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Episode 90 - E3 2019

Eclectic Gamers Podcast·podcast_episode·2h 28m·analyzed·Jun 16, 2019
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.033

TL;DR

E3 2019 recap discussing Stadia, Microsoft showcase, and major game announcements.

Summary

This is a casual E3 2019 recap podcast episode from Eclectic Gamers featuring hosts Tony and Dennis with guests Eric and Mike. The discussion covers major E3 announcements including Google Stadia, Microsoft's presentation, and notable game reveals like Cyberpunk 2077 (with Keanu Reeves), The Outer Worlds, Jedi Fallen Order, and Tales of Berseria. The hosts provide opinions on hardware, streaming platforms, and upcoming games with varying levels of enthusiasm and technical detail.

Key Claims

  • Google Stadia requires 25 Mbps for 1080p/30fps 5.1 audio, 35 Mbps for 4K/60fps HDR

    high confidence · Eric discussing official Stadia bandwidth requirements from Google documentation

  • Eric pre-ordered Google Stadia for $130

    high confidence · Eric directly states he pre-ordered the device

  • Cyberpunk 2077 has an April 2020 release date

    high confidence · Hosts discussing the Keanu Reeves announcement and release window at E3

  • Johnny Silverhand is a named character from Cyberpunk universe lore, described as a rock and roll hacker

    high confidence · Hosts discussing Keanu Reeves' character role and his voice work

  • Microsoft Flight Simulator's last release was in 2000

    medium confidence · Hosts discussing the history gap before the new announcement

  • Tales of Berseria is moving to Unreal Engine 4, a graphics upgrade from previous Tales games

    high confidence · Eric discussing the technical improvements in the new Tales game announcement

  • Microsoft acquired Double Fine and is now publishing Psychonauts 2

    high confidence · Hosts discussing the acquisition and its circular relationship with the Psychonauts franchise

  • Jedi Fallen Order features normal stormtroopers dying in one hit from lightsaber strikes

    medium confidence · Tony discussing gameplay mechanics shown in the EA Play presentation

Notable Quotes

  • “They have no common sense. You would think that if you're going to drain 1.25 million gallons of water that has solids in it, you would think to put more than two 8-inch drains inside that entire tank”

    Tony @ Opening segment — Sets humorous, casual tone for the episode with engineering complaint digression

  • “It's a solution, but not to the right problem.”

    Dennis @ Stadia discussion — Succinctly summarizes the fundamental issue with Stadia's market viability given regional connectivity and data cap constraints

  • “It's like Fallout, but in space... it's from Obsidian and Fallout New Vegas is still my favorite of the modern Fallouts”

    Eric @ The Outer Worlds discussion — Explains appeal of The Outer Worlds and establishes credibility of developer pedigree

  • “All to announce a release date almost a year in the future.”

    Tony @ Cyberpunk 2077/Keanu Reeves discussion — Expresses mild disappointment that the major E3 moment was just a release date announcement

  • “Everything about this trailer screamed Shadowrun to me which for cyberpunking is good... that's a good thing because Shadowrun's amazing”

    Eric @ Cyberpunk 2077 discussion — Connects game aesthetic to established cyberpunk reference that conveys quality expectations

  • “I think if my math was right from last year so Microsoft does now have more studios than Sony, yes?”

    Tony @ Microsoft acquisitions discussion — References corporate acquisition strategy and market positioning

  • “They're back for some reason. Honestly, I don't care.”

    Mike @ Battletoads discussion — Expresses apathy toward Battletoads revival despite recognizing the IP

  • “I think that's a perfectly fair thing to say. I think it makes games like Sea of Thieves and State of Decay 2 way more viable than they would be on their own.”

    Dennis — Identifies Game Pass as transformative platform for lesser-performing titles

Entities

TonypersonDennispersonEricpersonMikepersonKeanu ReevespersonCyberpunk 2077gameThe Outer Worldsgame

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Microsoft acquiring studios at rate exceeding Sony's current portfolio expansion

    medium · Tony raises question of whether Microsoft now has more studios than Sony; referenced as relevant competitive positioning metric

  • ?

    community_signal: Cloud gaming market expansion focused on PC expanding Game Pass subscription reach and appeal

    medium · Hosts note Microsoft releases on Game Pass Day One strategy; both classic games (Age of Empires 2 DE, Flight Simulator) and new titles part of lineup strategy

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Battletoads revival abandons original platformer-racing hybrid identity in favor of standard side-scrolling beat-em-up with generic art style

    medium · Mike and others criticize art style as 'terrible'; complaint that what was shown is 'just your normal side-scrolling beat-em-up' rather than what made original distinctive

  • $

    market_signal: Microsoft Game Pass positioned as industry-leading value proposition driving adoption of secondary/marginal titles

    high · Hosts agree Game Pass is 'best deal in gaming'; hosts note it makes games like Sea of Thieves and State of Decay 2 'way more viable than they would be on their own'; Day One releases are key driver

  • ?

    personnel_signal: CD Projekt Red maintaining strong reputation for iterative game quality improvement

    medium · Eric states: 'every game of theirs I have played I feel has been better than the prior game' starting from Witcher 2; establishes track record building confidence in Cyberpunk 2077

Topics

Google Stadia streaming platform viability and limitationsprimaryE3 2019 Microsoft presentation highlights and announcementsprimaryCyberpunk 2077 announcement with Keanu ReevesprimaryGame Pass value proposition and market impactsecondaryEA Play presentation and game announcementssecondaryDouble Fine acquisition by MicrosoftsecondaryCloud gaming infrastructure and regional limitationssecondaryHosts' personal gaming backlogs and recent activitiesmentioned

Sentiment

mixed(0.55)— Hosts are cautiously optimistic about major announcements like Cyberpunk 2077 and appreciate strong Game Pass value, but express skepticism about Stadia's real-world viability, disappointment in Battletoads direction, and general apathy toward several EA announcements. Overall tone is positive toward Microsoft's strategy while being critical of execution in specific areas.

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.446

0:00
Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. Today is Saturday, June 15. This is episode 90. And this is our E3 extravaganza. Wow, that makes it sound exciting. I know. In the E3 extravaganza, would that make it an E4?
0:34
E cubed. What do you multiply E times E times E? What do you get? An engineer. Maybe. Or a physicist. I don't like engineers. Why? They have no common sense. Hmm. You would think. You would think that if you're going to drain 1.25 million gallons of water that has solids in it, You would think to put more than two 8-inch drains inside that entire tank and maybe slope something to one of the drains. You would think. That's too hard for engineers. They're just too dumb.
1:07
But to the important stuff, because I can rant about engineers forever, it's E3. It's me, Tony. It's you, Dennis. That's right. I'm Dennis. Is it just us? It's just us. Oh, that's a change. We have a live studio audience. That's what we're doing. We are joined like we normally are on our E3 episodes by guests. That's right. And we'll have our guests introduce themselves so that people can identify their names with their voices. So we'll probably start with Eric because he's furthest from me. As you said, I'm Eric. And he's furthest from him. And Eric's been on E3 episodes before. I have. Have you been on all of them? I think so.
1:48
I think so. Well, I know one who hasn't been on all the E3 episodes. Yes, I'm Mike, and I'm back. I was on the first two, but last year I had family obligations I had to go to. Family. And this year I couldn't get a quick ride to St. Louis for the Blues celebration, so I'm here. Why couldn't you get a, I mean, I mean. We have times that they bought people down. You get on the train. Fifteen hours later, you're in St. Louis. Well, that would have been hard when I had to work this morning, so. There's always something serious.
@ Game Pass discussion
Google Stadia
product
Jedi Fallen Ordergame
Minecraft Dungeonsgame
Double Finecompany
Microsoftcompany
Tales of Berseriagame
Game Passproduct
Psychonauts 2game
CD Projekt Redcompany
EA Playevent
Forza Horizon 4game
Battletoadsgame
Microsoft Flight Simulatorgame
  • ?

    product_strategy: Microsoft leveraging absence of Sony and Activision presentations to capture exclusive announcements like Tales of Berseria

    high · Tony notes Tales announcement wouldn't have happened on Microsoft stage if Sony had been present; hosts recognize Microsoft advantage from competitor absence

  • ?

    technology_signal: Cloud gaming platforms like Stadia solve a solution for the wrong problem given regional bandwidth caps, throttling, and infrastructure limitations across major markets and rural America

    high · Dennis and Eric discuss how data caps and ISP throttling in urban centers and Australia/Europe make Stadia impractical despite bandwidth availability; rural America excluded entirely

