Episode Transcript
[00:00:18] Speaker A: Frickin G'day. And welcome to Oceanic Gaming Radio, your bloody one stop shop for everything you could ever possibly want related to Western Australian video gaming podcasting. Okay, the whole lot's here. You got the whole lot. You could possibly have any more. Okay. All right. So thank you for joining us. Appreciate you. My name is Captain Perth. It is a Monday. It's the 13 November 2023. This is Episode 78. And alongside me, as always, Pavlova Face and a very special guest. Not, as always, straightjacket Jim, but very much appreciated. Welcome, mate. No worries.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: Happy to be here, fellas. And may I just say, I love your intro music. It always gets me bopping.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: Oh, mate, we love it as well. It's a cracker. Hey, it's a friend of ours used to do kind of like, music producing just for a bit of fun. And we went through his back catalog when we're trying to get the music for this, and we're like, oh, we'll just find something in Pandy's little kind of side pocket. We heard that. We're like, man, this is like swamp frickin'dubstep, stuff. Like, this is it. This is literally what we needed.
[00:01:28] Speaker C: And it was so much better than we were expecting to.
[00:01:32] Speaker A: Yeah, it was great. And then also, we didn't have to have the whole try and find someone on fiver, make us a theme song and not really kind of be us. So it kind of was amazingly perfect in every way, but, yeah. Thank you, Jim. Appreciate that. Now, how are you going, mate? How's life been treating you?
[00:01:47] Speaker B: I'm doing really well. Had a pretty chill weekend, must say. Like, I changed my setup around a bit, put a few different things in, put in a new shelf. So I've got a nice shelf, which obviously everybody can see here. Being in podcast land, being an audio makes for great.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: Well, to give audio listeners a bit of an insight. I mean, Jim has a significant amount of memorabilia behind him in his live stream video. I'm seeing a lot of Star wars, and the other stuff is a bit too small for me to make out in our little podcast viewer.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: But lots of Lego, lots of Mario Lego over to my right here. And that's only the bits you can see on camera. Like, there's a whole wall here that's full of stuff and collectibles.
[00:02:29] Speaker A: I love it. Hell yeah, dude.
[00:02:30] Speaker B: I'm all about that single man. No. Mrs. This is what it does to you. No kids either.
Spend on other stuff.
[00:02:38] Speaker A: Yeah, and you also have kids breaking all your wonderful memorabilia.
[00:02:42] Speaker B: If I had kids, there would be a lock on the door to this room, no doubt.
[00:02:47] Speaker A: Love it. So you put a new shelf in, mate. What else happened over the weekend?
[00:02:51] Speaker B: Actually, I had a stream for the first time in God knows how long. I just, I've made these changes to the setup. Let's go test them. So, yeah, just jumped on, did a stream. Well, stream liked me. The games I was trying to play did not. So I was playing Star wars, the old Republic. I jumped back into that, doing some of the story content there, and I got to a certain point and I just couldn't get past it. The game just bugged out. So it got to a bit where you take control of this load lifter thing and you got to move this stuff around. But rather than teleporting me to where I need to be and then turning me into a load lifter, it just kind of turned my character into a load lifter where I was so I couldn't actually do anything. And I was so big, I couldn't get out of room.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: Oh, my God.
[00:03:38] Speaker B: And you know what? It's not the first time that's happened to me either. I had another character that I took through that exact same part and the same thing happened. So I'm just like, well, I'm stopping playing that for now.
Then I thought, you know what? I'll flick over to four guys because the stream Perth community get together is going to be playing fall guys. I think it's this coming Saturday, so I thought, I'll give that a go. Four guys wouldn't boot.
[00:04:02] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:04:03] Speaker B: Yeah, it was just a great time all around. And then I just went, I'm playing Marvel Snap now. I just want something nice and simple that worked.
I had a good time with Marvel Snap there in the end anyway.
[00:04:17] Speaker A: What's Marvel snap like at the moment, mate? I haven't touched that game at all. But I know when it first released, people were quite happy with it. And I don't know, what's the economy like in terms of microtransactions? What's the kind of meta feel like?
[00:04:33] Speaker B: It's still feeling pretty good to me. And admittedly, the only money I spend on it is I buy the battle pass every month because I like it and I've been enjoying the game that much.
I just want to spend money on it so that it gets stuff and can continue growing. And that's $15 a month that it's been getting out of me. I think I've bought pretty good game currency once or twice to upgrade cards but that's about it. So it hasn't got a whole lot of money out of me, and I feel I've got a great selection of cards.
[00:05:02] Speaker A: What will $15 a month get you?
[00:05:05] Speaker B: So it opens up more on the battle pass, so you earn more of the in game currency to upgrade your cards. And upgrading the cards doesn't make them do more in the game, it just makes them shinier and look nicer. And then when you get it to its max level, you can get a variant of that card. So it's just like variant artwork and.
[00:05:26] Speaker A: Stuff like that, right? Is that variant artwork? Is that like a random chance to get a particular variant? Is that how it works? That's kind of cool.
[00:05:34] Speaker B: It is. And it's really like the art styles that they've got there. Like, they had a series of all Venom cards, so all the characters in it, like you have. I think Mr. Fantastic was one of the early cards, so you'd have a venom variant of him so you could tell he was Mr. Fantastic with all venomized and stuff like that. And then there was, like, a series that came just. It's really cool, and it's just because it's so quick and easy as well. I love that you can jump into it and be done and just have fun.
[00:06:10] Speaker A: What's game length like? A game will take you, like a couple of minutes.
[00:06:14] Speaker B: Yeah, handful of minutes, depending on how it goes. I think it's three or four, I would say, because there's a time limit for each move as well. So there's only six turns, possibly seven. There's a card that can make it. So there's seven turns and there's, like 30 seconds, I think, to make your move. And after that, the game just says, oh, you didn't make a move. Cool. Well, you guess you passed this adluck.
[00:06:39] Speaker A: Yeah, because I remember, I guess the template that they were going for when they were kind of describing it before it had even come out yet, was that they were trying to create something where you could basically have a quick game whilst you're in line at the shopping center or something, waiting to use the checkout or something like that. Just something you can squeeze into your day here and there, but obviously still have enough depth to the game where that shortness of time, it doesn't reduce the complexity of the game and depth and enjoyment. It's just more. So the fact that you can squeeze it into smaller chunks of time in your day, right?
[00:07:22] Speaker B: Yeah, 100%. And it is that quick. I have literally done that. I've been in line for something and I've gone, I haven't done my dailies on Marvel Snap. Let's go and do that.
And of course, you get the tie ins. Like, there's the marvel's tie in at the moment because that's just hit cinemas. And before that, there was a Loki tie in. I think in between there actually, there was like a blade tie in. I don't know. Blade movie is still miles off if it comes.
[00:07:49] Speaker A: I was going to say that's not even close to that, is it?
[00:07:52] Speaker B: No. And there's still all those rumors about Mr. Ali and his role in there because he's not going on, doesn't like, which is understandable because it's quite close to. But that's pop culture. We're here for video games.
I went and saw the Marvels last weekend, and I will talk Marvel at great length. So I have to catch you. Pull him in. Yeah, that's enough about how my weekend went. How's your weekend?
[00:08:25] Speaker A: Yeah, mine wasn't too bad. I haven't done an awful lot. In fact, I've done pretty much zero gaming, which is.
I don't know, it's kind of been refreshing in a way, just kind of being completely detached from that for a little while. I think sometimes I find that a little gaming detox and then you come back, the gaming's just so much sweeter when you come back. Those little breaks are quite good for you. But, yeah, I didn't do an awful lot. I'm just trying to think off the top of my head. I looked after Ted a lot over the weekend because Mia was doing bits and pieces and then I got a haircut and that's about it, really.
Can't really say that I did an awful lot else. I've been learning a new programming language on the.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: Learning.
[00:09:13] Speaker A: I'm learning a thing called React, which is kind of like a UI framework for JavaScript. So it's one of the more popular ones. And I'm kind of using it as like a failsafe for if anything ever happened to my job, basically.
So that's kind of where I'm going with that. But it's been fun to learn and, yeah, just kind of. I've got a couple of ideas for some little side projects that I want to try and monetize and see if I can get like a little micro Saas thing happening, which would be pretty rad. And just a little bit of latent money would be cool if it ever did anything. But we'll see. I've got to build them first, which almost probably won't happen. It's just more of an idea. We're in the ideas stage right now. Okay. Whether that gets converted into the actual project and finalized project stage, we'll see. As a man with a one year old, unlikely at this stage, but it's nice to dream, you know what I mean?
[00:10:11] Speaker B: It'll be like me. I had these grand designs of making a game in Unity, and I was just going to make a bullet hell shooter. And I thought, oh, yeah, this will be all right. It won't be too hard. And then I started trying to teach myself Unity, and I went, this is a lot more complex than I thought it was going to be, so maybe I won't be learning unity.
[00:10:32] Speaker A: Yeah, unity. I mean, obviously we've also had the big unity conundrum and bits and pieces happen recently, but unity is fairly reasonable in terms of its price of entry, I find. I think when I say price of entry, I mean more so, just like, I guess your tutorialization of the ecosystem and learning about it is pretty good. And then I find other engines are a bit more difficult. Even unreal is kind of a bit more, I don't know, bit more technical, I guess. Whereas unity, you can do visual programming and bits and pieces.
But, yeah, I've definitely been there. I've got some half finished projects just sitting on my computer that I probably will never reopen ever again.
But, yeah, good old.
So anyways, that was my weekend now. Pav, we haven't spoken to you, mate. How's your weekend? Don't you think you're getting out of this bell, fellas?
[00:11:33] Speaker C: As I always say, I had a big one. I had. Not your average big one, but I had a big quiet one.
[00:11:45] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:11:48] Speaker B: What big one? It is. It's just the one.
Exactly.
[00:11:52] Speaker C: I had a super chill weekend. I got down to business and finally cleared my house after all my trips, I no longer hate myself walking through my house.
[00:12:02] Speaker B: No Huns involved after they're getting down to business.
[00:12:05] Speaker C: That's exactly it. No Huns were harmed. But, yeah, I actually played some video games to chill out with friends for the first time in God knows how long. So I just enjoyed my weekend.
[00:12:18] Speaker A: So talk me through what kind of video gaming were you doing? Walk me through it.
[00:12:22] Speaker B: It's a weird thing.
[00:12:23] Speaker C: I was hanging out with some friends who are big Pokemon fans. So we were playing some randomized Pokemon Emerald and we did this thing where all three of us were playing the game, but the items were randomized as well across each other's games.
[00:12:39] Speaker B: Oh, I love those randomizers.
[00:12:41] Speaker C: So we're all playing at the same time. And as we uncover an item in the game, it gets someone else. One of the other three of us.
