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S2 Ep107: Talkcast - June
72 Plays5 years ago
Links to help BLM and affiliates: https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/
Join Dave and Jake as they get serious for a bit, and then slide back into gaming to catch you up on goings on for the month!
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/
Join Dave and Jake as they get serious for a bit, and then slide back into gaming to catch you up on goings on for the month!
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/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Dinner Mishap
00:00:33
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host is always Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave? Uh, not amazing. I, I cooked myself some dinner, but I made like some nice breaded chicken, but probably used a little bit too much oil. And then I also had some kimchi and I also had a banana. So my stomach is, has no idea what's going on. Yeah.
00:01:05
Speaker
No, I understand that. I had some Popeyes earlier, and that's pretty heavy.
00:01:13
Speaker
But it's not the only thing that's pretty heavy. I'm just kidding. That's a rough transition. That's a really rough transition, right? But that's what we specialize in. Yeah. So obviously, we do this week to week. This is our talk cast episode for the month where we just gab and about random subjects, usually in the space of gaming with some other banter.
Discussion on George Floyd and Social Movements
00:01:38
Speaker
But with the recent events, we just wanted to
00:01:41
Speaker
at least acknowledge the events that happened recently with George Floyd and the officers in Minneapolis, is it? Yeah. Obviously a fucking travesty. I don't think anybody can deny that. Or people can, but they are dumb and have some very biased racial opinions. Any type of violence against people coming from the police is
00:02:11
Speaker
not the correct way to go about it. And this was a blatant murder slash lynching. I don't want to talk to too much about it. Because I am by nowhere, by no means a good resource on this topic. If anybody doesn't know, I'm a fucking white guy. And I'm also not the most informed individual. I've been kind of
00:02:39
Speaker
bubbling myself for a bit between one, I'm slightly antisocial to begin with, two, I got, I guess it was dumped. We weren't officially boyfriend-girlfriend dating a while back. And it's just easier for me to like constrict my circle. Oh, I don't need to think about this. I can just worry about myself. I don't need to think about so-and-so. I don't see them. I can worry about myself. And my bubble has been continuously shrinking to the point of somebody posted on Discord
00:03:09
Speaker
Oh, hey, you have to wear a mask outside to PA state law for coronavirus. And that was news to me because I was literally ignoring everything. Yeah.
00:03:21
Speaker
But I want to be more vigilant and aware of what's going on in my community, even though this is not my direct community. These are other people, other human beings in the United States who I should remotely give a fuck about because they are people. So I just want to say there are a lot of resources out there. If you want to get informed and support Black Lives Matter being
00:03:50
Speaker
an obvious name to go to. They have a website, much better resources, and can speak to things much better than we can. We'll put some stuff in both the description and probably the Facebook post when this episode goes up too. Yeah. Which is the future, so future me. Remember to do that.
00:04:13
Speaker
I was, I was ready to like step in as I often do, like to interrupt you and like cut you off and keep you from finishing the thought as is the way tradition of the episode. Right. Um, but you, I mean, I agree with everything you said. Uh, we, uh, to be frank, we spent like what, probably an hour and a half talking about this, trying to figure out how best to touch on the subject. And it's really hard. It's really difficult. Cause usually we're just jokers and really funny and
00:04:44
Speaker
Are we really, I don't know. Our goal is to entertain. This is a fun outlet for us to do week to week. And we hope occasionally somebody accidentally clicks this and is entertained for the two minutes they listen to it. Yeah.
00:05:00
Speaker
And it's like, I'm in a similar spot. I don't do, I don't feel like I impact the movement. I have my beliefs and I believe in institutional change and I see this as a murder and these are truly my beliefs, but I'm not the person to do anything.
00:05:17
Speaker
That's a fault in me, right? But I don't change my life, my impact, anything like that. We were talking about Facebook and how, you know, it's you can change your picture, you know, you can post a some encouraging words, you can do something like that. And it feels like platitudes. It feels like you're just appeasing your own guilt in the society or maybe trying to get some positive reinforcement yourself.
00:05:43
Speaker
And the fact is those little gestures matter when a bunch of people are doing them. We live in a society, as it turns out, and the society has some serious problems and societies change when people change. So even though it's not super significant and there are more significant things you can do, those little platitudes actually add up. And
00:06:11
Speaker
So we encourage people to do what they can. And we will.
Impact of Social Media on Change
00:06:17
Speaker
And then we'll go back to trying to be funny. Can I real quick just before we go back to the entertainment? So there's Run the Jewels recently. Great fucking band. Good band. Dropped their fourth album.
00:06:35
Speaker
It's not actually released released that you can buy it, but it is out on Spotify and it is free to listen to on YouTube as well. And YouTube thankfully has the uncensored version. So I can hear the correct swears for the situation. Uh, in their six song on the album, walking in the snow and verse two killer Mike says, I'm just paraphrasing this line here. So it's not to read the whole verse. Hmm.
00:07:03
Speaker
And you're so numb, you watch the cops choke out a man like me until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, I can't breathe. And you sit there in the house on couch and watch it on TV. The most you gives a Twitter rant and call it a tragedy.
