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S6 E15: Gratuitous Bush
97 Plays1 year ago
What game mechanics ruined otherwise great games? After covering the latest pop-culture news, reviewing some recent shows such as Foundation and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2, and then discussing some of the latest movie and tv show trailers, we sit down and discuss exactly this.
Beers Reviewed This Episode:
- Freshwater Brewing - Wedge Cerveza - Lager - 4.6%
- Gypsy Fox Brewing - Hoptimism - Pilsner - 5.2%
- The Zythologist - Rubidium - Sour - 5.6%
- Southern Highlands Brewing - Ronin - Japanese DIPA - 7.0%
- Temple Brewing - Weston St - DDH IPA - 6.4%
- Six String Brewing - Hazy Pale Ale - 5.0%
- Garage Project - Descent to the Dungeon of Dankness - IPA - 6.5%
- Dangerous Ales - Double Bock - Doppelbock - 7.0%
- One Drop Brewing - Madzilla - Red IPA - 6.2%
- Molly Rose Brewing - Crowd Goes Mild - English Mild - 3.8%
- Alice Springs Brewing - Stout - 4.2%
- Dainton Beer - Island Jam - NEIPA - 6.7%
- Seeker Brewing - Cruisin' for a Good Pine - Milkshake Pale - 5.6%
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:29
Speaker
Welcome back to Pixels and Bites on this very warm Sunday afternoon here in Sydney. I'm sweating my balls off already. And Pete's probably not going to be happy if I swear too much more on this. But I'm Dan. I'm here with Pete. Howdy. And Tom. Hello. And we're going to be trying some tasty beverages as well as talking some video game pop culture movies, TV shows. I think we've got a pretty good coverage on everything except this week.
00:00:56
Speaker
So we'll be touching on all things fun and interesting and having our beers at the same time. Yes. We're going straight into beers.
Technical Challenges with Audio
00:01:08
Speaker
You can tell I'm halfway through mine.
00:01:10
Speaker
Yeah, well I had to have one while we fucked around with my sound settings again for the 10th time. I don't know how much of this actually makes it through to the recordings, but I always have some sort of audio issues. I load in my PC and I either sound like a chipmunk, which hasn't been happening lately, which is nice.
00:01:31
Speaker
But the last two times we've tried to record the sound is just not been working at all. So me and Pete have spent, we spent a good 45 minutes this time, 50 minutes, probably almost close to an hour because we started just before three screwing around with this one and in the end, Microsoft troubleshooting fixed it for us. And last time it took us
Beer Reviews and Trends
00:01:53
Speaker
an hour and Tom just sits there and
00:01:56
Speaker
I mean, look at that. Look at that shirt too. That's a fucking James T. Cook level. It's warm day. I've gone full cellic. I'm not ashamed of it. Let's open it up. Yeah, that's what it is. Full cellic. You're right. You're right. Yeah. Nice. What have you been drinking, Tom, then? Well, I was waiting patiently and watching all the trailers that I hadn't watched yet. So that was actually good for me. You are super echoey.
00:02:22
Speaker
You are super echoey, Tom. Have you removed some cladding from the room somehow? Are you sure you're not running through your laptop, Mike, again, instead of your microphone? Oh, you're talking to me about sound issues. The door's open. Do you want to close the door? No, no, no. It's just, yeah, no, it just sounds like you're in a cathedral. I've got a lightsaber blade. Where is that? Sounds like you're in a cathedral. Hang on, Jasper's leaving. All right, piss off, puppy. Bye-bye.
00:02:51
Speaker
It might've been that. Anyway, top twirling lights that was around, Tom. No, now I've got a toy. Actually, it fucking was too, by the way, as soon as you close that door. Well, there we go. The cathedral that is my hallway, obviously.
00:03:05
Speaker
So I've been drinking the Freshwater Brewing from New South Wales, their Wedge Cerveza. Now I saw an article on the Crafty Pike the other day, is Cerveza the new craft, and I went, fuck off. Yeah, they're definitely making a comeback. I had many, many words to say about that article, some of which, all of which I don't think can be repeated on this podcast because
00:03:31
Speaker
I wasn't particularly pleasant to something. So basically summed up by what I just said. So yes, I was actually at an event the other week in freshwater with two soils down. So we did a little beer trade as you do at those events. And they gave me this. It's 4.6%. It's just a, you know, Mexican style lager. They say they put a bit of sea salt in there and it's got to be a hints of citrus.
00:04:01
Speaker
It's good for what it is, but it's not my style of lager, especially in Octoberfest season when you're getting all these fantastic German-style lagers. It is perfect, though, for a day like today. It is very, very quenching of the thirst, and it's a little bit warmer now because it's been sitting here for a while.
00:04:23
Speaker
Yeah, look, it's very much one of those beers that you would take to the beach and you'd have one or two after you get out of the surf. I imagine that'd be so much better straight out of the surf as well. You had a bit of actual sea salt on your face or something. Took a sip in, but yeah, look, it's...
00:04:38
Speaker
It's not the next big thing. So, need a bag of Dick's Crafty pint? Yeah, I'll fight you. No, but it's very well made by Freshwater. Yeah, I've got a few of their beers to try, not on today, but they gave us a couple. So I'm going to give that a... Let's give it a four. Let's give it a four. Why not?
Actor Passing and Sony News
00:05:00
Speaker
I can't go into much else about it because it's...
00:05:02
Speaker
What makes a surveyor a surveyor? I mean, it's absolutely like crystal clear. Like, yeah. So like, like body usually has corn.
00:05:13
Speaker
traditionally has corn as an adjunct in it. I think some people might use rice these days, but just really like, really low bitterness, uh, not pretty, pretty innocuous overall. Is it a lager style or is it the same thing? It's a lager style. Okay. So basically just means beer in Spanish. Oh, well that's very inventive of them. Yeah.
00:05:37
Speaker
Cool. Oh, well on that, I do need to give Freshwater credit and actually I'm changing my score. They're getting an extra 0.25 for this. Let's have a nice little dig at Corona. They finish off by saying a sun's red sundowner with a touch of Aussie citrus and sea salt. We know where we'd rather be. That is a great little dig on the back of the can. Well done. Extra points.
00:06:01
Speaker
I've gone the same sort of route, Tom, with a nice warm weather quenching beer. I've got Gypsy Fox Hopdomism. It's the New Zealand, then New Zealand Pilsner. 5.2%. It's got a really good
00:06:18
Speaker
It might have a little bit of age on it, but the New Zealand hop character is still coming through really nice. It's got a really nice spiced New Zealand hop character to it. Might have liked just a little bit more bitterness, but it's got a good bitterness to it. It's very light bodied as well. And just for this heat, it's just perfect as well.
00:06:37
Speaker
I may regret my next two choices in this heat, depending if it gets hotter in the afternoon or if we start to get a bit of a change come over soon. But this is this is a really good way to start. Really enjoyable. So I'm pretty on the New Zealand pilsters at the moment. So it's a it's a good new invention that the the industry has done over the last year or two. So good. I think we might go four to five for that one as well.
00:07:07
Speaker
I would have really liked to try it straight fresh. It's got no package date on it. It's best before 14th of March, 24. So just showing a little bit of oxidization, a little bit of age, but it's still a very, very good beer. Beautiful.
00:07:26
Speaker
Nice, so I am drinking another xythologist beer after I had a chat with shiv from xythologist after our last review and I in my defense I did correct the record in the end that the the twenty dollars for that that five dollar fifty six dollar beer was actually a mistake in
00:07:49
Speaker
they're in the cutty sellers labeling, so they charge me the right amount for the beer. I also then, in my defense, showed you guys a photo of the way that they've labeled those shelves because I wasn't going crazy, right? No, I've had trouble on that. It was a very, very tiny four-pack little note next to that price.
00:08:08
Speaker
Yeah, so it's got like 20 bucks in big letters and then in the mind uses fine print for a full pack. Anyway, so I had a chat with Shiv and she recommended I try the because I wasn't a fan of the brown, the English brown now. So this is this is rubidium. And again, I've gone the same route as you guys now that it's actually a cooler red medium.
00:08:29
Speaker
It's a cooler red in real life than it shows on like the camera warms up the temperature of the red color there a little bit, but it is a raspberry and rose cream sour.
00:08:41
Speaker
It is raspberry and rose cream sour. That's interesting. Yeah, it's a it's a pure peach color. It's a little bit cloudy. And again, same as same as you two, I've gone the refreshing summery beer kind of route and it's it's actually it's not a sour flavor. I think I've ever tried before because it's not overpoweringly raspberry. You get a lot of rose water out of it. So didn't you say strawberry?
00:09:09
Speaker
Uh, no, raspberry, raspberry and rose cream. So, um, uh, maybe a bit of RNA.
Gaming Industry Updates
00:09:18
Speaker
Linneus created the modern system, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Just look at the side of the beer. For example, several species come from genus, blah, blah, blah. This elemental beer focuses on the rosacea. Rosacea, I don't know how to say that word. It's in Latin. Family, a parent rank to rose, raspberry, loganberry, and blackberry. The genus of these berries is rubus, which comes from their characteristic red color and the inspiration for the name of this beer, rubidium. We give you this, the first rose of summer.
00:09:47
Speaker
Yeah, contains water, malt hops, yeast, lactose, raspberries and rose. So I don't think it's rose water. I actually think it's rose. I don't know if that means there's flowers mashed into it. How do you put rose in a beer? Petals in a tea bag? Who knows? But it actually tastes really good. It's not too mouth-puckeringly sour, but it's kind of right on that edge.
00:10:15
Speaker
I could have lent either way, like I'm quite happy with where the sourdness level is. I could have gone a little bit more sour and I would have been okay still. It's kind of a wide band there. I don't know when it was made, but it's best before it's 29th of March next year. So I suspect it's probably halfway through its life cycle. Yeah, no, really good beer to start actually. I don't think I said what the ABV was. I don't think you did either. And I don't know where it is, 5.6.