Message pops. I was like, you have received this.
[00:12:54] Speaker A: Wait, what? I'm so confused. So if someone picked an item up, everyone would get an item?
[00:12:59] Speaker C: No, everyone's items were scattered across everybody's game as you pick stuff up. Even the gym badges were scattered within that pool as well. So, yeah, it was like super obscure the way we had to play through.
[00:13:15] Speaker A: Because some things would only be accessible in other people's playthroughs.
[00:13:19] Speaker C: Because I never got the badge for cut shit.
[00:13:23] Speaker A: And so would you then have to get your friend to go and Find it for you to unlock it for you badge?
[00:13:29] Speaker C: They need to go find for me somewhere in their game.
I think my cut ended up being on Victory Road as well. So I had to wait for them to get right to the end.
[00:13:42] Speaker B: Brutal seed.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: Yeah, no shit. That sucks.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: What are you doing?
[00:13:47] Speaker A: For like the whole time, you're just walking around in Freaking Palletown.
[00:13:50] Speaker C: I was absolutely the worst at the game. So I was just like grinding mindlessly. So I had a level handicap over the other traders.
[00:14:01] Speaker A: Dear Lord.
[00:14:02] Speaker B: Yeah, it was a bloody good time.
[00:14:03] Speaker C: But we played for like a solid, like six, 7 hours. And I didn't even realize that time go by. It was fantastic.
[00:14:09] Speaker A: That's really cool, man. I really like that idea. That's a really unique way to kind.
[00:14:12] Speaker C: Of approach with the thing that we're using to play this. You can do this with not just Pokemon Holiday is an option in there as well. As well as like Final Fantasy Kingdom. A whole bunch of the items can be.
[00:14:28] Speaker A: I feel like a link to the past would be a really good one for that as well.
[00:14:31] Speaker B: Link to the Master randomizer is its thing on its own. But I remember one day it wasn't just everybody playing the same game. It was people playing different games and stuff would jump across because somebody like you might be playing Mario 64 and you get to a point where you a star supposed to be, but instead of that, you get somebody playing a link to the past gets like the Master sword or something. Yeah.
[00:14:58] Speaker A: That is melting my brain, Jim. Big God. I wouldn't want to be the person trying to program that together. That sounds like a nightmare. God. Very cool though, Pav. Very freaking rad. Anything else on your gaming horizons, mate?
[00:15:13] Speaker C: Not a lot of gaming in the future just yet. I'm trying to get all my ducks in line, plan all my events for the next year. But I am also jumping into streams again, getting into the oh my God. Stream mindset again.
[00:15:28] Speaker A: Are you scheduling or are you just kind of running with just a vague.
[00:15:32] Speaker C: At the moment I'm very vague. But I'm bringing back the good old trivia nights as well.
[00:15:37] Speaker A: Oh my God. Dude, that was like a hit. Remember, remember COvId? Remember that thing?
[00:15:44] Speaker C: I'll tell you, COVID has changed me so much by necessity.
[00:15:49] Speaker A: Rugged versions of ourselves.
It's funny though. I was talking to Mirror about the other day and COVID was wild. One thing I said to Mir, I was like, I can't even imagine having had a child during COVID and then having to had entertained them during lockdowns and stuff. That would have been supremely fucked.
[00:16:13] Speaker B: My nephew must have been two or three at the time COVID hit and she had a kid in school when COVID kicked off.
[00:16:21] Speaker A: Yikes.
Yikes.
Because I mean, some people didn't have access to things like daycare and stuff like that. So I don't know how we would have actually worked.
One of us would have had to take a significant amount of time off with a child the age of ten because it just wouldn't have worked.
You can't just have a child running around by itself and you working. It just wouldn't happen. But yeah, Wild time. Wild time. But I'm very excited about the trivia nights, Pav. I am.
[00:16:51] Speaker C: I'm doing it a little bit differently. It's going to be more in a game show format I'm inviting and it's going to be VTuber game show. So I'm inviting all my Vtuber friends to compete against each other head to head.
[00:17:03] Speaker A: Dude. Sick. That is cool. Okay, well, slight little change.
[00:17:10] Speaker B: Pav Pineapple Vtuber. When?
[00:17:13] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm just your usual Pavlova host but I will be introducing and highlighting some of my favorite local Vtuber friends.
[00:17:25] Speaker A: That's sick. And where can people find that Twitch TV Pavlovaface.
[00:17:30] Speaker C: That's their Twitch TV Pavlovaface. That's P-A-V-L-O-V-A-F-A-C-E. Pavlovaface.
[00:17:35] Speaker A: Yeah. Very nice. And Jim, what about yours, mate?
[00:17:40] Speaker B: I'm under straightJacker Jim. S-T-R eight J-A-K-T-J-I-M. So search that on Twitch, you'll find me. In fact, search that anywhere. You'll find me.
[00:17:49] Speaker A: Yeah. Freaking sweet, dude. Love it. All right, well, boys, enough of about us. And what about video games? Because that's what the people want. Okay, but before all that, let's get through our usual kind of house rules, et cetera. Just want to say firstly, a big thank you to everyone listening at home. Whether you're doing that via live right now, you're one of these legends in the Twitch chat, like Infernox, Sukai, au Sakose. Who else we got in here, Slatos? Just the freaking. The regulars. Just the Rippers. You want to join them? Monday night, 07:00 p.m., AWST. Just go to Twitch TV, OceanicGamingRadio. You can be here live, be a part of the conversation, talk a bit of shit. Give me and Jim when he's on a bit of. A bit of shit. It's great. It's what we're all here for. Otherwise, you can listen to us in your own time, the leisure of your own vehicle, your bed, your bloody swag. I don't know where you're listening to us, but whatever, you can do that anywhere via your favorite podcasting platform. Just look up oceanic gaming radio, or go to OGR show and follow the links. You'll find shitloads of links there. Listen to it in your favorite spot. Other than that, also, I want to say a big thank you to our wonderful Patreons. They are the legends that come out every freaking week and drop some spondulies in our wallet, which is great.
It is what we are using to do cool things like TikToks and all that kind of shit. I don't know what the fuck they are. Grizzly gets those made up, and I have no idea. I feel like such an old man when it comes to all these reels and shit.
[00:19:27] Speaker B: They just appear, and I'm in them called Vines.
[00:19:32] Speaker A: See, now you're talking my language, Jim. That's my kind of language.
But yeah. Anyways, so thank you to the following legends of whom I speak of. Sukai, Moosey, caging, Runt, Sergeant Paul Lee, G-D-J. Libs, Brendan Dan, Fantastic Strops and Slatos. Thank you, legends. Appreciate you. Yes. Ripped vine as said by Sukai Au in the chat. I feel like when they say we grew on the shoulders of giants, or whatever the fuck that saying is, that's Vine.
That was Vine. Vine was too. It blazed way too hard for its time.
It was too ahead. You know what I mean, Jim?
[00:20:19] Speaker B: 100% do. And it was too far ahead of its time and didn't quite.
[00:20:26] Speaker A: Humanity wasn't ready. It was like when the fucking Titans kicked down the wall in attack on Titan. Humanity just wasn't ready for that level of on demand short videos.
[00:20:39] Speaker B: I never actually used Vine. My exposure to vine was like vine compilations on YouTube.
[00:20:45] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. It was just being ripped straight into YouTube, but God damn classic. All right, Jim, we got a fair bit on the old quest log today.
We're going to start at the very top. All right. We had the golden joysticks, the big old joystick Arunis. They happen every year. I think they're generally held in London from memory.
Big industry Game Awards night. It's very well recognized in the same kind of echelon, I guess, as the game awards that it's held in the US. This is, I guess, the UK kind of variant for the most part. But yeah, we had a shitload of awards that were announced that night. So I'm just going to kind of go through them vaguely and we can kind of have a bit of a discussion.
What I will quickly do first is pull out the fact that Bouldersgate won 123456 awards.
If I'm reading this correct, awards. Yeah. Out of 12345, there's probably about 20 OD awards in here. So six of 20 is pretty amazing. And obviously they can't give everything to Bouldersgate because it's not much of an awards night. So I think the fact that they got six, pretty epic. Now, they won Best storytelling, Best Visual Design. Larian Studios won Studio of the Year.
They also won Best Game community, PC Game of the Year and Ultimate Game of the Year. Now, I don't really understand what that even is.
[00:22:27] Speaker B: I think it's just a collection because I can see they've got the different categories of PC Game of the Year. PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo.
That's the Game of the.
[00:22:38] Speaker A: So pretty. Pretty impressive amount of winnings. And I think it's probably going to be mimicking its takeaways at the Game awards this year with our good friend Jeff Keeley. Would you agree, Jim?
[00:22:51] Speaker B: I think, like, I haven't played and like, this year has just been crazy for big game, dude, it's out of control. It is. And they keep coming and it flushes stuff like hi fi Rush was the beginning of this year and that was an amazing shadow drop game. And it's probably not even going to get a look in because everybody's gone. Oh, look at this new shiny thing we've got. Look at Boulders Gate three. Let's look at tears of the kingdom. Let's look at Sea of Stars, which I was very happy to see one indie game, because that is an amazing game.
[00:23:20] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, hey, can I just say cocoons on this list as the breakthrough award that is. Again, I say it almost every week since I've played it. If you haven't played that freaking game, go and freaking play it. I'm pretty sure it's on Game pass. And goddamn, it is fucking awesome. It's so good. It's just an incredibly well put together, thoughtful, but also visually complex and stimulating. Beautiful puzzle experience. Just, oh, God, go and freaking play it anyways, regardless. Yeah. Boulders gate obviously sort of landsliding this one. But you're right. You're right, Jim. Even things like Alan Wake Two, I don't really think I expected that to be as good as is. And it is immaculate, by the way. Another cracker. You know, we had, you know, as a DLC come out this year and I've not finished it yet, but God, it's been brilliant so far. I'm loving.
Can't think of his freaking name. Idris Elba. Yeah, Idris Elba's appearance in that game is brilliant. And he plays the perfect role for him as well.
Got that kind of his sexy accent voice going as well. It's just a really good vibe. But let's move through a few more of these. Jim, they're still playing award no man's Sky. So that's kind of your ongoing game that's won the best accolade, I guess. And I think that's pretty well deserved, mate. Thoughts?
[00:24:48] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's definitely one that it's one of the few rags to riches stories that you see how it over promised at the beginning and is just developed into something so amazing now. You could potentially almost put cyberpunk in there, given its very torrid launch and how it's recovered and become a really great game. And I think the fact that they've gone and released this DLC has done the games a lot of favors because absolutely. I don't think a lot of people would have gone back to it had they just fixed it through patches later on and they would have done all this work and nobody would have seen it, if I'm being honest. So releasing the DLC as well, that could have almost been the still playing award. But there's so many games out there.