    • 2:26
    Well, I already took off two days this week so I could watch each of your stuff. Oh, wow. I've got that. I didn't come off work. I went on a trip and did all this stuff. I went home and watched everything on YouTube at two times speed unless they got something to interest me. I mostly on written summaries because I ended up missing so much of the video content. And I didn't go back because I was like, nope, I got other stuff I have to do. So, I guess, I mean, normally we go ahead and do introductions at this point, and then I don't have any planned pinball news to discuss. We'll just go right into E3.
    3:00
    Eric, what's happened in the last year? Well, as far as games go, I have played more Fortnite than I ever thought I would.
    3:15
    So sad. He's even flossing. He's sitting in a chair and flossing. I'm flossing right now. All that practice.
    3:24
    That's your intro. Fortnite. That's my intro. I am a Fortnite representative here. Okay. There's tons of news at E3 for that. Trust me. Okay. I'm full of trust.
    3:36
    Yeah, other than that, I just have a tremendous backlog of everything. And I occasionally pluck away at it.
    3:47
    Occasionally pluck away at Zachtronics games. Wow. That's probably exactly what Nick Baltridge says every day he gets up. Fortnite and Dectronics? Well, I know he hates Fortnite, but having a backlog and plucking away at stuff, that sounds like him. They've already had their E3 episode come out on Gaming On 10. Really? They have. I used that as part of my training. Didn't know what to say for this one. So, I'm going to sound real smart. All right. Next intro, Mike. So, what's happened in the last two years?
    4:18
    Stuff. So, I mean, I have a backlog as well. Somehow I still haven't played Titanfall 2. Oh, that was fun. Good story. Yeah. I have RPGs that I bought on sale on PlayStation.
    4:33
    JRPGs? Yeah. And I have not played them yet. So, yeah. Because new stuff always comes out, and I'm always about the new and shiny. Except when it's Titanfall, apparently. I guess. Or did you get that well after it was released? Well, I got that well after it was released. Everything that is, like, in my backlog of stuff is like, oh, that's on sale, I'll buy it. Or, ooh, I got that for Christmas or my birthday or something. So it's like, you should have, like, Don from Game of Thrones. Always have to get on sale, buy it, buy it, buy it. Well, I didn't even go into my movie backlog. When I got a stack of DVDs sitting in my room that's probably about two, three feet high. We haven't started the Eclectic Movie Podcast yet. We feared to do it because we know it would be way more popular. It would be so much fun, though. It would be. But speaking of fun, what's happened for the last two weeks for you, Tony? I bought a metal straw. I actually bought an eight-pack of metal straws so we can save the environment. My daughter wanted metal straws. I'm like, okay, sure, whatever. It's a cheap eight-pack. We'll buy them. I have this concern of chipping my teeth on those. I understand because it scares me every time. On the other hand, really cold liquids through a metal straw feels weird. but yeah no I mean I work until July I don't have another day off this month so yay I've been playing Rule the Waves and it's gotten memetic at my house it has become a meme my daughter walks by she glances over when I'm playing it she can now recognize enough of the UI to tell that I'm at war and who I'm at war with and she's decided that France is terrible because they won't give me peace for more than like eight months before they declare war on me again. I don't understand. I think their entire Navy, I killed like 40,000 of their people. They give me six months, and then they declare war on me again. I don't know. I don't get it.
    6:33
    It's very different from reality is what you're saying. Yes, yes. Well, I have been working as well, so I have a big conference this upcoming week that will keep me busy. And then last week I was out for another, it was called a learning community. So I think I learned some stuff. I learned that I really don't care for travel, though the flight to Washington is only two hours and 10 minutes.
    7:00
    So I forgot how quick it can be, but then I spent another two hours at the airport. Of course. So Millipede is gone. Yes. I traded Millipede. That happened. that was almost set on our last episode. You were trading text messages during the last episode. Millipede is gone. Buck Rogers is now in instead. So I don't really have any more room in the garage until some stuff is delivered. But you said that three machines ago. I say a lot of things that may or may not be true. I just don't. So anyway, I have finally, now that I'm back from the first trip and before I go to the second trip, today was work on pins day. So I've got like a lot of the parts that I'd been ordering had arrived. Pretty much everything I've ordered is now installed on games. Pretty much. I still have a few pieces that I haven't done. And I realized that I still needed more pieces, so of course, another order and all my clever planning to save on shipping is out the window. It happens every game. It doesn't matter if it's one game or six. I always need to do multiple orders. It's almost impossible to get it right the first time. Have you tried to trick this? Oh, I wrote them all out. it's just that eventually it's like, oh, you find out something later. I did. Oh.
    8:14
    No, I did the list. I check it all off. I feel really good every time I mark it down. I find the cheapest place. But then, inevitably, it's like, oh, wait, this broke after I took it off. Sort of stuff. Yeah. I mean, I did forget to put a couple of things on the list, but then I had other things that started to fail. Some of which I caught in time, and some I didn't. But, enough of the finer things. Yeah, let's get to stuff people actually care about. That's right. They care about E3, and that's why we're here. So that's what we're going to talk about. Now, in terms of our notes, I have a listing of all of the shows, I'm air quoting, the shows that happened. Some of which we may not have any comments on, because some of these I would never have identified as real shows to talk about anyway. I didn't even know some of those happened. I didn't either. We're going to run through it. We're going to do it chronologically, like we typically do. And then we will, like we tried to do last year, just talk about the things we want to talk about. We won't run through every single item. And maybe this one finally, thanks to there not being Activision and not being Sony, can be done in under three hours. Maybe. It's a dream I have. It's a dream. So speaking of something that I have no dream for, the Google Stadia Connect. Oh, we're going to start with Stadia. I was going to make a joke. Starting with Stadia. We're going to start with Stadia. We are. Which, Eric, you're probably the only one who cares. I have a feeling. I know I don't. I did pre-order. Of course you did. Because it's Google, so of course you did. No, not because it's Google. It was $130. You see, now he's like Nick again. Nick Baldrige again. Everything Google is is blessed. Everything by everyone else is evil.
    9:59
    Go on, though. Tell us about how low bandwidth we need for this thing. So according to their documents, it is, I believe, 25 on the low end and 35 on the high end. So 25 for, or there might be a tier lower than 25 for 720p stereo, but I think it's 25 for 1080p, 30, 5.1, and then 35 for 4K, 60 with HDR, and the full-on thing. So, now I have, I was in the Project Stream test beta, I don't know what to call it, the preview, if you will. And so I played around with it a little bit. They had a, it was set up for Assassin's Creed Odyssey, and it played fine. Now, to be fair, I'm on Google Fiber, so 35 is a distant memory. But, and at the same time, I also don't have a 4K TV. So, you know, the high end of this doesn't mean anything to me significantly. But I think it's interesting technology. It does work.
    11:11
    Like I said, I've seen it work. And the entry fee is low enough that it's worth trying. And worst case scenario, I end up with a Chromecast Ultra that I can watch videos on anyway. And hope you don't have data caps. I don't have data caps. That's the big thing. I mean, it seems like, okay, it's going to be good for, you know, the few random people in the U.S. who actually have good Internet. But for a lot of people, it's not even going to be. Even the low end is beyond what they're looking for. Rural America is out entirely. Well, and here's the thing is a lot of the major urban centers are out because most of the providers there have pretty hefty data caps where they won't charge you more, but they will cut your speeds to nothing when you cross them.
    12:02
    I also thought, ironically, one place where you would think it would be able to thrive because they have the infrastructure for Japan, it's not going to be available there, by the way, I heard. I didn't see the full list of countries, but there's a list of 14 countries that it's going to roll out to, but not initially, but that's typical for Google. They roll out for the U.S., and then they slowly roll out for everywhere else. Because you would think Japan and Korea would be like target, big major targets.
    12:28
    Yeah, I mean, I think the bandwidth capping is also an issue in Australia and in many European countries. So even if they have the bandwidth, the throttling issue, the capping issue is going to be a problem. So the bottom line is that this is a solution, but not to the right problem. Right, well I mean they can't fix fundamental problems that have nothing to do with them and it's not as though Google is the only one going down this route either No, there was a lot of discussion at I believe part of the Microsoft presser as well about their new cloud stuff and yeah I get it, that's a direction that companies want to go I don't know my takeaway was that Baldur's Gate 3 There was that. That was interesting. Everything else seems like a has-been game. I don't see a killer app for this, so I don't think it moves units. Right. Well, I think that's part of the reason why it was kind of a low-key thing, is that they don't have that killer app yet.
    13:34
    And, yeah, I'm not, at the same time, I'm not interested in rebuying all my games again on another platform, especially considering that they're just PC games again. Just. Now, let me connect to the Steam library to this, and it's a game changer. because I don't have a high-end PC.
    13:50
    Why not? You don't have the time. Well, then, speaking of time, let's go ahead and transition over into EA Play then. And the reason why I think that it's important to transition in the context of time is that never before, I think, have we witnessed a company take three hours to speak about six games.
    14:11
    I did not see the EA Play one. I watched part of it because there were a couple things I wanted to see you want to see are they making a Madden yeah I saw one thing about the Madden game and that is apparently Patrick Mahomes is OP like seriously OP is that just reality that was my reaction we in Kansas City know because we witnessed he almost took the fact that we had no defense and still let it go all the way But, I'm assuming Jedi Fallen Order is the game you were really interested in. That's a game that I've not really seen negative response to, either. No, I mean, the only, I guess, downside that I've seen people comment about is it looks a lot like your standard action-adventure type game nowadays. You know, like your Tomb Raiders, your Uncharted, things like that. But, it's like, that's not really a bad thing. It reminded me when I saw it of the, what was those old Jedi games? Were you the Sith? The Force Unleashed? Force Unleashed. Those were a little bit more extreme in how ridiculous they got with Force powers.
    15:26
    You don't think they're all just ripping a Star Destroyer out of orbit is normal? Yeah. Well, but that was counterweight there was your Nerf lightsaber. True. Well, this one, at least from what I've seen, normal stormtroopers die in one hit. They don't dismember them, but I just assume that's because they didn't want a mature rating. Well, yeah, which makes sense. But, I mean, normal stormtroopers, one swing was taking them down. As it should. Yeah. And, I mean, they look like he has some interesting force powers, like the whole, like, you can, like, freeze someone in place for a bit. And I saw one little clip from the stream that they showed up through the level. they showed him do that to someone while he was firing so the blaster bolt was stuck there kind of like it was in the Force Awakens but then he force pulled the stormtrooper to him and moved him in front of the blaster bolt which just seems mean but it was also very cool why'd you shoot yourself?
    16:24
    I'll permit dialogue, I'm sure you can unlock with a $5 payment into Jedi Fallen Loot Crate um Apex Legends. I guess it had a new character. Are people still playing Apex Legends? Apparently they are. They are. It dropped off pretty hard, but it's still maintaining in the profitable range. Eric, did you flirt with Apex Legends and then go back to Fortnite in your one year summary of Fortnite? No, I haven't played Apex Legends, nor have I played PUBG. Okay. So you're very loyal to your Fortnite.
    17:00
    Again, we don't have the time. We don't? How do you want to keep this under three hours? Okay. Because that's a three-minute mission by itself. Let's see. They're a new Sims game. Does anyone here care? Does anybody, anyone? I have never played Sims. I used to work with some. Like, who loves The Sims? There's one person.
    17:20
    There's like Aunt Jean somewhere who still loves The Sims and it's the most important thing. It's the only thing that's a real game. So is it like an actual Sims 5? No, The Sims 4. Oh. There was more new content. They go to, let's see, my summary information here says that they go to an island and it has cabanas and mermaids and something that's jet skis but not called jet skis so they don't have to pay jet ski. Right.
    17:48
    So there's that. Battlefield V, new maps. Battlefield V I've enjoyed. I've enjoyed it more than 1, even though I really respected the idea of 1. Battlefield 1 is the one in World War 1. Right. Battlefield 5 is back in World War 2. where it should be. Yeah. I played it a bit. It's fun. I kind of prefer the modern ones more at this point, but at least with World War II, you get weapon choices that make sense. Yeah. Like, there's diversity. The new maps look like they had a nice diverse set of maps. Some were infantry-based, some were vehicle-based. They got one coming out later in the year that's supposed to be basically the World War II version of Operation Metro, which is like, okay, I just hope it's not a big bottleneck like Metro was.
    18:34
    He's referring to a battlefield map for those who might be thinking like Metro Exodus. That would be it. No, that would be it. Battlefield 4, I think it was. Was it 4 or 3? I think it was 3. It probably was 3. I think the name of the map was Metro 20. It was Operation Metro.
    18:53
    It was like everyone followed the way. It was Metro in DC. Just like the Metro. Yes, and as much of a bottleneck as the real life Metro is. Yeah, and they're supposed to be adding Pacific Theater stuff starting in the fall, I think. That's cool. Okay. I've been waiting for Battlefield and the Zulu War. Everybody's got single-shot trapdoors. I'm sure that's a... Maybe after Battlefront 12 that'll be when it comes out. You know, DICE was busy.
    19:24
    So I guess now we can go ahead and transition to the I guess the first big presentation, which was the Microsoft presentation. Obviously, no Sony this year, no Activision this year. Sony being very notable as being one of the three big hardware players at this point.
    19:41
    Does anyone want to start with a particular game or hardware? I mean, Microsoft was, I think their usual about 90 minutes. Yeah. And. Well, the first, I think it was the first thing they showed. What was it called? I'm looking through here. The Outer World. Yeah, the very first thing they showed was The Outer World was an extended new Outer World trailer. Which, it looks awesome because, you know, why wouldn't it be?
    20:11
    It's like Fallout, but in space. Well, yeah, and it's because it's, I mean, it's from Obsidian and Fallout New Vegas is still my favorite of the modern Fallouts, so. I've got high hopes for that one that looked good I have to admit as impressed as I was with Forza Horizon 3 having when they added the hot wheels the Lego I didn't expect they had the car they got me, I thought it was a real car too and then it's a Lego car they had a lot of smoke around that they did Yes, yes, yes. But it was always a running joke for years that Microsoft always brings out some super hot sports car to promote whatever the latest Forza is. Here's my actual notes on it.
    21:03
    Hey, look, they brought out another car on stage. Hey, what? The car's Lego. What the hell? So that was fun.
    21:15
    Forza Horizon 4 is a lot of fun. Little Life Play the video is very good. so will I get this? I don't know. I ended up not buying the Hot Wheels one because I moved on to other games and didn't want to invest in DLC at that time but maybe Cyberpunk 2077. Of course. Highlight of the conference for the attendees at least was the Keanu going out there being John Wick with them He was being Keanu He was very charming Winning over the crowd and then yell stuff out and he'd yell stuff back to them. All to announce a release date almost a year in the future. I thought it was going to be like really close.
    21:56
    So, let's get when this release date is, April. Okay. Well, it's less than a year. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, that was, a lot of people were, that was game of the show for them last E3. And I mean, it's Project Red. Right. And they're going to hopefully do it right. so it looks good every game of theirs I have played I feel has been better than the prior game and I got in with them as of Witcher 2 so and this screamed, everything about this trailer screamed Shadowrun to me which for cyberpunking is good that's good, that's a good thing because Shadowrun's amazing yeah, no they've definitely got the they look right, my understanding is Keanu is not just playing some random person in there. He is playing John Silverhand, I believe is the name, which is an actual named character in the Cyberpunk universe. So Cyberpunk, they're adapting a tabletop role-playing game into this in a similar way that The Witcher isn't adapted from a Polish series of books.
    23:08