00:10:42
Speaker
Five point six. And I only paid six bucks for the game, just for the record. So I'm going to give that. You read the fine print. Yeah, well, no, I took a photo and I checked it on the way home. I'm going to give that a four to five as well. So. Solid start. Yes. Well done, everybody. Shall we get into some news? We interrupt this broadcast with some breaking news from the front. I think we should.
00:11:09
Speaker
I think we should. Well, let's rip the band head off and get into some sadness first. It's always sad news and we just go up from there. Yes, Michael Gambon passed away earlier this week. He's 82 pneumonia. Yeah.
00:11:25
Speaker
Yeah, that's rubbish. I'll always remember him not just from obviously Harry Potter and with seeing detective everyone talks about his role in that, but the fact that he forever when had Gambon corner in the original Top Gear at a corner named after him for where he went absolutely completely off. Yeah, yeah, it's sad. But hey, what a run. What a hell of a run.
00:11:49
Speaker
Mm. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Was he the second? Yes. Yes. Dumbledore. Dumbledore. Not Gandalf. Gandalf. Fuck. Getting great wizards around the wrong way. I do have a mild hangover today too. So let's see if these alcohol can jumpstart it a little bit.
00:12:07
Speaker
Nothing for her, but the hair of the dog. Get into it, Pete. Get stuck into some news. It's fucking Sony, Sony, Sony, Sony, Sony. As I was going through the news, their name just kept coming up. So PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan's retiring after 30 years as the head of PlayStation, essentially, as CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment. He's only been in the CEO role for four years. So he's kind of hasn't been there very long.
00:12:35
Speaker
But, you know, at this point, is a shake up a bad thing? Probably not. Ironically, the group, the group C, the person who's going to step in temporarily until they select the replacement is already the group COO, the group CFO and a CEO from one of the other Sony parts. So. Yeah, right. Doesn't sound like a conflict of interest at all. No, not at all. Chief of operations and the money.
00:13:02
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. The one making the decisions can also authorize the finance for it as well. Microtransactions in all your fucking games. What could go wrong? Dictatorships start. Speaking of, so Gaming Heads, and look, I have to admit, I've never heard of this company before, but I did have a look at some of their toys. So Gaming Heads is a collectible manufacturer. I think they're based in Hong Kong.
00:13:27
Speaker
Um, making some really nice quality, uh, Last of Us 2 statues, uh, but also do some God of War and Bloodborne collectibles. They've been operating for 10 years. They're being worked, they've been working with Sone. Do you want the stage for a sec, Tom? I can't tell. Oh, they're just expensive. Yeah, they are. Um, but then you look at something, look at something like hot toys. Holy shitballs.
00:13:55
Speaker
The Doom one is like $1,800. That's what I went straight to as well. Two grand. You went straight to Doom. Whoa. That's a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, Peter. Sorry. I mean, it's cool, but I don't think it's $2,000 cool.
00:14:17
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I hear you. But also, if you have a look at the titles that they pick, they're titles that you don't see a lot of collectibles for, like they've got Fallout and Skyrim. You don't see a whole lot of Fallout and Skyrim collectibles hanging around.
00:14:33
Speaker
But apparently they were doing a shitload of things like The Last of Us and Sony has basically sent a cease and desist to say that they must destroy all existing merchandise instead of shipping existing orders. So for stuff that they've already manufactured, basically Sony's told them to get rid of it. They're saying that they've already paid royalties because these guys don't seem like they were doing the dodgy copyright infringement. They were actually in partnership with all of the parent companies.
00:15:00
Speaker
It doesn't look like they're not an Etsy store or something like that. No, it's not some guy with a fucking 3D printer at home with his Elgu. So for something to turn around and say you must destroy all existing merchandise is fucked if it's
00:15:17
Speaker
If that's, I mean, obviously that can't be the whole story, right? Because why would Sony do a backflip after accepting royalties? They know they're going to end up in court if that's the case. The worst part is, and just to make it uglier, the company Gaming Heads is now telling their existing customers who've prepaid for orders, sorry, you're going to have to chase Sony for a refund for your payment because we're not shipping you collectible anymore.
00:15:39
Speaker
For the Sony ones, like the Sony, yeah. But if you go to a retailer and you pay $2,000 to order something and then they tell you to go and contact some random third party you've never spoken to, like how the fuck does that work? The first tab on their website is actually licenses.
00:15:59
Speaker
Yeah, it's not. Once again, it's not like that. They're just IP infringement. You're not just printing Mickey Mouse t-shirts out of their backyard. Legacy of Kane. They've got a Razziel. That's cool. That's only 150 bucks. I might have to add that to my collection.
00:16:19
Speaker
I mean, I'm hovering over the buy now button for the Skyrim Dragonborn helmet at $80. Let's just pump the brakes there. What have I done? What have I done? Just make sure. What have you done? What have you done? Anyway, moving forward. The Raziel one, it's a light. It's got a light in his sword, in his light river. Yeah. Wow. Okay.
00:16:44
Speaker
Cool. Except, except it's $150 for just the blade. It's not, it doesn't actually come with the soul reaver. What? Uh, statue. Read, read the, the resio statue was not included. $1,300 for the resio statue.
00:17:05
Speaker
Yes, it's $1,300 for the statue and then another $150 to upgrade his blade to a light one. When are they ever going to make another Soul Reaver? I mean, the Soul Reaver games were fucking spectacular. Speaking of fucking spectacular games that they were supposed to be remaking, it sounds like the Kota remake has dead ended. So Sony's now taken the trailer down and has deleted all the tweets. It's Embracer Group, not Sony.
00:17:35
Speaker
Was it on their channel,
TV Show Reviews
00:17:37
Speaker
was it? Because it was Sony's Twitter feed that deleted all the tweets. It was linked to a state of play, was how they revealed it. The September showcase. Yeah. And they've gone back through and ripped everything off. They're just, yoink back. It's not a thing anymore. Sorry, guys. Yeah. Yeah.
00:17:58
Speaker
Over to you. Well, let's light a pyre first for abandoned Star Wars games. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger. It's getting angrier and angrier. Well, yeah, I think this is a bit, I don't know if this is, I can't say good or bad news. I think it's probably bad news for the series, but Stig Asmussen is leaving Respawn and EA, but he was the one who really behind, he was the creative director for
00:18:24
Speaker
For an order and survivor and with them, you know, can't come on a hand coming out and saying that there he started doing pre-work for Jedi three. Yeah, I don't know if it's good thing to lose your creative actor who really.
00:18:40
Speaker
Typically not a good thing. Having said that, God of War rotates creative directors every two games and they seem to have consistently delivered good games. So the creative director that brought us the new God of War was not the same creative director who brought us the sequel and yet those two games were 100% consistent and contiguous. So it's not necessarily a bad thing if they pick the right person to replace them.
00:19:07
Speaker
yes and hopefully they do because yes i'm very excited we shall see yeah i do was there any news on why he left or why he was moving on like because that doesn't seem that does seem a bit interesting that if you put that much care into two games and the last one or both of them being a huge success
00:19:31
Speaker
It seemed like there were differences between EA and him, and especially the way EA has handled Star Wars over the years. Yeah, okay. Kind of fucked that license a little bit, except for the last couple, but yeah. Yep.
00:19:45
Speaker
Okay, just, yep, cool. We'll keep my mouth shut. We'll all be playing Call of Duty on our PlayStation 5s. None of us will be playing Call of Duty on our, but some people will. The people who only own their PlayStation consoles for Call of Duty. That's right. We get to still do that, yes.
00:20:06
Speaker
It now seems certain that Blizzard, sorry Activision Blizzard will be acquired by Microsoft. Sony and Microsoft have just signed a deal to make sure that Call of Duty continues to be co-released on both platforms. Indefinitely. They Sony couldn't pull their fucking finger out and guarantee that Elder 6 would be. Come on. No. Get your fucking priorities right, you dumb idiots. I'm glad Jim Ryan's gone. Fuck off.
00:20:31
Speaker
After I've just dropped 800 bucks on a fucking Xbox system, and I'm already bored of Starfield, but we'll talk about that later. Still on Sony, they've been hacked yet again. Those fuckers just need to... For all the C-level executives, they've jammed into that one guy's head. They definitely need a CISO, a Chief Information Security Officer, because those fuckers just keep getting hacked.
00:20:56
Speaker
So this time, so last time it was 77 million user accounts. That was the massive one. That was some time ago now and they ended up doing it. They ended up being dragged in front of Congress to explain how they fucked up so badly and how that many people's personal details got compromised in one hack.
00:21:13
Speaker
This time, it's only 6,000 internal files were basically ransomed by a company that seems to do ransomware as a service, so you can retain them to hack into a company and ransom their shit, right? It's only basically refused to pay. People are just worse, aren't they? But they're not people. These are all state-sponsored groups.
00:21:42
Speaker
This one's got apparently has ties back to Russia, which quite a few have been tied back to Russia. Others have been tied back to China. It's all the normal. And I'm sure in China and Russia, they hear all about all the fucking US government sponsored hack groups that are hacking in reverse. But the point is this is like this is now cyber warfare, really.
00:22:03
Speaker
So yeah, so Sony have said they're not going to pay the ransomware, so the hackers have basically said, cool, we'll be selling your shit on the dark web soon. So we just went to see what comes up.
00:22:15
Speaker
Maybe that's what they're going to do with this new CFO. He's just going to go and be like, I'll just buy it back with some of our profits. Look at that. Wow. No, no, please. No, take that away. Your oblong fucking head. You look like Day of the Tentacles. It's Dan in a lava lamp. That's an instrument. Groovy, baby. I'm pretty Utah.