00:07:19
Speaker
And this is talking about obviously George Floyd's murder and how people will kind of go on social media and just say, what a terrible thing that happened. And then it's so easy to go back to our day to day lives and ignore it. And this is something I'm definitely guilty of for other events in the past. Um, but I don't think that any of those things in the past and let alone this thing is something that we should just do one
00:07:50
Speaker
give it like the Sauron's eye focus for the time, the entertainment attention span. Don't give it a fleeting glance and say hashtag sad and then go about your business. Um, I think the president uses that one also. Yeah. It's cause he's a shit. We're not going to go into all the details of that either. Um, but
00:08:15
Speaker
Please do some research. Please look into this a little more. Do not forget what happened here and let's try and be better as a society and treat everybody with the respect they deserve. Yeah.
00:08:30
Speaker
That was the next verse, right? But truly the travesty you've been robbed of your empathy. So replace it with apathy. Yep. Yeah. So, I mean, if nothing else, even if you're not out there on the streets, you can resolve to be a better person in this and just resolve not to lose your empathy and to maintain that care and love for your fellow human beings. And that's what's going to get us through it.
00:09:03
Speaker
Until next time, no. I want to cut it there because I'm just going to... It's a heavy topic and you can be discussed in much greater detail. And it has been. And it will be. Yeah.
Dota 2 Battle Pass Analysis
00:09:16
Speaker
But to hard cut into some of the other content that we have prepared, Dota 2 has at last released their battle pass.
00:09:30
Speaker
I can tell you're really excited about it. I wrote some notes for this. I'm ready to tear into this thing. So I will say as somebody who still plays Dota 2, I did get the battle pass because I like supporting Dota 2 because I've been playing it on and off for probably a couple of years.
00:09:47
Speaker
And the game is free by default, but they have the battle pass to kind of incentivize people spending money to contribute toward the prize pool for the next international players. That's true. Obviously due with COVID-19, TI-10 is currently postponed until a later date and it's more viable because to have that many teams and like a crowd,
00:10:18
Speaker
And, you know, to have like ticket sales for an event that people can go to probably be very cumbersome to try and do online. They have had some online tournaments in the past, but obviously a lot harder to orchestrate. All right. But that's, that's what battle pass is. What are your thoughts on this specific battle pass?
00:10:36
Speaker
So I had some notes here, because I did take a look at it. And credit where credit's due, Valve puts most of their work into Dota, happens around these Battle Passes. Around the International and the Battle Pass in particular is where a lot of this yearly content comes out. Other games use different release cycles. Overwatch usually does stuff around major events. For Valve and Dota 2 in particular, they front load all of that into the Battle Pass.
00:11:05
Speaker
which makes it a really exciting time for people playing the game. And the fact that this battle pass lasts so long, I think will actually give a lot of people time to earn some of these rewards without dropping a lot of money on it.
00:11:22
Speaker
And that being said, there is a lot of potential money to drop on it. And as always, I think Valve is anticipating people will do that. So one, yeah, definitely. The prize pool each year has been consistently going up where they kind of target higher and higher things. The concern from a lot of the community has been too much emphasis is put into TI. So it's really only those top tier teams competing.
00:11:50
Speaker
So if you're like a tier two or tier three team in the scene, you could still be like a legit competitive team. But there's not as much incentive for you to do a major tournament when the prize pools are so low in comparison. There's not as much money for the teams year round. So it's not as sustainable for them. Yeah, it's
00:12:16
Speaker
It's unfortunate, obviously, to have it pushed back. But I feel like Valve is always going to make their money off of this. I tried to briefly look up the price pools. It's been pretty crazy. I don't have hard numbers here. Last year was 34 mil, I think. Yeah.
00:12:35
Speaker
34 million, which I believe every year has surpassed the previous year and basically set the world record every single time. The first time was a crazy surprise. I don't think Valve expected that much money to show up. And then every battle passed since then has been more and more front-loaded.
00:12:56
Speaker
with content and promised content, largely because they make more money off of Dota than anything else they do besides Steam. Yeah, because they still make content for Dota. I mean, they periodically touch on TF2, but yeah, Dota is very much the cash cow and
00:13:20
Speaker
Also, obviously, it's all a game. I don't want to undersell it. But from a financial perspective, it's very profitable for them. Now, here's my gripe. My gripe is there's some really cool stuff in this one.
00:13:36
Speaker
And that's not a great gripe. Another gripe is, there's some really cool stuff in it, and since I'm not buying the Battle Pass, I'll never have it. And that's my gripe, no. The real thing is, in particular point, there's a couple price points here I wanted to mention. If you just bought the levels, so you're like, I'm doing the full whale approach, and I'm not playing trying to level up your Battle Pass, because that's one of the mechanics, right?
00:14:03
Speaker
get levels in game by playing the game. Yes. There are like little achievements you can get to get points to level up your battle pass. Then there's other little mini content as you go to incentivize you to keep playing or if you want to rush it out. They do have things that like certain levels, which you would have to grind a little bit for.
00:14:26
Speaker
by a bit actually mean a lot. If you're playing the game regularly, like three times a day, it's not that crazy. But even I who play who plays semi consistently, I'm not usually dropping three hours a night. It's more like five hours a week. It's more like five hours. I just keep losing.