    Okay. So it's not an original IP for CD Projekt Red. But so Keanu Reeves is playing a specific character from that lore. Okay. Which is a good fit for him, from what I understand, is that Johnny Silverhand is a rock and roll hacker. Rock and roll. I did hear that they've already had him record a significant amount of dialogue for that character. It sounds like it will have to be perhaps a major quest giver or something along those lines, so it's involved heavily in the story that you're playing. so there's that so obviously that was a highlight the new Minecraft Dungeons which looks like Minecraft no Minecraft Diablo you think so yes very much Minecraft Diablo that's everything I've read or heard about it is yeah I got a Loot Crawler vibe from it so yeah every single weapon or item that you pick up has a little story with it and all that aww there's nothing wrong with that those are good games I like For a lot of parents, it is literally, hey, look, another game I can play with my kids. Right. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's perfectly fine. What do you all think about Microsoft acquiring Double Fine? I think it's a good fit. It is an interesting full circle, because Microsoft was originally publishing Psychonauts 2. And then they bailed on it. And then Majesco picked it up. And then Majesco was acquired by a biotech company in order to acquire their NADDAQ symbol. And then, I'm not kidding, and Majesto's NASDAQ symbol, by the way, was cool.
    24:48
    And then, who was publishing Psychonauts 2 most recently? I think they were self-publishing and funding through FIG, and now Microsoft has acquired them and are publishing it again. That's right. And so, as you spoiled, Psychonauts 2 is a thing. Yes. It's coming. Oh, it's, yeah. We promise. That's not news. Does anyone care? No. I've never played Psychonauts I've heard good things about it but I've never played it I have played lots of Double Fine games I like Double Fine games I can hope that this acquisition means that someday we'll see a Costume Quest 3 Yes I would really like to see Costume Quest 3 Does this I think if my math was right from last year so Microsoft does now have more studios than Sony, yes? I think so. I think in terms of numbers, yeah, especially when you consider... What other terms would there be?
    25:47
    Well, I mean, you... I'm just kidding. I'm exploring what are the other ways... Qualitative versus quantitative. Okay. So, you may have been implying more... AAAs. Yeah, more AAA studios. I see. Okay. Yeah, I don't know. That doesn't exactly sit at the same level as, like, a Ninja Theory or a... what's the studio that did Spider-Man? In Columbia? Yeah, which I don't know. Does Sony even own them?
    26:15
    I'm honestly not sure. I don't think so, because they did that... They put... Sunset Overdrive was theirs. Yeah, but at the time, Sony didn't. But there may have been... I just figured they just tried to exclusive deals. They struck a deal with Microsoft for Sunset, and then they struck a deal with Sony for Spider-Man. Yeah, yeah, that could be. Which I have not played either. My understanding is both of those games are very good. Yes.
    26:40
    But Sony came out on top with Spider-Man. Though I guess it's got a lot of the mechanics that made Sunset popular. Refined into the spider.
    26:51
    Insomniac is a privately owned company. Oh no, we don't use the internet cheat. We just have to will this. You'd think with four people someone would know. I did. I looked it up. Thus I know. Alright. Battletoads.
    27:07
    Why? I was really excited when I heard that music. Like, I know that. That's the pause music from Battletoads. And then they showed it, and I'm like, that's not Battletoads. That's dumb. It was like Battletoad Crashers. That's what I thought. Yeah, it has a very behemoth feel to it. Yeah. But not, it doesn't seem like.
    27:26
    Battletoads has brawling mechanics, but it is not a brawler, which is what that was. That also is very much a platformer race. It's everything. They had the Turbo 2 thing or whatever. Do you think that they didn't show enough of the gameplay and that stuff's actually in the game? Maybe, but the problem is what they showed... I don't like the art style for one. Yeah. It was terrible.
    27:51
    But what they showed, I mean, it looked like just your normal side-scrolling beat-em-up. Yeah. I'm going to delve back straight into my stream of consciousness notes, because I was doing stream of consciousness notes while I was watching all of these. For Battletoads, they're back for some reason.
    28:10
    Honestly, I don't care. I remember playing this game, but I don't care. I loved the original. I played it so much. It took me off and on playing that game for like a year to be able to finally beat it.
    28:24
    That's a game I don't think I ever cared to beat. it never caught me that hard well let's see I was thinking while we're talking about since we're on something that nobody cares about and it's not important do we really need Age of Empires 2 definitive edition remastered for 4K really people really love that game Age of Empires is a pretty popular RTS I thought it was a smart one Well, I enjoyed the game, but the thing is, there was a full remaster for that like three years ago, I thought. I don't think it was a full... I don't know. I don't think it was a full fledge. I think it was more of a... Just to sort of run on modern stuff. Yeah, that kind of thing. It was more of a re-release than a remaster. Right. Well, would you... I mean, in a blast from the past vibe as well, Microsoft Flight? Flight Simulator. That, I understand. I did too. when was the last one? 2000, I think. Yes. And people still play that. It was the one free-to-play one that they had. Yes, there was that. It was a Games for Windows Live. That and Age of Empires were at the same time for Games for Windows Live. So I think it might have also been released on Steam, but I could be confusing things. And that Age of Empires game wasn't like the Age of Empires 2. It was really similar. The only one I ever played was really similar. Oh, really? No, don't get me wrong. I used to do custom maps and play... I loved Age of Empires 2 all the time. I loved it. It's one of those games that looking back on it to me is like, do I want to play Warcraft 2? Not really. I mean, it was a fine game back then. Yeah.
    30:10
    I wouldn't really want to play it now. I think both of these announcements are very much shoring up their lineup for Game Pass for PC.
    30:20
    Which would make sense. Yeah. And at the price point they launched it at, that has seemed to have been received very well from what I've read.
    30:29
    I've considered it. Yeah. I'm actually in a weird position where the Game Pass for PC is not of interest to me because I have two years paid up of Game Pass for Xbox. So I would have to pay 10 extra bucks a month to get it. I can't just add the $5 like I could with the Game Pass. Right. Plus time paid up a while for Xbox Live, so the $15 is a really good deal, though. Yeah. They're really trying to make it a track, and so many of these Microsoft's published games coming out day one on it. That's what's driving a lot of people, and that the price, especially we'll get to Ubisoft's price point later, but the price makes it right. I mean, it's... A lot of people say it's the best deal in gaming, and nothing has changed I would agree with that. To usurp that title. Yeah, no, I think that's a perfectly fair thing to say. I think it makes games like Sea of Thieves and State of Decay 2 way more viable than they would be on their own. Yes, I've heard, man, someone may have been joking that with adding PC that there was probably a huge surge, or there was a huge surge in the Sea of Thieves player base already. It could be. So, any thoughts on Dragon Ball Z Kakarot? yay for staying in Freeza Saga again? Again. Yeah. That's not our favorite saga. That was my whole thought when I watched it is if the actual engine, the actual gameplay is fun, it could be good, but I don't really care that much. And I'm a huge Dragon Ball fan. I've got a shelf of Dragon Ball figures. But I just, it's if that's all it is, I don't care that much. Yeah. So.
    32:20
    Yeah, Batman and the Man-Toy are a couple things, but the one thing that I was really excited about was the new Tales game. I was going to bring that one up because I think that was one of the few things that probably really surprised people seeing it on the Microsoft stage. Well, they didn't have a Sony stage. Exactly. And that was to Microsoft's advantage for a lot of the AAA stuff. But also just the fact that it's actually coming to Xbox. It is. I mean, other than Tales of Vesperia, both versions of it, Microsoft hasn't gotten any Tales games. Right. And the Tales games are, like, huge. Yeah, I mean, they're not Final Fantasy huge, obviously, but I look forward to the Tales games. I don't really play Final Fantasy games. I know people who don't like JRPGs, but play Tales games. I think it's because Tales really was a very action-oriented RPG before a lot of other JRPGs did it. That was always my takeaway. Right. That's the reason I really got into it when I started playing them. But this one, they're finally moving to Unreal Engine 4, which is good, because Tales of Games, I mean, they never looked bad, but they were never graphically impressive. They had the best cinematics. Well, yeah, but I mean, you're getting one of the best videos in Japan at Duo. Yeah, because, I mean, what was it? I think it was Vesperia, where your first, like, 45 minutes of gameplay was, like, seven and a half minutes of gameplay, and the rest of it was the cinematics. That's a JRPG trope Oh yeah So yeah it looked cool It's been a while since I mean the last JRPG I played was Final Fantasy 15 in my case But Let's see what else Gears they covered the Gears game At least the pop and the main game Right the pop and the main game Now the main game thing started Something that continued throughout E3 on every stage that actually got to the point where it was nauseating for me. How much money did people dump to get Terminator buy-ins to everything?
    34:23
    Yeah. My Twitch ads lately have been the Terminator in Gears. When I was watching Overwatch League last night,
    34:32
    bank of eight ads, three of them are Terminator. Right. It's everywhere. And I, it got to the point where it was just like, okay, now, it's like, I went from not being interested in Terminator, but hey, maybe I'll watch it when it comes out on video, to screw it at this point. I don't, no, you don't deserve it.
    34:55
    But going back to Fear is Crime for a second, one thing I think is odd, this game comes out in, I think, September. We really have not seen that much of it, though. No, I thought there would be a lot more gameplay on the, and actually, that would be probably one of my bigger criticisms of Microsoft. While they really stressed and they did get through showing 60 games, they didn't provide much depth on any of them. And a lot of them were not gameplay funded. Nope. A lot were cinematic. And that's been a gripe of mine. That was a big complaint I had with Sony in the past. There was a lot of cinematic stuff like last year. And it's just like no, I want to see... It should not be just a train of trailers. That's what the Game Awards show is. The train of trailers within awards no one cares about. I just, a little bit more like, well, like what the PC Gaming Show apparently did. A lot of Q&A would have been appreciated. At least for a couple of the big ones. Yeah, because, I mean, usually at least for things like Forza, they always have gameplay. Right. And they, yeah. And I remember when Forza 4 came, when they made the Forza 4, the big Forza 4, I think it was last year. They showed like seven or eight minutes of like multiplayer gameplay. Yeah.
    36:13
    Now I do like it when they show like recorded gameplay. You don't need to bring someone out on stage to live play it in a scripted way. The only instance they did of that was to show off that cloud tech. The Project X cloud? Yes, which I didn't like because I didn't understand anything they were saying. It felt like they had a lot of buzzwords that sounded really good about how their code would do code stuff, and it was going to be codey, and then look at how great it was streaming to her phone. I have no context of the bandwidth in that facility. I have no context of how this is supposed to be backwards compatible with a bunch of software and work with other services, but I guess Google's thing is going to work with it, I guess? No? I don't know. No you saying the Bethesda Oh that the one Okay Sorry I jumped Oh yeah yeah yeah You talking about Orion Okay Yeah okay yeah Sorry I was confused because I didn remember that part No. Now, Microsoft's thing is going to benefit Sony because they're entering that MOU with them to start using xCloud to drive their streaming, I thought. I didn't think it was that Sony's using xCloud. I thought Sony was just agreeing to use Azure. Okay, maybe. So Azure is Microsoft's cloud platform. apparently I don't know anything about the cloud stuff. It is neither. Clouds are fluffy. I guess. So, whatever. I mean, it's one of those things, all the cloud streaming stuff I like on paper.
    37:49
    Around, you know, again, no caps around here. We don't have exclusive franchises in the Kansas City area for Internet, so a lot of this stuff will work here. I think the only other big thing then, And Halo ties to this, of course, is the Project Scarlet. Because Halo, as I did predict on our last episode, it is a launch title for the new Xbox. I was wrong, though. They are yet again targeting a holiday 2020, whereas I thought they would be able to try and put it out earlier in the year like Nintendo did with their Switch. Because I've been assuming that Sony's PS5 will also be holiday 2020. given that all the leaked stats I'm seeing say that these machines are basically the same machine.
    38:40
    Thoughts on products? I mean, I haven't sat down and done a really close comparison. Some of this stuff, again, it was like, why are they talking about 120 FPS and 8K resolution capabilities? You don't even have 50% household uptake on 4K yet. People are still buying DVDs nowadays more than they do Blu-rays. I think the key takeaway from that is that they said it is four times as powerful as the Xbox One X so is that what they meant by current gen? yeah they were specifically talking about the Xbox One X and it's four times as powerful as that so however many teraflops that the Xbox One X I think it was four teraflops Xbox One X oh quadruple 16 teraflops that's a lot of flop that is many many floating operations so um Yeah, it was a lot of buzzwords. I thought they'd show a little something with it, other than just people talking about how they love... Right, they showed one scene of, like, some deer, and then they showed Halo 5, and neither of those are particularly compelling. But at the same time, it's hard to make a case for something like that, because you can't even make a case for HDR on a stream... Exactly. ...that people are going to be watching on their phone, or they're going to be watching on their television, which doesn't have that capability. So it's really hard to show off that kind of stuff. So I think the only real takeaway you can... Well, so the four times thing, and then both they and Sony are getting in front of, we want to kill load times. Right.
    40:09
    I think that talk was good. They seem to have an idea of something that is an SSD, but something more? Well, it's kind of like they were basically going to use the SSD as RAM. Virtual RAM? It doesn't make any sense. because an SSD is way slower than RAM. Yeah. So there was that statement, and then there was another statement where someone said the SSD and the solid-state drive. Yeah. They were two separate things, which that's what SSD stands for. Right.
    40:39
    I mean, virtual, given the price of RAM, I would think, why not just put in more RAM if that's what you want? Well, an SSD is way cheaper than RAM. And maybe that's the, I mean, using virtual RAM on an SSD is a lot faster than the old days when we were doing virtual RAM on hard drives. Right. So, I mean, there will be an improvement compared to the current generation if they're currently doing that with the hard drive space for some of their load. They might be talking about something similar to Intel has a technology called Optane that is kind of halfway between NFSD and RAM. They tend to be very small in the, like, I want to say 30 gigabyte range. but it is faster than an SSD but slower than RAM. So there may be something that they're positioning in there. Obviously they're not using Intel Tech because they are partnering with AMD. And the reason I bristled a little bit about you saying that the hardware is the same as the PS5 or whatever Sony ends up calling that is that they specifically made the statement that they co-developed this processor with AMD. And that surprised me because I had originally heard that they were using the same processors. So maybe that was not a true... Again, a lot of these were purportedly used. It will be interesting to see what actual CPU the PS5 is relying on, because I did think they were going to be identical. Both by AMD, both the same chip, a slight variant off of a common PC. Yeah, I think they're both Zen 2 architecture and Navi, which I think is the... Hello, Puzzle! We're not that Navi. I think it's actually named after the Avatar stuff.
    42:29
    So it might actually be Navi. Oh. Well, I guess Navi was Navi. I guess maybe we never actually heard her name said. So, I don't know. Anyway, any disappointments? Or anything to add?
    42:43
    Teddy's like, there's lots of disappointments with this console trash. But no, actually, there were one, two, three things that I actually was interested in that I wanted to touch real quick in Microsoft.
    42:57
    One was the 12 Minutes. Yeah, kind of a Grand Hogsday-ish little thriller, murder thing. It looked pretty cool. It looked cooler to me than the Groundhog Day game that Betheth is working on. Yes, it looked way cooler than that. I thought that was a Sony thing no it's is it a Bethesda studio that's working yeah that was on the Bethesda stage but normally I don't like Groundhog State concepts so I don't know if it would be my story right I don't know but it looked interesting it did because of the sort of mystery aspect exactly so yes that's a good one to point out there is a at Giant Bomb about two years ago they sat down with the developer of that and went over that game and it looks very different in this new trailer, but if you want to get kind of a better feel for the concept of it, it's pretty interesting in that the 12 minutes refers to the time loop. It is a 12-minute time loop. I thought it was. It's not like a whole day kind of thing.
    44:08
    And that through gameplay you can learn things. So that trailer didn't do a great job of showing that. Like, they kind of hinted at it by him saying, you know, you already gave me this gift kind of thing.
    44:24
