at some point.

Speaker 1 The Katamites

Speaker 1 has been really open about

Speaker 1 the process of making the game,

Speaker 1 what they think worked, what they think didn't work as well, ideas that they had to leave behind. Let me see.

Speaker 1 They have this great piece, I think, called the Autopsy of a Killer. Killer.

Speaker 1 Autopsy notes.

Speaker 1 Their tumbler is My Friend Pokey, spelt MyFriend, P-O-K-E-Y.

Speaker 1 And they have a piece. Oh, wait, I'm going to paste their actual link to it in the thing, and Austin can put it in.

Speaker 1 Yep, totally. It's really exhaustive.

Speaker 1 He kind of goes through game by game talking about making it.

Speaker 1 I think it's really worth reading after you've played all of them. I am excited to check that out after those.
Hell yeah.

Speaker 1 Any other thoughts on the Catamites or in general or Anthology of the Killer in particular? I guess people can go watch over on our YouTube and they should go do that.

Speaker 1 That is youtube.com slash friends at the table.

Speaker 1 All right. Any other things anyone wants to shout out before we wrap up? So tell me five words about Digimon

Speaker 1 Time Stranger. Stranger.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Five words. I'll give you 10 words if you want 10 words, but that's too many words.
It's five words. I was right the first time.
Five words.

Speaker 1 Agumon is my best friend. That's what I was thinking.
Those are the words. Yeah.
Those were the words.

Speaker 1 This is true mind sports.

Speaker 1 This is true mind sports. That is true.

Speaker 1 Guess what? They made a really,

Speaker 1 really big Digimon RPG that takes 12 hours to hit the title screen. Like the late title card.
And

Speaker 1 English dub Kilawa is there.

Speaker 1 Holy shit. I really am enjoying my time with it, but I am also like,

Speaker 1 I grew up, I was a Digimon kid, you know? Like, I have a lot of fondness for this stuff. I have a lot of fondness for the predecessing, like, Digimon story games, the

Speaker 1 Cyber Sleuth and

Speaker 1 Hacker's Memory, as well as like the old Digimon World games. So, like, it's hitting for me.
There's a lot of, like, it's an anniversary game. There's a lot lot of fan service and

Speaker 1 in ways okay yeah um I'm pretty sure it's an anniversary game um it's very pretty though it like is really stylish um

Speaker 1 the way that they render the digital world I love I think it looks really good

Speaker 1 they make it so much more colorful and like the the the one thing I think of is going to the digimon world very early like digital world very early on and it's basically you're in a space that is comprised of these like rectangular pillars and they are all sort of like jittering and like moving in and out and like the entire space is nothing in the space is static except for what you're walking on um

Speaker 1 but yeah i've been having a great time with it i'm i'm like 30 hours in i have no idea how far i'm how far in i am um

Speaker 1 you you do time travel you're trying to stop a digimon related apocalypse what did goes hard digimon goes hard always has always has always has i the the only thing i know about digimon is that they're some sort of digital Pokemon.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. They predate Pokemon.
Well, a Pokemon is some sort of a meat Digimon.

Speaker 1 There we go. Thank you.
Yes.

Speaker 1 I'm just trying to find...

Speaker 1 You're trying to find an example of a Digimon. You're trying to show the perfect Digimon to show Jack, and I think it's Gargomon.
We're doing the one that's your friend. Gargomon is also my friend.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but that's not Aguamon.

Speaker 1 I should have said Gabumon if I'm being real. I have described Gabumon as being like Michael Jordan in my home when I was growing up.

Speaker 1 I love that guy.

Speaker 1 Gabumon is great. You should send Gabumon too.
I'll also send Gabumon.

Speaker 1 And you should send here. You know what I'm going to do? Is I'm going to send the Gabumon evolution tree.
Please. I've just found.
I think that that kind of helps sell.

Speaker 1 Importantly, Jack, the evolution in these games is not linear. Whoa.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And frequently.