00:14:51
Speaker
But some of these price points roughly converted to if you just bought the levels at the more you spend, like any loot boxes or anything like that, the more you spend in a single purchase, the more efficient as far as in-game battle pass levels are concerned. It's $90 for the anti-mage reskin, the female one. I think her name's like Clay or something like that. I can't remember.
00:15:18
Speaker
Okay, whatever. Yeah, it's not actually, it's like, it's something like that. Fact check me while I look this up. But yeah, $90 for that. It's about $200 to get a Wraith King Arcana, which reskins him as Skeleton King.
00:15:39
Speaker
And this one particularly bothers me, but I'll get back to it. And then it's just shy of $300 in order to unlock the Wind Ranger Arcana.
00:15:53
Speaker
Did you find your name? I found a dumb joke, which was if anti-nages real name and he's a guy is Magina or Magina, then the female anti-mage name would be the, and it's just a dash. And that's a dumb joke on Reddit. So I didn't find the actual name. Sorry, I'll swap out for you, but this is, this is my grape. Um, $200 price point for Wraith King to turn him into Skeleton King.
00:16:22
Speaker
This bothers me because when the game launched, Wraith King was Skeleton King. Wow, what a hard and pointed... I don't... I get what you're saying. Yeah, this isn't new content to me. This is playing off people's nostalgia. It's like...
00:16:43
Speaker
They literally could just undo it and he'd be a low poly skeleton king. Well, it's not like they made a low poly skeleton king. Like it's, it is an actual skin arcane and they did do cool things with it. In general, a lot of the bot content in Dota 2 is just skins and cosmetic. Are they playing off nostalgia? Sure. Oh yeah. But at the same time,
00:17:14
Speaker
I mean, I played Dota 1 back in the day in the Warcraft 3 in high school during my networking class, but I don't give a shit. That's me personally though, right? Even like the, the IO Arcana for
00:17:29
Speaker
the companion group. I'm like, wow, that's awesome. I didn't get it. I just, I appreciate it. Right. I'm not going to drop money on something just for it. Typically. Yeah. It's just cosmetics are a cool way to increase your investment in a game. So like when I'm playing a certain character, I want to have my coolest cosmetics so I can show off while I'm styling on people.
00:17:55
Speaker
And then if they beat me and I lose, they know that I feel really bad about it because of how tricked out my character is. Right. Yeah. You're just like, I should be better for the amount of money I spent on this game. Yeah. So yeah, obviously.
00:18:13
Speaker
higher points to get to. A lot of people I know, like I bought the level 50 battle pass. So normal battle pass is 10 bucks. You just get it. You're level zero. I spent like $30 to get the one at level 50 starting point. But I know a bunch of people who are already at 100, 300, somebody was at like 500 because they spent a lot of money upfront and that's what they want to spend their money on. That's fine. Right.
00:18:43
Speaker
But I mean, it's just, it's for anything. It's how much you value that you're going to get out of it. Like I would spend good money on a nice meal. Um, maybe every once in a while. So like I'm getting something out of it. I'm getting enjoyment value.
00:19:04
Speaker
But at the same time, I'll also eat a can of Chef Boyardee and not give two shits.
Gaming Experiences: Skyrim and System Shock
00:19:10
Speaker
It's three, three possibly. Three cans? No, three poops.
00:19:22
Speaker
Yeah, I guess my point here is like this is the first battle pass I saw that really took off. It might have been the first battle pass, actually. It's pretty common in games to have something like a battle pass. And admittedly, this one goes over a long time. So if you're like a consistent Dota player and you're still
00:19:44
Speaker
not spending money on levels, presumably you can unlock a lot of this stuff. But like the subreddit has a bunch of complaints about people feeling that they're ripped off about some of these auxiliary mechanics like recycling and crystal maidens wheel and all this other stuff. And for me,
00:20:05
Speaker
my issue with it isn't just that there's like cosmetics and you can pay money for that. I think that's fine. I mean, I spend money on Overwatch periodically. So I would be the biggest hypocrite if I railed against that. It's that this one is so expensive by comparison. Like one of the reasons I quit Hearthstone was because when I was playing that and a new expansion dropped, I was like,
00:20:31
Speaker
slap down $150 so I could get most of the cards in the set. And then I look at the Valve Battle Pass and it's like $150? What are you, poor? There's some stuff in there that's very expensive. And they treat it like a Kickstarter. A lot of these rewards are for things that aren't in the game yet, but they're going to be made and developed. They're like stretch goals. I don't know.
00:21:01
Speaker
I don't know. Yeah, it is kind of weird that they have, like one of the things is a toy pudge, where it's kind of like a cloth. What is it? Raggedy Andal. Yeah. It's in that style. And that's planned, but not released yet. Yeah. That's just like the female anti-mage skin, I believe. Is that way as well? Yeah, that one's not in game yet. I think it's just the Wraith King that's in right now. The Skeleton King.