    So it was a really fascinating game when they showed it off like two years ago, and then it just sort of dropped off the radar. And so I'm excited to see it come out because it looked really interesting back then. Okay. Tony, you had another game you wanted to discuss. To bring you Phantasy Star Online with all, or two, with all content free to play in spring. Yeah, I was going to bring that up. I remember they started showing the trailer for that and I'm like, oh, I think they started online too, but surely it's not. That was my thought as well. Weren't they supposed to do that years ago? Sega has had that out in Japan since, like, what, 2010? Something like that. And they announced it for a U.S. release, but then it never happened. Yeah. There were ways to play it that involved modded versions of the client, and there is an English version of it that was released in some other territory, and it was, yeah, it was a thing. But also notable about that is that it specifically mentions Azure in that trailer. So maybe they made some sort of a deal to host it on that. But it didn't say xCloud, So I doubt they're planning on streaming it, but that would be another option. Well, I think the Switch version in Japan is streamed. Right. Yeah, I have heard something about that as well.
    45:50
    But I think that Phil Spencer also said it will be coming to other things as well. So it's not. Yeah. It's launching, I think, on Xbox, but then it's coming out on PC, and it sounds like it will eventually hit PS4. It'll be on your phone. It'll be on your left ear. Time exclusive. Yeah.
    46:07
    Typical for Microsoft. and the last thing that I really wanted to touch on was Elden Ring don't really know anything about it, I didn't think the trailer showed anything other, the only important thing about it is who's working on it it's Hidateke Miyazaki who is known for you know, Dark Souls and Armored Core and this and that Bloodborne, yeah Bloodborne, Dark Souls again and all that and George R.R. Martin yeah, when I was seeing it At first I thought it was another Lord of the Rings game. Forging a ring and everything. It's literally about a ring. Yeah. I think Martin was borrowing a little close from the source material there. I'll go ahead and give you a warning, Dennis. Go ahead and grab your pad to write down a time stamp. Oh my gosh. Going stream of conscious again. Put out the next f***ing book.
    46:59
    But whatever. It works. My only thing that I really want from this game is I want there to be like 50 main characters and like three survive.
    47:11
    That'll make it feel real. It's not real clear how involved George R. R. Martin is. I don't know. He could be one of those. He sat down and had a meeting with them and been like, well, wouldn't it be nice if your world had this thing in it? This full on could be like the Tom Clancy thing, or it's George R. R. Martin's Elmerang. It's Tom Clancy's taco drive-thru simulator. I mean, that's full on what it could be at this point. but I just it could be interesting I like the Armored Core games I don't really care for Dark Souls that much but I always liked Armored Core games so we'll see I've just done wrong with the Dark Souls games they're just not my cup of tea it may not be exactly what those were very atmospheric moody, difficult to navigate and then poorly programmed so it's hard and they act like it was a big challenge for them to make it overrated. Very overrated. Yeah. But they look great. There's a lot about Dark Souls I liked, and a lot unfortunately that made it not fun.
    48:15
    I was disappointed only in that I really, really thought that Microsoft would at least tease the new Fable game. It's been long enough. All the sources I'm seeing are that Playground's second team is doing Fable. Right. And they've been at it long enough that they should have at least been able to leak the name.
    48:36
    I mean, I don't know. They were too busy dropping the Blair Witch Project. Oh, gosh. You know, actually, when I was seeing the game, I thought the gameplay looked interesting. I like horror games, though. But then I saw Blair Witch, and I remember going to the theater and how motion sick that made me, and I thought, maybe I'd just throw up. I better not play this, which is unfortunate, because I didn't like the Blair Witch, because I had to keep my eyes shut the last 30 minutes because I was so nauseous. I couldn't watch the rest of the movie. You didn't miss any. Yeah, it happened to Cloverfield, too. I just kidding.
    49:09
    Cloverfield was good. You have to tell me ahead of time. I have to take Dramamine to do those things.
    49:14
    Anything else on Microsoft? A couple three things I wanted to mention. Spiritfarer, which I thought looked really interesting and twee.
    49:25
    Twee. Yeah, there's a lot of hugging in that trailer. Yeah, that's the one I was super cute with dark overtones.
    49:35
    Yeah. I think the woods was the other one that I thought was really interesting looking. That's the one with the two deer. You have a type. You very much have a type.
    49:46
    I just thought it looked really... Ori and the Will of the Creepy. I have played the first Ori game. I haven't played far enough into it to really get a feel for would I want to play another one of those, but I enjoy the time I have with it. But it is, yeah, there is a certain style to those. So I would argue that Ways of the Woods is a very different style than,
    50:08
    I've forgotten the name of that other one. Spiritfarer. Yes. No, no, their art styles were very different, obviously, and it looked like they had a different feel to them. But to me, they still fall into the same kind of archetype. Yeah, no, they're very indie-looking. Yeah. I guess would be fair. The indie archetype. What did you think of Bleeding Edge?
    50:34
    That action game from Ninja Theory It cut me It was a lot like a hero shooter to me It was A melee hero shooter Yeah It looked like it could be fun I don't know It did look like When they sat down with the character designer They were like We need our guys to be as hardcore as possible I need to take my hardcore guy and make him, you know, hardcore because this guy's just not hardcore enough. Also, it feels a bit like it's got a similar art style to Borderlands and Raid. At first I actually thought maybe it was Borderlands and I saw the footage. There's some brain confusion there that I'm not thrilled with. Yeah. And it also has another thing like the Terminator thing that I kind of just kept putting into my notes constantly again is eSports bait and streaming bait. Probably, yeah. But again, I mean, it's like they looked at Overwatch and like, okay, let's do something like that, but we'll make it Melee so it's different. And we'll take the character designs and we won't turn them up to 11. We'll turn them up to like 20.
    51:49
    This one goes all the way to 20. It's published by Microsoft. It's part of Game Pass. Yep. So it's worth noting that, you know, they shut off 60 games, 14 of them were from Xbox Game Studios and 34 of them will be on Game Pass. That's a lot of... Yeah. So, you know, I literally have in my table here a checkbox for whether or not this game is coming on Game Pass. So for a lot of these, I will get to try them out if I feel like it. Because I'm already paid up. If you feel like it. If I feel like it. And have the time. Right. And the energy. Yeah. That's why I don't have Game Pass because I'm like, I have a backlog already. I don't need this. If they put it on sale and it's $5 a month and it's like $60 a year, that's one game. As long as I play two games, I'm ahead, right? Yeah, but it's on sale all the time, so there's never... It's always on sale. It's always going to be a dollar for the first month for people. But only for new. It's only for new people. Exactly. But that's why I don't... I'm in a similar boat as Mike. I just, I don't... I've got other games I still haven't... I haven't finished Red Dead 2. I've got so many games that I've just started and it's not that I don't like them it's just sometimes I come home and it's like this game will take too much energy I'm going to do this thing where I can type some buttons and stare at my Excel spreadsheet for my Excel game for like three hours while I tweak everything and then just walk away from it I actually play very few games a year and it's been that way for years in fact I think it's been that way for a very long time for me. And here's the thing. 100% honesty here. The games I'm playing, the games I'm most interested to play, and the games I spend the most time on. Battletech, which is a nostalgia hit for me, but it's also been out for a year now, and I still play it probably more than almost anything else. Rule the Waves 2, which is just the Rule the Waves, which I've been playing for years and years and years and years, except for now either aircraft carriers, and cold waters.
    53:56
    That is 90% of my gaming. And I've got a stack of PS4 games, and I pull them out every once in a while, and I'll keep working on one, but sometimes I'm just like, I'm just going to go, because all those other games I listed, I can stand up and walk away at any time. It doesn't matter. Yeah.
    54:16
    But I think the moral of the conference was Microsoft should try and get Keanu Reeves every year, just for the crowd reaction. Yeah, that worked really well. One interesting thing about that conference is that it felt very 2006.
    54:29
    Like, there was pyrotechnics, fog, they had a car on stage, they brought out a celebrity. Yeah. They checked all the boxes. Bill Spencer seemed to have wanted to do an old-school E3 presentation. In fact, he tweeted later that he was sad that Activision and Sony weren't there, because he thought it would have made the show better. and I mean yeah this is a weird E3 but I don't know if we're ever going back I think maybe they'll all be weird now until it's dead until it's gone which is going to be forever so anything else on Microsoft I'm done the other interesting thing for me was the Elite Controller Series 2 yeah I'm genuinely interested in that the only possible saving grace for me and the only reason I might consider purchasing one, because I have the original Elite controller, full disclosure, and I really like it, is that there are at least speculation that controllers will work with Scarlet.
    55:34
    Yeah. So if, because I'm even on the edge of do I even want to consider getting an Xbox One X, assuming I also get a 4K TV, or do I just want to wait for Scarlett? And if I'm just waiting for Scarlett, do I really need a new controller if it's not going to be good for the next one? But if it's good for it, then that makes it a different proposition entirely. I mean, when I got my 4K TV, I still wasn't going to go to an X. I was going to wait for the Scarlett until I got robbed. And then it's like, okay, well, I might as well now. But, yeah, same. I don't want a controller for just over a year. I mean, yeah, I'll probably move the 1X into my room or something to use. But it's $150. Exactly. No, it's $180. $180 is like the Series 1. Yeah, the Series 1 was $150. This is more. Oh, it's true.
    56:29
    It's got twice the teraflop in it. The trigger locks are slightly different. The trigger locks are floppier. You have three profiles instead of two, which isn't that big of a deal.
    56:40
    More than one. For some people, it is the adjustable tension thumbsticks. Oh, it looked great. Everything about it, I thought I might be able to wall run as Lucio now. That's what I use to judge all Elite controllers. Because on... But it's so easy. On PC, it is. On console, it's very, very difficult. You're right. It's so easy on PC where first-person shooters are designed to be played. Yes. But some people, most people, play on console. So, play games on console. I don't know if most people play Overwatch on console, but most people play games on consoles. Speaking of consoles, let's console ourselves by finally moving on to the Bethesda E3 press conference. Which can be summed up with, we're sorry.
    57:24
    I'm sorry. That covers a good part of it, yeah. I thought it was really smart of them to acknowledge the issues that people had with Fallout 76. I thought that it was wise that they chose to acknowledge it in the way of apology.
    57:45
    What I think was the mistake is doing it more than once. Yes. And so I want to quote from an article I saw on GameCrate where they said for their summary of this show, quote, Oh my God, we are so sorry for Fallout 76 and everything else we ever did, and we thank you gamers for pointing out how bad we are. Please play our games, and also here are a few new reveals. there's a fine line between being nice and coming across as pandering and they stepped over that line but to their credit no live band this year thank you for that because last year was awful absolutely awful this was a better Bethesda conference than last year just because of that so interestingly the audience for this year's Bethesda conference would have been a better fit for the live concert. Last year's audience was not having it. No. Oh, my God. This year's had way too... The hype guy, someone needed to walk out into the... And I don't normally condone violence, but someone needed to slap the taste out of that guy's mouth. He was, like, in every room, but he was really loud at Bethesda. Also, another thing to credit to Bethesda, I think there was only one developer, like, one engine... It might have been when they were talking about the streaming service, who put in that one forced profanity. It's like on the Bethesda stage, they're like, we have to be edgy, so be sure to insert some four-letter words just sporadically, and that's how you bond with gamers.
    59:19
    But it feels fake. It feels like they don't talk like that normally. It doesn't feel like they threw the word in. It felt like the writer wrote it down, and it's on the teleprompter. Like in italics. and it was just one that I picked up on that entire time and I was just like it was less so again I approved of that do we want to I was saying because of Bethesda what they have I thought maybe we could the best thing to do is just have each of us pick one thing that was the highlight of the Bethesda for us and see what everyone else thinks and see if we all pick the same thing Okay. Do you want to start with each of us naming the thing? Yes, name the thing. Do Maternal.
    60:10
    Mike? Well, I would also say do Maternal, but I would also say Ikumi Nakamura. The internet? Yes. The only thing from all of E3 that I've seen any more hype about than how awesome she is was Kiana. That was it. No, when she was up there, I think I actually said, I cannot stand how adorable she is. I know.
    60:40
    She was the only person in the entire Bethesda conference and one of the very few people presenting for any of the conferences I saw who I thought actually cared. Actually cared. And that's a word that would be used would be authentic. Yeah, that's it. She actually seemed truly nervous to be on stage, but excited about her game so much that she was just overflowing with cuteness. Yeah. I don't know how I felt. Did you see it? Yes, I saw that part, yes. No. Her game was really interesting to me, despite not having any gameplay. Yeah. So she was the art director on Okami. And Bayonetta. And Bayonetta, yes. I couldn't remember that one at first, but yes. so yeah she definitely has a has some bona fides yeah she's got cred she's not somebody who was just thrown up there because hey we need a female on stage to round out our thing that we've seen in the past right I'm just referring to the art style for this game is significant so yeah no that game looks cool but what's your about like your pilot. The only thing that I really care about from Bethesda is what it's like.
    62:00
    Cyberpilot? No. I don't have a way to play Cyberpilot. I would play it if I had a way to play it. Maybe you should be more specific then. Yeah. I can't remember. Youngblood. Youngblood, that's what it's called. Yeah. On one part, I'm excited about that game. On the other part, I don't think I'm going to have someone to play co-op with.
    62:20
    You're not having me cry. Nothing. She can play Wolfenstein. She's in school. That's good. There's a long conversation that needs to happen there.
    62:33
    What are Nazis? You have a long conversation. We have talked about Nazis. What are cyber dogs and what are they mean? Yeah.
    62:43
    So. Okay, so you picked Youngblood. Yeah, Youngblood is probably the game from Bethesda I'm most interested in. Tony.
    62:51
    Well, I was going to go with Doom Eternal. Well, I mean, it was their tenth whole game that they built, clearly. That's why they held it to the end. We knew, everyone knew going in. There were no surprises, in my view, about Bethesda. Well, there was a surprise. I was surprised. Maybe other people weren't. They brought back Commander Keen.
    63:10
    Did they, though? Did they? According to the internet, they didn't. They brought back VIP. Let's go with that. Because it sure isn't the original. But the fact that they even brought back the IP is something that surprised me. They also named it wrong. There are two of them. It should be Commander's King, which I think is a far more clever title anyway.
    63:34
    Oh, hey, look, there's a pigeon and a box. He's just grabbing us. Oh. Thank you. Oh, the audience could not see Tony actually reach over and pass him. I'm picking up the box and handing it to him. I mean, I thought... I'm not excited for it. I'm not going to play it. I just thought it was interesting. Isn't it kind of like a free-to-play puzzle game? That's kind of what I felt. Does it really look like a platformer? I think it's fine. It's nice to see that old of IT coming back. Yeah. I mean, I don't think people should be as salty about it as they were with last year's E3. What was it with Command & Conquer? And it was immobile. Yeah. And people are just like, not only am I watching an abomination, I now know that Command & Conquer is dead as a franchise because this will never let it come back as what it once was. This doesn't impact Commander Keen, and Commander Keen in its old form will probably never come back anyway. No, it wouldn't. Whatever. They can do what they want with it. And to be fair, when I mentioned the no surprises, I didn't really know anything about Ghostwire. I still don't really know anything about Ghostwire. other than it's that sort of creepy game that falls into my wheelhouse. Yeah, and I mean, I'm going to be doing this a lot. This is recorded back to my notes. It was just spooky and the rapture, question mark.
    65:03