00:22:38
Speaker
Oh yes, it's my favorite thing. There's some new PS Plus games. So you got Callisto Protocol or Dead Space Light. Two games that I haven't played that I want to play. There you go. Farming Simulator 22. I'm assuming this was the second one you're after there. Yep, definitely was. He's going to drive his harvester through his fields.
00:22:57
Speaker
corn for his surveyor. And then Weird West, which is an isometric top down cell shaded from memory. I briefly watched the trailer. Yeah, I think so. The second one came out only six months ago. It looks pretty good.
00:23:13
Speaker
Yeah. I wanted to play the first one before I played the second one, obviously. But the second one, because it's turn-based combat, and the second one did something a bit different that I hadn't seen before in a turn-based combat. They have dynamic environments. So the first battle that you get into in, I watched the first 20-minute gameplay of it, the first battle you get into in the second one is a
00:23:43
Speaker
done on a train and the train, you're doing your turn-based combat, but the train is moving while you're on the platform doing your turn-based combat. There's something dynamic happening in the environment as you're just plodding along in the game, which just makes it that little bit more interesting, I think. That's something we haven't seen before, really. All turn-based combats are static. Fairly static, yeah. Usually static maps.
00:24:09
Speaker
Yeah. So they are probably going to all drop in the first of October today and the next couple of days they usually drop in the first week of October. Yes, for you Peter, the high on knife, which is the DLC for high on life releases in two days. Yeah. If you're going to jump back into that. I'm not.
00:24:32
Speaker
It's been nice knowing you guys. Yeah, I'll just go and fuck myself. I wasn't having to go at you. I just, I mean, I've played the game. I finished the game. Was it good enough to bother starting it from zero again just to play the DLC? Not really. So. Why would you have to start from scratch again to play the DLC? Well, now it's been released on PlayStation 5. I'd probably just go back and get the Platinum if I was going to play it again. Oh, right. Because what would make it like, what would give me any kind of point to wanting to replay the original game?
00:25:01
Speaker
Um, I dunno, it was, it was fun and it was different, but it was ultimately a short first person shooter game with a sense of humor and I can now move on with my life.
00:25:11
Speaker
There you go. There you go. Well, look, I put it there just in case. Anyway, back to the Embracer group, who we talked about earlier. Fuck, they flew too close to the sun and they've burnt the wax off their wings. So they're apparently shopping around to try and get rid of Gearbox, which is the studio behind Borderlands and a bunch of other games.
00:25:35
Speaker
and you know kind of three weeks after they announced they were shutting down volition which is one of the guys who did the saints row series so
00:25:45
Speaker
It's definitely bit off more than they could chew. Oh, for sure. But Borderlands, I'm sorry, Gearbox. I mean, we're quite successful with Tiny Tina's Wonderland, so I thought that was quite a successful game. So I think all the Borderlands have been successful. All the Borderlands have been, yeah. So why would you be trying to spin that studio off? I mean, I don't know what else they've got in their portfolio. Maybe it was just the worst of the best. They tried to buy everything at once.
00:26:14
Speaker
about six months ago. But yeah, the box of the Borderlands series has been great. He says as he still has a shrink wrapped copy of Borderlands 3, he's never got around to playing. So do I. One day. Because we're all gonna play together, remember? Yeah, we'll get around to it. And then we didn't.
00:26:32
Speaker
And then last little, yes, last little bit of news, which one I'm excited about. So the Albanese government, which is our current government for
In-depth Beer Analysis
00:26:41
Speaker
those playing at home, just in case you were confused, they revealed that their reforms to the classification of games containing simulated gambling will go into effect starting September 2024.
00:26:53
Speaker
So about a year away. This means that any game released after September 24 will receive an automatic R18 plus rating if it features simulated gambling.
00:27:03
Speaker
which you think of, the example they gave were online social casino games on mobiles. So, you know, if you've ever seen someone who's got a pokey addiction who then downloads the app that doesn't have money and they press there so they can get the little hit and spin, very sad. But that will be R18+. But for games that we were more likely to play, it's an automatic M rating if it carries any in-game purchases with a chance element, i.e. loot boxes.
00:27:31
Speaker
So, you know, people used to... Good. Yes. I mean, I wish they'd rate that higher, because to be honest, an M rating probably isn't high enough for studios to avoid microtransactions through the loot boxes altogether. If it was R, then it would seriously hurt their bottom line by killing the bulk of their player base.
00:27:52
Speaker
So it's I mean, it's good. And certainly it's it signals the nanny state stepping in the right direction on that particular issue. Although Australia does seem to continue to legislate fucking everything. But yeah, I think it's I mean, this one's not bad. Yeah. I mean, the most people kind of getting stuck into gambling only the better. That shit sucks. Yep.
00:28:18
Speaker
Anyway, that's the news. Let's just see, you know, we have the funny one to end it. Here's some otters playing with balls. Shuffle our papers. Right. I think Dan's got some A review for us.
00:28:35
Speaker
Well, it's not really a review, it's just an update on something that I'm excited about. So many, many moons ago, I'm just going to have to open Steam again, so I don't screw this up. You watch Dan suddenly go offline. Yeah, actually. Okay, I've got no downloads going, so that's fine. Microphone cuts out everything. Let me find it. There it is. Oh shit, I'm going to have to make sure it doesn't blast my ears too with the trailer that's going to play.
00:29:01
Speaker
So Return to Nagrim has been in pre-access. I've spoken about it many moons ago. It's classified Return to Nagrim, Nangrim, a Dwarven adventure. So it's a
00:29:16
Speaker
It's kind of a dwarvish Skyrim with a lot more crafting and survival elements. I know you can turn survival mode on in Skyrim these days, but this has got farming and crafting and everything to do in the game as well. I've played the demo several times just because I'm really looking forward to it.
00:29:35
Speaker
It's very pretty game first first person. None of the graphics are finished as of yet. The combat system in the demo is not not finished yet either, but you get a really good feel for the world that they're trying to create in it, which is great. So recently they've released two updates for like just information updates on where they're at with developing the world. They've released a seasons update and how the seasons will
00:30:02
Speaker
not just visually impact the environment of the world, but will impact your harvesting and your crops and everything. So you'll have to farm to the proper seasons within there, but will also impact phases of the moon will have some sort of impact on crafting and forging elements within the moon cycles and things like that.
00:30:27
Speaker
Due to deities being stronger or weaker during moon phases or? Doesn't really go into that side of it. Because you can imagine like the Selena goddess of moonlight and her sister, the goddess of shadow from Baldur's Gate, for example, like kind of makes sense. I imagine it will go into something like that. Pete, I might actually
00:30:55
Speaker
shoot you over to two pictures of the updated content that they've released just so you can chuck them up on the YouTube, the video while I'm talking about this, because they're beautifully represented in what they've done. They've done graphical
00:31:17
Speaker
depictions of the dwarvish calendar and the cycle. And it's just really, really beautiful. I love it. And it's just right up my art style. And the one I really loved was their update. They're talking about the update to the forging. And we've spoken many times before about my love of forging of hot metals. I'm about to buy my first forge, so I'm very excited about that.
00:31:43
Speaker
But within the gaming elements, they have, even within the demo, you need to control the temperature of the forge. But with most other games when it comes to forging weapons or anything like that, you chuck the wood in the fire.
00:31:58
Speaker
broken effort at best of the mechanics of forging. Exactly. So you've within this, you have to control the heat. So the amount different minerals need a different heat to be able to forge them correctly. You need to be able to obviously they've got a little thing here. It's mining, extracting, tooling and forging. So there's there's smelting of metals and everything that needs to be done at different temperatures than actually forging of tools and weapons and everything as you go along.
00:32:27
Speaker
But one thing that I've put into this, which I think is just I think it's just beautiful. They've added an anvil and anvil positions and how many strikes when you're crafting an item you do on certain positions on the anvil.
00:32:45
Speaker
So there's the heel of the anvil the face of the anvil the step of the anvil and the horn of the anvil and you can you can lay it out how many strikes on each on each section of the anvil. They've said that you potentially by trying combinations you might unlock
00:33:03
Speaker
recipes of other dwarvish clans, but the best thing that they've put in on this side of it, which makes me- It's like Dan in a candy store. Oh, man. It's called crafting the melody, hear the echoes of the mountain. Right. I'm going to read this. Like I said, I'm a little hungover. I'm going to stumble over this a little bit, but I'm going to try and get it out in one hit.
00:33:27
Speaker
Feel the resonance of the mountain with each hammer blow on the anvil. The medals have their song, their rhythm, and as a master blacksmith you'll learn to play the song. The Dwarven Crafting Melody is a symphony that resonates deep within the heart of the mountain.
00:33:44
Speaker
where the art of metallurgy takes on a mystical form. Every clang of the hammer against the metal isn't just a mere strike, but a note forming a unique song that speaks to the essence of each item being crafted. As the smith's hammer falls,
00:34:01
Speaker
He taps into the rhythm of the mountain itself, echoing ancient beats that have pulsated through the earth for eons. The anvil and the hammer serve as instruments that amplify this rhythm, allowing the crafter to tune into each melody and mold the metal in harmony. The result is a piece that isn't just a tool or a weapon, but is a manifestation of the mountain's song and legacy of the ancestral spirits.
00:34:29
Speaker
Each crafted piece is to be a blade. Each crafted piece, be it a blade, armor or trinket, carries with it a distinct song, a testament to the skill and spiritual connection of the hands who forged it.
00:34:45
Speaker
So and then I've got a little blacked out section that you can hover over, which is a little bit of a definition of that. Yeah, spoiler. So it says technically the number of blows and their intensity at different position, anvil positions defines the forging melody, which corresponds to a numerical hash.