00:21:30
Speaker
Yeah. And like some of the, it's not like valve always releases stuff really quickly. I think the previous years, there's one year where the Arcana winner, so that you have this big vote and people have this head to head. I think it was like Rubik versus pudge or something like that one year. Uh, maybe it's co-op. I don't remember, but, um, the winner took a year before the Arcana got in the game. Yeah. So it's just like, you're not guaranteed these things will be available very quickly either. I don't know.
00:22:02
Speaker
I think Valve sometimes rides on the goodwill people have for them a bit more than I'm comfortable with. And I say that fully knowing, again, that I like Blizzard games.
00:22:19
Speaker
and they've thrown into the ground. They're now on the saddle that was previously on the back of the Goodwill and the saddle is rested on the ground. I think there's nothing left there.
00:22:38
Speaker
I was going to say bi-annually no. I've had a yearly Halloween party for the past couple of years. That's the holiday I stole and I like hosting because one, I can dress slutty and make my friends uncomfortable. And also I get to drink and socialize, which is fun.
00:22:55
Speaker
Um, but it would be the equivalent of me at hopefully get to have another party this year, uh, and actually have people there physically without masks and within six feet. If I just like throughout the party was like, Hey, remember, remember that first party I threw, man. Oh, good times. I have a donation jar over there. If you guys want to ship in for pizza or anything, it's fine. It's fine. Yeah. It's.
00:23:24
Speaker
Blizzard is obviously doing that egregiously and they
00:23:29
Speaker
They fucking suck in my book, currently. They need to step up their thing and not just try and recycle old things. I understand there's a lot of nostalgia. You can get good value out of remakes, and certain things are enjoyed again or enjoyed in a new way. Like Final Fantasy VII Remake, I know certain people have issues with it, but a lot of people also got a lot of enjoyment out of it. A chance to kind of relive their childhood and not the shittiest graphics of all time.
00:23:59
Speaker
The comedic polygons, right? Let's be fair, like a fourth of their child. Okay. Yeah. This goes back to like playing off of some of that nostalgia and like they're spacing out the game like they did with like the fucking Hobbit movies and like, we'll have it in multiple parts. And that's another reason it kind of, I lost interest.
00:24:20
Speaker
I looked at some of the reviews for that. The Amazon reviews. Final Fantasy 7. And it's not great. They've lost basically a full star and the negative reviews are because people bought the game and they didn't realize that it was... I don't think it was heavily advertised as that at all. No. It's apparently a sub part on the back of the box.
00:24:42
Speaker
Now that's, that is, that is a very shitty thing to do. That is shady marketing in my book. And the top of the front is just Final Fantasy seven remake. It's not part one. It's not like the prologue. Yeah. Yeah.
00:24:57
Speaker
So that's something that a lot of people found out through YouTube videos of playthroughs or reviews. Because I'm not sure if you're looking to buy it on Amazon or order it digitally if that information is readily available to you. But it doesn't seem kind of misleading for sure. I mean, I didn't know for a long time. I legitimately asked other people who had bought it and were playing it because they talked like, oh, I beat it. And here are some of the last things I experienced.
00:25:27
Speaker
You mean the things at the beginning of the game. What are you talking about? Act one. I remember act one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um.
00:25:37
Speaker
I don't know. It's almost, it's almost the new DLC in a way. People are super pissed off about DLC and now it's just like, how much content are we actually getting for the money we're dropping into these games as a service? Yeah, it really depends. And I think it's exactly a case by case basis. Cause there are definitely examples of things where.
00:26:01
Speaker
Even if it's not the most cost-effective thing, if I deem it to be valuable, I'm going to get enjoyment out of it for playing this game. I'll definitely check some stuff out, whether it's just, oh, a character pack. Oh, some cosmetics are cool.
00:26:17
Speaker
But for me, it needs to not be the price of another game to do. And I need to actually then play that game. Like, I'm not going to get the DLC for something if only I can play for two hours, you know? Right. Which is why I'm still holding off on Iceborne. Wait for me, Rachel. I'm coming eventually. I'm coming. And I'm going to probably switch back to Bow because Hammer is the slowest fucking thing.
00:26:43
Speaker
I mean, I tried though. I don't even know how you do it. Also, Justin, I mentally heard you go, whoa, I'm going to be playing with you two and I'll endure your beratement of how I don't have an item loadout. Sorry, Jake. Sorry about that. Oh, we'll switch off to the hammer. In this case, fill the gap because hammer is awesome. One of the best weapons, but it's no lance.
00:27:03
Speaker
All right, since we're on DLC space and to derail from your notes, do you still have an interest in playing Iceborne? I know we played some Monster Hunter back in the day and we had an episode on it. We did. We had an episode. This is pretty much the game I bought PlayStation 4 for.
00:27:22
Speaker
No, it was just a single four. And I mean, I think Monster Hunter was my game of the year that year. It was just legitimately amazing. I'm kind of surprised on myself for having not picked up Iceborne at this point. But I think I have spent enough time in deep meditation to realize what the reasoning is. And it's just I've got a lot of games to play. Like I'm having fun playing games that are coming out that I'm picking up. And Monster Hunter was a game where it's just like
00:27:52
Speaker
and a social experience at its core. Best enjoyed with people and also it's a lot of time spent.