    Because it was just people vanishing randomly. The concept was enough to bring my interest up higher than I honestly thought my interest would be for anything in Bethesda, except for Doom. Yeah, because I didn't expect anything but just normal Bethesda stuff. But Doom looks good. Yes, Doom looks good. But nobody's surprised by Doom looking good. No. Well, and so for the Ghostwire, Shinji Makini is behind that game. And so he has done, as I've... Oh, Makami. Makami, sorry. Shinji Makami. Thank you for the correction. So I guess a lot of people know him for Resident Evil games, but I know him for the two Evil Within games that Bethesda has published. Yeah. And I liked both of those games. The first one was better, more of a Resident Evil, very claustrophobic vibe, whereas the second one is almost open world in the way it approaches it. But they're very scary, and they're fun to play. And those reasons are why I'm willing to put faith in Ghostwire, even though I didn't get to see any gameplay. Right. Still, obviously, it doesn't have my dollar yet. Yeah. But, so that would be the closest thing to a surprise. But the thing with Doom Eternal is that it's just, it's everything that, it's just more Doom. And that's what everyone wanted. Now, I am interested in the multiplayer battle mode that they were talking about. I never played the first... I didn't either. I didn't do any of that. But the whole thing with, hey, look, you're demons, you spawn more demons, and somebody's the Doom Slayer. That reminded me of, what was it? Evolve? Yeah, Evolve. Or one of the modes in Left 4 Dead. Yeah. Which Evolve flopped really bad, so I just... But that was what I thought. It flopped really bad not because it was a bad game, but because they really, really, really were trying to make it eSports. Yep. And so they spent a ton of money on that, and... They didn't take off. game, yeah. It didn't have... It was light on content at launch. There were lots of problems. But my understanding is Evolve was fun to play. There just wasn't much there there.
    67:19
    In terms of Wolfenstein, I don't have any thoughts on the cyber pilot thing. No, who cares? Yeah. But Youngblood, yeah, it looked fun. It looks like the two sisters have different capabilities in terms of attacks. So that looked like an interesting change. I know last year there seemed to be a lot of backlash and the concern that it's a spin-off. People want to play as B.J. Bakowitz. They don't want to play as this kid.
    67:45
    But I think it's still got all the pieces, like Doom Eternal, I think it's got all the pieces that made the first two rebooted Wolfensteins popular, so I don't see why it wouldn't be popular. If it hits the right beats, there's nothing wrong with it. To me, it's not that I am disappointed that this is the game and it doesn't have the character I want to play, because that part isn't the interesting part about the Wolfenstein games to me. I just, my concern is there's like a 20 year gap now in the story. So are they going to cover that or is there still going to be a game to wrap that up? Because that's the part I'm interested in. There's no reason there couldn't be more going back. When they debuted it last year, it felt like they were announcing a spin-off. That they haven't announced another game makes this feel like this is the actual sequel. which is okay again it will probably be a great game the first two were fantastic but again you know I want my story hmm no that's and maybe they'll fill in the blanks in the game just they haven't presented it as that yet they've presented it as it's the 1980s we gotta go find him yeah gotta find him speaking of finding things how did you find the Orion streaming technology I obviously got it mixed up with xCloud streaming technology and Google streaming technology so I don't know what to think anymore specifically how I interpreted that presentation was we have this idea we are patenting this idea we are going to use this idea to club the rest of the industry into submission I just don't understand why it was on the stage there was no proof of concept Everybody has to have a cloud strategy. Okay. Well, I don't know if it needs to be on the E3 stage. I don't disagree. But I think Bethesda is trying to establish themselves as both a games company and a technology company. And that was their, hey, we're going to make your games great, just come license our tech. Okay.
    69:52
    That seemed to be very much like, you know, this is their Unreal Engine pitch. We can we can make your game stream better. All you gotta do is pay us.
    70:06
    Hmm. Well, we'll have to see. Yeah. If anything comes of it. Any other thoughts on the Bethesda? I think we hit every game. We didn't, but we hit everything that matters. We didn't talk about Elder Scrolls Legends. We didn't talk about Fallout Shelter. We didn't talk about Elder Scrolls Play. I keep forgetting that mobile was gaming. Don't you all have phones? No. But also, they added Battle Royale to Fallout 76.
    70:36
    Yes. They didn't talk about Fallout 76. Do we want to talk about how they... There's so many players, 54 players in the Battle Royale game. That's never been done before. I mean, that exact number. Correct me if I'm wrong. When Fallout 76 was announced, didn't they stress, wasn't it the point of the game, that this wasn't like the single-player Fallout? There weren't going to be NPCs, and now here they are, added in as a free update pack. It's called, oh God, oh God, we spent too much money, please, please save it, please, please, please keep buying it, please. Yes. A game where, in Germany, I saw photos of them bundling Fallout 76 with the Fallout 76 bundle. as in the console had a copy in the game and they take another copy of the game to the box.
    71:31
    So you give it to your friends. If you give them that you won't have a friend. Because and you wouldn't have had it. Maybe that's why they had NPCs because you lost all your friends because you said hey let's play Fallout. Isn't it a great game? Let's play it as an MMO.
    71:48
    With another 50 cell battle royale people. I don't know. I don't know I it was I think it was a step up as a presentation but I still I mean I already knew about all the stuff I'm excited for Doom followed by Youngblood except for Ghostwire but without any gameplay I can't really be excited I just I like the premise of it interesting right horror game but it looked like you're going to be investigating there's going to be detective elements not typical survival horror yeah so a twist and hopefully better than that one Microsoft I think it was a launch title, Ghost Detective game, which I played. It wasn't very good. I can't remember the name of it. Did you talk about D4? No. No, that was a weird psychic investigative game. I would like if it was something that brought as much interest to me in that style of game as like the Alan Wake shit.
    72:45
    Actually, when I first saw something, I can't remember if it was that game specifically. It may have been. I was thinking Alan Wake, Alan Wake, Alan Wake. That was Blair Witch. It was Blair Witch. That was my thought too. I'm like, is there another Alan Wake game? You're not the only one who came up with it. And then it went bad. It all went wrong. Yeah. The game I was thinking of was Murdered, Soul Suspect. Oh, okay. Never heard of it. I have heard of it. It's not someone who was murdered, right? And you have to solve your own murder? Yep. Yeah. I played through the game. It's okay, but it's awfully simplistic. I was disappointed What I wasn't disappointed with Was the Devolver Digital Big Fancy Press Conference Devolver Direct 2019 Yeah Unless you were expecting games In which case you were probably deeply disappointed But Devolver Last year was the first time I watched their presentation It won me over I went back and watched the prior one because of it And this continues that They have a story arc going on And I'm sure as Eric would approve of they're not like waiting 20 years to continue their story. They do it every E3 they continue their story. It's only like a 20 minute presentation. Yeah, no and yeah that's all it is but it's fun. So I'm not going to go on YouTube and watch them. I'm not going to spoil what happens in terms of the story. To my knowledge there were like two-ish game reveals. There was six on my list. Really? Yeah. So I have Carrion. Yep. That was the big new one That was the important one That the one that interested me That the one where you playing the alien the monster in a platformer Yes
    74:29
    So it reminded me of a reverse tower defense game I once played. Obviously a different genre now, but same idea, just turn it on its head. I'm wondering from what level they showed of it, if it's going to be kind of a Metroidvania type thing, because it seemed like it would be an interesting take if it basically, instead of having to find power-ups, you had to consume certain people in order to be able to get past certain obstacles. It looked like a Metroidvania. Yeah, from what they showed. The graphics looked a lot like um... There is a Metroidvania game that was made by one guy. Oh, yeah. Axiom Verge? Yeah, Axiom Verge. Which is really good. It's a great game. But the graphics are very, very similar to Axiom Verge. I don't know if there's any shared lineage there at all. The developer on that is Phobia Game Studios, so I don't know if that's... But could it just be that everything's got to have that art style anymore? Yeah, it just seemed more specific. The particle effects in that seemed very, very familiar.
    75:30
    Let's see. There was an expansion for the game The Messenger, but that's not a new game. No, no. No, this is my list of things they announced. There was that arcade cabinet. Yeah. Is that for real? It appears to be. That's what it appears to be. Enter the Gungeon is close to the gun dead. Right. Now, Enter the Gungeon is an awesome game. If you like that roguelike type thing, like, I went to it after playing a lot of FTL, and Enter the Gungeon is great. It is tons of fun. But, yeah, when I saw that cabinet, it's like, ah, this has to be a joke. But apparently it's not, and it looks pretty cool. Yeah, and I am on the Devolver website, and they are showing it listed there. And it's supposed to arrive exclusively in arcades early next year, and custom cabinets will be purchasable for homes directly from Griffin Aerotech, which is handling that side of it. No prices yet, right? Not that I'm seeing. Arcade game, but it's just a light gum game. I'm going to guess from the neighborhood of $3,000 to $4,000. That would be my guess. But cheaper than that? cheaper than a new... cheaper than Ten Ball, yeah.
    76:48
    So, I mean, that's where they've got to keep it controlled under that floor. So what other games did you take note of, Eric? My friend Pedro, Blood Bullets Bananas, which they showed last year. Yeah. And it comes out on the 20th. So has that not been out yet? I thought maybe there was a new expansion. No. Okay.
    77:06
    And it's weirdly only coming out for PC and Switch, according to their thing. Yeah. I might get that for PC. It looks interesting. platformer-ish. Yeah, then the Devolver Bootleg, which is out now on... Oh, yeah. Which I thought was... It's, you know, they committed to that joke. They do.
    77:27
    I give them credit for that. And then Fall Guys Ultimate Knockout, which looked to be a sort of puzzle platformer kind of...
    77:36
    It looked a lot like Wipeout, in a way. I don't remember it. I guess Lemmings would probably be a better video game. Okay. I remember that part now. Okay.
    77:47
    Yeah. Any thoughts? Karen looks kind of neat to me. Pedro does, too. It was funny. It was 20 minutes. They made a Terminator reference that probably wasn't sponsored. Yeah. That's true. Good point. Probably the only one.
    78:06
    Technically, the next thing would be the Upload VR Showcase. I have done nothing with this because VR is a fad and I don't care about it. Okay. If I had VR I might have watched it but I don't care. I didn't even know it was a thing. Eric? Well yeah I know VR is a thing. I didn't know the show was a thing.
    78:27
    Then we'll sail past that and we'll sail into the PC gaming show. Which I did not watch though I have heard was received pretty well this year compared to say last year in terms of that it went with a strategy of having time for a lot of questions and answers with some developers, which is something most of the other stages didn't do. So, and that's something I typically like, is getting more of that depth. A lot of times that happens in between the press conferences, but apparently they did incorporate it into the PC Gaming Show.
    78:58
    There was more information about Baldur's Gate 3 at the PC Gaming Show. I know a lot of people are. I never was really big into Baldur's Gate. Have you played any of them? I've played some of them. two. Yeah, it's not been a huge thing for me.
    79:13
    Let's see. There was the Borderlands 3. It got some Q&A attention. That's been... I think I actually saw that part of it. I watched a highlight reel because it's two and a half hours. Alright. I don't have... Anything that stood out to you? Are you ready to buy auto-chests? No. The only thing that I really interested in is Borderlands 3. What about that RPG where you play as a shark-eating fisherman? They talked about that to talk about last year.
    79:41
    You know what? If it's like... If it's like Pony Island or one of those other kind of silly concept-y games that's not very expensive, I could see me doing it for fun, but it doesn't scream, hey, I need to go have this game.
    80:03
    Alright. Any games anyone wants to talk about from this show? No. I've already established I don't have a high-end gaming PC. Okay. I think you could probably play Conan Chop Chop on your PC. Oh, yeah. I heard about that one. Yeah, it was an April Fool's show. Fun-Con is still producing those? I'm not sure. Okay.
    80:25
    Yeah. There were several things, none of them I cared about. Okay. That's fine. What about the next showcase, the Limited Run Game Showcase, which apparently is a thing now, where it's about giving physical copies to a bunch of indie games, limited physical releases, so it's oriented towards collectors and those who are adamant about owning everything physical. And I know people like that. They're starting to have to yield. Right. It's kind of like the equivalent of vinyl releases. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, like, Random Acts of Memories was released on vinyl, despite that not being a great medium for that. So it gives people something, you know, The vinyl comeback is insane. Target now has a whole aisle that is nothing but vinyl and Bluetooth record players. Yeah, I think part of that is the, it's not really a rebellion, but just that, I chalk it up to the same thing as pinball, that there's just a lot of digital stuff now, so people are looking for other things that are entertaining in an analog format. And with records, it's real easy if you want to get into trying to do scratch DJing and stuff to actually use physical vinyl and learn how to do it if you want to play around with it. But vinyl sales, I think, have been going up ever since 2010.
    81:42
    Right. I mean, they didn't have anywhere else to go. It's more than a fad. I think it's more than a fad. Anything that lasts more than five years, in my mind, is more than a fad. You're right. I think that's a solid definition. So VR will be dead because it won't be a big thing in, like, now. It already is less popular than it was. But it's been around for more than five years.
    82:03
    And vinyl has existed for decades. What I mean is that growth trajectory, like how pinball has been growing since 2012. It's been more than five years. It's more than a mere fad. Vinyl has been growing for more than five years. It's more than a mere fad. VR is a fad. VR is a big thing. Microsoft dropped talking about Oculus or whatever compatible Xbox One X doesn't even advertise that it has the power to do VR. They're not adding VR to it because it's a fad. Yeah, the tech isn't there yet. It's closer than it's ever been, but it's not there yet. They're almost a trip in 2,000 tangles of wires and die. That's why they have the Oculus Quest now. Christ. We'll see how that goes. I don't think it's going to do even as good as the original. Well, we'll go to the real next real press conference, which would be Ubisoft's. Oh, Ubisoft's next? I thought Square Enix was next. Not in my list. Okay, I might have misordered them. But I'm following another publication's list. Gotcha. No problem. So, we can do Square if you'd like to jump to Square. I didn't do them in order. I have mine all over the place. Square anyway. Okay.
    83:08
    So, Ubisoft. Do you want to start with their TV show? Oh, cool. I'll probably watch it. Tom Clancy's Division 2, the TV show.
    83:21
    I did not watch this one when it aired. I don't feel really strongly about. I'm not surprised that they added Zombies to Rainbow Six. That's like their biggest service game success recently. Oh, is that what the infection or the quarantine is? Yeah.
    83:41
    So I have Rainbow Six Siege. I don't play it a lot because I'm not very good at it. It's like multiplayer only, and they get really hardcore about when you accidentally shoot them in the face, and they're on your team. but um so there's that and apparently they're still supporting For Honor which I didn't think did very well for them I didn't think they're trying to Rainbow Six Siege that game and keep giving it but here's the thing Rainbow Six Siege was liked when it came out and its popularity kept growing it started small and grew large For Honor dropped and everyone's like this is going to be awesome and then they played it and they're like this game's crap and it died Siege is still growing For Honor they're like Please, look, it's better now. Keep playing. Yeah, I don't know. I think the lightsaber thing was pretty cool. I don't know. I think I got it as a Games with Gold, so I can finally play it. Have you? No. I don't have the stuff to play. No, normally for me, here's the thing. Normally, I always associate the Ubisoft conference with having some Far Cry thing. And I don't have that here this time. No, there was no Far Cry. So, because of that, I think it feels like the Tom Clancy show. Very much so. But he died.
    84:58
    His name lives on. Apparently, slapped onto everything. Eric, were there any particular things that you wanted to talk about? So, you mentioned earlier, and I'm sorry I can't remember her name, being the most earnest person at E3, but I would argue that John Barenthal's dog was the most earnest thing on stage.
    85:18
    I don't know why he brought his dog on stage. Because John Barenthal brought his dog on stage. It was a desperate attempt to outdo Keanu Reeves. And he lost. I mean, if it wasn't for the fact that I don't like him, I would almost feel bad for Jon Barenthal, because I'm sure he was thinking, oh, this is going to be a big thing, and then suddenly they're like, we're sorry, Microsoft had Keanu Reeves. And he's like, okay, well, that's fine. I'll be number two. And then Bethesda rolls out, and Kumi, who nobody knew, and suddenly is like, maybe Keanu is better than her. And Jon Barenthal's like, I'll bring my dog and maybe people won't think that I'm a b****. But they don't because he's Jon Barenthal. And Jon Barenthal's a b****.
