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S3 Ep194: Talkcast - February 2022
75 Plays4 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they talk about whatever they want to talk about, including Microsoft, Blizzard, John Mahaney, Oliva Munn, and what you would do if your work location was suddenly replaced with McDonalds in this week's episode!
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Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
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Transcript
Introductions and a Mixed Day
00:00:48
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake and I'm joined by my co-host is always Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave? What's going on? It's a mixed bag. What's in the bag? What's in the bag? This one is in the bag. Oh, there you go. It's just been like a mixed bag of,
00:01:14
Speaker
like work's been a little bit weird, nothing awful. But also the day that work was weird, I went to the doctor to say like, hey, my toe has not been feeling so great. And they're like, well, it's not an ingrown toenail, but hear me out if you like, we can just cut some of that off like right here. I'm like, fuck it, let's go. Okay. So they did.
00:01:37
Speaker
And now I have a wound I have to treat for like two weeks. Yay. That's very uncomfortable. But the thing is, the whole point was to remove an ingrown toenail that was causing issues. So hopefully this alleviates that. So that was both.
Toe Troubles and Humor
00:01:52
Speaker
That's weird, for one thing. I don't know, surgery. No, not a fan, by the way. Not a fan at all. So I failed to follow the logic, I think. So it's not an ingrown toenail.
00:02:05
Speaker
We can operate anyways as though it was. That's what sounded like you said. So.
00:02:12
Speaker
For anybody who's grossed out by this, sorry. When I was 16 or 17, I had an ingrown toenail and they went and did the whole cauterization procedure. This will never be an issue again. Then within the last year or so, I had some issues where I felt some pressure like, oh, the nail is probably digging in my skin a little bit. Maybe I'll go see them about it. They're like, hey, not an ingrown toenail. Were they checked up in the front there where you're pointing by the issue?
00:02:36
Speaker
Here's some ointment for it. If it becomes an issue later, let us know. It's been four or five months since then. I'm like, hey, I used the ointment for a bit and it was fine, but now I'm seeing some issues again. Can you take a look? And then again, it's not an ingrown toenow here. Right. But as a placebo procedure, we will operate. But I mean, what they found is it was apparently in the back. Okay, gotcha.
00:03:04
Speaker
So I don't know how the body works because it wasn't connected there at all. It's all made up as we go. Yeah. Well, hopefully you feel better and don't need further surgery on your body.
00:03:16
Speaker
Yeah, that'd be great. Just elective surgery from here on out. That's the goal. Well, that's the thing. It's really hard for it to get insurance on board. You're like, hey, there's this thing I want to try. They're like, what is it? Do you need it? Will you die otherwise? I'm like, well, no. I'm just going to prove my quality of life. They're like, no. They smack it out of my hands, the approval papers
Humor and Job Changes
00:03:38
Speaker
or whatever.
00:03:38
Speaker
The way you said no reminds me of. John Mulaney. John Mulaney. That's what I was trying to evoke there. Yeah, that was right on point. There's a callback I was gonna make to something that you said, but I can't remember what it was. So just insert like a joke here mentally. It was pretty funny, I think.
00:04:00
Speaker
Oh, got him. Um, well, that's kind of an eventful week, uh, between work and surgery. That sounds like an adult week. I don't know if I like, Oh, I remembered it. Okay. Right. Just remove the previous joke in the last related to that.
00:04:16
Speaker
but you said you had an eventful week at work or an interesting week at work. And I was like, what does that mean is where my brain went immediately. And what I visualized is like you were walking to the workplace. There's already some incorrect assumptions here. Walking to the workplace doesn't make any sense. Being outside doesn't really work anymore. But I imagined you just like walk up to like the office building that you work at and it's just like,
00:04:45
Speaker
A McDonald's now. Like overnight. You show up and it's now a fast food chain. You're like, do I go in? Have I been getting overpaid? I'm the only salaried McDonald's employee. Working from home also. Someone sends you a message like, hey, could you check out the fryer? You're just like, hmm.
00:05:14
Speaker
No, actually. Well, as long as my boss is also remote and they think I'm in the office, I can be remote and be like, Oh yeah. Yeah. Ice cream, ice cream machines busted again. But I mean, that's par for the course. Yeah. Anyways, that's the end of my joke. Thank you for listening. That was, that was better than the initial haha. Right. That's kind of a placeholder. I'm glad we stuck through it.
00:05:40
Speaker
Yeah, John Mulaney would really be proud, I think, of what we've accomplished here this evening.
00:05:48
Speaker
Speaking of accomplishments this evening, this is a talk cast where we talk about whatever we want to talk about. What do you want to talk about? John Mulaney briefly. Okay. So I apparently found out, not apparently, I found out that apparently within the last year or so, John Mulaney got married to Olivia Munn and they started dating. And the only reason I know Olivia Munn is from like G4. Yeah. And also she's just lovely and talented. Yeah. Also in Mass Effect.
00:06:17
Speaker
No shit. Yeah. Anyway, she has a lot of cool stuff. Um, so that was just an interesting insight. Yeah, that was not, if I were to like line up pairings in my brain, I wouldn't probably have like made that associate. No, I don't know what associations I would make for people like, Oh yeah. John Mulaney should marry spend the wheel. Uh, freaking this person, you know, I literally couldn't think of a name off the top of my head. Um,
00:06:48
Speaker
I went to Lance, Lance Riddick, making the zeitgeist of celebrity, but it's actually just, I think a callback because he's the last celebrity that I mentioned on, on the podcast. Pretty sure. I think maybe vague gesture arms. I don't remember. We'll get the, um, the one fan who's just really into soapstone Lord to fact check that one and let us know after the fact the owner of the codex.