00:28:02
Speaker
Even if I try to grind out all the nitty gritty and become best in class as far as gear, it's still a decent amount of time. Now, there's a lot of content in there for sure, but throughout the week, I usually want to play some games with people. I've been delving back into some single-player Skyrim just to dick around. Yeah, I saw you had that open for the last three days.
00:28:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's mainly that's up. I'm either listening to podcasts or for the first time in a while listening to news. Yeah. Skyrim is a great podcast game. I think like the last two or three times I went back to Skyrim. I paid no attention to ongoing dialogue. I don't even have audio on in the game. I'm just running around with a big hammer. Just knocking forlorn.
00:28:56
Speaker
I want to say Forsaken, Forsworn, and Falmer, and anybody who gets like a red pip on my map. Right. They attacked a chicken the one time, so that town's dead. Yeah. I'm really just trying to.
00:29:14
Speaker
level stuff up. I'm just exploring. I'm not doing main quest even yet. You can pretty much skip that though. As I've said, I like doing RPGs. I like the progression of levels and stats. So that journey is what it is for me. But beyond that, it's just kind of a passive game. The only reason I ever did main quest pass like the first playthrough was just to get dragon rend. That's it. But dragon rend is a heck of a shout.
00:29:43
Speaker
Oh, Dragonwind was the Skyrim spoilers. I'm going to forget to put this in the description. Dragonwind is the thing you get by using the Elder Scroll to go back in time and see how the old Nords fought the dragons. And they developed this shout that was taken from or given to them by Parthanax.
00:30:09
Speaker
And you shout it up in the air, and if it hits the dragon, it's a big cone. If it hits the dragon, they're surrounded by a blue aura and forced to land. They have to go to ground until dragon ruin runs out.
00:30:21
Speaker
What I love about that is when you say forced to land, it's not like sky shot or anything else where it's like a tethered and they get pulled down. You make it seem like they're crash landing a plane. Like, we've got to land. Like one of the fucking engines went out and they're just going.
00:30:41
Speaker
That's literally it, though, because there is there is an animation in that game. So if you injure a dragon's wing and it's near certain surfaces, I think they just literally have some programmed in the game. It will like crash into the ground and literally get like partially buried and then like climb out or whatever and keep fighting you, but won't be able to fly. But Dragon Red doesn't do that. It just is like you must land at the nearest convenience. It's just like the radio operator from the tower.
00:31:10
Speaker
We're coming in for a water landing, but that's okay because this is a water plane. Yeah, that's nice because then you don't have to worry about dragons flying away and you can just poke them with sticks. Good to know. I see you having the notes here. System shock demo. Yeah, I heard you played that. So before you say this. Okay.
00:31:35
Speaker
I was like, all right, I'm going to put this on here and then I'll talk about it. And Dave went out of his way looking at some of these notes in advance, seeing a demo, taking an interest in games that I have an interest in. Play system shock. What a man. Can I put in my two cents?
00:31:55
Speaker
Sure. I fucking hated it. So I had heard of System Shock obviously from lore days of that's certain things like Davey Sex and Bioshock and these immersive sims kind of their progenitor. I never played the original, but they had this demo for I guess is it a remake or is it a
00:32:20
Speaker
It is technically a remake, but it's a relatively small team that just kind of has the IP is my understanding. And it's not like they're doing a remaster. They're just trying to capture some of the essence of it. But the game's in like Unity versus like Quake or whatever the original version is in.
00:32:38
Speaker
Um, Grant, I want, I will preface it is in alpha. It is completely an alpha. Um, I think they just wanted some early feedback from people and that's fine. Uh, but for me, there was nothing in the game, at least at this point, either stylistically or anything that's going on to make me remotely give a shit about it. Yeah. Again, it is alpha, but.
00:33:06
Speaker
Everything felt kind of repetitive and generic. There's probably not a whole lot of content in the game at this point. Also, the voice acting seemed kind of like Jake called me on his phone but was wearing his Corona mask at the same time. And he just was lackadaisical about aliens being on the ship. Like, yeah.
00:33:28
Speaker
I have here as a point, voice acting varies from good to pretty lifeless. And I stand by that. And this is one of the red flags for me. As voice acting doesn't necessarily get better as a game is developed, those are recorded lines.
00:33:49
Speaker
Now, I could go back. I played like System Shock 2, not like the original one. And maybe they're really just trying to be true to form to those old games where like your voice acting crew were people like within walking distance of your block. Like you just had Ryan.
00:34:07
Speaker
Can Tim do this? Tim, get in here quick. Tim's like, I just do the graphics. We need to read a couple of these lines. Yeah, it could be that as well. But there's no excuse. One of the reasons I want to damn that so much is.
00:34:21
Speaker
So let's say you have a game with a silent protagonist and just text, essentially a virtual book, if you will. You can infer that world completely to your imagination, right? And that's kind of what
00:34:40
Speaker
it's running off of entirely. But as soon as you inject a voice, you are adding a personality and a definitive, this is what we have intended for it. So when you have shitty voice acting, and it's like just not believable characters, it becomes a lot more Mimi. So essentially, it's going to force the immersion one way or the other.
00:35:04
Speaker
Yeah. There are some games where like the voice acting is so fucking good. I didn't necessarily like other parts of the game, but I was very invested in the universe because of that. Darkest Dungeon.