    86:05
    Why do you not like Jon Barenthal? Honestly, I don't know because every time he's in a show, I love him in the role he plays. I think it's just because he plays b****.
    86:18
    Wasn't Shane on Walking Dead, is that what... You're going to have to edit me so bad to edit him. He's just furiously writing time-lapse.
    86:28
    But, at least I've read the comics, so I knew that was coming. But, except we should have died earlier. But no, I don't know. I honestly don't know. It's not like...
    86:39
    Why can't I remember the actor's name now? He was the really bad Superman. Oh, um... Brandon Routh. I hate Brandon Routh. I know you. And it's not like that. I actually don't really have a problem with Jon Barenthal. I thought he was great in Punisher. I don't like Shane, but I honestly thought he was one of the characters. The way he played Shane was fine. I've not seen Jon Barenthal in something where I'm like, why is he in this? He's been great in everything. For some reason, every time I did see it, it was just like, Jon Barenthal's a b****. That's just what it is. It's just natural reaction. I don't know why. I enjoy everything he does.
    87:16
    Okay. Well, I don't want to talk about him anymore because I'm getting... I think he's a very good fit for Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon. I do think he's a very good fit for Tom Clancy's Recon. Why do you... So, taking a step back for a moment. So, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Quarantine is not a different game?
    87:34
    I'm going to have to... I'll search it. Because that was... They showed it separately from the Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege. they added like spy operators. That's the thing in Rainbow Six Siege is that there's operators, which I think are the characters you play as. Yes. And so they just keep adding more and more. It's a job system. I don't know how many of them there are. There's dozens. It appears to be a spinoff. Okay. So it's based on Siege, but it's its own game, I guess. Gotcha, gotcha. I'm going to check GameSpot here real quick. PvE spinoff. Okay, PvE, you know, I might bite on that. So it is the Call of Duty zombies of Rainbow Six Siege. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege. Yeah, sorry, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege. Oh, okay. The mode, this is from GameSpot, so thank you, GameSpot. Quote, the mode appears similar to Rainbow Six Siege Outbreak, a popular limited time mode. No, there was a mode for Siege 4, and here they apparently spun it off into its own thing. Okay. I might get that, because while I'm too intimidated to play Rainbow Six Siege online, PvE, which is how the old Rainbow Sixes were, that's kind of why I got the game first. I knew it was PvP when I got it. But it might still be online in that situation. I don't know. Maybe. Well, they're calling it PvE. I'm just playing it. And if it's a focus on a PvE, then people don't feel so bad carrying you while you learn. Right. And if it's that, and it's the three-player co-op, so basically what we're talking about is Tom Clancy's Left 4 Dead 3.
    89:16
    Yes. Faster than Val. I'm actually interested. Faster than Val. Are you going to play it, Eric, on your $15 a month Ubisoft game pass? I do not currently intend to subscribe to Ubisoft. Oh, that's a nice cover. Wow.
    89:35
    Wow. Although, You're like the John Barenthal of this podcast with that answer. Uplay Plus is available for Stadia.
    89:44
    Aww. So, if I want to play a bunch of Ubisoft games on my Girlcast, that would be a way to do that. You could play all the Clancy's. I could play all the Clancy's.
    89:57
    Michael, you're going to get that Ubisoft suspicion service? I play so few Ubisoft games. The last one I played was that Starlink game, and they weren't even that great. Are you going to get Just Dance for your Wii? No. I wanted to mention that. Well, I'm mentioning it. Not Wii U. No. Wii. Yes. So Just Dance 2020 coming for Xbox, PS4, Stadia, Switch, and Wii. Wii. That's because there is still a market for that. I read, now this was in the comment section of a Reddit, so take it for all the truth. I don't know if I'm going to get a great assault. There is evidence that a lot of nursing homes still are using wheeze for physical movement activities. Oh, that would make sense. And that's what this is in part targeting. That would make sense. Because that seems like the type of thing they'd be all about.
    90:48
    I'm going to go ahead and... I'm going to skip past what's going to be the obvious high point, I think. Yeah. And continue on to their thing. their paid subscription stupid thing. Was I the only one who felt like the announcer seemed like somebody was holding a gun to her head?
    91:13
    Wow. I bet you John Barenthal on stage. With his dog. With his dog, who's cool. Very nice dog. That is the chillest dog, because that was a large enough and loud enough crowd that no dog I've ever known would be able to deal with that. I've known a couple, but they are exceedingly rare.
    91:36
    But the whole thing felt so stilted. I mean, it felt like, I mean, in reality, it was like, we can't actually announce this, can we? This is like the most horrible thing ever. I'm going to get booed off the stage type. That's what it felt like. It felt terrible. I mean, the presentation was terrible. The whole pass was terrible. It is a horrible idea. It is a bad deal when you compare that you can get Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which includes Game Pass for Xbox, Game Pass for PC, and Xbox Live Gold for the same price.
    92:12
    And we're not tied to a single publisher. Yeah, it feels like they mispriced it. I think they were clearly modeling it off of EA's subscription model in their heads. But then, given the sheer deal aspect behind Microsoft's package, which now is on PC as well, I think it's undermined a lot of those other services that are publisher-specific. Right. Because you can get... But EA's so much bigger also than Ubisoft is. Right. And the thing is, with Game Pass, for $15, you get it on console, you get it on PC, you get your live gold. You get all of that for the same price as this, so you can play some dumb games. Yep.
    92:58
    Yes. There's not one that's in here. Some of these in here, I literally, my only note was dumb. I didn't even bother to put the B on it. Now, on their Uplay Plus presentation, they did say that there would be 100 plus games available.
    93:16
    So. Are they county? 20 of those are just dance. Right. And 20 of them are Assassin's Creed. Yeah. And at least 15 of them are the different sections of, like, Brawlhalla. And at least 15 are the variants of Far Cry. Right. There we go. Right. It seems to get to that number. If you like the sameness of Ubisoft, it's a good deal, maybe.
    93:40
    But you probably already own all that stuff, is the thing. Yeah. So let's talk about the one highlight, Watch Dogs Legion. That was the complete highlight. It was the only thing. Have any of you played any Watch Dogs games? I have played a lot of Watch Dogs 2. I have played all the way through Watch Dogs 1. Watch Dogs 2, from everything I've heard, is far superior, and it is a very enjoyable game. Watch Dogs 1 was more of a proof-of-concept style game when I played it. I did get all the way through it. It did keep me engaged. It just was a little too simplistic.
    94:18
    But the hacking stuff was fun. Now it seems like they've taken it to the next Saints Row-ish, we're now grandmas level.
    94:28
    And there's nothing wrong with it. No. I like the fact that they laid it out that it's you are recruiting people. Not uncommon. You play lots of games where you recruit people to help you out. Yeah. the fact that you recruit people to help you out and then you can play from that character's point of view is interesting to me. Well, at least from what I saw, I think there's no main character. That's how... You just play as the people that get recruited. That's everything I read. That's how everything seems. You're not, you know, I'm not Bob, the main character. You're Watchdog. You are the Legion because they are Legion. So, and it... It looks interesting. So it seems to me that the common thread is DedSec, which is the group. Yes. And then that Jarvis-like AI assistant that is talking in your ear the whole time. Yeah. Which makes sense. I may go back to this franchise and revisit it now. Watch Dogs 1, well, I liked it. I didn't like it enough to bother with it. Right. I heard really good things about it. I heard it was super enjoyable. and it has some fun missions that gave me some of that Saints Row vibe without being that over the top. It was more like Saints Row 2. Silly, but not. But not, yeah. And not all of the missions were that way. Some of them were super serious, but some of them were very. They were Saints Row 2 feels, which is good. That's a good thing. Now, I love Saints Row 4. I enjoyed Gat out of Hell. I mean, I like Saints Row games. But this game, it kept my interest for a long time for what it was. I didn't finish it because it's an open-world game, and I could go to Open World Games Anonymous because I have an open-world game problem, and that problem is I have to do everything. There's a reason that I crossed 250 hours of Fallout 4, and I wasn't even halfway through the storyline. Yeah You may just want to focus I don't play I just don't play open world games anymore I don't have the kind of time To really enjoy It's not fair that you don't play them anymore It's very hard on 10 minutes a week Very hard Anything else on Ubisoft? Yeah so The thing that I'm concerned with on Watch Dogs Legion Is that What we saw The different characters they played as because they played as, I think, three different characters. No, maybe four different characters throughout that demo.
    97:03
    How much actual variety is there going to be? Or are we going to see, like, the same six characters over and over again kind of thing?
    97:14
    Yeah, because a lot of what they showed, it seemed like, okay, well, all this dialogue is very specific to this character, but there is no way they're going to be able to do that for every random NPC in the game. There's going to be plot characters, and then there's just going to be the proc gen characters. Right. Well, and in Watchdog 1, like, if you walked around on the streets, there weren't very many variety of character types that you met. Right. And they mostly just re-skinned their outfits. Yeah. And in Watchdog 2, like, when you hacked phones, eventually you'd get to the point where if you hacked enough of them, they were obviously just repeating different scripts. Sometimes with different voices, sometimes the same, and sometimes this and that. but it and that's going to happen that's just the creative timing and technology limitation that I mean to do some of that stuff you have to pour so much time into it it's just not worthwhile in the end unless you run into people like me who's like you've read like every instant message for everybody for the last like nine hours well yeah because it's there I don't know if we're on this problem thank you one other game I wanted to talk about from Ubisoft is Roller Champions. Ah, eSports, babe. The game. Yeah. The note I made, because I didn't catch the title at the beginning, was Skate Skip Ball.
    98:38
    Ah, yes, yes. Ray-P and Basketball Mechanics combined game. Right. Yeah, they call it a skill-based team PvP sports game. That checks a lot of boxes. For quits, sure. Yeah. So, that's how it looks like across the team. Roller Games, basketball and Rocket League. So, yeah.
    99:00
    It looks interesting. It doesn't look like a game I'm going to. I literally said Esports fake and dumb this time with the V.
    99:10
    One other thing I wanted to bring up was, there was something they only showed a cinematic trailer for, but a game called Gods and Monsters. Oh, I did have them just for cutesy. Yeah, it kind of had a it wants to be Breath of the Wild look to it. I thought Breath of the Wild art crossed with Kid Icarus. Yeah, maybe. Because it's got the mythology, Greek mythology look to it. That's what gave it to me. Yeah, and my understanding is that's the Assassin's Creed Odyssey people doing that one. Yes. Which I've heard very good things about the direction that that Assassin's Creed has gone. Actually, the two most recent in general being better, well, depending on what you want. It's not the old Assassin's Creed that I remember. They've gone far more RPG. Right. So, this might be an attempt of Ubisoft to actually put out something that isn't the same cookie-cutter Ubisoft for the game.
    100:10
    It's a good thing to point out, yes. Anything else on Ubisoft? I'm going to guess we probably won't talk much about what the next technical showcase was, which is the Kind of Funny Games showcase. I did not catch that one. Apparently, according to the summation I've seen is that they went through 60 upcoming indie titles just in rapid succession. There's basically trailer, trailer, trailer, trailer, trailer. I didn't watch it. I didn't watch it. Then we're not talking about it. But we're acknowledging that it existed. Now here's something that we will acknowledge existed and everyone knows about. That is the Square Enix E3 press conference. So, let's go ahead and get Final Fantasy 7 remake out of the way. Does anyone not think it looks awesome?
    100:58
    No. I gotta admit, we talked about remake not that long ago on the episode, and we've had nostalgia interest, but nothing huge, huge.
    101:08
    I want this bloody game now. It's looking like the way that they're approaching how even the gameplay is, is different enough, coupled with how long it's been since I played Final Fantasy that it would feel like a different experience to me. I really don't like how they're carving this up into multiple games, though. That's my big issue with it. Yeah. I don't think it's ever going to get released otherwise.
    101:34
    Didn't you make the comment it was like two Blu-ray discs worth of content? Yeah. But isn't that just going to be like 4K cinematics?
    101:43
    Isn't that what, I mean, where's the size of the content really? It's got to be the constant. That was why it was on so many discs originally, was just you had to keep them stored on CDs uncompressed and play them. Well, yeah, but they don't have to do that anymore because they can do cut scenes in real time now. Mm-hmm. But are they doing that? Well, I mean, I'm sure there's some things that are going to be pre-rendered when you, like, zoom out really far or something like that. It's going to be HDR, 4K, Sephiroth.
    102:14
    They probably won't even be in that game. That's true. Never mind. never mind. This is going to be the head of that tech company. Well, coming from someone who's never actually played Final Fantasy VII, because I didn't have a PlayStation, and I wasn't really that big in RPGs when that came out anyway. Do you need a hug? No, I don't. Okay. From what I've seen of it, I want to play it. Yeah. My big issue is, am I going to need like three generations of consoles to play this whole thing by the time it's all out? Because it sounds like they don't even know what the next game is going to be yet. Have you heard of Kingdom Hearts? Yes, I have, and that's why I don't play it. Now, to be fair, if you get this on Xbox, my guess is, though I haven't seen a confirmation yet... Is this not exclusive to PlayStation?
    103:01
    No. That leaked out of a store. Oh, okay. An Amazon candidate or someone. Yeah. It's timed. It's timed for Sony. Okay. So, yeah. Someone mistakenly, one of the shops mistakenly put up the Xbox version and took it down later in the day. This was about a week before E3. So, no. It's going to come out for more than that.
    103:22
    I'm going to guess that Project Scarlet will be fully backwards compatible with the Xbox One. Absolutely. They've announced it.
    103:32
    I mean, the PC architecture is established. In fact, they have stopped making backwards compatible games for the Xbox One. Because they were working on backwards compatibility. That team is working on backwards compatibility for Scarlet. Okay. So, given that, there's that. I guess you could take comfort with it. I'm sure the PS5 will be, because again, the PC architecture is already in place on the current end, that that won't be a problem. But you may be dead before they all come out. If you think you might get the diabetes or something, you might want to treat it, is what I'm saying.
    104:07
    Yeah, so that looks great. So let's talk about the other stuff that came out of the Square Enix. I don't know what to start with. Crystal Chronicles getting remastered, Strikes and Nostalgia. They did.
    104:26
    That's why I can't put it in the same tier as Grand Theft Auto. I don't have it. But I do have that it's going to be on PS4, Switch, and phone. Switch is the only one that matters. My question is, is it cross-playable? I didn't look. I don't know. Because if we could do it on, if you could literally have it on Switch and phones and PS4s and everybody playing together. I mean, two of those, yes, probably. The third one is always kind of an iffy. I don't know. But it doesn't matter. I've got a Switch. That's all that matters. What it says right here is it says we'll be out this winter. Yeah. So that could be anywhere from. That is close to a release date. Yeah. It's probably small in the next year, but. Yeah, I just want... I don't even know if I even want to get it and play it. Now, what would be really cool, and I know they're probably not going to do this, but the closest thing to a sequel they released for that were a couple of WiiWare-only games for the Wii called Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles My Life as a King, I think, and My Life as a Villain. There were actual other Crystal Chronicles games. Were there? Yes, because I played at least one of them. I think 3DS had one.
    105:43
    Okay, I don't remember playing one on 3DS. But they were sort of a more of a management sim kind of thing. So they could throw that into the package pretty easily, I would expect. But who's going to come and manage who carries the basket?
    105:58
    Well, we know it won't be you. I don't need a basket. I just need somebody to heal me when I come back in from not having the basket. You know, they haven't gotten into any detail on, you know, how they changed the gameplay mechanics or anything like that, because, of course, it doesn't have to be that way anymore.
    106:15
    But that's the charm. That is part of the charm. I agree with you. I will be 100% honest. If this comes out and they got rid of the basket, screw that game.
    106:26