[00:25:34] Speaker A: That get that mean Fortnite, right, like the OG map came back and they had their biggest weekend on.
[00:25:44] Speaker B: Know.
[00:25:44] Speaker A: It's pretty impressive in pretty, pretty. I'm glad that no Man's sky won it because I definitely think that they deserve that now. Like you said earlier, Jim, we also saw Sea of Stars getting best indie game. I agree with that.
[00:26:01] Speaker B: Sea of Stars was amazing. It made me go buy their first game, the messenger, which is also amazing. I've never seen a Dev sabotage studio knock it out of the park so hard with their first two releases in completely different categories as well. I want to say that because I don't think they're getting enough credit for what they've done there.
[00:26:21] Speaker A: Yeah, look, I think I have really enjoyed Sea Stars. I think for me, maybe the only thing I wished was there was a bit more complexity in the game systems, in the combat, I guess. But despite all that, very solid game, solid RPG experience, and highly worthy of taking home best indie, in my opinion it would have been either that or cocoon. I'd probably give it to Cocoon personally, just because I've never played anything like it. Honestly, it's just one of those games. But I'm still going to see Cocoon, obviously, with the breakthrough awards.
Let's talk about best lead performance. Ben Star from Final Fantasy 16.
Do you know what? 100% agree.
Chris Rosfield, I think was the character's name in that game.
Sorry, Clive, not Chris. Where are I getting Chris from regardless?
[00:27:27] Speaker B: Isn't there a Resident evil in there somewhere? You're probably thinking, Chris, what's he.
[00:27:30] Speaker A: Yeah, I think you're right. I think I'm getting completely mixed up. Regardless, I did finish that game, and I think it had its shortcomings, obviously, in its pacing. And I guess, just, again, if we're going to be talking about game systems and being underwhelming, I mean, that game had probably one of the most underwhelming game systems of an RPG of all time, in my opinion. But regardless, you definitely could not knock the voice acting and the performances in that game. I mean, Ben Starr did a superb job as Clive, and I think he managed to just really capture that character really well, emotively. And just the scenes that you had with him and his brother Joshua and stuff, just incredible. And even the sort of final moments of that game, not spoiling anything, but they were just so well put together and yeah, just an incredible video game, full stop, I guess. Yeah. Again, I wish it was different in the way that it presented the combat and stuff like that because I think that would have made it an incredible, incredible video game. Like a Boulders gate three level experience, but it didn't quite get there. But I think it's a good sign of things to come for Final Fantasy.
[00:28:50] Speaker B: I didn't get to play it myself, but my housemate has it and I'd walk out. Every now and then he was playing it on the big TV with the surround sound system and all that going, and every time I couldn't help but stop and watch it. But my one observation was, I wish it was a little bit more Final Fantasy and a little bit less devil may cry.
[00:29:08] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think that was the problem for me is, and that's a really good way to put it, I think they kind of tried to blend the two experiences to the point where they kind of handicapped both experiences because they just couldn't put enough time to make both of those amazing in their own right. Visually, the combat was incredible and the moves that you're pulling off, but they just weren't kind of fun to really do.
It almost felt like to me when you're in an MMO and for example, we're to Warcraft and you're like level ten and you've got like five main moves and you just keep rotating them over and over and over again. And the combat just feels like shit until you get to Endgame. But you never really got to that endgame point. So. Yeah. Anyways, look. Final Fantasy, excellent Ben Star, very deserving Critics Choice Award went to Alan Wake too. I think that's a great recipient of that particular award. Alan Wake. Absolutely an incredible thriller so far. I'm pretty close to finishing it. I think I've probably got a couple of major parts to go through, but I've really enjoyed my time with that game and been pleasantly surprised with it.
Have you thought about picking that one up, Jim, or have you picked it up?
[00:30:29] Speaker B: I haven't even looked at it, if I'm being honest.
One of my side gigs that I do is I write for a website. And so I've had a reasonable slew of review titles over the last month or so. So I haven't. Haven't even thought about picking up anything new. And in fact, at the moment I'm kind of wanting just something safe and familiar and maybe even just a break just to do a palate cleanser. Totally. And Alan Wake's not really one. Like, I'm not a horror game, sort of, because that's the vibes it sort of gives off to me. I could be completely wrong with what it's about, but those sort of games aren't usually my game.
[00:31:08] Speaker A: Yeah, there's certainly horror elements. I think I'll probably put it more in the thriller category with some kind of psychological bits and pieces happening. But, dude, I totally get it. I think what really drew me in is I'm a big fan of Twin Peaks and just seeing some reviews kind of liken it to that. I thought, okay, I'm going to have to play this be has to happen and I'm glad it did. Now, the final one I want to touch on, Jim, there's a lot of other games in there, actually. One I'm going to quickly pull out is just best streaming game, which I just find that title hilarious because, okay, who's deciding that? But that went to Valorant, so very cool.
[00:31:49] Speaker B: I do wonder how they do pick that though. Do they absolutely go, what's the most streamed game and most watched hours for the last year?
Because I would put in a case for league on that or even dota.
[00:32:01] Speaker A: Well, exactly. And I would also argue that the communities for those games are probably stronger than maybe what Valorant is. I don't know for sure, but yeah, who freaking knows, mate? I think ultimately maybe Valorant greased some palms. Who freaking knows with these award ceremonies?
But yeah. Now the final one I wanted to touch on, Jim, because I want to know your opinion. Most wanted game, Final Fantasy Seven rebirth.
[00:32:30] Speaker B: Look, I'm probably a bad person to ask about this because I've noticed my gaming habits over the last couple of years have slipped away from looking at the AA games to my most anticipated games. There's two that I've got my eye on at the moment. One, it's like an early fallout style game called Broken Roads, which, the Australian one. Yeah, that's set in southwest rural WA, which is like going through there and seeing all the stuff there. But anyway, that's getting a little bit off track. But yeah, broken roads, unfortunately that's just had a delay for QA testing, which 100% support. But I can still be disappointed that I'm not going to play it in the next couple of weeks.
[00:33:14] Speaker A: When's the rough expected release date for that?
[00:33:17] Speaker B: Early next year now. So it was 20 November and pushed back to early next year.
[00:33:22] Speaker A: Yeah, because I know we're kind of going off track, but it leans hyper into the kind of like early fallout one and two kind of style, right?
[00:33:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
Rather than being like right and wrong and good and evil decisions, they have more a morality wheel, which from the demo that I played works really well and gives you that Shades of gray rather than this is. Which are right and wrong.
[00:33:50] Speaker A: Yeah. Bit more realistic in a post apocalyptic world, right?
[00:33:53] Speaker B: Yeah. Let's be honest, the other game for me I'm looking forward to is the plucky squire, which, oh, dude, it had me at the way it was going through the pages, and then when the squire jumped off the page, I was just like, how can I get this? So I can see why people chose Final Fantasy Seven Rebirth as the most Wanted award. And really, if I'm thinking about big releases coming up, that's probably near the top of my list of what I'd be looking forward to if I was still looking forward to big games, which, like I said, generally I don't.
[00:34:31] Speaker A: Yeah, I think, look, I got to definitely mimic you there.
You just sort of reminded me that plucky Squire is on the way.
It's definitely something I'm looking forward to in terms of just a solid. Because that's Devolver, I believe. Devolver digital from memory.
Anything devolver puts on my plate, I'll happily eat.
But there's a couple of things I think I'm definitely really looking forward to. Rebirth. I fell in love with the Final Fantasy Seven remake. I loved that. I thought they did such a good job of recreating that video game in a modern graphical setting and stayed pretty damn true to that boss. Also kind of giving it its own persona. This kind of weird is time changing, is the timeline kind of splitting off from the original what's going on here? And kind of giving it that weird, like, what's next? So I'm quite excited to see where that goes now. Another thing I'm actually quite looking forward to as well is Dragons Dogma Two. The kind of early gameplay stuff of that I thought looked really amazing. So quite excited about that. Also looking forward to Warhammer 40K Space Marine Two. I think that looks wild. I'm not like an out of control big Warhammer guy. Quite like the books that I've read here and there, but I guess the mobs of enemies and stuff that are sort of coming through that looks pretty sick. So interested in getting my hands on that.
It's not a game itself, but it is an extension of a video game. And I'm presuming that we'll probably get some Elden ring two DLC. So Elden ring DLC? Not two, but DLC next year. I'm hoping we'll see.
That's probably my most anticipated, personally, for.
[00:36:26] Speaker B: Those playing the OGR bingo at home, he just said Elden Ring.
[00:36:29] Speaker A: Yeah. So, yeah, you can tick that one off now. Pav, have you got anything you want to bring to the table?
Most anticipated Silk song. Silk song? Yeah. Which I think totally warranted. It's going to be a banger right now. How many times have they delayed that.
[00:36:49] Speaker C: Now officially only a couple, but they've also just not told us anything for a long time.
I think we've only got like one official delay this year, but until then we've just heard nothing.
[00:37:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I swear it'd be more than that. But I think you're probably right.
[00:37:10] Speaker C: I could be wrong.
[00:37:11] Speaker A: I've always.
I totally agree. But yeah, that's definitely on my radar as well. Big time. I mean, I loved Hollow Knight and I thought the way that it melded those Metroidvania with the elements, with the souls, light kind of combat, and then also had this kind of weird world with the law buried in item descriptions. God, it's going to be good. I'm very excited for that. Is it still a three person team that's working on that?
[00:37:45] Speaker C: I don't know. Definitely a core team. I'm not actually sure.
[00:37:49] Speaker B: Yeah, surely after the success of Hollow Knight, they would have been able to pull in some additional talent, even if it's only extra people.
[00:37:57] Speaker A: Yeah, I'd imagine they want to keep it fairly slim just for those big bucks returned. Personally, I mean, I would. The guaranteed big bucks return, that's the thing, right? Less people, less spread of the big bucks. So I don't know. But yeah, anyways, look, that was the joysticks. And yeah, I think for the most part I was actually pretty stoked with who won what and yeah, I think definitely foreshadowing some big wins for Boulders Gate in this year's game awards.
[00:38:29] Speaker B: Looking through the list, there's only one I disagree with. Sorry, I know we're trying to get off the topic, but it's multiplayer game Mortal Kombat one, but I also don't have anything to replace it with now. I'm wondering if they might have gotten that because there's not really anything else.
[00:38:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I can't really think of anything off the top of my head that would probably usurp that place.
That is a brand new video game, I guess, from this year.
[00:38:57] Speaker B: Yeah, that's the only one I kind of disagree with. But like I said, I have nothing to replace it wiTh.