00:07:18
Speaker
I I won't believe there's any lore until somebody makes like a a shitty website with a couple of links to other articles about like like dot soapstone or as somebody has like a youtube video with like theories right and Dave like behind the scenes these videos don't really tell all I'm like no they're dumb
00:07:41
Speaker
How are they really making money with the podcast? The important questions. Yep. Yeah. Must be all that advertising that we do. We've advertised for a lot of products. It's just none of them either know about it or are real.
Microsoft and Blizzard Acquisition
00:08:01
Speaker
And I don't think one of yours canned bread is either. I was thinking about it. Thinking about it.
00:08:10
Speaker
Yeah. Anyways, other things that are going on. Talking about whatever. There was actually several news items we had slated to potentially talk about in some of our recent episodes. And we like just never hit any of them. So some of this stuff might be slightly older. But one of them.
00:08:30
Speaker
is that Microsoft is buying Blizzard, not really super new information. So this is not hot off the presses, which means we have more time to present informed, educated expert opinions
00:08:47
Speaker
My asthma's acting up. About how we think this is going to impact the industry. But I do want to pre-pend. One of my calls on Discord was already right. I was like, it could be subject to antitrust investigation. And they are. FTC Federal Trade Commission is checking them out prior to the deal being going through. So we should see.
00:09:13
Speaker
It gives me the illusion that there's like some degree of checks and balances to people who are so grossly paid compared to like an average person is.
00:09:26
Speaker
Microsoft is so big they go up against this stuff a lot though. They've got to have a membership card or a rewards card for times that they've defeated antitrust suits at this point. Because I remember one of them a while back was for installing Internet Explorer by default on Windows machines.
00:09:47
Speaker
And I think the argument was so much of the market was Windows operating system that by installing their own browser, like as the default, they were giving themselves an unhealthy advantage in the browser wars.
00:10:04
Speaker
I mean, I can see that argument for sure. But what they didn't know is that Internet Explorer is kind of bad. Even Microsoft knew that eventually. They just made Edge, which is bad for other reasons, but sometimes good. Isn't that awful of chromium though? I think so. Something like that. I couldn't say for sure. I'm reluctant to disparage friend of the show Microsoft.
00:10:29
Speaker
I mean, you've also said front of the show Blizzard before, so say what you will. Now I don't have to differentiate. But obviously this is this is good news for anyone who was hoping that there would be a change in leadership. It seems like Bobby Kotick's not going to stick around. Going back to November, Microsoft ahead of Xbox was like, hey,
00:10:59
Speaker
everything he's doing is completely unacceptable. And we should be against it. And I am against it. Paraphrased. Friend of the show. And then it would be really weird if like in just a few months later, they acquire the company and they're like, and he's gonna stay CEO, right? That would be interesting. Definitely want to see it going that way. I definitely see them getting rid of Bobby Kotick.
00:11:28
Speaker
That's the only name that I know publicly. I'm sure there are other people. I mean, he's one of the big ones. Yeah. But I feel like the perception always is like, oh, Bobby Kotick has been accused, and rightly so, of all these things, but old leadership kept him on. And now that we have a change of regime, change your press though, it's now good.
00:11:52
Speaker
And I think it's always a step in the right direction, the same as like presidential elections or other elections or a change in leadership. But I don't think the change alone magically fixes stuff. It's just like this person was like visibly shitty and okay, you don't see them anymore, they're gone.
00:12:14
Speaker
He's still around, he still exists. He might get picked up by another company who's like, oh, he's a really big name, and he'll be willing to take the PR hit to bring him on, or he'll just live out his days rich as fuck. Yeah.
00:12:31
Speaker
Yeah, they're like loading him down with gold bullion and then pushing him out of the plane. Like it's an extra strategy. I mean like from a strict business perspective, he's actually been incredibly successful. I'm pretty sure he was around when they oversaw the purchase of like King Entertainment, which does like a bunch of mobile games and brings in stupid amounts of money for Activision Blaze.
00:12:54
Speaker
And even the acquisition by Microsoft, like if you think about it, even if Microsoft is trash talking him, he was CEO when this massive above market valuation acquisition went through, right? Like Microsoft paid more for Activision Blizzard than they were estimated to be worth, presumably to just close the deal even faster because money is just a number to Microsoft at this point. And you know, $60 billion,
00:13:24
Speaker
Might as well be a billion dollars, you know? Yeah, I guess I'll just like shovel some of that out of the money room. That's essentially what they were doing at that point. But Kodak oversaw it. So like as a business person, he's been remarkably successful as a human being, debatable, you know? Well, I mean, all his subordinates worked that much harder because they don't want to get molested. Oof. Oof.
00:13:51
Speaker
I realize you're like, this is business. I'm like, the world is shit. Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's pretty crappy. I think like one of the reasons people have, cause there was a lot of hope, I think like in discord when this came up, one is.
00:14:06
Speaker
we wanna believe that Blizzard can be better and that they can not, you know, continue to have these toxic cultures or these harassment cultures and like within the company. But we also want to not have our memories of the games that we cared about like tarnished, right? Like I do still enjoy playing Sarcath Co-op. I play Overwatch with friends, do all this stuff. I wanna believe that that can extend into the future and still like be developed and not like feel like a scumbag
00:14:35
Speaker
if I choose to support it in the future, because I don't want to be a comeback for supporting it in the future. You know what I mean? And replacing leadership, like you don't know if things are changing below leadership. You don't really have visibility on like if the day to day culture is better blizzard or not, everyone will say it is who's to know, you know, right? And the same way we didn't have visibility until the allegations came forward originally.
00:15:03
Speaker
We need an inside person is basically what you're saying. Right. There's a listener out there. Wants to turn a coat. That's not right. Traitor. No. What's the whistle on Blizzard? I would use a different choice of words. And you want the smallest platform imaginable to do so. No one will find out it was you.
00:15:31
Speaker
You could give your full name. We dox people every episode. It's not affected them. Don't worry about it. I mean, not the harp and like the whole Bobby being a piece of shit thing. As far as like the IP is concerned.