00:35:20
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I don't want to disparage entirely some of the lines. So I actually died before completing the demo, because I got swarmed a little bit at the end, and I overestimated how much health I had. But, and unfortunately, you have to start from the very beginning if that happens. Heads up. There were some good lines in there, and I was like, man, these actually make me more disappointed. Because the good lines were like, it is possible you could have attained this. It's not all people talking in monotone.
00:35:52
Speaker
You were talking about how someone was like in danger and they had like a monotone voice. I remember that exactly. I remember the specific point I picked up a dialogue after like a hallway of enemies. And they're like, oh my gosh, Jim's dead. And I'm like, is he dead though? He doesn't sound dead. And if he is dead, you didn't care that much. I don't know. Voice acting, you have to get right. Yeah. A lot of other things can be,
00:36:24
Speaker
I don't know. Again, there's always going to be a ton of parts. When one thing kind of stands out in a negative way, it becomes a glaring fault.
00:36:36
Speaker
Yeah. So you actually played this before I did, because I was going to play this. I played this like over the weekend or something. I had a sunny productive day where I was like, I'm going to do podcasts. Can't even say the fucking thing I do. I'm going to do podcast stuff.
00:36:55
Speaker
So I was like, oh, I'll check the notes early because Jake has been the one doing the notes for the past year and I just wing it. But I thought I would check it out because it was free. It is on GOG, so I did have to get an installer. It is also on Steam. Oh, it's on Steam now. Yeah, I didn't have that note in there. I found out, but it's been on Steam since like January. Yeah, so either of those works.
00:37:22
Speaker
What was interesting to me here is you reached out to me on Discord and you're just like, I hate this. I'm like, oh man, that kind of sucks because I enjoy System Shock. So Dave and I just have really different opinions about games. And then I played it. I was like, man, I hate this.
00:37:41
Speaker
And I don't think I biased you in any way. I think if you would have just played it on your own, I would have played it. Oh, you've been like, what do you think? We would have just said like, no, I was ready to like fight you on it until I actually played it. And I was like, ah, man, the enemies are super generic and they don't they don't feel that good. And most of this game plays very samey. So here's
00:38:06
Speaker
Here's the gripes from someone who knows System Shock, or at least System Shock 2. They don't give you any powers in the demo. And powers were the one thing that Bioshock really took from System Shock, the idea that you're mutating your character in some way, you're getting abilities. They were technology in System Shock, instead of evolution. But same idea.
Nostalgia in Game Remakes
00:38:31
Speaker
That was like the core concept. They literally give you an energy bar, and they only let you use it to fire a gun that runs off the energy. And so I'm just like, none of the depth that could have resulted from having these different augments, like Deus Ex. Deus Ex is a game that uses the system really similarly to how System Shock did. None of that depth is there because there's no powers.
00:38:58
Speaker
And you feel it. You feel it's missing. Yeah. And the combat feels, at least at this point, very Runescape-y. By that, I mean, you're taking turns hitting each other, which to be fair, that's where Skyrim is right now for me. It doesn't feel great.
00:39:18
Speaker
But again, it's still early stages, but it was not the best showing by any means. And here's the gripe I have actually, because I am all for giving games a pass while they're in alpha, while they're in beta, whatever. This is a demo, which means they want people to play this game, presumably, or else they would have made it freely available. And for the life of me, I can't understand why, because to rant,
00:39:46
Speaker
I think this game has a lot of potential. There's a lot of cool stuff in here. By the end of it, the game started to get a little more difficult. I found myself getting a little bit invested. And all of these good aspects could have been massively magnified if the rest of the game was up to snuff, was developed, if I wasn't playing an early dev version of it. But instead, it's going to decrease my chance of buying the game. It's going to tent my opinion of the game for its duration.
00:40:16
Speaker
And I have no idea why this is out there unless they literally just needed investor money. Like why give people a bad first impression? I don't know. I think it does go back to what I was saying about they want some degree of early feedback from the consumer.
00:40:34
Speaker
That's why a lot of things will go on early access. So they can A, possibly get some money early, two, have it be iterative because people provide feedback and direction and also will bug test some things for you. Hey, I keep clipping through the wall on floor two by the one gunman. Okay. We've tested that, found the issue, fixed it. Some free QA, right?
00:41:00
Speaker
But why not, I guess, have early access in that case? Like, I'd be more willing to give an early access game of the past than a game that releases a demo of an early alpha version.
00:41:13
Speaker
Because if early access, you're like, you're telling people this is not ready. Back in my day, demos were something you could do on essentially at Walmart. You'd grab the hard locked in controller.
00:41:31
Speaker
that had just like a little bit of wiggle room but you just uh stood in place and latched on and you played through like a mission and you had one boss that's how it was and then you're like this looks fun mom i would like to
00:41:46
Speaker
save up my allowance for this. And then you look around and you realize your mom has left because he spent the last hour and a half holding up his controller. That was fun. Like your mom was nearby. You initially knew where your parents were. And then you're just like, after you got done, you're like, I got to phone my parents. Yeah.