00:35:04
Speaker
This hash defines the procedural appearance of the forged item,
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00:35:09
Speaker
tool, weapon, jewelry, tankard, et cetera. If you change the melody, the shape changes in tandem. So if you're crafting a sword and you do different strikes on different parts of the anvil, that determines, well, from what I'm reading, that determines the shape and nature of the blade, tool, weapon, jewelry that you're creating.
00:35:30
Speaker
And they've got a little thing under it that's got a little lute forging the melody. I wonder whether they're actually going to have something that's maybe procedurally generated with the anvil strikes.
00:35:47
Speaker
I'm so interested to hear what they do with the soundscape of the forging part of this game. It absolutely warms the cockles of my heart to know that someone has gone to this much effort to create a forging mechanic within a dwarvish game. I mean, these people obviously love the
00:36:11
Speaker
the mythology that they're creating around this world so much that I mean, they're creating backstory, graphic novels and books and everything to to correspond with the creation of this game. They're absolutely going all in with this. And I will preach this to the day it comes out and hopefully well after it comes out and get as many people to purchase this as possible because these people need to be absolutely commended for the effort that they're putting in on this. Yeah, right. Yeah, wow.
00:36:42
Speaker
That's good. That's me done. Most I've talked on the podcast in a long time, I think so. It's like 10 episodes. So yeah, that's why Tom and I are just stunned into silence. Should we review our second beer?
00:36:56
Speaker
Up to you, Timekeeper. Well, we can't really go straight into a break after reviewing our second beer and come back from a break and review a third. So let's talk beers. Someone else go first this time. Thank you. Dan, what are you drinking? I've got Southern Highlands Brewing Co Ronin Japanese double IPA.
00:37:17
Speaker
I was very interested. Good double IPAs. Hard to come by. Yeah. Hard to come by. The Japanese side of it interested me. I don't know what's Japanese about it. I'm sure it's probably written on here somewhere. Wasn't it cobrood with the Japanese? I don't know. The sun's gone behind the cloud and I don't have a light on. It's either that or the Japanese quad because I've had that one. I think that was the Japanese quad you were talking about. Right. Give me a light. I'll look it up. You keep talking about your beer.
00:37:46
Speaker
Blending rice, malt, and a Japanese hop too, I think. Sriracha. Sriracha Ace. Yeah. Is that? Something spread Sriracha Ace used as a late edition M dry hop. Yeah, cool.
00:38:05
Speaker
It's really nice. It's a little bit lighter bodied than I originally went into, but I guess being a Japanese rice, I probably should have preempted that.
00:38:20
Speaker
But that doesn't, it's, that's not a, that's not a takeaway from it. It was just my, my dumb preconception going into a double IPA and being an American double IPA. Um, but I should have, when it said Japanese double IPA, I should have already realized that the hop character is really nice. It's got a kind of bit of a, a herbally meant Foley character to the, the, the hop character, the bitterness is nice and dominant without being harsh or sharp. Um, it's really well rounded across the board.
00:38:51
Speaker
You could feel the alcohol a little bit, but you kind of want to as well with these style of beers, but it's not overpowering or throws it out of balance. So I think that's a really well-crafted way to go. And it's wonderful artwork as well. Yeah, wow. That's really what caught me was the time and effort put into the wonderful anime samurai on the, or the Ronin, good, the samurai, the Ronin on the Ronin artwork on the can.
00:39:19
Speaker
Yeah. Excellent. Good. Good job. Uh, I've kind of go 475 for that one. Yeah. Wow. Nice. Something in the news about a Southern islands brewing the other day. Really? They've not had a herb. No, they've, they've, uh, they've gone in with, um, an English craft brewery as a paired up, as a paired up joined in business with them. It was, uh,
00:39:50
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it's nothing for or against that. It was just, yeah, it was just powder, powder monkey brewery in Gosford. Oh yeah. That is. Yeah. They have acquired Australian brewery, Southern Highlands Brewing. They've acquired it. Yep. Yep. Interesting. And are they a craft brew company themselves? Uh, yes, I believe they are. Um, so now we're going to have the powder monkey craft bar and bites.
00:40:19
Speaker
So now we've got small businesses buying other small businesses. Halfway across the world. Halfway across the world. Well, I mean, it's better than fucking, you know, Lion, Nathan buying everything or whoever. So yeah, cool. Sweet.
00:40:34
Speaker
I'll go next, Tom, if that's all right. Please. Cause I have a disappointment to talk about. So this is, uh, this is temple. Well, I don't know. It might be your fault. It might not be. I can't remember now. This is temple brewing Co's, uh, Western street, Western street. Yeah. Western street. I remembered double dry hops, uh, West coast IPA. It was really looking forward to this one, 6.4% ABV. And I'm reading the description.
00:41:00
Speaker
With very brief description, our classic West Coast IPA, a trio of cryo-hops providing piney, dank aromas, balanced body and lingering resin-like bitterness. Now, this could only have come from one of two places and was purchased in the last three weeks.
00:41:16
Speaker
Not naming either of those two places. Well, you've fucking already done it. Well, I've actually named the other one as well in this episode. So, um, but it was packaged in October last year and it's best before was in May.
00:41:33
Speaker
And I was wondering why I couldn't taste any of the description on the site. There's no, there's no dankness left. There's no, there's no massive pine notes. It's just a, it's, I mean, look, it's definitely an IPA. You can tell it's an IPA, but yeah, it's just unremarkable as an IPA. When did you say that next May is the expiry date? No, the one that just went past. Yeah. Pete, where is the timber? May didn't just go past.
00:42:02
Speaker
May was four months ago. You said it was packaged in May. No, no, no. It was packaged in October last year. Yeah. It was best before the 25th of May.
00:42:16
Speaker
So, yeah, OK, Dan, it was four months ago, but it only had six months to start with on its best before seven months. And you know, as well as I do, that the freshness of the hops is going to drop off a curve pretty quickly, about three or four months after being packaged. So by the time you drink it at its best before, it's already lost most of its its its resiny notes, some of the stronger notes. And here I am four months later. So, yeah, I'm not going to rate it because I don't think it's fair to temple brewing.
00:42:43
Speaker
Um, for me to, to, to rate the beer based on the sample, cause I can tell it's aged. Like it has an oxidized, it just doesn't have the flavor punch that you know, that it should have from a double dry hopped IPA. So yes, in fairness to them, I'm not going to rate it, but 6.4%. I'm sure it'll still get me pissed. Once Tom's gone, I want to throw a bonus beer rating, a bonus beer comment in.
00:43:10
Speaker
Okay, take it away Tom. Do you want to go first while it's on your mind? Oh, yeah, no, sure. I don't mind. Just my bonus comment is I had the Batch West Coast IPA and the Batch American Pale last night. Fantastic. Both incredible, incredible beers, like just exemplary hot
00:43:30
Speaker
expression on both of them. And just the West Coast IPA is exactly the style of West Coast IPA I like. So it really plays into my into into my field there with the lighter malt character. I don't actually I make a really heavy West Coast IPA. And I don't mind it. But it's what our customers want. It's not what I like to drink regularly myself. I like to drink the lighter malt body ones. But yeah, both the batch American American pale and the West Coast IPA.
00:44:00
Speaker
Excellent. If you can get your hands on them, do it. If you haven't tried them, do it now. Yeah, nice. I actually had exactly the same two beers last night, Dan. And I agree wholeheartedly. And that pale punches above its weight, too. That's the new one. Yes. A brand new beer, yeah. Tom, what are you drinking, mate?
00:44:23
Speaker
I'm having the, uh, well, I'm investigating Peter. Um, someone's about to get a very fucking angry email from me. Uh, I actually legit thought it was fucking, um, cutting sellers. So yeah, whatever Trevor, someone's about to get a very, that didn't arrive.
00:44:53
Speaker
long time ago. Anyway, I am drinking the six-string thousandth brew. Hey, they said the thousandth brew. It's all the way from New Zealand. Just kidding. Yeah. Yes. This is five percent. It is a hazy pail using Kashmir, El Dorado and Nelson Southern. And it's yeah, it's a very well made little hazy pail. I was going to do a little
00:45:21
Speaker
I was going to actually have a little, little joke at Peter's expense and say that I had a hazy pale and bring up the can of the latest hazy days from garage projects, but, and then not actually crack it and drink it. So now he actually hates the fact that I have them all the time on the. I don't hate the fact that you drink those beers. I, not at all. You got six of them.
00:45:39
Speaker
I got sick of trying to look up the numbers and it not being, I can't find it on. Yeah, they dropped the number system, which is annoying, yeah. But yeah, this is really good. The only thing that's, I know it's like the generic design on the back because everything's based around like a guitar amp and on these, but they've got these little very nice and gold bitterness and alcohol dials on the back there.
00:46:03
Speaker
Forbidness and alcohol percentage. And it's the same design. I'm sure it's the same design no matter what the level is that kind of bothers you because I couldn't because it's a miss, right? But it's so close. It's I mean, the 12 business on a scale of zero to 100 is sitting like there. It's right in the middle.
00:46:26
Speaker
The 5% alcohol though is just, it's like 4.8. It's just shy. It's like, come on man. It's just triggers all the OCD in the world. What's it, what's it actually called? Sorry. Thousandth brew. It just says hazy pale, but then they've got a big thing saying it's their thousandth brew. Yeah. Okay. I'm guessing their thousandth recipe.
00:46:47
Speaker
Yeah, so it's just called the hazy pale ale. Just the hazy pale ale, yeah, 5%. It's very nice. It's really peachy and citrusy. It's not, it's quite, not quite thin, but it's like a light body. It's probably the best way to scrub, not thin, which is good again for this kind of hot day. But it really,
00:47:11
Speaker
It's got it carries that citrus citrus flavour all the way through which is nice doesn't like drop off suddenly or anything and leave like nothing in the back end but yeah I'm gonna give that a yeah it's a it's a solid four.