00:15:48
Speaker
I think we've talked about like some crossovers before and like the potential for good that they have. Or if this is for me, remembering watching a YouTube video of somebody who did it much more eloquently than I, but like you can do really cool stuff with crossovers. Sure. It might be like a little bit incestuous between like really big IPs under Microsoft and Blizzard, but also Blizzard like puts their own shit in their other shit. I don't think that's going to be like a, whoa, holy shit too much.
00:16:17
Speaker
Yeah. If anything, I'm hoping that it provides more, well, one, obviously the important things cleaning up the culture, 100% in the environment, to the games. Like I'm honestly hoping that it helps provide the focus that Blizzard has needed recently.
00:16:35
Speaker
They haven't done much recently that I could particularly care about. Overwatch 2 is a long time coming. I think some of that was from poor leadership decisions because it's not like they don't have the manpower to do what they want to do in a timely fashion. They definitely can. A lot of things come down to shitty management, I feel.
00:16:59
Speaker
Yeah, I wish they just wouldn't announce things until they're basically ready to ship. I realize that that's not the modern marketing strat. Don't tell Jake you're pregnant, by the way. Holy shit. Until you're ready to ship. Yeah. Go and gold. Here we go. Jake gets a textile cap. I'm having the baby. Oh my god, my cousin's having a baby. Why didn't you tell me about this?
00:17:24
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, Microsoft has so much potential or so much money, right? Like they dropped $60 million on a company that's going to take a while to pay it off. Like there could literally be one person up at Microsoft that's like, I kind of just want Diablo 4 to be good and I don't really care if it makes that much money. Just like work on it for like another five years.
00:17:51
Speaker
And it would probably be good, you know what I mean? They're going to have a lot less pressure, I feel, for some of that stuff. Real talk, it's going to be Diablo 3 and a new engine. That's my suspicion. Yeah. Because when I watched the Diablo 4 trailer, it looked very much like the Path of Exile 2 trailer, which made me sad a little bit, because Path of Exile 2 looks beautiful. So Diablo 4, at least from what little they showed, it looked pretty nice, at least aesthetically. Yeah.
00:18:20
Speaker
I can't imagine they're going to change too much from their more accessible approach. So a more limited number of classes and progression and amount of abilities you can do. Where Path of Exile is just like, who wants to go off the deep end, kids? Right. They're very much two ends of the spectrum. That's fair.
00:18:41
Speaker
Um, there's a terrible joke in there, but I'm just going to let it go. But the, uh, we're adults here. Um, but yeah, I mean, I, my hopes for Diablo is they literally, this is a high ask from Blizzard. I understand that, but they have a good launch.
00:19:03
Speaker
For the products that they're coming up with this is this is what I'm hoping for Like literally don't just add a money shop for no reason or a marketplace like Diablo had Immediately, you're already doing a better launch than three like Diablo 3. I think it's actually a great game right now It's not perfect. It has problems as false. There's some stuff that like to did that Diablo 3 never really got but
00:19:28
Speaker
Otherwise it's actually like get it on sale, play with a friend. It's a good time. Um, but like there's so many lessons that they could learn, but they like literally blizzard just hasn't been recently. And it's irrational to believe Microsoft's going to solve all of it, but I hope, I hope they can like.
00:19:49
Speaker
Hey, this other development team, help the Blizzard team out. Let's help get this stuff over the finish line in a good state, I don't know. Again, I want to try and distinguish between what the dev team's doing and what management's telling them to do. Yeah. At least that's my perception that there's probably some disparity between the two. Because very much my job is I do the thing that I'm told to do.
00:20:14
Speaker
I'm not trying to like, granted, I'm not doing like anything end user phasing where it would matter in the same context of like video games. But like I know that there's oftentimes like a difference between what you might have an idea for and what your boss tells you to do.
00:20:31
Speaker
Yeah. But that said, I would like them to have a good release in the same way. I don't give a fuck about Pokemon. Not two cents. But I'm glad that RCS is being really well received by people. Oh, yeah. Because to me, it looks very jank. But people are having a great time with it. So that means that Pokemon can take a different form and become something else outside of just the basically 2D game. And that's really cool.
00:21:00
Speaker
I'd love to see more games like in that space that can play around with the core mechanic a little bit or just branch out outside of like it's the exact same game again.
Evolution of Pokemon Games
00:21:11
Speaker
Yeah, we updated the year on it. It's kind of so I have like I also have no attachment to Pokemon. So this is kind of like this is dangerous territory. I know some of our some of our listeners do really like it.
00:21:24
Speaker
Anytime I see a Game Freak game, I'm like, this is clearly a Game Freak game. This is something they obviously could have made better. For RCS, it's like the world looks like it's a PS2 world, maybe slightly newer than that. It's very low-res, even for Switch, which is not a powerful console. But it's good enough. There's much better looking games on it.
00:21:53
Speaker
I don't care too much about all that. I'm glad that they're actually experimenting. I had a coworker reach out to me actually and ask if I knew anything about Pokemon because she had been playing it. I was like, nope. Had a nice conversation, but I don't know that much about Pokemon. That's a good sign. If random people who barely ever talk to you about games are like, hey, check out this thing. I'm really into it.
00:22:18
Speaker
That's a good sign for Pokemon, not that it needs more exposure. Right? Well, yeah, it's it's very well known as a thing. But I mean, a lot of times people will.
00:22:31
Speaker
I mean, it's so big that you might not know. Oh, did you talk about the Pokemon cards? Like the PlayStation game? Not PlayStation, like the Pokemon Game Boy game? The movie, actually. The movie's good. Do you remember crying the first time you knew what emotions were watching that? I mean, Ryan Reynolds, Detective Pikachu. It's an empowering performance. Legitimately good movie.