[00:39:02] Speaker A: Yeah, just take it away from it and don't give it to anyone.
[00:39:05] Speaker B: That's right. That is, nobody deserves it this year. Go away.
[00:39:09] Speaker A: Exactly. Now, Jim. Yes, Grand Theft Auto. We're stealing cars and we're going to be doing it for the 6th iteration. We're going to be learning more about that at the start of December.
People are getting very freaking excited. Rockstar announced after a long slew of just going on about how it's their 25th anniversary and thank you so much for playing our video games. We started this company in 1998, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they went ahead and said, just to let you know, early December, we're going to be releasing the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto Six. And we look forward to many years to come of sharing experiences with you.
Yeah, the internet went fucking freaking wild. Like big time.
[00:39:56] Speaker B: I think they only put that out as well because Jason Shriya leaked something that's saying that there was trailer coming soon. And so then Rockstar Games come out and said, by the way, settle down, calm the farm. We're getting there. Look, I guess it's exciting times for GTA players, but I think I'm going to be one of the first in the world to say I don't care.
[00:40:23] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm going to be honest with you, Jim, I don't care either.
I played GTA roleplay for all of about a week and then just didn't. And I think that was the most fun I've ever had in GTA. Look, I played a fair bit of San Andreas. I quite enjoyed that. But ultimately, for me, I've never really enjoyed the GTA experience all that much because.
And look, yes, I know it's not close to reality, but I'm going to word it like this. It's too close to reality for me. It's just Gangland War and stuff. And I just don't find that particularly interesting or captivating. And I'm always looking, you know what? Not enough fucking dragons, man. Boring. Move on. Like, I'd rather play Skyrim, honestly. And that's saying something. Unfortunately.
[00:41:15] Speaker B: I do get back to how my gaming has changed and how I prefer the smaller, tighter experiences these daYs. But I haven't played any GTA apart from GTA Five. And even that I only played because I managed to get it when Epic Games were giving away the free game. So I got a free copy and I played a few hours of it and I just went, I'm not that interested in this.
It's not even really an interesting story to me. And once again, the argument could be made that I didn't play it for long enough to really for the story to pick up. But I would also argue that if the story is not grabbing me in the first couple of hours, then that's the story's fault, not mine.
[00:41:57] Speaker A: Well, that opening story mission in GTA Six was pretty like balls to the wall. So, I mean, if it didn't capture you in that moment, I don't know if it was really going to capture you at all, to be honest. And I agree.
For me, it's just not a particularly interesting kind of game experience.
And I don't really thrive off that sandbox all that much.
If I was going to play something like that, I'd rather play something like just cause or something in those kind of. That realm. Because I just think the setting's more interesting because it's a bit more foreign for what? What was it, New York or some shit? I don't know. I couldn't even tell you. Who knows?
[00:42:38] Speaker B: Do something like Saints Row where you just go stupid crazy, where you end up leading the gang and then you end up as president, and then you.
[00:42:45] Speaker A: End up fighting aliens and then, yeah, you're a superhero.
It's an obvious choice. Yeah, look, I'm definitely in the same boat, but regardless, I can see why people are very excited. I mean, these games are beloved. It's going to be interesting to see. I am looking forward to seeing the trailer. I must admit I couldn't give a shit about the game itself. Like, I don't want to play it, but it's one of those hallmark times in your life where the GTA six trailer is coming out. And of course I'm going to watch it and I'm going to be quite interested to see what they have to offer. I'm hoping that it's not just a.
I hope it's got a significant amount of gameplay in there. I want to seE, I guess, the quality of the game engine they're utilizing. I want to see. There was rumors about them patenting a locomotion system which is supposed to enhance their animations dramatically and make them look insanely realistic. I want to see these things.
I want to see them doing because I remember when Red Dead Redemption Two was coming out and they were talking about the horse's testicles shrink in the cold. Like, I want to see that level of detail in GTA six. You know what I mean? Pav, he doesn't want to see that level of detail, but I do. That's what I'm excited for, I guess, is that next level of game system.
[00:44:07] Speaker B: That may also contribute to why I wasn't a big fan of GTA Five was because I first started playing it a year or so ago or a couple of years ago. And it's just like, by that point it's already a ten year old game. And what it's offering has been offered in other places before in games I've probably played so I'm sitting there going, yeah, this feels like other games, when really it may have been the game that started that. So that could also be a thing coming to it late. But, yeah, like I said, I've lost the word now. Not wanting to put everybody else down that is expecting this to be great things. I hope it is and I hope that the people that love GTA five, love GTA Six. But for me, it's not a game I'm out of for.
[00:44:54] Speaker A: Yeah, and I think if we've learnt anything over the last couple of years as well, Jim, is the level of hype and anticipation for some of these AA games that are in development and actually executing to the level of hype that is being generated is very slim, may I say.
And we haven't really seen anyone do it in recent years. I'd say probably Bouldersgate was probably the first to actually fully execute on the amount of hype that was generated.
[00:45:26] Speaker B: I loosely say tears of the Kingdom as well, but Nintendo in their own little world where they do their own little thing, but they do it really well.
[00:45:34] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah, I think it's going to be interesting to see if they can, because people are literally losing their shit. Like, the tweet I'm looking at has 1.5 million likes for the announcement of the trailer itself, which is. That's ridiculous. It's got 170,000,000 views of that reply to a tweet. Yeah.
[00:45:56] Speaker B: Or whatever we're calling it.
[00:45:58] Speaker A: Yeah, Rexes. But, yeah, people are obviously excited. So, yeah, I'm not excited for the game. Excited to see what they're going to announce. Excited to see where Rockstar can take that. Not excited to inevitably learn that there was probably like two years of crunch and developers fucking didn't eat properly for six months. And those kinds of stories have come out of Rockstar plenty of times. And I'm sure we're going to probably hear about them again after this game comes out. But, yeah, I think it's going to be an interesting time, Jim. We'll see how it goes. All right, moving along, mate.
Jim, you got a Steam deck?
[00:46:38] Speaker B: I don't.
[00:46:39] Speaker A: Would you like a Steam deck?
[00:46:42] Speaker B: Are you offering?
[00:46:43] Speaker A: Because I will take one. Well, Pav actually is offering a Steam deck.
[00:46:49] Speaker B: Generous of you, Pav.
[00:46:50] Speaker A: Yeah. Yes, I know. He's incredibly generous of him now. So generous is he. He's planning on getting you the brand new one that was announced literally last week.
[00:47:01] Speaker B: The one with the OLED screen.
[00:47:03] Speaker A: The one with the OLED. Yeah. He's dipped into his own personal funds for this one as well. Jim, look, jokes aside, where the Patreon.
[00:47:10] Speaker B: Fees are going.
[00:47:14] Speaker A: No Pafto. You freaking give me those eyes, mate. That's not happening.
Jokes aside, we have had that announcement of an OLED edition of the Steam Deck, which is quite exciting for a number of reasons. We're getting an increased battery life. We're also getting faster downloads. We're getting a nicer screen. Obviously it's an OLED screen from the standard LCD screen.
You're going to have much more vibrant colors and excuse the pun, but you're going to see your games in a new light now. Yeah, faster downloads. We're going to be going the WiFi six route. So I think the old Steam deck is only WiFi five, so I believe. I think it was three times faster or something like that, which is pretty quIck. Okay, pretty fast. And speaking of quick and fast, it's also lighter. So faster, better, stronger, lighter, and cooler. It's got a better fan in it this time. So I think it's about 5% lighter than the LCD model, which is impressive because the screen is bigger and it also weighs less.
[00:48:24] Speaker B: Looking at the stats as well, there's also a 1 TB model, which I would absolutely love. But you've got one at the moment, don't you cap?
[00:48:32] Speaker A: I do, yeah. I ended up going for the two five six gig LCD model when those were the only ones that were available. And. Sorry, the 64 gig model, I'm getting mixed up and I just expanded with an SD card, which is pretty quick.
[00:48:54] Speaker B: And I asked if you could expand the memory.
[00:48:56] Speaker A: Yeah, so I've got a 512 gig SD card, which is the optimal speed and everything, and it's freaking quick.
The 1 TB is pretty sexy and sounds great, don't get me wrong. But yeah, in terms of other features, there's not an awful lot change. There's some slight changes to, what do you call it? The GPU I think is slightly different. I think it doesn't fluctuate between one and 1.6. Think it just sticks at 1.6 GHz. So it's technically still the same, but the OD ones can drop a little bit. So it's technically a better for GPU, but other than that, it's pretty much the same device.
[00:49:45] Speaker B: I have noticed one thing in some little stats that I'm looking at here. It comes with a longer charging cable. So like the six LCD model is a 1.5 meters cable and the 512 and 1 TB models have a 2.5 meters cable. So if you're playing away in bed and it's running low on charge. You can just pop that in and just get a little bit extra wiggle.
[00:50:09] Speaker A: Room and it'll mean very little for people in Australia, Jim, because the only way to get this is through a resupplyer, I. E. Amazon or someone Kogan, et cetera, which is how I bought mine because they don't stock them in Australia natively through steam. You can't buy them through steam, you have to buy them through a resupplyer. And they package a brand new charger with it that's Australian compatible because the ones that you get natively with the device is American or whatever else.
What connection is it?
[00:50:43] Speaker B: Out of curiosity, is it like USBC?
[00:50:45] Speaker A: Yeah, it utilizes USBC.
I actually use my Nintendo Switch charger to charge my thing and it works perfectly fine.
[00:50:54] Speaker B: Well you can get some, just a side note, you can get some USBC laptop chargers that do really quick charging for phones because I do that, I've got a USBC laptop charger that was only like $50 or something and it just charges my phone from zero to 100 in an hour really quick, which.
[00:51:14] Speaker A: Is the way to go. Really?
Yeah.
Look, ultimately, Jim, one thing I will say about this device is they've got a limited edition see through, what do you call it? Steam deck. Like shell. It looks very sexy. It's very nice.
[00:51:33] Speaker B: I always remember the Nintendo 64 had that. I was going to say casing.
[00:51:38] Speaker A: Yeah. Reminds me of the.
I feel like the most classic one is that little purple see through controller. I think that was the first one they ever did that vaguely transparent sort of opaque kind of thing going on. They've kind of done that with the shell here and using the classic kind of valve red for some of the accents on it. And it does look really good.
Those limited editions are only available in the US and Canada, unfortunately. But they did say if it sells well they'll consider doing it elsewhere and for different colors and stuff down the track. So that's pretty cool. But yeah, a really nice looking little unit. And I mean, I got to say I love my steam deck. So it's good to see that they're. Because steam is a bit funny with their hardware. I was kind of dubious as to whether they kind of really kind of consistently support the steam deck post launch. But I mean, if they're doing an OLED variety, clearly it's selling well for them 100%.