00:47:22
Speaker
Congratulations on your thousandth brew, six-string, all the way from the central coast of New Zealand. That's going to become our running joke. I like it. Unfortunately. I like it. Yep. Cool. I'm going to talk really quickly about a couple of reviews because I did talk about them in a little bit more detail last episode, but now the seasons have finished. I just kind of wanted to end cap them. So foundation season two.
00:47:52
Speaker
new story, thoroughly enjoyed it. And it's also a recurring theme in Wheel of Time, which I'll talk about next episode because there's one more app to go. But what I really liked about Foundation Season 2 was they
00:48:09
Speaker
They didn't just do the same thing as they did in season one. They introduced a really interesting storyline or plot device, a story mechanic, if you like, to push the story forward in the first season. They executed it really well. And I'm actually glad that they dropped it for the second season. Second season had a very clear story arc from start to finish. It was told in a far more serialized way.
00:48:33
Speaker
Kind of reminded me of Witcher season one with all the time jumping versus Witcher season two where it just went to telling a story in sequence and it did so very effectively and it did. Foundation season two did exactly the same thing.
00:48:46
Speaker
So the story got bigger and the focus changed to interstellar war and the fall of mankind has begun and you can start to see the cracks in the foundation or in the empire itself in a really interesting and somewhat surprising way. Like I was the underlying story in what's driving the empire and the collapse of the empire was revealed right at the end and it was
00:49:15
Speaker
Like i said interesting and surprising so definitely check out season two if you could get through all the mass in season one. And then star trek strange you well i said i said communist last episode what i meant was socialist they not communists the star trek federation is socialism.
00:49:37
Speaker
Strangely well season two fucking brilliant absolutely like stand out performances some of the later episodes in season two were just spectacular. I really interesting intricate storylines again this was more episodic this is like a traditional star trek tv series now it's it's you know self-contained stories quite frequently they even did now the original series and next generation even deep space nine did some musical stuff.
00:50:04
Speaker
But they never had a full blown musical episode, as in where everyone starts singing. That sort of stuff was done quite frequently during the first actor strike, sorry, the first writer strike. They started doing musicals randomly in a lot of different TV shows. But I got to say, the first 10 minutes, I'm like, really? You guys went there like, what the fuck? But it actually ended up being not terrible.
00:50:28
Speaker
They were well-written songs. The singing was actually all the original actors. So the cast were all singing. Not all of them can sing, but they all gave it a jolly good go. It was entertaining. So yeah, that's all I have to say on those two things, but they're both worth watching. And Dan, you're on mute, my friend.
00:50:48
Speaker
Pete, sorry, you've gone, you've gone super... Oh, I'm glad that wasn't just me. ...pixelated. Like horribly, horribly pixelated. And it's like your bandwidth just went to the toilet. Yeah, it's all right. It'll, it'll pick back up. It'll catch up. Always does. Did you like that I stayed in character the whole time and was just like, yes, I can understand entirely what you're saying. Oh yeah.
00:51:13
Speaker
You were saying you couldn't hear me either. You were garbled as all hell. Oh, fuck. We got most of it. You might want to check that we got a break. OK. Then you'll have to do the voice over recording. Luckily, I can put on my own voice quite well. That's it, I think. Any other reviews? I have nothing to review. We haven't been watching anything new lately, except we've gone back and restarted UK Taskmaster at season one.
00:51:43
Speaker
all the way through. Well, the new season's just started too. Yeah. Weekly episode drops. Yeah. We've decided not to fuck it. We're going straight back to the start. Yeah. And we were, for some reason started randomly on season nine. And it's like, no, we've missed all these. Let's go back and we'll start from the beginning.
00:52:02
Speaker
Oh, some of those early ones were fucking fantastic. Yeah. But I'm also in the same kind of boat as Pete as I've got a couple of series that are like, it's one episode left. I'm like, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. It's annoying, isn't it? Yeah. Especially if it's good because you want to talk about it, but you know, you shouldn't.
00:52:18
Speaker
Well, now that you say that the I know it's not your your guys interest, but American Horror Story just started the newest season as well. And after the disappointment of last season, which was a fine season, but just not American Horror Story. And this this one after one episode is back to its strengths, back to its back to its American Horror Story weirdness and janky bad acting.
00:52:48
Speaker
I remember I've never sat down to watch it, but the ex-wife used to play it all the time. And I know that she spoke to Lou about it quite a lot as well. And so I did see a few episodes in the background while I was kind of in the room and not watching. And yeah, I could totally relate instantly to janky acting. Yeah. Oh, it's massively janky acting.
00:53:09
Speaker
And like a year pass and I go, hang on, is that this is season two, right? But it's totally different now. It's sitting in an asylum, whereas last season it was set somewhere else and they're the same actors. Are they the same characters? She's like, no. So it's the same cast every season, normally. Yeah. But I mean, there's also the season
00:53:32
Speaker
Season five or five or six, I think we're up to seven or eight now, I can't remember, but it was called American Story Apocalypse. I actually went back and crossed over with season three.
00:53:45
Speaker
the coven. So you've got where you're talking about, you've got all these, the same actors playing different parts in different stories as each season goes along. And completely, most of them unconnected. And then you had a complete, complete connection there between two seasons. A great deal of time. Yeah, right. Where there was no link in between there as well.
00:54:14
Speaker
I always thought it was a cool concept to use the same cast to tell completely separate stories per season. It reminds me of like a theater company putting on like a two different Shakespeare plays one after the other. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's interesting. It's definitely not for everybody because it is fucking weird and you do have to get past the bad acting. But some of them are good actors, but like Zachary Quinto has been in it since season one and he's not in all the seasons. He pops up here and there.
00:54:43
Speaker
Yeah, when he's not doing a movie or, you know, getting paid lots of money to do other stuff. And you can tell that he is by far the best quality actor in this season's case. Mind you, he just hits it. Didn't Zachary start with dodgy TV in Hero? Wasn't that where he was kind of made his name?
00:55:05
Speaker
Yeah, he was the bad guy in Heroes, wasn't he? Yeah, he was. Oh, God, his name, the bad guy's name. Cyla. Cyla, I think. Yes. Jinks. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I mean, I got you a Coke. I'm off the hook. Cool. All right. I think on that note, we'll take a quick break.
00:55:34
Speaker
And we're back. Oh, I probably should.
00:55:38
Speaker
We're not back. We can be back. We can be back. No, we can be back. Just, uh, I was just about to say I, knowing my talents in pouring nitro cans, I probably should have grabbed a piece of paper towel on my, my way back. So no chaos, chaos. Yes. Yeah. All over my computer desk. I'm pouring. I'm currently pouring mine on top of my keyboard and realized that was a bad choice after I committed to it, but that's all right. And it's a big can too. So it is a big can. Oh, I love this artwork.
00:56:08
Speaker
I know. How good is it? This is going on the fridge. Oh, yes. So for our third beers, you know, in a rare case of coordination and planning, we're actually all trying the same beer. And as Tom correctly pointed out, even after we'd all committed to trying this beer on the same podcast, we still also needed to explicitly coordinate which of the four beers we would be doing.
00:56:34
Speaker
Because I was doing it first. I knew you were. That's why I said it. I knew you'd fucking do it first. So for those playing at home, this is garage projects descent to the dungeon of dankness.
00:56:47
Speaker
with, which is a West Coast IPA. I might actually try and find the artwork and I might throw the artwork up on the episode if I can. Oh, man. I want to print this out and put it on my wall. It's so fucking good. It's very reminiscent. I'm pretty sure you can get it on the GP store. I think they had prints of it. Yeah. And there he goes. He's off buying the t-shirt. So this was released for, I'm 90% certain and someone could probably factor it. I think this was released with Beervana, which recently happened.
00:57:17
Speaker
which is a GP collaborative BFS they do. Oh, it's their main page as well. It's like the login page, but it's, it's a different artwork. Oh, you got it. I think they did a couple. It's called the, oh, it doesn't say it on the can. It's called a descent to the dungeon of dankness one-shot adventure.
00:57:39
Speaker
No, they've written a one-shot adventure you can play. Oh, they have, haven't they? Oh, come on. We've got to do this. We've got to do this. We'll do this as a one-shot. Download the adventure. Yeah. This would be like a six-part miniseries of updates. We'll record us playing the game. That could be a one-shot. Oh, yes. That'd finally get me to play D&D. Oh, good. Well done. That's fucking great. OK, I'm going to read on that after the podcast. Yep, you can DM that. Thanks. That'd be good if you could. Old DMA, yeah.
00:58:10
Speaker
So the beer itself, has anyone actually bothered trying it yet? I am putting it to my lips as we speak. I got too caught up in the moment.
00:58:28
Speaker
garage project doing fun things all day we can get you can get all the boss level the boss level the mecca hop that all the mecca hop series are all have prints too yep they're only 20 bucks yeah nice uh i went on a t-shirt um
00:58:47
Speaker
Yes. So the beer back to the podcast. Oh, the out of the world Pat. Oh man. This is bad news. Like he's just discovered that they've got a fucking website. Bad news. Well, I didn't know they did prints. So now you're doing it. Yes. So you go, you go. Um, it is dank as fuck. I mean, it is very grassy, very herbaceous,
00:59:15
Speaker
Um, yeah. Dank is definitely the right word for it. Dank's got its own definition, right? It's, it's not like anything else. It's got a very specific flavor.
00:59:26
Speaker
Yeah. So I would describe dank as that piney resonance that you get from American hop. That is like smelling wet weed and like in, in turn wet, wet hop as well. Um, it has that, uh, that very, that very specific. Piney grassy leaving that you just said piney grassy herbaceous. But it's almost, but it's, but it's almost a.