00:22:59
Speaker
I think that's one of the last movies I saw in theaters actually. Yeah. Cause I went with like a girl I was seeing at the time and her friends and it was a blast. I really didn't know what to expect, but it was good. No, it was good. It was entertaining.
00:23:16
Speaker
Yeah, we want to see improvement. That's the thing. That's what I want from these games. You're going to be owning the franchise. You're going to be owning a series of games. Step one, make good games. Step two, improve over previous games. And then step three, which is an optional step, continue to release games.
00:23:35
Speaker
That's actually predicated entirely on the previous two. You actually just don't do step three if you can't do the first two things. I mean, that's not gonna happen in that order. I imagine within like the first year of the merger going through, they will release something as like, this is our new thing. And this will kind of be like they're getting themselves on the map as like a new entity, that new identity.
00:24:02
Speaker
And then I do imagine them making some changes to existing IPs. Maybe they'll hammer Overwatch 2 through. Maybe they'll do another Warcraft. I don't fucking know. But I think this is very much like a strike while the iron's hot. They've been given this thing and they need to make it their own or at least polish it.
00:24:26
Speaker
Yeah. Instead of just be like, hi, we own all the stuff and we live over here. Yeah, Microsoft has an opportunity like post this acquisition to shake things up. And then while the gaming industry is like looking at these IPs, be like, all right, here's the big announcements. Here's what we're doing. Here's our time for them. Let's freaking go.
00:24:48
Speaker
A lot of potential there. Again, looking forward to news on Diablo, Warcraft, Overwatch, and then they announced a survival game they've been working on for six years. That sounds like it's a big deal, but we know like nothing about it, so it's not really. So, who's to say? Yeah, big, big suss on that. I know survival games are...
00:25:08
Speaker
fairly saturated right now. There's some really good ones, some cool takes. There's one you're like, I feel like I've seen that exactly somewhere else before, but like, better. They didn't really hear anything about that. Yeah, they didn't announce it until like after the Microsoft acquisition because I think they were just really concerned about the jokes about the survival environment just being the Blizzard office. It's just like, ugh. And then something about Bungie.
00:25:37
Speaker
What? Not to be one out after Microsoft bought Blizzard for like $60 billion. Sony bought Bungie for like 3.6 or something like that. All right, so uninformed outsider opinion. From what I recall, Microsoft used to own Bungie and they did Halo.
00:26:03
Speaker
So where did Bungie become its own studio and then get picked up by Sony? So they separated for a time or they were independently acquired. They were part of Activision Blizzard. They were owned under Activision Blizzard and then bought themselves out again to become fully independent. So 343 games. OK, what was that? Yeah.
00:26:28
Speaker
On the Microsoft side 343 Kept halo like that was Bungie was not leaving Microsoft with the halo yp like there's not there's a lot of timelines out there some would say infinite and Against all odds none of them have bungee leave and maintain halo. So I mean bungee did anthem By where by worded anthem, but bungee did destiny
00:26:57
Speaker
It's better than Anthem. I don't mean to say that. Yeah, Bioware is with EA and they did Anthem and EA is not so sure about that Bioware thing anymore.
00:27:12
Speaker
But the shed is actually full of the corpses of all the companies that EA has killed, so they actually can't. Hear me out. I think EA, the long con, right, is to make this reanimated amalgam that will murder all other games. That's probably true. They're going to make a super game from the corpses of everything that they just fucked over.
00:27:34
Speaker
It's not wrong, but yeah, it is the one game. Yeah, it was like it's like their opener. Yeah, we are the game. It's just like a thousand voices in unison.
Impact of Gaming Industry Acquisitions
00:27:49
Speaker
Yeah, we will challenge everything. Yeah, but the Sony acquisition of Bungie is kind of interesting. This is actually fairly recent, you know, off of the Microsoft
00:28:04
Speaker
um, Blizzard acquisition. So we know that it's not just in response. It's not like, Oh my gosh, give me a company that's under $5 million we can buy. Um, cause talks take a while, but I mean, this is potential for in some weird twist, the company that made halo that defined Xbox the early years, you know, to really put it on the, on the map, um, to work for
00:28:30
Speaker
the console war, uh, like antagonist to Microsoft, essentially Sony, which I find endlessly hilarious. Like, that's just funny.
00:28:42
Speaker
It's at a point it becomes kind of like sports teams where you're like are you rooting for the team or the people on the team? Because the people on the team will get trees around a whole bunch. I heard recently, grain of salt, I don't know if it's true or not, that apparently Nintendo and Sony were initially like friendly enough together
00:29:04
Speaker
But then they separated ties entirely because Sony wanted to do disc games on PlayStation and Nintendo's like no fuck off. Yeah, cartridges are the future.
00:29:20
Speaker
I still feel like they're both doing fairly well, but whenever I think of gaming from just a global context, I think of Nintendo stuff. Yeah. Because what are your parents going to think of? Oh, it's a Nintendo something. Yeah, that Mario Tetris guy.
00:29:37
Speaker
Yeah, like it's so broad appealing, whereas like, namely five titles on PlayStation 4. You can do it now because you probably have exactly five titles on PlayStation 4. Like in my actual library. Bloodborne, there's a Spider-Man, I'm sure a Batman game also came out on PlayStation. There you go, that's it. Five titles.
00:30:02
Speaker
That's prolific. God of War, probably. Yeah. God of War, because he was in that fighting game they had for Sony. Sony All-Stars. Yeah. Then there had to have been a fighting game. Tekken. Tekken. Tekken does sound like it would come out on PlayStation. Spyro was on the older PlayStations, but now it's on Steam. That's another weird twist.