00:42:05
Speaker
I legitimately, I mean, I guess a lot of us probably were, but go to Walmart, find the one unused controller. Sometimes it's the crappy game. Let's be honest. Yeah. But then your parents are just like, you good? And I was just like, yep, I'm good. Come back before you leave. And then just that thing, you know, it was a different time. Now those are just coronavirus dispensers. Yeah.
00:42:31
Speaker
Try to think of it, I've even seen those and I've been at stories in the past, past a little bit. Hand sanitizers? No, just like having the controller plugged in for something. I think they still have it, like Walmart electronics. Now, admittedly, it's been a little while since I was at Walmart because I'm scared of it.
00:42:53
Speaker
It's too many people. I don't know where my closest one is. And usually if I want like groceries, I'm going to go to a grocery store specifically. If I want something else specifically, I'm going to go to that specific store rather than hitting all bases at once. Home run, that's what they call it.
00:43:14
Speaker
hitting on the bases once. Yeah. But yeah, I don't know. We'll see. I hope that that game sees massive improvement system shock because it's a classic series and I would like to see number two. And I would like to see Shodan make me really terrified again. And I don't know, it was great. And I want it to be great. Maybe it won't be though. We'll see. Yeah, I've always going to have a soft spot for
00:43:45
Speaker
kind of deeply world-built transhumanist things. Basically I'm waiting for 2077 to come out as my next muse. I'm gonna see how many consecutive days off my company will allow me to take when 2077 comes out because now there's no conflict with a wedding, a dear beloved friend's wedding, friends with I guess the S and
00:44:12
Speaker
than the apostrophe, so it's multiple friends. You're friends with both people in the wedding. Both people, yeah. You could have said friend's wedding. That could have been implied. Yeah, that probably would be the easy way to say that. But yeah, I'm looking forward to that. There are some other things that have come out recently. So this is something I didn't realize. Sea of Thieves came out on Steam.
00:44:38
Speaker
I watched it a little bit. I was like, it seems OK, maybe a little underdeveloped. I think it was on Epic Game Store first, something like that. So I didn't care all that much.
New Releases and Gaming Trends
00:44:49
Speaker
But apparently Rare made that. And I didn't realize that. I didn't either.
00:44:58
Speaker
rare from such games as Banjo-Kazooie, Conquers. Oh, that's fair. Yeah, that's actually a good idea. I guess not everybody know who the rare games are. Back from N64 Days got their big fame.
00:45:13
Speaker
Yeah. Um, and it actually doesn't look terrible. Uh, it looks like they've added a fair amount of content. It's got good reviews on steam. Um, I'm like, uh, maybe I'll wish this list. I'll take a look at it later. I might watch an updated trailer then to this give it that. Yeah. Cause I don't hate the idea and people are like, if you just like exploitation for exploitation sake and finding out fun things to do, then this is the game for you. So I'm like, yeah.
00:45:40
Speaker
I like this. Yeah, it's definitely me. That's why I just leave my house for hours on end. I just want to get a feel for my surroundings. Just wander out there. And I would be remiss. I said yesterday, but yesterday is not going to be yesterday when you guys listen to this. June 3rd is when CFPs came out.
00:45:59
Speaker
June 5th, also the past, wink, is when the Command and Conquer Remastered Collection comes out, which one of our friends is adamantly interested in, I would say.
00:46:17
Speaker
I'm going to ask who, you're going to say their name, and I'm going to go, they would. Who? AJ. Oh yeah, he would. He's very much a war enthusiast as far as video game chickens are. Yeah, he uses the word murder a lot. But this is the first game in all of his expansions, and Red Alert 1, and expansions. There's a lot of cool things about this.
00:46:46
Speaker
It's rare that I say that about an EA published game, but it looks like they put a lot of effort into it. They got the original composer to like rerecord, live record a lot of the the tracks, higher quality versions of them. And I don't know everything about it. These last couple of years have been remasters like through and through. It seems like we get half of the games released the year are actually remasters of old games. But sometimes I don't hate it, you know,
00:47:16
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I've heard Resident Evil's been doing a good job recently. I don't really play those, but just from what I've picked up, from what I've gathered. Another thing coming at some point, which was mentioned at E3 and I think we touched on once is Fall Guys, published by Devolver Digital. Oh yeah.
00:47:39
Speaker
battle royale of essentially being like a little jellybean person and going through it to Keshe's castle style, very cartoonish series of challenges where you start with like 100 people and it gets dwindled down per round or challenge. I think that's just going to be a fun party game to do at lands, etc. Was this the almost like Wario Ware minigames weeding people out?
00:48:09
Speaker
Round by round. It seems like a lot of people are being weeded out. I'm going to send you a link. Metachat. It's the first one in that list. It's like some IGN game list. This very first picture is The Last of Us 2. Oh, number nine. Yeah, it looks like a very fun party game. Oh, yeah.
00:48:36
Speaker
Um, so this is, I actually did see the trailer for this and this is largely, I think the warrior where idea is thinking of as it's just like, um, goes from mode to mode and you'll have some goal to like run around and try not to die. And the last couple of people move on to like the next mode. It's, it does look tremendously fun. Parts of it are like, um,
00:49:01
Speaker
Uh, gang beasts, almost. I get some, like, gang beasts vibes here. But just tons, tons of people. Very loose physics based. Now that is really cool.