00:59:55
Speaker
It's there's an acidity to the flight to the smell as well. Like it's it doesn't burn, but it almost it's got that kind of almost a metallic twang to it. I can see where you're coming from with that. Yeah.
01:00:11
Speaker
I just feel like, yeah, it's very, very good and why it was so familiar. They've used the terpenes again, the botanical terpenes. Yeah. Yeah, right. Which to enhance that amount of dankness, which is that bureau had yesterday, the devil's lettuce one they did. Yeah, I laughed at the name of that. I was at a wedding, so I couldn't reply, but yeah.
01:00:36
Speaker
But, um, it was super dank, like a real hit of lemon, which at first it kind of was synthetic, but then it went off, but it was just, yeah, I really think it was from adding those, these terpenes in. And they talk about in like the couple of articles I read is they're not using, they're favoring like the hop terpene. And Dan, you probably explained it better than I would, but, um, just exactly what they actually do to a beer. But from what I gather, they literally just.
01:01:05
Speaker
bump everything up to 16 out of two. Yeah. I'm not sure actually. I actually haven't done enough research on it, but that's, that's from what I get to is that it's, it's, it's a flavor enhancer rather than a flavor itself. Hmm. Yes. Let me, let me do some, uh, the Googling some Brewer research. I'll put myself on mute. They've said for this, you don't have to listen to my clicky packy keyboard.
01:01:34
Speaker
Their aromatic compounds found in many plants, Dan. Though many people commonly associate them with cannabis. I know what they are. I just don't know what they like the the actual the usage of.
01:01:51
Speaker
As in, are they extracting plant compounds and then re-adding them back into a brew at the end of the process to maintain the profile of the chemical structure, maybe? Yeah. Yeah. Or you have fun with that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You buy a chemistry. I've literally just found an article, which is not just- From medical news today? It's a-
01:02:14
Speaker
I'm on medical news today, which seems like a half legit website. I'm still on the garage breeder website, so they've used for this one. They've used. Just giving up on the podcast. Fuck it. It's Sunday afternoon. It's a long weekend. No, I'm reading the description of the beer. They've brewed this with Nelson, Savin, Strada, Centennial and Columbus, and then they've added in Tanacle Terpenes.
01:02:37
Speaker
I love this beer. Like it's got a real, it's almost a grapefruit pith as opposed to like a citrus, like an orange pith to it as a main flavor profile. Really bright. Bright is the, which is funny when you think about descending into the dungeon, that wouldn't be bright.
01:02:57
Speaker
And it's like you can smell the dankness, let alone taste it. Bright is a very good term, not just talking about it visually. Pete got a really good shot because of the glass that he's using just then when you were drinking, Pete. Like you can see the actual bright clarity of the actual product itself is where you're going to see my oblonged headache through the glass again if I do it.
01:03:21
Speaker
I've actually got a proper colour chart behind me if you want me to hold that up as well. But bright on the flavour and visual side of it is a really good descriptor of it and probably not something that you would necessarily associate with the term dankness. Agreed. Agreed.
01:03:44
Speaker
Excuse me, it's interesting because I am multitasking much to the chagrin of ex-girlfriends everywhere, but terpenes seem to be responsible for the aromatic nature of almost all plants that are strongly aromatic.
01:03:59
Speaker
That was the thing with the devil's lettuce one yesterday, literally putting my face like I was drinking out of a can as I was walking the dog and sticking just up to the can hole and having a whiff. It was literally like I was standing in front of a bag of hops and just basing it like a big old whiff. It was so aromatic. But yeah, this is this is great.
01:04:21
Speaker
You know what? We should, Dan, we should save up a couple of these topics and I'll reach out the Shiv again and see if the guy will join us for the podcast. And we can, because I mean, he's a biochemist, right? Yeah. Some sort of chemist.
01:04:34
Speaker
molecular chemical. I didn't read his fucking LinkedIn profile. But, but I reckon it'd be interesting to have a conversation with somebody like that about these phenols and thiols and and, you know, these, the terpenes, yeah, cryo and where it's all going as an industry as well in terms of we seem to be moving past what you can achieve.
01:04:59
Speaker
naturally through a natural growth, like a natural growing process in hops. We did the dry hopping, then we did cryo hopping, and now we seem to be doing, they're still natural extracts, so the compounds themselves aren't synthetic, but they're synthetically extracted to add more and more flavor.
01:05:16
Speaker
So it'd be interesting to talk about the kind of the state of the industry. Yeah, actually, that's that's a that's a quite an interesting topic. That'd be a spotlight. It'd be our very first B related spotlight on this bigger pop culture podcast. There's a there's an Australian HPA do hot products. Australia do quite a range of oils and extracts, hop extracts and everything these days. So
01:05:41
Speaker
I've never really read or used Gone Too Far into it. I probably should, but it's one of those things that
01:05:54
Speaker
cost-wise, I guess, and everything. I know some people have started to use them in core range products as flavor enhances and everything like that. But as you said, it is very much a turning point. Do we now continue to go this route and experiment with these things or stick more to more traditional styles of brewing? So it's an interesting question to ask, probably a wider audience as well.
01:06:24
Speaker
All right. Well, I might start making inquiries and we'll see if we can get somebody on the podcast. Um, but for those listening to this particular episode, you should definitely excuse me. Yeah. Like and subscribe. Um, and then that was one of the worst ones yet.
01:06:45
Speaker
And then let's talk about this beer. So I'm, I'm, I'm going to rank this very highly. This is at least a four and a half, if not a full seven five for me. I love a dank as fuck West coast with a lot of, a lot of punch to it. Like it's, it's got a nice lingering, resiny flavor as well. Long after you've taken your last sip. So I'm really digging that. So I'm going to stick with a 4.75. Well, average scores, I think. Tom.
01:07:13
Speaker
Yeah, look, the fuck just happened. Oh, my sister's calling me. Unfortunately, I will not answer that call. Yeah, I'm definitely into at least a 4.5 at a minimum. I think I want to get through a little bit more. Mine's very cold. I think it's just a little warming up. Whereas my house is approximately 60 degrees centigrade at the moment.
01:07:38
Speaker
Yeah, I got no problem. I'm sitting in a closed room with a fan about this big with my PC running. Yeah. Very, very green, green street. I'm on luckily. So it's very cool. But yes, no, I'm gonna let this just wall up for a little bit and I'll jump back in. But I just want to see if it improves a little bit.
01:07:56
Speaker
It will, it will as it opens up. It's interesting too, like mine's, like we've just said, mine's quite warm now as well. Not quite warm, but it's warm. It's warm-ish. It'd be seven or eight degrees by now. Yeah. And the hop character is, it's so well made.
01:08:20
Speaker
that there's nothing coming through for an IPA of this strength and of this hop character that puts you off drinking at warm.
01:08:28
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's absolutely correct. Yeah. I totally agree with that. And traditionally, well, traditionally that's probably not the right term, but typically you wouldn't want to drink a fucking IPA as it warms up. Thank you. Cause it just becomes, it just becomes the bitterness turns into acid and you just end up with this really ugly and especially that dankness to like that, that can turn quite, uh, awkward. Yeah. Accurate is probably a good term. Yeah. Phenolic that that's.
01:08:57
Speaker
that you can go that way. It's only 6.5, so you're not at the warmer temperatures going to get a huge amount of booze coming off it and everything as well. But if they haven't centrifuged this, it's got a slight haze to it.
01:09:14
Speaker
It's probably been centrifuged or... Well that's completely fine or something. Oh yeah, Tom's is quite cloudy. That's a chill haze, I guarantee it. Because we're all drinking the same beer and that is a... Look, you can see my face through mine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. Well, chill haze. Yeah, chill haze is quite an interesting concept to where the proteins are forming under low temperatures, but
01:09:41
Speaker
God, we're almost getting philosophical about our beer now. Yeah, but I think it deserves that time. This quality of beer and something that we're all having together, it's not like one person sitting there talking about it and the other's going, yeah, cool. I wish I was drinking it too, kind of thing. So I think it's an excellent product. I think it's excellent. I think it's flawlessly made. So I can do nothing but scale this as a fire.
01:10:08
Speaker
I don't think there's a single fault to it. You put this in an awards and it would definitely get a gold. It might lose out just a little bit on hop character for the style. It's got a good strong hop character, but I think you put it up against- Out of balance maybe? Not out of balance, just not quite enough maybe to push it into that gold territory.
01:10:34
Speaker
But it's definitely in the territory that if I had a four pack of four, four 40 mils, these four 40s, yeah. Um, four 40 mil, six and a half percent, uh, IPAs like this, I'd be drinking the whole four pack. Back to back. Yeah. Yeah. And I consciously made the decision of not putting the second one in the fridge. Yeah. Okay. Because I don't want to drink it tonight.
01:10:57
Speaker
Yeah. And I don't want to be tempted if it's in the fridge. Yeah, fuck it. I'm just gonna have it. So that's the thing. I think mine's you guys saying yours is probably about six, seven degrees by now. Mine's definitely come from a very full fridge. I I had the beer fridge kind of full at the moment. So I obviously it's colder in there than it probably should be. But
01:11:25
Speaker
Yeah, look, I'm definitely sitting up there in the four, seven, five to five range. It's even if it's slightly warming up just by holding it. It's just, I'm getting more and more of that, that, um, that real hop.
01:11:38
Speaker
Yeah, and dankness coming through. It's very oily now, too. It starts to get warmer, but it's not an unbalanced. No, no. It's really pleasant. I think we should just declare it a five. Let's just declare it a five across the board.
01:11:57
Speaker
Well, Dan was at five. I was at 475 and you were at four and a half to 475 to five. So I think we just call it a five. Because as you said before, everybody who's listening to us at home who have already liked and subscribed are seeing they're going, yeah, that's great. I wish it wasn't better that time. It wasn't better that time.