00:30:29
Speaker
That's the funny thing, actually, to the Microsoft acquisition of all these things is like Microsoft, a lot of publishers still aren't really putting all of their things on Steam. Ubisoft is kind of like iffy on it. EA doesn't always put all their stuff on Steam. They have Origin and Uplay Store, right? But Microsoft doesn't care. They're just like, again,
00:30:52
Speaker
the money room, right? Like we don't actually care about money at this point. So sure, we'll put our stuff on Steam and we'll throw it in the Xbox game pass, which is going to pop off because every game that you can play on PC is going to freaking be in that pass now. Yeah. Like everything. And they put games in as soon as they come out. It's not like play budget games. It's like, did Microsoft publish this? You can play it day one as part of the game pass.
00:31:24
Speaker
And this is now where we get back to like games as a service where you don't need to like necessarily have the console and the hard copy of stuff. You can be like, well, we'll just get the game pass, spend 15 bucks a month and play some games with my buds. And honestly, as a consumer, it's not a bad option. Yeah. Because there's so much. It's the same reason why people like Netflix so much. I don't want to go to block. Why should I get a fucking movie? Doesn't exist anymore now anyway. But you don't want to.
00:31:55
Speaker
I want to get the oversized pop. I really only liked sliding in the movies back in the slot, like the return slot. You park your car, you just throw it into the wall, and you're like, oh, we're out of here. That was actually my blockbuster shutdown. There's so many damaged discs. But you have access to so much, so it makes sense. Yeah.
00:32:19
Speaker
I guess it's not how much you use it, but still it's like, it's fairly cheap, which is why some people will let like Netflix lapse for months. Even if they're not watching for three months, it's still value to keep it around. If you can watch X amount of movies the next month. Yeah. Would you pay a subscription MMO fee in order to have hundreds of triple a games with new games added to the list that you now don't have to buy for a lot of people? The answer is just yes. Again, friend of the show, Microsoft, but yeah.
00:32:51
Speaker
No, it's gonna continue to be a good deal. I don't have one, full disclaimer. I don't have the Microsoft Game Pass, because I'm still working on my backlog from 2008, but we're gonna get that.
Current Gaming Experiences
00:33:03
Speaker
Dave's shaking his head, we're not gonna get that. What is on your backlog at the moment? What's your next top couple games?
00:33:09
Speaker
So I'm actually playing through Ender All Special Edition, which is a full conversion of Skyrim. That's fun. I enjoy it. I think it's a better game than Skyrim in a lot of ways. It's a handmade game. I want to say, I like how this week so many people were playing Hollow Knight on Discord. And then I look at Steam, it's like, Jake's playing, oh, he's playing Skyrim again. It says I'm playing Skyrim, yeah.
00:33:31
Speaker
It literally says Discord says that you're playing ender all when the launcher is open. But as soon as you actually launch the game, it's like, no, that's the Skyrim and then switches it over to Skyrim, which is really hilarious because it means at some point someone plugged in the ender all launcher. That is a short term process until you actually hit play. But they have no idea then way to know that you're not actually playing Skyrim. So whatever. Good game. Check it out. It's free. If you own Skyrim, either edition, you can just get it on Steam.
00:34:02
Speaker
But then once I'm done with that, if I get some PlayStation time, like a dragon, very high on the list.
00:34:11
Speaker
I think after you have one session, you'll message me and be like, dude. You should also message Dan and be like, dude. He'll be like, I know. So full disclaimer at this point, I did not beat the game. I got a good way in, but I think I just got tapped out on RPG stuff. I know Dan has. But overall, even as far as I got, everything's so fucking good. The gameplay, the story.
00:34:39
Speaker
Oof. The Yakuza series, like they are not all this type of game and it does have its faults, but it's just so entertaining to play. And it's really rare that like a crime fighter, not like Batman, but like, you know, a crime beat them up style, you know, arcadey sort of game really can have emotional beats. And I think we talked about it a little bit, Yakuza zero a long time ago, but yeah, it's just real good.
00:35:10
Speaker
It's solid. You'll like it. Yeah. I'm in a bag of milk or outside a bag of milk, outside a bag of milk. I'm going to get to that one eventually. I've heard about it. It sounds really meta. Milk outside a bag of milk, outside a bag of milk is the game title. I'm going to leave it there because I don't know what it's about. Okay.
00:35:33
Speaker
What are you looking at in your pre-Elden Ring fasting period? Shit. Who could have suspected that I would just turn the question back around on you so it's not just me talking. God damn it. Really it's just...
00:35:52
Speaker
checking out some Guardians of the Galaxy, redoing some Hollow Knight, because one person just has to start Hollow Knight and be like, fuck, we're back. Just when you think you're out. I will say, a little bit before we started recording, I'm trying to beat my previous percentage as far as the other achievements and stuff that you do as far as game completion outside of the true endgame. And I did just beat Nightmare King Krim.
00:36:17
Speaker
Nice. Which felt cool. That's all content I've never even completed. I just got my good true ending. Oh, I haven't done like for the music alone. It's that fight's worth it. Yeah, but I'll need to go back and do his second phase. It's just a phase. Just a phase mom. Face dude kicks your ass. Oh, yeah. Um,
00:36:46
Speaker
And I also saw you were playing vampire survivors for a bit. I think you sold me on it very briefly. Legitimately. Every time I played it, I have been invisible on Steam because it's been like the most comparatively janky game that I've ever played.
00:37:02
Speaker
It's very much like a top-down. Enemies will spawn from the side. You have projectiles that fire automatically based on your weapon type. So you might throw out a dagger in front of you or do like a simple whip animation. And it happens like on a whatever time interval.
00:37:18
Speaker
So you're just basically doing was to kind of move around your character. And then as you kill enemies, you can get experience from them with like gems and then you can level up. So you might find some other weapons or you can upgrade weapons. But basically it becomes like you just get as far as you can and becomes like a bullet storm, basically. Right.