[00:52:41] Speaker B: And look, when you're talking about a steam deck, is there really a lot you need to do to it. To keep it, obviously you got to release different iterations as the hardware improves. But I think we can see from the switch, even though it's not as powerful as what the steam deck is or anything else really. Probably my phone's more powerful than the switch these days. But look, you don't have to do too much to it to keep it up to date and to keep people playing on them, I don't think. Because no really is the draw card for it.
[00:53:13] Speaker A: Yeah, well, so the thing is, right, so because of the form factor, and I did a bit of research into this because I was curious as to where the technology is at and what we're looking like and how long is it going to take for me to get the freaking 40 80 in a handheld kind of device. And that's going to be a freaking long time, let me tell you, Jim, based on my research. So the issue is there's a thing called TDP, right? And that's how much heat is generated by your CPU and your GPU. Now, to keep that at a acceptable level for a device that sits between two hands and is a very small device that requires a very small fan, because again, you need to hold it in your hands. It's an incredibly difficult engineering problem to solve, both in terms of architecture and physicality of the device. Right.
[00:54:10] Speaker B: Why can't we just build in a screen to the big 40 80 Tis that are like half meter wide and just hold on to that? Surely that'd be okay.
[00:54:21] Speaker A: Yeah, you can give it a crack. But from what I understand, steam and valve did a shitload of research into optimizing the TDP for the form factor, basically. And so what the steam deck represents is like the best bang for buck in terms of economical pricing and also what's currently kind of available.
They even came out recently and kind of said, look, the next iteration of a steam deck is at least a couple of years off, et cetera, maybe longer, because the technology is not quite there yet. In terms of giving us that next acceptable iteration of the next step in the steam deck, I don't think valve upgrade when exactly.
And I mean, if we're kind of looking at like say, I don't know, a 50% increase in the specs of a steam deck, is that really worth a brand new price point? Probably not. I think like valve are probably aiming for something like two to three times faster than the original Steam deck in their next 2.0 kind of iteration, right? So we're still a fair while off. That is what it is. But regardless, in the meantime, Jim, we have the OLED. Okay, so pretty exciting and it looks really nice. So go and have a look at the trailer if you're interested. Now, alongside all this, they didn't announce this. This was through data mining. But it looks like we've got an interesting new feature coming to Steam potentially soon. You will soon maybe be able to mark games as private and hide them from your friends. So when Sukai gets in and loads up sort of feet simulator 2024, he will hopefully be able to hide that from his friends.
[00:56:15] Speaker B: You know what I say to that, Sukai, don't let anybody kink shame you with your feet simulator. Just own.
[00:56:24] Speaker A: I wasn't implying that he should be shamed by it. I was just more so implying that he might have the option in the future.
Ultimately an interesting feature.
I think it's a feature that makes sense. I mean, there's been a few times where maybe I've been like at jobs in the past, perhaps that I've been at home and playing a video game and maybe I want to be online so I can play with some other friends who are doing a similar thing to what I'm doing. But I would like to hide that in a more constructive way where I don't have to go completely offline. So this will probably give you that option, which is kind of cool. So interesting, but yeah, cool. I guess we'll see if that actually happens. For now, it's just a bit of data mining stuff, but yeah, keep an eye on that.
All right. Jim, were you ever into the Overwatch esports kind of stuff? Ever not.
[00:57:27] Speaker B: Overwatch got into a bit of local, World of Tanks esports and League of Legends. Big fan of that and passingly familiar with CS GO or now CS Two. But Overwatch wasn't one I was ever into.
[00:57:41] Speaker A: Yeah, no, me neither.
It's funny because I feel like Overwatch was in that time period where video games were being built to be esports games. And I feel like there was a very specific moment in time where all of the marketing was the next big esports game. Right. And that was kind of how games were marketed back then at that particular moment in time. And Overwatch was definitely in there and they pushed really hard. Blizzard pumped a lot of money into getting that sort of grassroots esports stuff off the ground and trying to make the teams look really nice and kind of slick and getting people hyped up. And it just never really eventually owners.
[00:58:29] Speaker B: Into buying franchises, I think.
Yeah.
Reading what they're having to refund teams now that the Owl is dissolving, it's like 30 million a team or something. That's ridiculous money.
[00:58:46] Speaker A: So if you're kind of at home wondering why Activision Blizzard might have to pay these people back and there by virtue Microsoft will have to be paying these teams back, there was a certain buy in cost that was required for things like licensing and all the other bullshit that goes behind esports for these teams to buy into to become a part of that league. Now part of the contract that they would sign inevitably would be if the league ever dissolved they would get some percentage of that back. And that is basically the debt cost that Microsoft is probably going to have to foot now that. Well, it is going to have to foot that. It's in the contract now that the Overwatch League is being dissolved, of which over the last week and a bit those teams universally voted to dissolve the league because I just wasn't getting the support both from a community standpoint and from Blizzard, realistically the game is just not popular anymore. They tried hard with obviously Overwatch two in brackets but it's not stuck. It hasn't stuck and people aren't interested I guess ultimately. Thoughts Jim, what do you reckon?
[01:00:02] Speaker B: I think you've hit the nail on the head there. I think that the transition from Overwatch to Overwatch two has not gone as smoothly as Blizzard would have hoped. And I think that they burnt a lot of goodwill with players and I think it's pulled away from that. But I also think there's more an overarching issue at the moment globally, not just in esports but worldwide economy where everything is on the desk.
[01:00:27] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[01:00:28] Speaker B: And it's not just blizzard and Overwatch. You see it. Like Grizz was saying, I think last week that people he knew went to Ti, which is the international for Dota. Big, huge competition, supposed to be the richest in the world and it felt like it was a downgrade kind of thing.
[01:00:49] Speaker A: Yeah, like a tumble.
[01:00:50] Speaker B: Interestingly, that's another.
[01:00:58] Speaker A: Dota is now owned by Steam.
[01:01:00] Speaker B: Oh, there you go. Yeah, so slightly different but even locally and like the Australian esports scene, you have to take things with a pinch of salt because there is just no money in it whatsoever. But League of Legends earlier this year, probably a couple of months ago, Chiefs, who are a huge Australian esports name, were bought by Team Bliss, which is going to be interesting because now that means that for the LCO, which is the local League of Legends competition, you've got bliss and Chiefs. But the rules say you can't have one company owning two teams in the league. So one of those are going to have to disappear. And these aren't just small teams, these are Team one and Team Two in the league. And team Two just bought Team one.
Yeah, it's really weird.
[01:01:48] Speaker A: Interesting. Yeah.
[01:01:49] Speaker B: Sukai is saying in chat, Chiefs is out. I believe, and I would believe that as well because on my Twitter feed I've seen popping up lately like a few of the Chiefs players are saying I'm still contracted, but I'm being allowed to explore options. So I think that.
[01:02:02] Speaker A: Interesting.
[01:02:03] Speaker B: I think that a lot of the Chiefs going in. Sukai also saying in chat, another bought chief spot. Yes. Fury bought Chief spot.
[01:02:11] Speaker A: There you go. Bloody hell.
That's the economic kind of situation we're in. Right. And then you throw dubious corporate contracts and everything else that goes around it and then all of a sudden people are footing bills, I. E. Microsoft or people are having to forego team spots into leagues, all kinds of stuff. It's an interesting time to be alive. Not in a nice way sometimes. I mean, we're seeing an immense amount of people suffer with redundancies and layoffs recently, especially in the gaming scene and just tech in general.
But yeah, I mean the Overwatch League, another casualty of A, poor economic climate and B, probably also mismanagement by Blizzard. I mean one thing, Jim, is know Blizzard, you have a perfectly good esport there called StarCraft and you don't even fucking support like, you know what StarCraft.
[01:03:07] Speaker B: Persists in spite of Blizzard, I reckon.
[01:03:11] Speaker A: Exactly. I mean, even you would argue that Dota persists in spite of Blizzard.
[01:03:16] Speaker B: For those playing along at home that don't know the history of Dota. Dota started out as a mod in WarCraft Three, which is Blizzard property. And then it got so big that it spun out into its own game. Kind of like how Counterstrike was a Half Life mod and that got spun out into its own game.
[01:03:32] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly right.
[01:03:33] Speaker B: I do want to say as well, I kind of get the feeling that this is just another stepping stone for Blizzard. They've realized that the Overwatch League isn't doing what they want it to do. They've got some not so good press from when Overwatch two launches. It might be seen internally easier as a way to wipe the league and start clean again in a year or so, which I think will happen because the reports I've been reading have kind of been saying that there is going to be something else, but just not the Overwatch League.
[01:04:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's going to be a lot more bare bones and kind of low key as well from what I understood. And I mean ultimately probably in terms of a financial hit because the Overwatch League would have cost Blizzard X amount of dollars per year. I can imagine they were making money off of it. I'm sure it probably looks slightly better on their books ultimately.
But regardless, if you are into Overwatch, I'm sorry, you're probably going to going to have to find that elsewhere.
Yeah, there you freaking go. Sukai is saying in terms of revenue, StarCraft Two was outsold by the first amount microtransaction in WoW. Which is, I'm totally all for those kinds of I guess, price comparisons, but it just blows my mind that why aren't Blizzard putting out a new StarCraft with microtransactions in it? Because people would fucking buy that shit. Like put this new skin on your freaking Protos or your zerglings or whatever. People will buy that. I don't understand why they're not doing it.
[01:05:15] Speaker B: Does it does seem like they could do something for that? And there are skins they could bring out for units and everything as well because that's the thing about things like Dota.
[01:05:26] Speaker A: Economy is just out of control.
[01:05:28] Speaker B: Well, each champion gets different skins that gets released. Why can't you do that with StarCraft? And StarCraft Two had champion units. Not that I really think they get played or even can be played in competitive, but there's stuff that you could do there to make StarCraft a good thing. But I also think that RTS games and the competitive scene isn't big like outside of Korea. Who even really plays StarCraft two competitively anymore.
[01:05:59] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a fair point. Though. I do wonder what I guess the RTS kind of ecosystem would look like if there was a kind of AAA level well supported StarCraft variant. What would that look like? Would there be a better, more kind of like community supported Western audience maybe. We don't know because they don't support it.
[01:06:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I've just said that about RTS and then I've just remembered that there is an Age of Empires competitive comp every year called the Low something or other.
[01:06:37] Speaker A: Oh hell yeah. I'm all about that. That's sick.
[01:06:40] Speaker B: Kind of get the feeling in the back of my head something saying that Red Bull is involved with it.
That could be why. Because Red Bull tends to grab onto something and run with it. And so if they've got hold of that then that's probably why Age of Empires is still going as a.