    I'd have no interest anymore. I don't know. I did do some quick checking, and I haven't seen them confirm anything about cross-platform. yeah I wouldn't expect it I don't think Square has ever announced anything about cross platform anything alright so separate from Crystal Chronicles do we want to talk about Outriders and how generic it looks so generic I didn't even remember is that the one that is very very much aping Mad Max Fury Road or am I thinking it's a shooter it's the 1-3 player co-op shooter that I don't think they really showed anything but just cinematic stuff. They showed so much stuff. The thing is, that was like one of the few non... Yeah, yeah. The lady in the middle looks like Furiosa. Yeah, I see where you're getting that, Max5.
    107:21
    Yes, so yes. That's the niche here. Are you going to buy it? Well, I mean... Can I have the pride of a Square Enix service that would give me the ability to get all of their games on launch? Yeah, sure, for $15.
    107:36
    But don't worry, you have the back counter. You can go back and play Final Fantasy IV yet again. Remember, it was originally sold as 2 in the US. Well, hey, they remastered 8. Sort of. It doesn't look like that great of a remaster. Yeah, I mean, they up-sampled 8. Yeah.
    107:57
    Then the fonts look kind of weird. Why does the music still sounded good. That was the best part about it. I did not hate 8, but 8 had some good music. But all Final Fantasies have good music. I think 8 probably is underrated.
    108:13
    No. 9 is underrated. I think 9 has exactly the amount of enthusiasm for it. As much later as it deserves. 9 is like the third best Final Fantasy. I'm not ranking them at the moment. I'm just saying, I think... Fourth best Final Fantasy. Eight has some undeserved criticism.
    108:38
    Moving on from this attempt to spiral us into a discussion of where all the Final Fantasies are ranked, is there any enthusiasm around the table for the Saga series, which is now going to have West... I think these are first-time Westerners. These are first-time Westerners. Remaking Saga 3 and Saga Scarlet, Grace Ambitions. I don't care. I know nothing about that series, so I don't know. I've actually heard of it. I would like to see a re-release of the original 2.
    109:05
    Okay. Because Romancing Saga came out here as Final Fantasy Legend, which I know you know that game. Mm-hmm. And then Final Fantasy Legend 2 was Romancing Saga 2. I would like to see, in a way that they did the collection of mana, which I don't think they even talk about that at the Square Enix. It's the Nintendo one.
    109:26
    I would like to see them do something like that. Okay. So for them to release one Romantic Zoggy game seems like a not great deal. Okay. Yeah. I get it.
    109:41
    Call of Duty 1? Oh, I'm sorry. Battalion 1944 Eastern Front? That looks so generic. Generic war shooter? Yeah.
    109:50
    When it popped up, I'm like, are they just playing Call of Duty? Like the original Call of Duty? What about the Avengers game?
    110:04
    I feel bad for them because they made a choice to not go MCU. It was a mistake. And it was a mistake. It looks close enough to it but far enough away from it that it's just kind of like, And they chose the same characters except for Hawkeye. Nobody likes Hawkeye.
    110:27
    Poor Hawkeye. I do think, I think they made a mistake. They should have, if they were going to make them different, they should have very, very embraced different and gone, even if they kept the same characters, gone like either pure comic or just so different as possible. Yeah, they're too realistic looking. Right. They create a weird sort of side feeling to Uncanny Valley. It's not that they're different. Yeah, I'm fine with that. I mean, I want to say I don't like the art style, but I don't think there's actually anything wrong with the art style. I think it's just that they look so close and yet so far away that it feels like discount Robert Downey Jr. And the story sounds interesting. Yeah. For a generic Avengers story. But at the same time, a bad thing happens, and then five years later, we're getting the band back together. And that is what Avengers do.
    111:24
    No! It's what Jedi do. And they don really get to tie the entire time Yeah well the Ghost Band So you know that just feels too much like they were pulling plot threads out of Endgame that I like you couldn have picked a different time frame You couldn't have done, you know, and we didn't need Thor, we can have Vader-Rigville. Right. It would have been cool. Everybody, there's a ton of characters. Everybody has thoughts about Vader-Rigville. I mean, ultimately this is Marvel Destiny. Yeah. And they're going to roll out new characters over time. Yeah.
    112:03
    Hank Pym, not... Scott Lang. Not Scott Lang. Yeah. So, you know... And I think eventually this game will become a thing that is just... No Luke Lawson, no David Lynn, no Bob Slott. The pitch that they made at that presentation felt like discount MCU. And it hurt them bad. Yeah. Real bad. And from what I've heard of, I guess they showed a demo of Behind Closed Doors. and the impressions I got from it, they talk about how the game is going to have multiplayer. The person who saw the presentation was like, I don't understand how this is going to have multiplayer. Because I guess what they showed was a little bit from what was seen in the trailer, but it was basically, you play as this character for a while, and then for no reason whatsoever other than they want you to play as someone else, it goes to you playing this character. And it did that through the whole demo. Lovely. And it's like, okay, so how is this multiplayer now? Is it going to be? You're going to take a break. Is someone else going to play? Are they going to be like separate multiplayer missions and then there's a story missions or what? Yeah, I'm guessing the single player story is going to be you need to try out all the characters. And then the multiplayer is going to be more, you know, raids and the very Destiny kind of thing that they seem to be pitching. Yeah. Which I say that as someone who's never played Destiny, but I get it as part of my pre-order form.
    113:24
    Congratulations. Destiny 2, that is. I don't have any other games out of the Square Enix presentation that I want to bring up. No. It's DLC, DLC, remastered DLC. Yeah. They launched the last Remnant remaster during the event. Yep, on Switch.
    113:44
    Oninaki got a lot of time on this page. It's my interesting. I didn't watch that. I did. You got a lot. Whatever. It didn't interest me. Okay. Now, I liked the trailer they put out for Life is Strange 2. It had a very going-on-a-journey, heartstring-tuggy type. I liked Life is Strange after the first episode. Yeah. And it made me, I've had interest in Life is Strange. I've never played it. I've had interest in it because everything I've heard about it. This looks cool as well. but yeah oh Aquapath Traveler is coming to scene okay is it already arrived? yeah it was like the next day or something I thought that was one of the quick release ones I just want to finish that it's long yeah I need to get back into that as well otherwise I don't know I've got a whole bunch of notes and none of it's anything interesting I mean literally this was Final Fantasy 7 and Crystal Chronicles for me Well, then, we'll move into the last presentation of what's seen as E3, and that would be Nintendo, as usual, their E3 Direct. A lot of positive response to Nintendo, I would say, broadly, from the community, from everything I've been reading. Even from people who are Nintendo fans. Except for one thing. Well, we'll get into that, but let's start with some happy stuff.
    115:16
    Smash. All right. So, DLC confirmation of the hero, I guess as he's known, from Dragon's Quest. I think what was more exciting to a lot of people was that Microsoft allowed Banjo-Kazooie to go on over. And that apparently made a lot of people lose their minds. So, there must be a lot of big Banjo-Kazooies out there. That reveal was, that was solid. That was solid trolling with Duck Hunt. Yeah. That was good. Yeah.
    115:44
    So, I guess that seemed to resonate really well. the remaking localization of Trials of Mana seemed to be pretty positive for fans. The third one had never come out here. Right, second and set two, three didn't come out in the US. So they released a collection of that, but then they're doing a complete remake of that third game. Which looks really good.
    116:10
    They spent a lot of time on Link's Awakening. And it looked really good. Yeah, that art style is really nice. That is a nice art style. And Zelda Maker Lite. Yeah. Zelda Maker Lite, yes. A lot of time was spent on Luigi's Mansion 3. Yeah. My daughter wants that. Don't you mean you want that? I also want that. At the one Luigi's Mansion. I have not played the second one. I didn't know there was a second one. I didn't know there was a first one. That's a lie. I want the second one. Yeah, everyone knows about the first one. I like to think that Luigi's Mansion is probably not true, but in my head canon, that's the game which started the now broadly accepted stance that Luigi has brain damage.
    116:56
    Interesting. I can see that. And that he's just not the smart one. And people are allowed to make fun of him for it. So it's like he's bad, too, and deserves to be made fun of. So Nintendo did actually change the personality of Luigi over the years. Yeah. So at one point he was like the greedy brother. but I think I saw a Wario there's a video on YouTube where someone put together the whole actually analyzes the actual point where it shifted and where like in the RPG games they started making fun of Luigi being the dumb brother and all that yeah there's a point he's the coward and but Luigi Mansion was a fun game we actually just went to Dave and Buster's the other day and we played the arcade one and she had a lot of fun with that so then when she saw trailer four and three she was That makes sense. Super excited about that. Also, Gooigi is a thing.
    117:47
    Yeah. I like the mechanical aspect of that. Because he's made of probably ectoplasm, then spikes don't affect him. So I guess in the single-player mode, you will be swapping between them in order to solve puzzles. Okay. But it's got up to eight-player multiplayer, which is kind of... Crazy? I don't say crazy. Kind of... Silly?
    118:13
    Interesting. It's not only a safe word, it tells one nothing. Speaking of nothing but a story trailer, apparently a very well-received story trailer, Fire Emblem Three Houses. Yeah, they put a lot of gameplay on that in their Treehouse stream that they do, which they always do over for like three days. They had a Nintendo Direct a while back that was all about Fire Emblem Three Houses. So there's been a lot out on that game. I still not... I've never... The only Fire Emblem game I've ever played is their Dynasty Warriors spinoff game. So I know of the characters from that.
    118:51
    I've never actually played a normal Fire Emblem game. I know someone who loves the series and she is super excited about this one. No, I've never played Fire Emblem. Yeah, all I know about Fire Emblem is from Smash. That's very good. You've got to look at Animal Crossing. Not a lot. Well, it depends. The Treehouse 3 showed quite a bit more. I'm only focusing on the presentation. It's not fair to take a three-day treehouse and compare it to a presentation. No, no, no. It's an hour. And my daughter... And my daughter is watching twice now. Of course. That's fine. My wife is watching twice now. Yeah.
    119:25
    My daughter is very excited for Animal Crossing. My wife is very excited for... Basically, at this point,
    119:31
    I think my wife is going to get a switch. Ah. Because she wants Sword Puppy and she wants Animal Crossing and she wants Spyro and apparently she wants a Switch other than just playing it online.
    119:52
    Well, that makes sense. There are a lot of other things I know that were announced, but those are the ones that I was going to go ahead and mention, so I'll kick it over to any of you to pick up another one you want to talk about.
    120:04
    What? They're making a new Contra game. It looked bad? It looked terrible. I hated the look. I have played some bad Contra games. It looks way better than those. Oh, wow. Okay. We can play the bad ones because they're putting out the Contra Anniversary Collection. I believe those are on that. No, they're not. Yeah, the Apple Loose Interactive Contra games for the PlayStation 1 were real bad. No, I downloaded the Anniversary Collection because I love the old school Contra games. It's just, I had never played Contra hardcore, so I guess this is the one they put out on Genesis. Yeah. It's bad. Is it? You can't run and shoot at the same time. Oh. That's why it's hardcore.
    120:46
    That's bad. I mean, when it started, when the trailer started, I was like, is this Contra? And it was, and I'm like, I'm not actually interested in this at all. No. It's just... Panzer Dragoon. Now, Panzer Dragoon I recognize instantly. Yeah. And that... Yeah, I am interested in that. And I think that's going to be a great thing to use, like, Joy-Con controls for, with, like, gyro to aim where you're actually shooting. I could see it. As opposed to just moving a gun around. Yeah. As opposed to just moving a cursor around. Because, like, when I played the Dragon Light game that's on Xbox, what is that called? Crimson Skies. Yeah. Crimson Dragon. It's one of those where you just move a cursor around to point at what you want to kill, but I have problems with those games because my brain can't decide if it wants the control inverted on those. I can see that. Because it's like, okay, I'm just moving a cursor around, so I don't need inversion, but then suddenly I'll feel like I'm flying or controlling a camera, and I'm like, I want inversion. My brain will go back and forth while I'm playing the game. I can see where that could be an issue. Yeah, so I'm hoping it'll have, you know, I'll just point at the screen at what I want to shoot. now one thing on before we continue flipping back to Animal Crossing as I think we completely forgot to mention they pushed this game it was a one bad thing so I was trying to find the message that my wife sent me because she was watching the direct as it was on and she got to the point where they announced that it was coming out in March of next year and said some less than savory things about that seeing as my daughter was beside And my wife was on the other side.
    122:32
    I will tell you, the answer was, no! Why? Why, God? Why? I want it now! I think part of the why is the remaining year of Nintendo Switch's schedule is stacked. It is insanely busy. There is a lot of good stuff coming out. I would argue that the average Animal Crossing consumer does not care for most of that. They care about Pokemon. They might, yeah. And they might not also because Nintendo cares. And Nintendo's like, wow, our schedule is stacked. Let's just push that on. Right. No, I'm sure Nintendo is looking at it from how do we, you know, get revenue spread out over an entire fiscal year. And March of 2020 pushes it into the next fiscal year. Yeah.
    123:22
    Yeah. So, you know, they may have a weak lineup. next fiscal year, and so they're trying to shore things up a little bit by Animal Crossing.
    123:31
    Now, I'm sure you've all seen the headline, and I have not dug enough into it, about something about Nintendo losing a billion dollars in value because of this announcement. Nah, I haven't, man. I've heard about it.
    123:44
    I'm sure there's more detail in that. Maybe someone read billion yen instead of billion dollars. Right. Or something along those lines. What it amounted to, it was pushed past the end of the fiscal, stocks dropped. Yeah, that's all it is. It happens. Yeah, and it's not a big deal because they have Pokemon coming in. Right. I'm both a financial advisor, but I would say that if Nintendo stock is low right now, it might be a good time to buy. I don't think it's that low. If they lost a billion dollars in value, that's a billion dollars for them to regain in value. That's nothing. That's not nothing, rather. And we can't forget also coming out is...
    124:22
    Unce. Is that a cadence of my rule? Cadence of my rule. Because that's what we need is a Zelda-themed Krypton-Decker dancer. Unce. I would argue that we absolutely do need that. Have you played Krypton-Decker, Answer? Yeah, it's pretty good. It's actually fun. It's also really cheap on Switch right now. Oh, I think I've got it on Steam. I have it on Steam, yeah. Yeah, I also have it on Steam, but it's like under $2. so in additions the good Marvel game out of this whole thing Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 so I actually saw the Nintendo Direct before I saw the Square Enix so I thought the new Square Enix game, the Avengers game that everybody was hush hush about was Ultimate Alliance 3 so that was a little confusing for a little bit They announced that earlier in the year. Yeah. It's not like a new announcement. It's just... Not much at Nintendo was a new announcement. No. With their directs and stuff, I don't see why you would... They don't. They spread news that way. I mean, my understanding was that Trials of Mana was new at the E3 as an announcement. And they had some sort of tactical game based on the Dark Crystal. Yes. The Dark Crystal Age of Resistance Tactics. Yes. Which my wife is also interested in because... She loves the Dark Crystal. And she's so excited because there's a new Dark Crystal TV show coming out. This appears to be a tie-in, but it is an interesting game to make as a tie-in. If you're going to make a tie-in game, a tactics one is not typically the path you go. Typically not. So, Dark Crystal XCOM looks interesting. Is there any other things in... They spent some time on No More Heroes 3. Yes, I'm excited about that. I love No More Heroes. I've never played any of them. Yeah. They're so much fun. I think I watched you play some of one of them at one point in time. Maybe. Probably the first one. Probably. They're fun. They're silly. They're over the top.
    126:23
    There's another game they spent some time on called Astral Chain. That looks awesome. That's from Platinum Games. Okay. Platinum's kind of old. They did a mess. Okay. That's the one where you're hooked up to the creature. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. No, that looks cool. That looks really good. They did a lot of showing on that in their Treehouse Dreams. Okay. So the combat looks really solid. But there's also one... It's platinum gang. But there's also, like, the whole thing is you are a cop, so you actually do detective-type stuff, too. Oh, interesting. I'm a Batman. I get it. The things you're fighting against, like, normal people can't see them, but they come from, like, another dimension, and you can even go into that... Where are the invisible demons going? Yeah. So now it's Death Stranding.
    127:09