01:12:16
Speaker
I know, but the clunkier it is, the better it is. That's true. That's my opinion. I do really appreciate as well that it's the female character at the front and center has proper fucking armor on too. It very much reminds me of Dragons of Kern. Is it Kern?
01:12:33
Speaker
I mean, the dude in the back with the mullet in the mouth, he looks straight out of a bad romance novel. Yeah. In the 80s romance. Which I fucking love. It was Anne McCaffrey, Dragon Rider's a perm, but it's not that artwork. But it is reminiscent of D&D artwork.
01:12:49
Speaker
Yeah, she's got the whole David Hasselhoff Nick Fury thing going. Yeah, the project eye patch. The front white streak, grey streak in the hair and the eye patch. The dwarf's got his guitar slung across his back.
01:13:07
Speaker
It's a, it's a fucking eight string. Yeah. I was just going to say that actually. Yeah. It's an eight string. It's an eight string loot or something. Probably double strung as well. So it's actually a 16 string. Also he looks straight out of a Henson film. Yeah. Doesn't he? Yeah. Yeah. And then you've got the, the swashbuckling pilot looking pirate looking dude behind him. It's very, uh, so to the coast, the, um, the, the third dude that stopped at the wharf.
01:13:35
Speaker
Oh, that was the guy that we were talking about, the romance novel man. With the mullet, yeah. Yeah. He looks like he's straight out of a D&D plot line. Yeah. No, he looks straight out of an 80s porno. 100% that's what he looks like. Has he got an eye patch as well? He does.
01:13:53
Speaker
No, I don't think it's just the shadow of the hair. It's very, very, it's some of the best... It's very escaping LA. It reminds me of escaping LA. Oh, Snake Pliskin. Oh, yeah. Minus the mo. Give him a beard. Yeah, you could snake Pliskin, definitely. Yeah, look at him. Yeah, it's glorious.
01:14:13
Speaker
Very similar, yeah. Alright, let's move on to a fucking trailer trash. Family Men in Tides. 20 minutes on a beer. Let's move into trailer trash. That beer deserves 20 minutes. True. First cap off the rank. Toxic Avenger has a teaser, a red band teaser trailer out.
01:14:36
Speaker
Look, it's a teaser trailer. You don't really get to see what the fuck's actually gonna, what's going on. You don't even see the toxic avenger himself.
01:14:45
Speaker
You see his silhouette. Silhouette of the Dinkleberries. Yes. It's fucking everything at the moment. Using another trailer that I watched, I don't remember what it was, but back to that. He's doing a Nick Cage. Oh, no, no, no. So it was it was a trailer. Samuel Jackson just being in everything. Yeah. No, no, no. So it was a trailer that I elected not to include because you guys aren't interested at all in it. But the the new
01:15:12
Speaker
What's it called Hunger Games, the new Hunger Games prequel? I told you. But Dinklage is in fucking that now too.
01:15:22
Speaker
And I didn't realise it was a prequel, but it apparently is. Anyway, um, so Toxic Avenger, it, I mean, you know, it looks so delightfully eighties. It does. It does. It looks like the, like I don't really remember the original movie. I remember there was the two, it's just nudity. Uh, but it looks like it was eighties style nudity. Like it was, Oh yeah. Yeah. Tear the, tear the blouse off the lady for no reason. The big bush. Yeah.
01:15:53
Speaker
And it just, the, the, the violence that you get from the teaser trailer, it just looks like that. Over the top squib, like, like over the top eighties squib, someone standing there and flailing their arms while they're getting riddled with bullets and all the squibs are going off. That's what I get from that. So, Tom's, Tom's hurt himself.
01:16:21
Speaker
Oh, just the whole thing about the gratuitous bush, and then it's like, no wonder he's got a mop handy. Just really set myself.
01:16:33
Speaker
For those playing at home, Tom had a joke in his own mind without vocalizing it first. I'm crying. I'm actually crying. God, I'm hilarious. I actually thought you were going down the scary movie. Was it scary movie?
01:16:52
Speaker
The, the piss take where he pulls out the fucking chainsaw. The hedge trimmers. The hedge trimmer. Yeah. Nope. Nope. Nope. Anyway. Wow. Anyway. Sorry. Yes. Sorry. Serious, serious pace. I mean, if Hope Mum doesn't listen to this episode.
01:17:10
Speaker
You can put that in brackets underneath the title, Not Mum Friendly. The episode title. Not Mum Friendly.
01:17:25
Speaker
Wow. Wow. Making up for the short first segment. If they stick to it and continue on that for the entire thing, I think it'll be something really unique coming out. And if they just go whole hog and not worry about offending people, and then it could be something super unique that comes out.
01:17:51
Speaker
It was studio behind it a bit, not, I'll look it up. Not mainstream. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure, but you know what it reminded me of the, the jaw when he, when he had the tongue hanging out and he, so, so the only reason, so for those who haven't seen it and one go and watch it, but, um, mainly it was red band because the toxic Avenger takes a swing with some sort of staff.
01:18:16
Speaker
Some sort of magical, but it's been made to look like some sort of. Yeah, so he takes a swipe and he just takes a guy's jaw clean off and you end up with like this tongue hanging out and this just missing bottom jaw. It reminded me of
01:18:35
Speaker
We've seen that kind of stuff in Bad Bad Bad. What's the fucking zombie show that we've all watched and stopped watching? Walking Dead. Walking Dead, thank you. So we've all seen that kind of gratuitous violence before. But it almost reminded me of Army of Darkness in its 80s piss takiness. Like it doesn't take itself at all seriously. And if we get another Army of Darkness style movie now,
01:19:03
Speaker
I'm fucking loving it. Hail to the king, baby. Appropriate for that comment. Have you guys seen the shot of Elijah Wood in this?
01:19:16
Speaker
No, I didn't know he was in it. Elijah Wood's in it and he plays, I think he's like the CEO of like the toxic company that's like, you know, creates him, but he's gone full Gollum. He's like, he's like a cross between penguin and Gollum. Like, Oh yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. That is, that is very penguin. Yeah. It's penguin cross Gollum. Kevin Bacon's in this. I can't wait. Holy shit.
01:19:41
Speaker
Yeah, right. I mean, Elijah Wood, he was the main character. He's playing Weird Al Yankovic, isn't he? No, that's Harry Potter. Daniel Radcliffe. Oh, sorry. You're right. It is Daniel Radcliffe. You're right. All right. Moving on.
Nick Cage and Hollywood Dynamics
01:19:57
Speaker
Second trailer, Dream Scenario. I don't know what to make of this. This is a film with Nick Cage in it.
01:20:04
Speaker
where he is appearing in, he's a, he looks like a, some sort of high school professor, teacher of some kind, and he starts appearing in people's dreams. Yes. And shoots to stardom as a result of appearing in everyone's dreams. Sorry. The toxic Avenger is being made by legendary entertainment, famously made interstellar, the Dark Knight, June. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not, it's not mainstream. Yeah.
01:20:34
Speaker
Well, you put Elijah Wood, Toxic Avenger, and it's just in the images other than what he actually looks like in the movie. It's everybody saying that... That he's playing the Toxic Avenger. He's playing Toxic Avenger. Yeah. It must have been just an early rumor when he signed on. When he signed on. Yeah.
01:20:51
Speaker
No, no, it's the Dinkleberries. Dinkleberries. So yeah, dream scenario. So Nick Cage offbeat just looks like he's having a bit of fun, to be honest. This looks like similar vein to... Dottie Darko?
01:21:07
Speaker
Well, uh, yes. Yeah. No, sorry, mate. I'm in terms of Nick Cage movies, uh, to the one with Pedro Pascal, the, I can't remember the, um, thinkable massive talent, the unbearable weight of massive talent. I still haven't seen it. Oh, you can still, I know, I know I need to. That's definitely, um, but that kind of vibe of like.
01:21:27
Speaker
Some parts that he definitely takes seriously, but other parts are just, it's Nick Cage having fun. Just having a fun old time, making films, which is what he does and he loves. Probably this one won't be as self-aware as that one is, but I got the same kind of vibe, yeah.
01:21:41
Speaker
And we're straight into the next trailer, which is Butchers Crossing, also starring Nick Cage and could not be more different. Holy shit, yeah, wow. So this is Red Dead Redemption style period piece in the wild wild west, hunting the last of the buffalo, skinning them all, and clearly he's an unhinged fucking serial killer to boot.
01:22:03
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Super unhinged. The way they shot really trailer or cut that trailer probably should say of the cutting of the beat the way they were hammering in the bullets was perfect. I love that. That really sold it to me. Yeah, definitely got a bit of revenant vibe.
01:22:20
Speaker
Yeah, I was just going to say that. And Revenant was another beautifully shot cinematic masterpiece without needing to upgrade my TV to a whole cinema. Bucky Villanue. And it seems very similarly shot in this. So I'd actually be interested to see if there's any crossover in cinematographers or directors. Anyway, so two Nick Cage films back to back getting a trailer in the same week is quite unusual.
01:22:45
Speaker
Yeah, particularly like that shot at the end of the trailer, the second one, where it was just, it's Nick Caves in there, slightly unhinged looking and just slowly shaving his head. Shaving his head with a fucking cutthroat. Oh Christ. Okay. We're all going to die. This is going to be a ring scenario. He's going to come through the TV and just, bye bye Tom. See you later. I got it. Just shivers the first time that chick crawled through the TV. Sorry. You've, you've got to, you've got to give the man credit. Like he,
01:23:15
Speaker
He, he's all of a sudden become this cult, not, I shouldn't say all of a sudden. It was a slow burn. And then just like incredibly becomes this cult icon where everybody embraces his weirdness and he's gone.