[01:07:00] Speaker A: Jim Silo v. Yep. Owl goodbye. All right now, Jim, you're much of a Modern Warfare player, like you like your Call of duties.
[01:07:11] Speaker B: I have not played a Call of Duty. I don't even know which one it was, but it was the one where you play as a terrorist going through the airport. I think that's the last Cot I play.
[01:07:19] Speaker A: I think that was Modern Warfare one or two, the originals, the originales, but yeah. Well, look, you're probably not, definitely not going to want to play Modern Warfare three either, mate. Because apparently, according to reviews anyways, it seems like the campaign is insanely rushed to the point where apparently people are finishing the campaign in about 4 hours, which is insane. It's pretty quick, dude.
[01:07:47] Speaker B: I heard a report that there was somebody that was just dropping into lobbies and in voice chat just to say, unless you're downloading this on 150 Meg Connection, it took longer to download this game than to play the campaign.
[01:08:04] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I mean, according to reports supported by those reports, some of the review, I mean, I haven't played it, but the reviews I've been kind of skimming over looks like a lot of people are suggesting that, well, they think that the campaign was fairly quickly whacked together in a very short amount of time. And the kind of hallmarks of that is A, the length of the campaign, B, it kind of seems like they have retrofitted the existing kind of battle royale maps into kind of like these very poorly thought out mission style things going on. The story isn't quite, well, kind of put together. I mean, most people don't play CoD for the story, but there is a story element that some people do really get into certain characters in there.
And regardless, it seems like that just didn't quite come through well in this particular iteration of the game.
[01:09:03] Speaker B: After the outcry for Star Wars Battlefront the Second, I'll call it a better term, when that came out and people realized it was just multiplayer and people kind of lost their shit about that, amongst other things that that game was infamous for. And then Battlefront Two, the second came out and it had that campaign and EA is going, look, it has a single player campaign and it was just this very short.
It was all right, but it was nothing special, really.
[01:09:33] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. I'm definitely getting similar vibes for this one, Jim. Based on what I've kind of seen, just little things as well. Like for example, they're kind of saying there's no real stealth mechanic in this game. You kind of just get too close to the AI and then the AI just knows you're there and starts shooting at you. So you can't really approach with an awful lot of stealthiness or anything.
But yeah, ultimately it just kind of looks like this particular campaign kind of stinks and probably best to give this one a wide berth. Maybe just wait for the battle royale stuff to come out and call it a day.
[01:10:07] Speaker B: We'll go back and play the original Modern Warfare titles.
[01:10:11] Speaker A: Yeah, the better ones.
So there you go. Modern Warfare three freaking stinks. Now, Jim, I don't know if you're keeping up to date with the Bungee news, but obviously we've recently had a lot of information about, I guess, the layoffs that we've had recently at Bungie.
We've seen an awful lot of. I think it was about 100 employees were let go or something quite insane.
And yeah, there was a lot of kind of rumors and rumblings about who was to blame. And Bloody Sony's come in and they're pulling all these people out to be replaced. And kind of seems that there's a few more bits and pieces, some kind of revelations that have come out in the last week. Kind of seems like, firstly, management at Bungie are the people that kind of pull the trigger here. They're kind of directed that you'd need to slim down and how you decide to do that is up to you. And this was the way that they decided to do so. Apparently employees asked if there was any, I guess, insight into whether they looked at board and CEO compensation as a way to, I guess, avoid the layoffs. Exactly.
And it was said that some bonuses were, were forfeited, et cetera. But some of the money that these people get paid at these levels is just out of control. Like five plus people salaries. It's just ridiculous.
Ultimately, I know they're important mechanisms in the chain of an organization, but I can't imagine their role in the company is worth that amount. They're not doing the groundwork. So regardless, CEO Pete Parsons kind of noted that these bonuses were forfeited, but he didn't specify the size of the bonuses or any other information. So kind of swept that one on the carpet.
[01:12:20] Speaker B: So classic interesting thing being Bungie, because you've just gotten out from under the heel of Activision Blizzard and then you sign up to Sony. And I kind of wonder if that interference that they were trying to get away from at Activision Blizzard has followed them to Sony. And admittedly this is a business decision rather than a game decision. So I guess time will tell about that. And particularly with new old IP Marathon that they're working on and if that has on that game, well, I think.
[01:12:53] Speaker A: That'S potentially, I mean maybe we'll get to the impact there shortly, but maybe just to kind of explore that whole idea of the effect of Sony buying in to Bungie, I think that the fact that, like you said, they've gone from Activision over to Sony, but they celebrated quite hard about the fact that they were independent studio again, and then all of a sudden they went to Sony. I think the reason they probably ended up going to Sony was because they realized, fuck, it's pretty hard to make a crust in this industry as an independent solo publisher developer with a single title, I. E. Destiny, and keep that money coming in. And I think that they were seeking cash elsewhere. And hey, if they didn't have Sony to bankroll them for a little bit between now and before when they first got acquired, we might have seen these layoffs Ethernet earlier than we already did.
So I don't know. I don't know, that's for sure, obviously. But clearly Sony has given them a fair bit of cash to get their kind of stuff off the ground. I think one interesting thing that's come out recently in these reports as well, Jim, is just this kind of undercurrent of the implication that upper management at Bungie is kind of seeing the next DLC expansion for Destiny Two, I. E. The final shape as I guess the kind of redemption arc for Destiny Two at the moment because it's been through a significant kind of tumultuous critique from its community and reviewers in recent patches and expansions. And they were kind of hoping that the final shape would be kind of as good as some previous ones, such as Forsaken and the Taken King. Some of the most popular contents that they've dropped, but it's really important that they execute on that. And now that they've got less people, they're kind of split between trying to work on marathon. And I guess a lot of the community is kind of suggesting that, hey, is Destiny shit? Because you're just kind of working on marathon and you just have a skeleton crew on Destiny Two. What does that mean for the final shape? It seems pretty scary at Bungie right now, sort of looking outside in and it's going to be interesting to see how they go moving forward, I guess.
[01:15:16] Speaker B: There was a comment Sukai made in Twitch chat earlier on. It says how well gamers are eating this year is such a stark contrast to the state of the overall industry. And I think seeing what's going on with Bungie, and not just there, but other stuff as well, because there's a story we're going to get to in a minute about Sony as well, with culling some of the projects that they've been working on. And it really is a stark contrast to the games that have come.
[01:15:50] Speaker A: It's. It's an interesting time, I think, for a lot of reasons, Jim, and I think one of the reasons is honestly just talking about live service games and their lifecycle, and we're seeing that lifecycle for some of those games, kind of getting to an endpoint for some of them. Some of them continue to go up and up. You got your no man's skies, which is still generating a shitload of revenue, by the way. Your Fortnites are still kicking on, but some games just can't seem to perpetuate and they can't seem to iterate on their base to provide interesting new content. I think Destiny Two is well and truly in that boat.
[01:16:30] Speaker B: Unfortunately, it's the old Netflix thing, isn't it? Because Netflix came along and revolutionized how we consume our video content and then everybody's gone, we want a piece of that. And so everybody's there doing their own thing and it's pulled out and stretched it thin. And I feel like that's happened with live services as well. Like, you've had stuff that's been around for a while. Like, your MMOs are always your live service type thing, and they'll come and go, but you'll see other games, like your destiny that's been around for a while. Or then Avengers, that game was a year, 18 months, and the service got shut off. Yes, it's a very hard thing to try and balance. Like, everybody wants a slice of that pie, but everybody's taking a slice of the pie. The slices are getting real thin.
[01:17:17] Speaker A: And if that pie is, I mean, let's be honest, hours of the day, that's what you're competing for. You're competing for a player's sort of leisure hours in the.
I mean, how you need to give them a reason to come back. And I mean, as far as we can see, Bungie is kind of bungling that trust it had in its player. It's. It did have. I don't know if it still got one. As far as I can tell, it doesn't seem to have one. It did have an incredibly loyal fan base that would come and eat from the Destiny plate, regardless of how consistently similar the content was. But I think players are starting to hit the point of saturation with that particular IP. And Bungee is doing itself no favors by splitting up its dev team and not giving Destiny the time of day to really get into its own and take it in new directions. And yeah, I don't know, I think we're slowly seeing that and the fact that they also now lost 100 devs that could have potentially been working on that, I think it's going to probably die a slow death. Unfortunately, I'm a huge Destiny fan, but I've not played it properly in the last couple of years and yeah, I can't see it really recovering from this. But we'll see, we'll see what happens.
I don't know. Now, like you mentioned, Jim, Sony has reportedly delayed six of its twelve upcoming live service games, which is wild because firstly I didn't know that had twelve live service games in development, but apparently it does. It's a lot. But I think this also kind of implies, I guess, kind of the corporate objective for what live service games are. I feel like they know that a lot of these games just don't convert into something that sticks around or people actively put money into, but they know that there's probably some kind of amount of conversion where some games do make a bit of cash because people get involved and enjoy them and it's kind of like just chucking shit at a wall and just waiting for one to stick, right?
[01:19:28] Speaker B: Yeah, that's exactly what it feels like to me, throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. But it feels dirty to me.
[01:19:36] Speaker A: Absolutely, I agree.
[01:19:37] Speaker B: Games are all about those microtransactions, and the fact that they've got twelve lined up says to me that even if these only last a little bit, they want to throw as much microtransactions and make as much money from them as they can and then can them.
[01:19:55] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. But clearly these games are making a significant amount of coinage, Jim, because they wouldn't do it otherwise. Right.
[01:20:04] Speaker B: Ultimately I can't remember where I saw the report, but I did see somewhere that.
And granted, this year is probably a statistical outlier, but the top selling video games for this year have been single player experiences.
[01:20:22] Speaker A: Yes.
[01:20:25] Speaker B: It'S kind of the world we're in at the moment. Like Baldust Gate Three. We cleaned up with the golden joysticks and yeah, that has a multiplayer component, but it's not there to nickel and dime you. Tears of the Kingdom Salt had the biggest opening weekend of any Zelda ever. Then you've got other games like Diablo, for all its faults, had people playing it on the open.
[01:20:48] Speaker A: I mean it was the biggest release Blizzards ever had.
It was huge.
[01:20:54] Speaker B: So there's all these games that can be experienced in single player that don't have these microtransactions that are there for the cooperative gameplay that have succeeded. AnD I'm not sure, I think people, and consumers in particular are learning and I get sometimes we operate in a bit of an echo chamber where we know games, we know the different types of games that are out there. But I also feel that consumers in general are becoming more aware of these types of games and know that. All right, little Timmy wants this game for Christmas. What is it? Oh no, look at all these microtransactions.
[01:21:32] Speaker A: Yeah, it kind of reminds me, Jim, I feel like we're getting close to another video game crash where we basically had a massive crash in the quality of video games around at the time. The Sness was out effectively maybe just before, but to the point where.