    This is coming out. Yeah. And watching the trailer for this, it doesn't make my brain explode trying to figure out what's going on. They spent time on Demon X Machina. I always pronounce that one as Demon. Yeah, that was fun, too. It looks like they've made a lot of improvements to that from when they put out the demo version. Last year? Earlier this year? I don't remember when it was. I remember hearing about it. It did not have the greatest stuff. Reviews. Yeah, I mean, I played the demo of it, and it was like, it's fine, but it looked like they made a lot of adjustments to it. I mean, it's got four-player co-op.
    127:51
    The only other game that I had in Prior Sin. Yeah, we kind of mentioned in Prior Sin. That's the winner. It's a monster game, and it looks like an old school game. Monster XCOM. Yeah, it's Monster XCOM. Did you see who's developing it? No, I didn't. It is Romero Games. Oh, I did notice that. Yeah. John Romero and his wife. Right. Which is, her name is Brenda Romero, and she is better known as Brenda Braithwaite, who worked on the Wizardry Games, as well as, there's another, I can't remember off the top of my head, there's another notable, she is well known. She's a person. Yes. She's not just John Romero's wife. Yeah. By no means do I want to reduce you to that. Okay. That was the winner of Nintendo. Really? They didn't say anything else. Well, but who was kind of the one really important thing they threw in at the end? Super Mario Maker 2. Well, no. Well, that's awesome, too. This month or next month? The Catan. I like Catan. I think I'd rather play it on tabletop than on a computer, though. It's more social interaction. Well, to answer your question, Mario Maker's out the 26th of this month. Okay. But no, I was talking about Breath of the Wild.
    129:01
    Breath of the Wild already came out. I got it. That was a long time. Well, I mean, their short little cinematic trailer has been torn apart by the internet trying to figure out everything.
    129:12
    Obviously, the big takeaway from everyone was Zelda's got a bitchin' new haircut. Well, that's the part I didn't even notice. But, well, that led to questions of, is she going to be playable?
    129:23
    Because shorter hair means less physics to do with something moving around. Maybe. chic. Maybe. But also, the music that plays at the start of that kind of sounded like Twilight Realm stuff. So people are wondering if they're going to bring that in. Also, the corpse that they find, obviously everyone thinks it's just Ganon's corpse, but Ganon in this was not an actual person. He was more of a force of nature type thing.
    129:53
    But in one of the, like, cinematics in the game where they're talking about the past, they show this old artwork from like, ruin-type stuff that shows Ganon being fought by the past hero who had red hair.
    130:10
    And so people are wondering maybe that corpse is of him. I love this deep dive insanity. I know! Frame-by-frame on stuff. It's so much fun. I can't say anything. I do it for movies. I did it for the Godzilla trailers. Like, frame-by-frame. It's hilarious. And when you get the right groups online that really go insane into stuff, and give this vague reference to this tiny little thing, this tiny little bucket of knowledge that like nine people know.
    130:41
    Well, unless there are additional Nintendo games to bring up. A couple interesting ports. Ports. Yes. So, Resident Evil 5. And 6. Resident Evil 6. Which no one cares about. I thought they were dropping that one from Canon. It was a weird reveal on that one Because it was like a trailer of people Going into a house to play Resident Evil Yeah that was weird It's like you're announcing ports I won both of those games I'm sorry The Witcher 3 Which is a really interesting Yes there have been a lot of jokes online About the revolution of Switch Witcher 3 I saw one That was showing somebody With a sledgehammer Beating what's his name? I can't remember his name all of a sudden.
    131:32
    You're all into a switch. You're just crushing it into a switch. You see a horse's leg sticking out and Yennefer's head sticking out just under the sledgehammer. It's like, it'll fit! I know it'll fit! I saw someone, I think they took a screenshot from Ultima Online and put that on the screen.
    131:52
    Witcher 3. also Alien Isolation I have not finished that yet I haven't played it but it is an interesting choice to put on the Switch you know what Tony you need to give that put that on Switch and hand it to your oldest daughter and say that it's the new Animal Crossing we'll see how far it goes once she realizes that actually that's kind of it would be terror is very fun now what I need to do that and I need to set it up She's always talking about she wants to do stuff on YouTube or stuff, so I should just do it. And just go, okay, here, we'll let you stream this game. Yeah, so let's play. Let's play. Have fun. I'm a monster. Lights off.
    132:39
    Another one I'm interested in. Doom Eternal? No. This is how you're going to play Doom Eternal is on the Switch. Yes. Wolfram's nice coming to it as well. Oh, that's right. I heard it played okay, the last one. I will probably continue playing on the Xbox for that. Or Stadia. Ni No Kuni, which I didn't realize you were trying to say.
    133:02
    I just love how your voice changed. I wish it was on camera because you just kind of bopped your head to the side. Or Stadia.
    133:10
    I was waiting to see the little TM pop up beside you. Or to hear your Google Pay wallet just go, Ding, ding, ding. Brought to you by Charles Jr.
    133:24
    So, Ni No Kuni, which I didn't play when it came out originally, and I didn't realize when the trailer, during this, that it was a port of the original one. So, that looks interesting to me. Which, didn't it come out on the Wii U originally? I think it was on PS4. Was it PS4? Okay. I think that's one of the ones that fell into my thing where I just wrote lots of ports.
    133:49
    Yeah. Like, the new Super Lucky's Tale. Yes. Anything else? Something that I didn't realize was at the Square Enix instead of the Nintendo one is Dragon Quest Builders 2. Ah. The first one is a lot of fun. I've heard good things. I'm looking forward to a second one. My daughter was also like, oh, I want to play that. Mm-hmm.
    134:09
    Yeah. I think that'll be. I don't have to put any negatives on the first one. Though it doesn't seem like it is just Dragon Quest 2, but in Dragon Quest Builders. because Dragon Quest Builders is kind of Dragon Quest I. Right. Or at least it follows after Dragon Quest I. So it's fascinating that they even tried to slot it into the chronology, but this one seems more like a direct sequel to that than something else. Okay. Well, based off of that, and we'll roll out, obviously, the showcases that we didn't discuss because who cares about them anyway. Right. But we need to start with who lost E3. we always have to start with the truly challenging one I'm going to go ahead I'll kick this one off and I'm going to say I think EA did if for no other reason than they had so much time for so few games to be fair though EA wasn't actually at E3 I know but we're counting it in the chronology of what we listed so EA play I think of all the things we talked about is the loser They're not there, so they don't count. We didn't talk about them. Tony is out of contention. My conditions are, it has to be showcases or events that we covered. And we've covered EA in the past, and EA's been E3 adjacent for several years now. So anyway, I think EA, of the stuff we talked about, of the segments, the presentations, I think EA play a lot. I don't think it was a train wreck, but three hours for a half dozen games is not... there's nothing really to say about FIFA and Madden. New rosters.
    135:50
    I'd say it loses because it was too long. I think it was just too long for what it was. I actually kind of agree. I didn't watch the A1 so I don't have to I didn't either. It's based off of I knew they were and I watched a pilot reel because I didn't care. I watched the two things about it that I wanted to see. and everything else would be me. Yeah. He's been me. Yeah, no. I mean, I, I don't know. I mean, I'd give an honorable mention to Bethesda for it being the apology tour,
    136:24
    but it still was a better, but as I noted already, Bethesda was in, in my view, overall an improvement from last year's Bethesda, so. Bethesda was better than Ubisoft. Yeah. I didn't want Ubisoft, so. I would say Ubisoft was the most important. Ubisoft announced that I'm interested in Bethesda. So maybe you should pick Ubisoft as the loser of E3. I think it would be E3. Because Bethesda had, like, two games. I could be picking E3 off of the sheer tone-deafness of launching a $15 a month streaming service. That was, like, the most tone-deaf announcement.
    137:02
    I think. I think a pretty easy win is being the most tone-deaf. Probably, yeah. I mean, there were some other things that were just, like, gobbledygook buzzword speak like the other cloud system stuff, but that wasn't patently offensive to gamers. Right.
    137:20
    Anyway, that's not what you want to talk about. You want to talk about who won E3. So I want to know, who won E3? We did. The gamers? No, we, because they got an announcement that there's something coming to we on these. Oh, that's clever. That's clever. And that was thanks to Ubisoft, who you were just now panning. Oh, I still pan Ubisoft as well. Maybe you should have picked Ubisoft over EA Clay as the loser of E3.
    137:51
    It was at least during E3. Ubisoft was the second one. Now, again, I did not watch it going based off of all the summation documentation I've gone through. I would probably say Nintendo.
    138:06
    I know that they didn't have really any surprises other than two games in. But who did? Who really had surprises? So, I mean, in that regard, I just think that of coming up stuff, they had the most that my read is. They had the most that is just highly anticipated, as they often do. They also had the most that wasn't just, here's a bunch of cinematic trailers. Yes. So you've got what other game has had the Breath of the Wild 2 treatment where people were dissecting the trailers after the fact from E3? Wow, I'm sure probably a lot of games did. Well, there are people that always look through them all, but I don't know of anyone any others that have the same level of fervor behind it as I've heard on that one. I've read some pretty hefty stuff on Jedi. The Trials of Mana was a surprise, the localization effort. So that was, I mean the closest thing that anyone else has in my view, and I'd give them the number two, would be Microsoft. The Double Fine announcement was pretty surprising to people. Yeah. And it's a pretty big deal long term. But gaming-wise, while I thought the Microsoft conference was smart,
    139:27
    it wasn't. It's not for now. It's like, there's gears. Everything else was, almost remind me of how Sony often was, where it's all out there, all out there, all for Scarlet. Not to that same extent, but, I mean, okay. No Forza this year, is my understanding. That's why they had to play with the Lego. It's just, okay, they're gearing up for the next year, so this is the breath before the exhaling of the new stuff, but that also isn't very exciting. So, I would say, I think Nintendo overall resonated with fans more, so that's why I'm going to say they won. I think you've got the top two picked right, and I think it's a dice roll.
    140:12
    I think the high points of the Microsoft show, like the actual true high points of it, were probably the high points of E3. I think Nintendo did better overall. Yeah. I mean, it's always exciting to talk about the next gen, so Microsoft rolling out and talking a little bit about their next gen was going to be a but it wasn't a surprise. Everyone knew they had to be. This was their opportunity. Because Sony wasn't going to be there to steal any thunder. It's hard to distinguish it also because it's just, well, it's going to be better.
    140:49
    Four times better. Right. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it's still, they don't have anything to show for that yet. So it's a tough sell, I think. For me, the way I'm judging it is, who showed more stuff that I'm probably going to play? Okay, that's a fair way. In that respect, I think Microsoft. Just simply because of the sheer volume of stuff that they showed, there's probably more things on that list that I'm going to end up playing than what Nintendo showed. But I think it's a very close... Both of those are definitely top two. No, it's a good point. And it's something I struggle with on Nintendo because Nintendo, just every year, because their pedigree is the best pedigree because they go back further than anyone else. So whenever they bring up Mario or Luigi or anything, you've got decades of lead time off of anyone else. It's almost unfair. But life isn't fair. So that's kind of my thought. Mike, what would your takeaway be as the winner? I would go with Nintendo just because a lot of what they showed is stuff that I will play. I mean, like I said, the remainder of this year is so stacked full of stuff. I mean, Mario Maker before the end of the month.
    142:04
    That's a lot. Pokemon at the end of the year. Between that, you've got... We're already talking about three of them. After Chain comes out, Damon X Machina is out a couple weeks later. I won't play the Fire Emblem, but that's going to be a big one.
    142:18
    I mean, there's so much stuff. Maybe you'll love it. Maybe, but... In terms of, like, what thing did you not expect that interested you? It doesn't have to be a game, but that's kind of where my brain is. What announcement that you wouldn't, that you, even if it was an upset at a time, that you didn't know about until you learned about it from E3? For me, it's easy. It's Ghostwire. Me too.
    142:42
    That's the game I had no idea about that I'm most curious to learn more about. Yeah. of the caveat of something I didn't know about going ahead, that's what I'm most interested in. Okay. Eric? I don't know. Probably Collection of Mana. Okay. Mike? For me, it would probably be that new Mana game. Well, the remake of it. Oh, okay. Yeah. Because, I mean, I saw some of their live streaming they did of it, and it looks like a fun action RPG.
    143:14
    Now, here's a version of kind of a spinoff of the things you already knew about, what has your highest interest level after having seen more of it?
    143:29
    For me, I have to admit I'm much more interested in the Final Fantasy VII remake than I had, even after seeing the latest trailer, just because they clearly redone, made modifications to the action battle system to make it even more action-y, so it's going to feel like a different game.
    143:46
    I like the old battle system, too, but it feels different. But I actually, I think what I'd name number one is I'm a little more hyped now for Doom Eternal than I liked Doom. I liked it a lot more than I thought. Doom and Wolfenstein feel very, very different because it felt like, other than like the second to last level on Wolfenstein 2, for example.
    144:09
    Wolfenstein, you could sneak around. There are a lot of pauses. Doom, it's just like you never get to catch your breath. And I had a lot of fun with the first one. I've had a lot of fun watching it speed run. And so I'm just really looking forward to getting back into a shooter in a single-player approach that is frantic. Yeah. And so for that reason, I actually, you know, there are a number of things on the Bethesda side that I'm like, I would like to play this and this and this. But that one's definitely going on the list. I would probably also say, I mean, like, Final Fantasy VII, seeing how that plays, I would really like to play. It could be the gateway drug to a Final Fantasy adventure for you. Maybe. I mean, the only numbered game I've played is Eleven.
    144:54
    That's part of the collection of mana. Final Fantasy Adventure. Yeah. But I mean, besides that,
    145:01
    seeing a lot more footage of Astral Chain, that looks like it's going to be a lot of fun. I mean, I love Platinum Games. They make really good games, and since it sounds like Bayonetta 3 is having problems. Platinum Games. can make good games when they don't make terrible games. Based on Ninja Turtles.
    145:24
    And, like, well, as long as they don't rush things out. I'll admit, the one Transformers game was Oh, yeah, Devastation. That was fun. That's the funnest Transformers game I ever played.
    145:39
    But, yeah. Like I said, it sounds like Bayonetta 3 they're having problems with and it's not going to be out for a while. which I don't know I mean I'm disappointed that it's been like two years since they announced that we haven't heard anything about it but it's also I want them to get it right because Bayonetta has been like the pinnacle of action games for me and they I think the Bayonetta's are the action games I've beaten most recently I mean I don't play a ton of them but I enjoyed them both quite a lot Eric so I'm definitely interested in Final Fantasy VII Remake. I'm more interested in it now that it appears that it's coming to a system I actually own. So there's not going to be a $400 dongle that I have to attach to it.
    146:28
    But, you know, it's still day one for me is going to be the next Wolfenstein game. That's what I did with the last one. That's what I'm going to do with this one. I'm just going to dive into that for a while. Yeah, maybe you'll beat this one before me.
    146:40
    Could be. Maybe not. I don't know when I'm getting it. I haven't answered yet. You have, in my mind.
    146:53
    Well, in your mind, what was my answer? In my mind, your answer was going to be Doom Eternal. No. I was close, though. That's number three. Number two, like all of you, Final Fantasy VII. I have more interest in that than I have in 4. You already had pretty high interest. My interest was already pretty high. That's why I didn't have it up as high. Right, but that's... It's not... It was high, but now it's like... I was interested, but I wasn't sure I was going to buy. Now I'm pretty sure I'll buy. But no. I've actually gone from being, oh, it could be interesting, we'll have to see whatever, to full-on on the high train for Cyberpunk. Okay.
    147:37
    That game now has... It had some interest, now it has my attention. so alright it looks cool it is the power of Keanu it helped oh gosh what if Keanu had brought the dog what if it is Keanu's dog and he loaned him out just to help because that's the kind of guy he is it is it all fits it's probably the dog from John Wick 3 I haven't seen it yet Well, nowhere by. But if people want to see more of us, you can't because it's a podcast. But if you want to write in to us, you can email us at We're also available on We're on Twitch and Instagram and Twitter as And we'll be back in two weeks with both video games and pinball. Yep. And John Barron thought we actually liked you. Maybe. we don't know you so anyway that's it that's the end of the E3 extravaganza so goodbye everyone Sean Brown Fossil