Speaker 1 Fuck. Eventually, Digimon will become like kaiju-sized.

Speaker 1 You can kind of the second last one on the top there and the one below it are both massive.

Speaker 1 It's so funny to me that the thing on the left is kind of like a jelly bean. Yes.
Then the jelly bean gets a little cockettish, and then all hell breaks loose. Yeah.

Speaker 1 This has always kind of been the joke with Digimon:

Speaker 1 it goes from being

Speaker 1 a little lizard with like wolf skin on it to being a like big big wolf to being a werewolf with like jinko shorts on and then it's a mech wolf with missile launchers and that's just one way it could go because it could become like a weird alien walker at a certain point or like a weirdo with a big gun drink a beer they drink a few small beer oh there's a digimon that has been the one of the my favorite things in this game is i walked into a digimon bar and immediately was approached by a renamon and i was like someone on the dev team had a dream that they needed to fulfill

Speaker 1 Oh, that's great. Yeah.
Do they talk? Yeah. That's one of the things Digimon have over there.
That's one of the big differences. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, they're people. Yeah.
I have a conversation with

Speaker 1 my Gargo Mon, and he's like, hey, should I, hey, I want to hang out with my friends. What do I need to do?

Speaker 1 And then you give him advice, and that affects their personality, which affects how their stats level up. There are so many systems in this game.
Their evolution, presumably. Are you his employer?

Speaker 1 No, I'm like his mom, kind of. Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 Interesting. Yeah, it's it's a whole thing.
Can I introduce you before we wrap up to one other little guy who is also my friend? Maybe you've met him, maybe you haven't.

Speaker 1 His name is Poco, and he's the world's smallest clown. Oh, my goodness.
Oh, my goodness. This is a free 90-minute or so

Speaker 1 adventure, point-and-click adventure game. Oh, I'm back to the world.
It's about the world's smallest clown

Speaker 1 who gets kicked out of

Speaker 1 what my partner called clown heaven.

Speaker 1 Yeah, sure.

Speaker 1 Down to a tiny world of snails and beetles and insects. Well, he's really small.
He's really small. He's the world's smallest clown.

Speaker 1 You got to solve some puzzles and you got to click on some things and you got to like make pigment out of flowers that you find to solve other different puzzles. You got to get the band back together.

Speaker 1 You got to make a little stew at one point. So, you know,

Speaker 1 there's a lot to be done.

Speaker 1 Oh my god, the Steam description says meet and befriend a cast of five homunculi. Say no more.
That is it. It is gorgeous.
It's a student game.

Speaker 1 It's a student game made by, like, led by an animator, a student who came from like animation and then indie game design, and it shows.

Speaker 1 And there's a lot of like spot animation from other animators. So it's like, it's not like a tiny, tiny team.
It's a couple dozen people, I think. But it, but it's like, there was one lead person who

Speaker 1 was in an undergrad student, an undergrad game dev program or undergrad, you know, maybe it was an undergrad animation program.

Speaker 1 I'm actually not 100% sure, but one or the other who was like the lead on this. And I, and the rest of the animators, I think, are also undergrad students.

Speaker 1 And so it animates like one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in this, you know, type of thing in this genre, this kind of point-you click adventure. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Poco the Clown has so much personality. personality justin's trailer justin's trailer it's like obvious it's great

Speaker 1 it's free

Speaker 1 you can donate you buy the soundtrack for a buck um i was really i played this last night or two nights ago and was really really charmed by it uh so i wanted to shout it out um yeah go play it poco po co the clown does he have a good time in the end there are multiple endings jack

Speaker 1 oh my god you'll have a choice you'll have some choices to make towards the end is what i'll say but i think he's having a good time all all the time, the way he's hopping around like that.

Speaker 1 But he does want to get back to Clown Heaven.

Speaker 1 If I got cussed out of Clown Heaven and I could hop around,

Speaker 1 you do what you can. Yeah.
The hopping around helps, but. It ain't Clown Heaven.
It ain't Clown Heaven.