00:37:41
Speaker
the popular gearbox game from Randy Pitchford. Bullet story. He calls that EXE at a point. I'm kind of waiting for a sale in his full retail email at $2.99.
00:38:02
Speaker
So I will say right now, regardless of what you think about it, buy it for three bucks. It's fucking $3. And I've spent probably 20 hours in it because I just wanted like an idle turn my brain off type game. And it's very good at that because I'm just doing WASD.
00:38:19
Speaker
But also, after I played it enough times, I'm like, oh, I need to go for this specific build. Gotcha. Because there are your weapons. It's not a King James Bible, but it's a book that floats around you. You can have a cross that goes out. A lot of this is off of Castlevania theming and some other stuff. You have weapons that fire at their intervals or whatever their patterns are, but then you can also get passives.
00:38:47
Speaker
So passes might deal help you deal more damage, might have you hit things in a bigger area, might have you attack faster. Right. But certain weapons can be upgraded to like their top tier if you have a certain type of passive. So I tried finding these combinations and look some up and you can do some like really silly ones like the cross one.
00:39:11
Speaker
When it's max level without the upgrade, you just shoot out crosses and they go out for a bit and then they go back the way that they came to have some coverage. To heaven. To heaven. But if you get, I forget which item is paired with that for the passive, you can upgrade a step further and it becomes Alucard's sword that just flies around the screen.
00:39:34
Speaker
And it's all like pixel graphics, but like it, it's fun and cool. I'll be honest. No, that is cool. It's been very pleasantly surprising for a $3 game.
Nintendo's Copyright Stance
00:39:45
Speaker
And apparently, apparently it's blowing the fuck up, which I did not expect. Yeah, it has 23,000. So this was released. It was December 17th. So it's been out for.
00:39:58
Speaker
Two weeks and some change. No, that's terrible. What? A month and two weeks and some change. We're not in January. It's not January 3rd. But it has 23,000 reviews on Steam and it's overwhelmingly positive right now.
00:40:14
Speaker
Which is, that's really good. I mean, admittedly we're in a bit of a gaming drought, but I don't think people are that desperate that they're going to go on steam and actually review things. So you'd like three games total. And one was because I was mad. Uh, the other two were actual reviews, but I've seen a couple of games too. One of them was after like 40 hours of gameplay. I actually beat the game. It was like an indie game and it was like 40 hours and I was like,
00:40:44
Speaker
I'm sorry, but like I have to leave a negative review because looking back on it, I got strung along a whole lot. Um, is a graveyard keeper. I think was the name of the game.
00:40:58
Speaker
I should go back and like leave some actual feedback in some of the games that I either really enjoyed or really didn't enjoy. It's got, DOTA has to have some crazy ones. Like people must have like 30,000 hours in it by now. And they're just like, game's not good. I love, I love humorous community reviews for games.
00:41:23
Speaker
I think the favorite, my favorite comment I've ever heard, which is only through proxy because you were checking out and reading the comments and reviews was for Barrett trauma. Do you remember what that was? Uh, no, wait, what was it? No, I don't do. I hope this is going to be a stupid aside. None of us remember anyway, but it was a submersive and breathable.
00:41:52
Speaker
Right. That was really good. That was really good. That tickled my insides. I found it funny for like two days. Yeah. No, it was really funny. I wouldn't mind playing a little bit more barotrauma. I think it's going to be hard to get the three people would be necessary to really run with it. I also kind of want to see the game develop a little bit like before jumping back into it.
00:42:20
Speaker
Because it's still early access, I think. And there's still a couple of things where I'm like, man, I wish the sub design was a little different, or these mechanics were a little bit more developed. But it's good. So here's the Dota review. Yeah, Dota review. 2,364 hours on record. Run while you can, not recommended.
00:42:48
Speaker
I'll be honest, I played for probably about the long and I did not know you could even run in the game. I'm going to convert some of this.
00:42:59
Speaker
All right, I'll buy some while you're doing that. Something that I did want to talk about that is in fairly recent news is Nintendo being Nintendo apparently did a strike on the Silver Gunner channel. And by strike, I mean like they took down videos and they took down 3,500 videos.
00:43:22
Speaker
Which, weirdly enough, is not even half of the videos on that channel because they've been doing stuff for like 11 years. But still, it's I think the biggest strike and take down to date, I think it's safe to say. For anybody who's not aware, Silvergunner slash Gilvassunner
00:43:43
Speaker
They will either put direct uploads of some video game soundtracks. I would go there and let's do a lot of Kirby stuff for Kirby Super Star because that was a big part of my gaming childhood. They will also do a lot of remixes and meme covers of things.
00:44:01
Speaker
So snow halation, there's probably 400 things of snow halation crammed into other stuff with space jam and any meme stuff. Geez. They produce a lot of content. Some of it's good. I'd say a lot of it's good. Some of it's not for me.
00:44:24
Speaker
Overall, like the take has been, it's shitty in Nintendo to do this because they haven't really ever had music publicly ever in any capacity.
00:44:37
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's really crappy. I mean, it's another feather in Nintendo's cap of treating their community like trash, but they actually were kind of some of the exception here. There were other companies that would more aggressively go after copyrighted music, Nintendo music in particular.
00:44:56
Speaker
Or they would go after their own music for their games. But games for the most part have kind of escaped a lot of that. If you weren't on the radio, it didn't get struck nearly as much. And Nintendo particularly, they have a lot of these retro style things. They have Kirby songs, they have all of this, Donkey Kong.
00:45:17
Speaker
music that people really love because it's nostalgic or will have like repeating themes across like the entire series of games. And Nintendo didn't take any of the stuff down.
00:45:31
Speaker
So there's just years of it out there built up. And a lot of people are going to be surprised when, you know, their channels get nuked. Um, when Nintendo goes after this stuff, but they have a different view of copyright, I guess, then I shouldn't say a different view. It's within their rights. Yeah. It's one of the 100% their intellectual property, right?