00:49:18
Speaker
entirely unrelated to that. Prey was released on GOG. So for all of our listeners, don't use Steam because of Steamworks DRM. Totally recommend that. It was on sale when I last looked at it, and I refused to open the link again to see if I would now be incorrect. But I think we both liked Prey. Yeah, Prey was really good.
00:49:44
Speaker
It's another one of those interactive sim fields. I care about the story. I get invested in trying to cheat the game as much as possible by finding alternative methods to solve a particular problem. And that not being able to ever open doors because I don't have the right level of password ability or cracking.
00:50:09
Speaker
I actually, on my last attempt through the game, I used a speedrun strat to mantle over an object, which put me outside of terrain. Jump onto a key card, which was a collidable object. And if you miss it, you fall through space and die. But jump onto the key card, grab another key card, which is just like a dev area, where they put the items to be teleported elsewhere later. Grab that key card.
00:50:39
Speaker
jumped back into collidable terrain, took a shortcut and beat the game. Freaking great. Love that game. And you can play the game for 10 minutes as well if you follow these guidelines. No, I just I still appreciate it. I'm just glad it's not patched. Another thing I wanted to draw a little bit of attention to was that Dave shaking his head. You just you just don't
00:51:08
Speaker
I just want to bullet off full news things, I guess. I mean, so this is something I wanted to talk about because it branched off of what we were talking about earlier. But I missed Moist Critical's Smash tournament that happened like a couple of months ago. And then I went and I looked up what this guy's been doing. And he and the people supporting him are literally
00:51:38
Speaker
providing all of the tournament support that Nintendo absolutely will not provide to the Smash scene. Yeah. Nintendo is really shit for anything community-based. Their online's always been fairly shitty. They don't seem to understand how to connect people to allow them to play games with each other. Their network's fairly shit. But with everything that's been going on with having to do online tournaments,
00:52:07
Speaker
The fighting game scene is very active as far as its community. So Moi is critical, who is a YouTuber, also Smash enthusiast. I believe he plays some as well, but I don't think he's obviously like a pro player.
00:52:26
Speaker
at least at that level as far as I've seen. Yeah, no, but it was all right. He has like a $20,000 tournament that he kind of started, but then was doing some casting with Alfred was on there. A bunch of other common casters for the smash scene were there as well. And then they got pro talent from everywhere.
00:52:51
Speaker
Yeah, and what I didn't realize was the scope of this. This has been running from April. It's going to run through July. They've just had one, two, three, four, five, six, seven different events with the Europe edition. They're calling this the quarantine series, if you want to Google it.
00:53:13
Speaker
the Europe edition happening this last weekend. For people who listen to this episode, the weekend it comes out. So anyways, if you also have any interest in Smash, as all of our fans obviously do, because no one's ever written in about it, check it out. It's fun content. Yeah. Well,
00:53:37
Speaker
That's it, Dave. We've gone through it all. There's nothing left. And I'm sure that everything will be fine next week and we'll be able to record. Yeah. It's gonna be weird. It's about to actually look you in the eyes, the eyes, instead of, you know, monitor Jake.
00:53:56
Speaker
Cause we're totally gonna record in person anytime soon. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, 2021 perhaps. Um, like I said, 2077, um, 2077 that's, oh, you're actually looking forward to the next time we can record together. It's not a game. It's just, what did you think? Oh man. Hopefully it doesn't take that long. What have you been playing recently?
00:54:23
Speaker
Total War Warhammer. I really like strategy games, as it turns out. And it is Total War Warhammer 2, specifically. It's a very addictive one. And I will not go into details about it, but I recommend it. It's fun. I'm trying to think what else I've been playing. A bunch of Flash games, actually, from the classics.
00:54:48
Speaker
Oh, like browser Flash games? Yeah. There is a Flashpoint 8.0 thing you can find online that's basically this massive archive of Flash games. And the full download is something like 330 gigabytes, but it's basically every Flash game that was ever made. But these people wanted to archive everything, so it wouldn't get lost when Flash is completely disabled later this year.
00:55:17
Speaker
And it's hecka cool. There's also a non-330 gigabyte version, just 1.7. But it has all those classics, like those things we talked about in the previous episode, Defender Castle, all the armor game stuff, Newgrounds, all of that. It's freaking great. I haven't had a yearning to go back and do some Flash stuff yet.
00:55:43
Speaker
But I could definitely see myself appreciating that throwback. Yeah.
00:55:50
Speaker
I think I mentioned last time the Lego games, or maybe it wasn't on the podcast, but the Lego games haven't holed up as much as they did. That's unfortunate. Yeah. They always have a certain charm to them, but I'll always have system. Oh, no. Oh, it's all going to crap. Well, if you guys have ideas for things that aren't going to crap, feel free to send them in.
00:56:17
Speaker
Thanks. Send them in at soapstonepodcast.gmail.com if you have ideas for new episodes. Or you can join the discussion on Facebook at facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast. And as always, we'll see you in the next one. Have a good night.
00:56:53
Speaker
Bye!