Speaker 1 Paradise Honk.

Speaker 1 Jack, do you want to shout out anything before we wrap up? I don't think so.

Speaker 1 You don't have anything else like a small friend in it? We've talked a lot about small friends here on the shout it out section. Oh, I've been playing a little bit of Vane.

Speaker 1 The small friend, I suppose, in this is a bunch of horrible zombies.

Speaker 1 Vane is a very intricate.

Speaker 1 I've been playing Clock Zauer. God damn.

Speaker 1 Vane is a very intricate first-person

Speaker 1 zombie game. It takes a lot of cues from the legendary Project Zomboid, which I would love to talk more about one day.
But the big thing about Project Zomboid is

Speaker 1 it is essentially

Speaker 1 it does to the zombie survival game what something like Dwarf Fortress does to the systems driven like building game in that it is super mechanized and bitty and involved and interesting and Vayne does a really good job of taking that kind of impetus and putting it into a first person

Speaker 1 zombie game. It is kind of like very characterfully ugly.
It looks like a sort of unity target render in a lot of ways, which I find very charming.

Speaker 1 It's multiplayer so you can play it with your friends. It is a clever.
I'm gonna play this. This looks good.
It also has a really big demo. Oh, interesting.
Uh, this reminds me, I want to play Misery.

Speaker 1 I want to play Misery. Did you see what happened to Misery? No, wait, is it gone? Uh, um, GSP copyright struck them.

Speaker 1 What? Tell them about Misery briefly. Yeah, I'm not aware of this.
I mean, I was gonna by looking at the Steam page and describing it. Now, you gotta do it off the dome.
Uh, it is a multiplayer,

Speaker 1 you know, first-person

Speaker 1 cooperative exploration and combat game that is clearly inspired by the excellent Stalker series that apparently has been DMCA struck

Speaker 1 the pages

Speaker 1 by GSC, the developers of Stalker, Shadow of Chernobyl, and it's like,

Speaker 1 let me read that. They play it.
I have it installed already, so I don't think they've keep me from it. They have, you know, there were like nods to Stalker, and it's clearly inspired by Stalker.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's like people playing guitar around the camera. The famous gate, you know, the broken leaning gate.
Yeah, but that wasn't. That's

Speaker 1 okay, yeah, sure. Okay.

Speaker 1 GSC, this is

Speaker 1 Friday, November 7th from the Misery Writers.

Speaker 1 GSC Game World attacked Misery with a DMCA strike, and the store page is now suspended, so you cannot

Speaker 1 buy the game at the moment. In their claim, they state that misery infringes on their IP and that players' reviews mention stalker which means it hurts their interests.

Speaker 1 This is absolutely untrue and we will fight back to reinstate misery on Steam.

Speaker 1 Misery is a completely different concept happening in the fictional Republic of Zaslavi and has nothing to do with the Stalker universe, Chernobyl, etc.

Speaker 1 Misery uses no characters, plots, storyline assets, monster music, code, etc. It is all either originally created or legally licensed.

Speaker 1 We think that this is an abuse of power against small independent developers by a large corporation and it should not be a thing. We do not pose any threat to GSC.

Speaker 1 And then it goes on to say, as you briefly said, Austin, of course, Misery was inspired by many things, including games, movies, and books, but filing a DMCA strike for that is wrong.

Speaker 1 We also want to remind GSC that their games draw heavily from Roadside Picnic and the store movie by Andrei Tarkovsky. Yeah, that's wild.

Speaker 1 And they do not own the copyright on depressive Soviet-era buildings, playing guitar, vodka, radiation, or abandoned locations, or even the poo.

Speaker 1 We are 100% sure this misunderstanding will be resolved. Misery will be back on Steam very soon, and we will see many amazing news and new content.
Sorry, amazing updates and new content.