00:45:58
Speaker
but also fuck them. There's ways to do stuff. I don't know. The channel wasn't making money off of it. They were doing it because they liked games and music. They were at Magfest a couple of years and they even did some live mixes of stuff.
00:46:24
Speaker
This is being silver gun or not Nintendo Nintendo, the DJ at Magfest. Yeah, I mean, it's crappy. Because like this stuff, if you if you really heavily prosecute and protect your IP in these cases, like people are just.
00:46:45
Speaker
You try to get like Super Mario soundtrack off the internet and you do any measure of a good job. People are just going to forget the tracks. One of the reasons I think Nintendo stuff has been timeless has been because you like a song, go listen to it. And video games have been a sort of place where that stayed pretty reliable, right? Want to listen to Soul of Cinder? Load it up. It's on YouTube. Yeah.
00:47:12
Speaker
Again, I wanted to tell the story because it's Nintendo related. Back in the day, I loved Kirby Air Ride. Game fucking slapped. Is it still the day? It's still good. But it had obviously a lot of Kirby tracks on it and some other updated ones for the game, blah, blah, blah.
00:47:34
Speaker
But I enjoyed it so much. And they actually had in their menu, you could go and listen to just the music. I was like, Oh, fucking cool. Let me do that. But then like your screens basically just looking at a menu while like the music plays. So at the time, I was also trying to like exercise as a youth. And I walked like Billy Blanks, who did like Tybo or some type of like boxing fitness, right?
00:47:58
Speaker
So, for an old CRT, I would take the video cable for the DVD or VHS for Billy Blanks, put that in, and then I put the audio cables from the GameCube and put that in the TV. So, I was like doing curvy with like pungent stuff and like that for me, like that's how I was experiencing the music. But now, like if I'm working or doing something else when I have music on the background, it's YouTube that I go to.
00:48:25
Speaker
Because maybe they'll have a nice video with it, maybe they'll have a playlist. Spotify doesn't really have as much niche stuff for like video game tracks. It's usually like, oh, somebody covered a thing. I'm like, that's not what I was looking for. Yeah.
00:48:40
Speaker
Unless you're like an indie developer or somebody like full AAA studio OSTs, a lot of times don't get. That's not really true. Some of them do end up there, but I don't know Nintendo to put their OSTs on Spotify, for instance. I don't think they've outside of like them doing this diamond and pearl Pokemon thing for the music recently, I don't think that they've ever released music anywhere.
00:49:12
Speaker
This is a very random aside and I'm not going to, I can't advocate. I don't know anything about these artists, but, um, Kirby's dream band is a great artist name. Oh yeah. I think I have one or two of their songs on my Spotify playlist.
00:49:28
Speaker
That's great. But yeah, I don't see any official Nintendo things here. So they take it off of YouTube. Where are you listening to this stuff? Are you listening to it on Nintendo Virtual Console, which is probably somehow what they think that they're incentivizing people to do? Or are you? I like to load up my Nintendo Switch to listen to some tunes. Yeah, right. Just hold it up to my ear.
00:49:51
Speaker
and let the good times roll. And then after two hours, it'd be like, hey, my battery's dead. Yeah, it's from my point of view, I'm going to argue yours as well. You have no say in this chick. I think it's just like a very old dated view of like, don't touch that, that's mine. But it's literally not harming anybody.
00:50:16
Speaker
And I would argue that if you're hosting Nintendo's music to make it publicly available for people to listen to, they're not going to say, oh, I need to follow this channel more. They're going to say, oh, that's a good Nintendo song. Listen to more Nintendo songs. Maybe I'll check on some of their games. Maybe I'd like that. If anything, it's free marketing.
00:50:36
Speaker
I would argue. Yeah, he would argue. Even a more advanced, I'm going to take my own position that you've now stated and extend it and say like the reason that Nintendo didn't pursue, like the fact that Nintendo didn't pursue copyright striking all of these sources has actually helped Nintendo to grow to be that household like staple. I'm not going to say it's fully related to it, but like
00:51:04
Speaker
How many times have you heard Mario tracks? How many times have you heard Yoshi tracks? All of this stuff, like it's ingrained into gamers. And anytime you want to go back and relive that nostalgia, you could as a refresh. This is taking refresh completely out of the picture, right? Like I'm not going to be able to go in there and listen to Yoshi's Island tracks without fear of Nintendo coming in and killing me, which is, I assume, where they're going with this. I just.
00:51:33
Speaker
I don't know how far they're going to take it. Obviously, if it's like a full song, it's a little more egregious of like you're making our thing publicly available to other people and we don't want that versus however many YouTube videos you've watched of like Dunkey or people streaming on Twitch where like they have sound bites of like, oh, that's definitely from Mario 2. That's definitely from this other Nintendo game.
00:51:59
Speaker
They're used as iconic soundbites because they're iconic. They're part of the gaming culture we grew up with. So they get used as memes and other things.
00:52:11
Speaker
Hey, this is my brother Luigi. I'm a Luigi. The strongest argument I can think of that I'm good jumping off the soapbox because my legs are getting tired, is that listening to music, Nintendo music on YouTube, subtracts zero from their sales.
00:52:31
Speaker
No one is going out and buying Luigi's Mansion because they're like, I bet that there's some real good music in Luigi's Mansion, you know, or Super Mario RPG or anything like that. They're playing the games. You could have amazing music. People aren't going to buy the game because of it unless it's literally...
00:52:48
Speaker
a music game in some degree, right? Huge plus a lot of times, but it's not the decision maker. And it's definitely not the type of case where it's like, ah, crap. I mean, again, like Thousand Year Door, the OST is up on YouTube. So I don't think I need to pick up a copy for the Switch, right? Like, no, people play video games to play video games. Nintendo's not getting themselves any sales. They're just removing themselves from people's minds.