What was that?
[01:21:55] Speaker B: Sorry eT, I'm looking at you.
[01:21:58] Speaker A: I was going to say to the point where we buried a massive amount of stock because people just weren't buying the crap that people were putting out. And I do feel like we're almost there for live service games. Some of the shit that gets put on mobile is just abysmal. It's pathetic.
[01:22:14] Speaker B: Just as a side note to that, do you remember as a kid buying the Nintendo games and they had that Nintendo seal of, you know, that came about because of all the shovelware games that were coming out on the Atari and whatnot. And so Nintendo had a standard that gold sticker meant that it meant Nintendo standard. So you knew that it was at least going to be a half decent game.
[01:22:34] Speaker A: It's going to run okay and it's going know, be bug free and probably be a reasonable experience. But the thing know, obviously you don't have that seal of approval now obviously we've got a pretty good amount of reviewing and I guess, you know, review culture, know, getting the word out about video games. But yeah, I think it's going to be interesting, Jim, even if we look at the state of the economy as well, we're kind of heading towards some kind of crash regardless. But yeah, anyways, interesting time to be a gamer, Jim. It's that simple.
Now that's basically the quest log for the week. We didn't do a poll because Grizz isn't here and I forgot and yeah, it just didn't happen. So bad luck. Sorry. We'll do it next week, maybe we'll see how we go and we kind of spoken about our video gaming. Unless you've got another video game you'd like to bring up, Jim, that you've been playing recently.
[01:23:33] Speaker B: Just one. I did a review for Shout out to the website for Roundtable Co op.
[01:23:38] Speaker A: Yeah. Now before you go, let me just quickly play this, Jim, I want to know how's your gaming been going?
[01:23:47] Speaker B: So apart from the issues I had with Star wars, the old Republic, and four guys that we mentioned earlier, Marvel Snap, enjoyed that. But there's a game I've been playing recently I do quickly want to mention, called my Time at Rock.
[01:24:00] Speaker A: I've heard about this, but I have no idea what it is.
[01:24:02] Speaker B: So it's kind of a cozy post apocalyptic game is probably the best way to describe it.
Lots of relationships with Townsfolk in there. So you come in Stardue Valley like? Yes, very Stardue Valley like. But whereas I have kind of problems with those games where it becomes too Sandboxy for me and I don't know what to do next. And the game says, you can do anything. And then I get decision paralysis and go, I'm not going to do anything and then stop playing.
[01:24:34] Speaker A: I'm going to do anything but play this game.
[01:24:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
My time at Sandrock had this really cool gameplay loop where you would go, you'd get commissions, you'd build stuff, you'd sell it, you get the in game currency, and then you would continue on with the game to the point where I think I put 30, 40 hours into it and was about halfway through the game, like, story wise. Yeah, it had definitely sucked me in. Yes. It was a sequel to my time at Porsche as, but made by the same people.
[01:25:09] Speaker A: Right. Okay. I've played my time at Porsche and that had the interesting kind of like digging mechanic from memory where you could kind of go into a cave and it kind of had almost like a red faction level of digging into rock and stuff from memory.
[01:25:29] Speaker B: Yeah, that has that as well. It has multiple different areas you can go into. It has a bit of a combat area as well because you kill animals or enemies and they give you certain resources that you can then go build stuff. But it all kind of flowed really well for me. I was really enjoying my time at Sandrock. So, yeah, I just wanted to give that a quick shout out there.
[01:25:52] Speaker A: Yeah, great, mate. Actually, that reminds me, I pulled down the deep rock galactic survivor, I think they called. It's like a top down, rogue light kind of shooter thing that it had going on.
It turned out that game was basically a vampire survivors clone and just not a particularly fun one.
I played the demo and, yeah, it just doesn't have an awful lot going for it. That really kind of made me want to stick around. I mean, it kind of still mixed the elements of the classic deep rock galactic stuff where you're digging and trying to get ore and stuff to upgrade your certain things. And the different oars you would collect would give you different currencies to upgrade different things along the way. But it was just kind of not super fun, which is a shame, because I really liked the look of it. It just didn't quite capitalize. Yeah, what do you do? Here's what it is.
[01:26:53] Speaker B: Exactly.
[01:26:54] Speaker A: Yeah, here's what it is. All right. Now, it's that time of the week, my friends. It's time for a bit of rapid fine news. Brought you by jump, DJ Francesco. It's in the freaking game. Brought to you by our good friend, DJ Francesco. He's just a legend. Thank you very much, Mr. Francesco.
All right. First came off the rank. The PS four, PS five, Twitter integration will be no longer supported or accessible soon. Jim, I can't remember the exact date for that one. I imagine not a huge loss, but I guess it's probably just costing them a shitload of money to maintain that integration, because Elon Musk made you start paying for the integration and Sony is probably going, why the fuck are we paying for this? How many tweets we sending off? Ps five and Ps four. S what, one a week? No, get rid of it. Get it out of here.
[01:27:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't mind that. But the bit that got me was the tweet that I saw about this said that turning off that integration includes the ability to view any content published on X on a PS Five, PS Four. So that kind of reads to me that anything that you posted from your PS five or PS four will no longer be viewable on Twitter. And that stinks.
[01:28:15] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, you could go to Twitter and log in and look at the things you posted. And the content that you posted from your device would presumably still be on the device. You just can't access X from the device because it consumes the API, which costs money to use.
[01:28:33] Speaker B: I imagine that makes more sense to me because when I first read that, I went, wait, the stuff that you posted from your PlayStation is not going to be available on X?
[01:28:43] Speaker A: No. I think the file that you would have put up, if it still exists on your PlayStation, it'll still be there. Obviously, your account will still have the stuff on there. You just have to sign into the browser natively to get that.
[01:28:56] Speaker B: Once again, who really cares?
[01:28:59] Speaker A: Well, exactly. I would love to know the numbers of users actually utilizing and posting clips and stuff. I'm sure there was a significant number, but I can't imagine it being like, oh my God, there's like a shitload of users using it. And again, I can't remember what the pricing was on using the API for.
It was when Elon Musk announced it was like, for example, Reddit did the same thing. All of the Reddit readers, the free to use Reddit readers, gone off all of the marketplaces, et cetera. Same thing happened with Twitter. Tweet Deck no longer exists properly because the API was just so expensive to use for grassroots.
Small dev teams just couldn't afford to utilize it. And I guess we're kind of slowly starting to see those prices trickle into big business and people going, do we really want this? Not really, which personally I think is kind of going to bite them on the ass eventually.
[01:30:00] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so as well.
[01:30:05] Speaker A: You want people using your service, right? Ultimately that's what you want. And so if you're restricting people consuming the service through basic means of putting content onto a feed, I mean, I know they're missing out on ad revenue from having people consume the feed through their own means because they can inject the ads into their stream and shit like that. But ultimately it's a hard one to.
[01:30:32] Speaker B: Ensure that a, you're getting he Twitter rant incoming. So just bear with me here. Elon Musk has come in and said, we're doing all this stuff, we're changing things. We're going to stop the bots. I still get just as many DMs from the bots and like, oh yeah, half of the likes I get on my tweets are still bots. And you look at them and they're like scantily clad women and go, yeah, I know you're not a real person. I know me. And you haven't got my humor yet, so I haven't personality.
[01:31:03] Speaker A: My favorite ones are the like, hey, I'm a graphic designer and just give me your PayPal and I'll hook you up with some cool Twitch emotes real quick. Yeah, promise you I'm not going to just take the money and never give you.
It's. You're right, Jim. The money that's apparently been putting and is not really being shown. But regardless, we're not getting the integration on the PlayStation anymore. Bad luck, gamers. Sorry. Now, we spoke about Fortnite a little bit earlier today, Jim, the original map, the OG, was implemented and brought back to know all your classics like your tomato town or whatever. It's.
You know, I couldn't tell you another one, quite frankly, because I can't fucking remember them. And regardless, regardless, they had, in one day, 44.7 million players totaling 102,000,000 hours just for one day, which was a massive day for them. Huge.
May I just say it's pretty impressive to be able to support that many players on a system in general.
So, yeah, congratulations to those devs, because that's fucking impressive. But, yeah. So, Fortnite, the OG map, very, very popular. There you go. Now, interesting one here, Jim. Starfield used to have a fully voiced protagonist, and then Bethesda at some point decided to drop that entirely and go with a silent protagonist. And those voice actors were given other characters of which I can't remember who they are. I think Cole and the other lady can't remember her name.
Andrea. Yeah, that's the one. Yeah. So they were given other roles within Bethesda's kind of video game, of which the voice actors actually praised Bethesda quite a lot because. And this wasn't really something that I was quite aware of. But quite often this kind of thing does happen where they partially start to record something and then go, oh, I don't know if we want to do this anymore. And quite often those voice actors will just kind of get kicked to the curb and not be re. Kind of integrated within the game elsewhere, et cetera. Whereas these particular voice actors were like, this is pretty rare to get another role within the game. So props to Bethesda for keeping us on. Normally you just get kicked to the curb. So impressive.
[01:33:37] Speaker B: I must admit, I do kind of like my silent protagonist a bit better than I do too. Voiced ones. Sometimes it fits depending on the story you're telling. But generally I like the non voiced ones.
Surely even if they didn't get these other roles in the game, they would have been paid for their time anyway.
[01:33:59] Speaker A: I'm absolutely positive of that. I think it's maybe more so.
They just are happy to have been in work beyond that contract, I guess.
[01:34:12] Speaker B: Which is, as an artist, I can imagine that it's never good if you do some work and then it doesn't get shown and you've worked on this project.
Like, the actors that get cast in a movie and then their scene gets deleted, it's just like, well, I've been in the movie, but I'm not seen.
[01:34:28] Speaker A: Not to mention they probably had a certain prospected amount of work hours and that probably became diminished. And I'm sure it would have been in their contract that if they decided not to go forward with it and they maybe get some degree of a payout, but they wouldn't get the full amount of money and that probably wasn't super great. So yeah, ultimately, yeah, good on them.
Now, Jim, Phil Spencer has reported that the Japanese PC game market has doubled and PC game pass users has quadrupled. And based on those two statistics, I would like to say well done Atlas, I. E the creators of Persona, all of which are available on PC Game Pass, I think you have single handedly quadrupled the PC game users market because those games are ridiculously huge. And yeah, they're probably going to have to stick on the PC game Pass for a while to finish the game.
[01:35:20] Speaker B: I agree with that. The only other thing that kind of came to mind being that mobile gaming is such a huge thing in Asia in itself. I did wonder whether maybe the cloud streaming to phones may have been part of that, but this article is specifically talking about PC gaming, which is huge.