Speaker 1 This is very unfortunate and painful for us both mentally and financially, but the development continues. All the updates will be delivered on time and soon we can play Misery again.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 I'm glad you brought it up because

Speaker 1 I'm glad to have taken the opportunity to mention that they got struck, but

Speaker 1 it's not. Yeah, this completely took me by surprise.

Speaker 1 Now I really want to play it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Now I got to go play Streisan affected it. That they really did.
Shoutouts to,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 I guess I will hold out the possibility that someone involved in Misery's development like brought some assets over, but that doesn't sound like it's the case. So

Speaker 1 it seems like they are saying that that's not the case. Yeah.

Speaker 1 All right. Well,

Speaker 1 I might, I might buy Europa Universalis. Oh.
I want to know. I want to go in.
I want to, I want it in my life, and I don't have the time for it. It breaks my heart.

Speaker 1 I want to see you stream it. I would stream it with you.

Speaker 1 If you get your head on it, I'll learn it. And then we'll stream it.
Yeah, I would love to stream EU4 with you. 5.
E5. The fifth Europe is coming.
This has just come out. Or is coming out.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's just come out. I am an old man planting a tree for a future young man to rest in the shade of right now.
In that

Speaker 1 this first 20 hours of playing Europe Universalis is going to be awful, but in six years' time, I'm going to be like, oh, I know how to play EU. Yeah.

Speaker 1 that sounds great to me. And I'm the young man under the tree, actually, because I don't have to.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I didn't actually plant the tree. I actually do just get to hang out and be like, whoa.
Wow. How big can Alsace go?

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Giant Al Sais gets even bigger because as the years go on, you know. Do you know what year EU5 starts in?

Speaker 1 No. I don't know if it's fine.
It starts in like 1340. Oh, it's earlier.

Speaker 1 It starts before the end of CK. Yes.
Right, because CK goes until 14 something. 1790, I believe.
Yeah, right. That makes sense.
That makes sense. I guess, technically.

Speaker 1 I think CK should go longer, is the thing. No,

Speaker 1 I don't know. I think...

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't know. We'll do a podcast about this.
We will. We will.
We will. We will.
I think it needs to go to the Westphalian peace. I think it needs to go until the beginning of the nation state.

Speaker 1 That's my feeling. I'm sticking to it.
EU goes, EU covers that period. Someone's outside honking at me for this bad take.

Speaker 1 All right, we're going to go before we spiral into another episode of Science Story.

Speaker 1 To be

Speaker 1 able to say, wait, don't I have to say plugs? Do we have to say plugs? Friends at the table.cash to support us. Please go support us.

Speaker 1 Go to youtube.com slash friends at the table to watch streams, including the stream of the streams of Anthology of the Killer.

Speaker 1 And I was gonna say unfair flips, but I don't think that they're up there yet. I don't think that's the time to get them up there, but they will be eventually.

Speaker 1 You can go to twitch.tv/slash friends at the table to watch the archives of anything we've streamed more recently.

Speaker 1 People should go listen to Media Club Plus.

Speaker 1 Y'all, the episode on The Happening just went up. You're currently in the middle of your M-Night Shyamalan season.
That has been a good one. You're on the next one.
I am on the next one.

Speaker 1 The next one to be released. And then Jackie.
Jack is on the curve. The next one to be recorded.
Yeah. And then the one, right, after that.
Yeah, I was on After Earth. So

Speaker 1 you can listen to me talk about my good friend Jaden Smith.

Speaker 1 Uh, get ready for a deep cut. It is a deep cut.
All right, yeah,

Speaker 1 please go leave us reviews. I think we're out of time today, otherwise, I would go find just a review to read.
I'll read one next time. Read two next time to make it up.
I'm making a note right now:

Speaker 1 read two next time, okay?

Speaker 1 Uh, Wheelbex, we will be back soon.

Speaker 1 Until then,

Speaker 1 to be continued. Good night, everybody.
Bye. Look out for the killer.