00:53:15
Speaker
Yeah. Like recent example, we played Omori. I stayed blind on that until I played through it. And then once I did, I'm like, oh, this game has some banging tracks. But I didn't load up the fucking game to listen to the track. Yeah. I went to my OS. On Steam, where it's available. All right. Shooting some holes in my argument here.
00:53:39
Speaker
I mean, sure, I could throw them some more money to support them. I did enjoy the game that much for sure. Now I need to do it out of principle, you ass-back. Also, I will say- I see you go through the mouse. Yeah, I'm doing it live. You're getting plausible deniability. Yeah. That's really funny. I'm actually- I'm going to fucking send you the receipt now if you're being asked about it. But I wanted to say the soapbox would be a great section for us to have to like- Oh my gosh. Dish our opinions.
00:54:06
Speaker
Wow. As soon as that soapbox, my brain tuned out to like whatever you said. I'm like, you gotta make this a segment. This doesn't matter anymore. So I have, there's a soundtrack section on Steam and I have the Outerworld soundtrack. It's apparently the only one that I have. I think I have one or two from Supergiant. I think I have Hollow Knights as well. Wherever they got downloaded to, it would have been on the old machine. I don't know if they kept over. I'm a liar.
00:54:37
Speaker
I have Icy Outerworld Subnautica, Superbrother Sword and Sorcery, they bleed pixels, this War of Mine Undertale and Warhammer 40k space marine. I guarantee that all but one of those were incidentally purchased as part of a pack.
00:54:57
Speaker
But there's apparently a section for it. I mean, again, I don't really want to load up Steam to listen to music. If anything, I would just use it for justification to be like, I feel good about having purchased this. I'm going to go now listen to this on YouTube because it's really convenient. Yeah.
00:55:15
Speaker
I feel like we have access to so much that very much when we want to buy into something, it's an opt in, which is why a lot of smaller bands and indie developers might have like, Hey, this is free. But if you like what we're doing and you want to support us, you can. So there's not like a fixed point of entry as far as cost. Yeah.
00:55:40
Speaker
But also like if, so like, let's say I'm somebody who doesn't have a whole lot of money and I really like somebody's music. I want to get their album. I want to support them, but I don't really have that much. Maybe if they're like $2, I'm going to tell my friends like, Hey, this band's like really fucking good. I like them. You should check them out. So it's like a good will initiative as far as marketing. That's just, that's my thought. I think that's fair. It's definitely fair.
Anticipation for Elden Ring and Conclusion
00:56:10
Speaker
But again, coming full circle, Nintendo doesn't understand any of these relationships or how their fans actually consume their products or the fact that people may actually want to play multiplayer in any of their products.
00:56:25
Speaker
Also, I just got the numbers back. Took a little while to run that. But if that reviewer had played Dota 2 three hours a day, they have played it for 788 days straight. Every day, three hours.
00:56:44
Speaker
I mean, that's probably correct. Yeah. I think the more correct assumption, maybe just like increasing it to six hours, you're like, yeah, I just got from home from work and ordered food and played Dota until I passed out. Nice soothing rage.
00:57:06
Speaker
Hey Jay, could you check your email real quick? Okay, let me see. I just want to know if you got like the same promotion that I did. It's about being male characters. We've got an Amazon delivery.
00:57:24
Speaker
Oh my gosh, I've been purchased an item and it is the Amore soundtrack at full retail price. Is it the you that purchased it and got it gifted or? Oh my gosh. Is it confirmation of somebody else who bought it? That is the second thing. Okay.
00:57:43
Speaker
All right. I'm going to report your steam account and take your stuff. The email looks the same. I missed the forwarded message part here. Also how I think it says my steam name in the email too. Oh yeah. Yeah. No, that would actually, that would be good to check too.
00:58:01
Speaker
But now I know that you earned 1,377 Steam Points for this. And I have your invoice number. Oh shit. And I know that you paid with a Visa. Oh shit. Anyways, so like I said, we docs people on here all the time. It's not really an issue. So I will not read out the digits. There's actually not even the last four. There's nothing on it.
00:58:30
Speaker
Yeah, if the date helps you with anything, good luck. Right. Anyways, that's all I got. Well, this is all to say. We're really just waiting until Elden Ring comes out.
00:58:44
Speaker
Oh, what's funny is we've talked about a lot of games that are like excited for it. We're like, yeah, really have to play through all this stuff. And then it's like, this is all biting time. This is, this is the delusion that they live with day to day as a moment of import around like comes at them. So, yeah, hopefully it's good.
00:59:07
Speaker
It will be. At least I will maintain that position until I die. It will be. Not even it has been or it was. It will be good. Day one. I'm waiting for it to be good. It will be. Will be good. I'm imagining you at like 50 years old and you're like, Elden Ring will be so good. So good. Dave, Dave, wake up. I'm playing poker with Sean Murray, you know. Uh-huh. Yeah.
00:59:35
Speaker
Oh man. I would have loved another person to think of like put at the poker table. It's all, the rest of them are dogs. If I, if the, uh, the poster is anything to be believed. Elden Ring, it just works. It just works. It just works. Um, anyways, that's literally all the news in the world summed up in the last hour or so by us, your faithful newscasters.
01:00:04
Speaker
I like how we're like, it's tall cast. We can talk about whatever we want in the news. We're talking about the news. We're talking about the news. We talked about a lot of other things actually. True. I just agreed. My total thing is borderline gaming news, I feel. Yeah. No, it's good.
01:00:22
Speaker
Not your toe thing, that was actually terrible. You should probably cut it from the episode, but if you guys have any other ideas for things we should cut from the episode, you could submit those ideas at soapstonepodcast.gml.com, or you could join the discussion on Facebook and suggest cutting Facebook from the episode at facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast. And as always, we'll see you in the next one.