[01:35:43] Speaker A: Yeah, and actually just off the top of my head, whilst it's popped into there, I'm sure the Yakuza games have probably helped with that as well. So probably a joint effort between the Yakuza games and the Persona games. So makes a lot of sense.
All right, Jim, now it looks like we might see a WoW console version Surface eventually. I mean, obviously we've had the creators of World of Warcraft Blizzard or Activision Blizzard be picked up by Microsoft. They obviously have their toes in the console market so I think it would make sense anyway. But recently one of the devs sort of came out and said, yeah, we talk about a console version all the time.
Interesting for Wow. I don't know how well that would go in all honesty, because if you've ever played Wow, I don't know how they're going to translate that to console easily.
[01:36:31] Speaker B: Yeah, anytime something like an MMO or an RTS says yeah, we got a console version, I kind of wince and go, these games do not suit a console with a controller.
The only RTS I've seen be half decent on console was Halo wars and that was specifically designed for the console.
I don't think I've even ever seen an MMO come to console.
[01:36:58] Speaker A: I think ESO has done a pretty good job, but I also think that ESO was built to be consolified.
Final Fantasy online doesn't do too bad a job, but I think a lot of the time the big bleeding issues for MMOs on consoles is the UI, especially if it's kind of a MMO like Final Fantasy or wow. How do you make those elements not look like shit? I think another issue that you've got as well is a lot of WoW's ecosystem know, for example, raiding requires third party add ons. So how do you get like literally there's one add on called Deadly boss mods that tells you when certain moves and stuff are coming up to give you visual cues and stuff.
How do you have access to that? I feel like it's not going to be raid friendly, which is your end game content realistically. So I don't know how that looks on a console. Maybe they have a solution for that.
[01:38:01] Speaker B: Or maybe it's a taster. Maybe it's just going to be their free to play part of WoW that they'll put on there and then go. If you want to play more on.
[01:38:12] Speaker A: PC, yeah, that's a good mean. Ultimately they don't have to support the end game hard on the mean. Like you said, if you want to become a hardcore, yeah, maybe you just need to go to PC and it's that simple. Right? And that's maybe another good way for Xbox and Microsoft to kind of bridge that ecosystem and get people between consoles and PC and kind of working between the both of those. But yeah, regardless, I think I would like a native console version of WoW just for like, okay, I'm going to go and do my dailies and I'm going to do that in the comfort of my console in bed or my Steam deck or whatever it is that I'm playing on, or I'm going to go and do some just basic questing stuff. And then when I want to do my hardcore rating stuff that requires more UI and more in depth kind of add ons, I go and do that on PC. Who knows what it looks like? Who knows if it'll ever eventuate. We'll see. We'll see what happens. All right, Jim Ubisoft speaking of layoffs, Ubisoft is suffering a fair few layoffs recently. As of last week, as the tech market continues to slowly perish under the weight of the economy or the lack of weight of the economy, it looks like 124 positions will be eliminated in total across the Canadian offices, which is quite a significant number.
And it's obviously going to have all kinds of effects on upcoming Assassin's Creeds, Far cries, et cetera.
[01:39:51] Speaker B: Yeah, look, I don't think there's a lot more we can add to that. We've spoken about cuts that have happened to Bungie as well.
There's not a lot more that I think I can add to that discussion. Really. Apart from you feel for those people that have just lost their jobs.
[01:40:07] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[01:40:08] Speaker B: Turning down so hard.
[01:40:10] Speaker A: Bit sour. Yeah. You hope that they can find something else. All right. Now, speaking of other places that have also laid off people recently, BioWare have teased the next iteration of Mass Effect. I believe it's called Epsilon or something like that. I can't remember how you pronounce it.
They released a very tiny, short trailer of a Blue lady. I can't remember what you call the race of people walking down a hall. And I think they've since released her walking further down the hall.
[01:40:47] Speaker B: That's the gameplay I'm here for.
[01:40:48] Speaker A: Yeah, it wasn't much of a teaser. It was basically 5 seconds, and it just kind of. Yeah, I don't know how hyped people were, but regardless, we're getting some Mass Effect at some point. There was a rumor that came out that we might actually not get this game until 2029, which I thought was fucking hilarious, but we'll see way too soon.
Yeah, I think they just want to ride the share price increase, basically. Yeah.
[01:41:23] Speaker B: But then you just get to this point, you end up with a cyberpunk that's in development for ten years, or you end up with something that you just friggin Metroid prime four. Where the hell is that? That was announced years ago. And then they announced, okay, well, it wasn't up to snuff, so we've scrapped it all and we're starting again and heard nothing of it since.
I would rather not know about a video game's existence until you were a year or two away from releasing.
[01:41:52] Speaker A: I agree, Jim, but guess who won't agree? The board of directors. And the poor unfortunate shareholders know their money, unfortunately, is tied up in this bloody video game business. And we need to support our poor, lowly agree games wanting to make money.
[01:42:14] Speaker B: Who does that?
[01:42:15] Speaker A: Yeah. Freaking lame. Right?
Now, the other thing happening with BioWare is laid off. Employees used this time to just remind people that they are suing BioWare for not sort of giving them their severance pay. So, yeah, just so you're aware, BioWare, you need to pay your employees that you severed. So just get your shit together.
[01:42:41] Speaker B: It's interesting that you're saying that, because, as well I've mentioned before, I play a lot of the old Republic online. They've moved from BioWare to another studio called Broadsword. So I don't know if that's owned and operated by EA, is it? That I think owns.
But that was a big thing. And luckily enough, I think most of the Swotor team moved over to Broadsword with the title move. But that's Bioware hemorrhaging a lot of stuff.
[01:43:14] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. I mean, BioWare has been bleeding profusely through its huge gaping wound, which is its lack of just supporting the things that made it great, such as a good narrative.
[01:43:30] Speaker B: They probably can mark that as the serious downturn.
[01:43:35] Speaker A: Well, exactly right.
I think that's a perfect sort of turning point for the most part. There was kind of writing on the wall for some of their earlier stuff before that particular title. But know, like so many other AA devs, and I'm going to say it, Bethesda, for example, are a shadow of their former selves. They just don't have the same.
You kind of hit a point of critical mass where you just lose. I mean, Blizzard's the same in my opinion. You kind of lose the thing that made you popular because you've just hit that critical mass where suddenly you're a big corporation and now you're being managed by corporate suits and everything else, and what comes alongside that?
Management styles and everything else. And you lose the things that made that company what it was. And it's devs creating good products and writing good stories and is what it is.
[01:44:34] Speaker B: The creative people behind the scenes just go, we don't want to put up with this. And they go and start their own compAnies. And you go, screw you guys. We're going to make our own dev studio with Blackjack.
[01:44:45] Speaker A: Yeah, and the cycle renews itself, Jim. And, yeah, we'll be talking about those new studios in ten years.
All right, Jim. Now, Half Life, we spoke about Half Life earlier today as well, was almost called Crisis or Fallout, which I find hilarious.
[01:45:01] Speaker B: Is this kind of like. So a bit of musical history here? Guns and roses at their peak, when the band imploded, they were writing an album called Chinese Democracy. And the offspring came out at one point and said, we almost called one of our albums Chinese democracy. And then in, like, little practice underneath, we got here first.
[01:45:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that is this in game form, which is. I just thought it was kind of funny because obviously those two IPs very much exist right now. And imagine if those names were taken and suddenly they were required to call themselves something else would have been interesting. All right, and the final one tonight, Jim, the Grammys have nominated a bunch of video games for Best video Game score, including Call of Duty, Modern Warfare, Two God of War, Ragnarok, Hogwarts Legacy, Star Wars, Jedi Survivor, and an indie game, Stray Gods, the role playing musical which has had a pretty good critical acclaim, actually.
[01:46:04] Speaker B: It's strange talking about stray gods in the same sentence as the rest of those games because those absolutely huge games. And then we've got stray Gods made by a little Australian indie Dev. I say little. They're on the rather large Summerfield Studios, I think it is.
But I can 100% say I haven't played the game. But just before PAX, the Thursday night before PAX, they had like this stray Gods fashion show on and they got in Montaigne, who's one of the singers.
[01:46:35] Speaker A: Oh, Rad. Yeah.
[01:46:36] Speaker B: On here.
[01:46:37] Speaker A: Great indie singer from Australia.
[01:46:39] Speaker B: Yeah. Because she's part of the work on Stray Gods.
[01:46:43] Speaker A: I didn't know that.
[01:46:44] Speaker B: That's really cool songs on there. And I discovered today that tripod Australian comedy band, classic writing input to stray gods as well. So that's really cool to see.
[01:46:57] Speaker A: Was Jordan Rascoe in Tripod?
[01:46:59] Speaker B: No, he was in Axis of awesome.
[01:47:05] Speaker A: Okay, I was getting mixed up, but.
[01:47:07] Speaker B: With you, but Tripod, I have a soft place in my heart for Tripod.
[01:47:12] Speaker A: Oh, absolutely.
[01:47:13] Speaker B: I just wish the rain had held off and I wasn't so tired because they were slated to play that Thursday night as well. And I wish I'd stuck around for it, but it was just, yeah, great to see stray gods up there with all those. And when you start thinking like, Hogwarts Legacy had such a big musical keys that they could pull from from the movies and a big leg up, so they're already hitting above their league. I think stray got there.
[01:47:40] Speaker A: Oh, big time. Yeah. And just good to see an Australian dev on there. So well done, legends, and well done us for reaching the end of the podcast, mate. Thank you, Jim, for joining us for another episode, mate. We bloody appreciate you coming in and filling Grizz's shoes.
[01:47:54] Speaker B: That's all right, anytime. Happy to be here helping out.
[01:47:58] Speaker A: An absolute pleasure and a big thank you to everyone listening at home. We bloody appreciate it. If you're listening to this via podcast, we'd appreciate a big old five star review on this bad boy, FYI, and write a fun little comment in there for us to go and check out later.
Outside of that, if you would like a link to any of our links, go to OGR show. You'll find everything you need there. A link to our Patreon. If you need a link to our Twitch so you can watch us live on 07:00 p.m. Monday nights you can go to Twitch. TvoceanicgamingRadio.
Other than that, pretty much everything else is on OGR show. Our Discord link. Come and join the conversation during the week. All that other shit, it's on there, the whole lot. Twitter. Go and join Twitter if you want to vote in a poll that sometimes we put up. Yeah, it's all there. Anyways, thanks for being here. We'll see you guys next week. Actually, I probably won't see you guys next week. My brother is having a baby. Not him personally, but his wife, and they are due to do that on the Monday, so I probably won't be here. But regardless, you're going to have grizz and a special guest next week. More info on that later. We'll see you later next time. Peace out. Bye.