01:23:34
Speaker
Yep. Thanks guys. You know who I am. Chiching and he's just going to cash in on it. It's about 10, 10 years ago is when he really, really started people going, Oh no, no, he's like cult good worthy. Like, yeah. You know what?
01:23:51
Speaker
If I honestly and you may not agree, but the or well, agree with parallel or see the parallel, but if Jim Carrey hadn't disappeared off the face of the earth, I actually think that Jim Carrey could have ended up in the same situation as Nick Cage.
01:24:05
Speaker
No, I can see that. Yeah. If you look at like movies like The Number 23. Yeah. Where he finally demonstrated that guy was capable of way more than just off the hook comedy. And he was a scarily good, scary character. And then he just quit Hollywood. Eternal sunshine. Eternal sunshine was spotless mind. You start, you bring those sort of things into it. But I mean, he checked out on the whole Hollywood machine. So that's the thing. And I guess that
01:24:34
Speaker
might play into the difference here where Nick Cage has gone. He used the Hollywood machine. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not playing to the beat of your drum. I'm paying to the the beat of Nick Cage. Nick Cage. Nick Cage drum. Great musician, but not the guy. Yeah. He used the machine. You're right. Yeah. And and it's it feels like that rather than him bending to their will, they've played to his will. Yeah.
01:25:01
Speaker
Totally. Hollywood's run by Nick Cage. If everyone will just turn and look at my whiteboard here, I'll explain it in four. It's a six degrees as Kevin Bacon. Best crazy person room I've ever seen, Tom. A lot of red string. A lot of red string. Did you guys watch Happy Season 2? No, I haven't.
01:25:25
Speaker
The fuck it he walks in and his old detective partner has the string board that you're talking about but it goes across the four rooms of the four walls of the room and he's ducking under them and he's like, this is the best crazy person room I've ever seen. It's fucking great. See, I always cut the image of you. I'd never watch that second season.
01:25:49
Speaker
Second season goes off the wall, like you've got to be prepared for some fucking weird shit. Like season one had some weird shit, but season two, he dials it up. Yeah. And I don't know what his name is. The dude from fucking law and order. Um, he just, uh, he just plays that, that drunk, crazy PI that's lost everything so well.
01:26:14
Speaker
It's just Christopher Maloney. It's the apex of that stereotype. Yeah. Because it's such a recognisable archetype character. Yeah, it was the role that he was born to play. Yes. And if he never does anything again, that man needs to win an Oscar for that role because.
01:26:33
Speaker
It's fucking great. It's one of the best roles put to film. I would pretty confidently say that he was born to play that role after playing such a straight detective. Yeah. For so many years. Yeah. Yeah.
01:26:47
Speaker
All right, we're moving on. I'm pushing this forward.
Doctor Who Anniversary Discussions
01:26:51
Speaker
We've got another 10 minutes out of those. So Dr. Who, 60th anniversary trailer. Did you watch that, Dan? I know Tom did. You sent it to us, didn't you? It was me. Sorry, my apologies. That's a Hollywood fucking trailer. I said to Pete, was Michael Bay involved at any point in the film with this? Because there were a lot of explosions. A lot of, yeah.
01:27:15
Speaker
If you watched and were a fan of the David Tennant, Russell, is it Russell? Russell T Davies wrote and directed. You can fact check me in the background, but if you're going to hearken back to those episodes, this was the trailer that calls back all of that, like an epic drama.
01:27:40
Speaker
Like the heyday of Doctor Who relaunch was David Tennant with Doctor Donna. And I say Doctor Donna specifically because it's a reference back to those episodes where she.
01:27:51
Speaker
Essentially. I never liked the actress. I still don't know. Yeah. Catherine Tate. I never liked Catherine Tate. And I'm sure there are many people who love Catherine Tate. No, she's an icon in the UK. Yeah. I just don't get it. I don't get it. I'm not in the UK. It was such a miss compared to like the, the actress they chose to play River Song was such a, such a hit, but yeah. But nevertheless, the characters, the characters importance.
01:28:22
Speaker
It was almost, I found her annoying, but I think she was designed to be annoying.
01:28:28
Speaker
As a character, as a counterpoint. But it was a counterpoint to Rose, because Rose had just fallen in love with the Doctor. The Doctor had found kind of a loophole so that he could go and be with her as an alternate version of himself in an alternate universe. And they needed a counterpoint to falling in love with the fucking... Because then they had, I can't remember the character's name, but they had the African English... The Doctor, the Doctor. Yeah. The Doctor who was with the Doctor.
01:28:58
Speaker
Yeah, and she was in love with him and he wasn't interested because he was still getting over Rose. And I think they needed Catherine Tate to come in just as a counterpoint to say this is asexual. This relationship is 100% platonic. And she actually made that comment a few times to reinforce that. So to bring her back for the 60th anniversary with him and the epic fucking explosions, as you said, Michael Bay.
01:29:23
Speaker
I just like I got shivers watching the fucking trailer very much reminded me I was waiting for the master I can't remember the really bad frosting hair version of the master to pop up with the can you hear the drums? Martha Jones.
01:29:41
Speaker
So, yes. Neil Patrick Harris. Yeah. Interesting choice. Very, very good bad guy. I mean, his bad guy is like, I'd love a million ways to die in the West. I'm watching Orville right now and I just finished the episode with Charlize Theron and it's very million ways to die in the West. Oh, okay. I haven't seen that. I haven't watched much of Orville, but I should. But Neil Patrick Harris and his
01:30:09
Speaker
quirky villains. I think count Olaf in that series. What is that? Yeah. Yeah. The kids series.
01:30:18
Speaker
Oh, the series of unfortunate events, that thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'd never saw here. I only saw the movie with Jim Carrey in that role. So Neil Patrick Harris seems to be born to play the quirky villainous man in those sort of movies because
01:30:40
Speaker
So much me this monopoly into it. Yeah, yeah. It's just he's just needs a monocle and he had tails and all the rest. Yeah. Yeah, no, he's great. I love him. And I'm so glad he's found his thing like having his name in a child star. He could have quite easily have fallen out after Doogie Howser. And he did for a while. He did. He disappeared for a long time. Yeah. But except for that, the perfect role he had in Starship Troopers.
01:31:09
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Never brain bug guy. Yeah. But just to just to just to fall into the his. But also to escape them. The ugliness of surrounding how I met your mother because that that was a massive hit. And then suddenly with the start of the at the very beginning of the work movement, it was utterly rejected for the misogynistic shit it was. Oh, because of Barney.
01:31:38
Speaker
Because of a whole fucking series, really. There's a lot of stuff in there that, look, I thoroughly enjoy the series, but it's on the nose for a lot of people. People who used to like it. It's like one of the worst fucking endings in the series. It's game of thrones ending. Yeah. It's a game of thrones last season, all level. After all that shit, then you can fucking that. Yeah. Dog. So I'm, I'm, I'm really looking forward to this. I'm assuming it's a two hour movie.
01:32:06
Speaker
I don't know, actually. Didn't look that up. Didn't look up. Yeah, it should be. So we're still talking about Doctor Who here, people. We've got a little sidetracked there, but it's the... Because we've known each other so long, we're straight on the same wavelength straight away. I haven't watched it, but they've actually released on YouTube the clip of Jodie Foster regenerating to Tenet.
01:32:31
Speaker
Jodie Whitaker. Jodie Whitaker. Jodie Foster. Fuck. She's still stuck in contact. I just did a U, Pete. I just did a U. Bro, in the last name of another person. Jodie Foster's still got the night vision goggles on going through Buffalo Bill's basement. Oh, no. Well, goodbye horses plays in the background. I thought she was stuck with the aliens trying to get back.
01:32:54
Speaker
That was a terrible ending to that movie. Yeah, I have not seen the regen. I'm actually really interested in where they go next. Because you do see Nacuti. Yeah, so they obviously then regen from Tenet to Nacuti for the continuation of the series in Nacuti.
01:33:13
Speaker
I want to say it is Nacuti, but I'm not a hundred percent sure. And Nacuti won Gutwa. Tight, tight, tight quicker. He was the fifteenth doctor. Yeah. So they show him at the end. Yeah, they do. He looks good. He looks good. Yeah. He looks good. They picked a good style for it. It's going to be three, three episodes apparently.
01:33:30
Speaker
title The Starbeast, Wild Blue Yonder, and The Giggle. There's going to be three episodes with Tenet for the 60th anniversary. Fuck yeah. I'm so glad it's not just one. There we go. Peter's excited. Fuck yeah. I'm excited. I think the Doctor Who band's been lifted.
01:33:53
Speaker
But honestly, when you when you think about it, like it went off and people stopped watching it. And the best way to resurrect a show that used to be really popular and suddenly isn't is bring back everyone that was fucking popular. So they brought back the writer slash director. They brought back the actors. Like if if this can't read, if this can't reenergize the series, then just kill it.
01:34:13
Speaker
Yeah, that's why. Look, I think Peter Capaldi is a great actor, but I didn't enjoy his doctor. And that's where it started. And then I couldn't. But I don't think it was him. And we've talked about this. Yeah, but I don't know. That was, that was the, yeah, but there was the start of the beginning. Like when I started, yeah, when I started losing interest in him as a doctor, then I couldn't jump on board with Jodie, which is unfair on Jodie.
01:34:38
Speaker
I agree yeah but I think it was actually it was a bit of fatigue a bit of fatigue more from yeah I don't know just the way they handled Capaldi's doctor was.
01:34:48
Speaker
It didn't feel in any way fluid and it was very stop-starty in a bit. They couldn't figure out who they wanted him to be. I got the impression that they injected him with a goal and I think the goal was the right goal, by the way, and that was because you had Tenet into Smith and Smith really did portray a
01:35:14
Speaker
Ah, haunted doctor, very well. He wasn't angry, he was sad about being the last and about all of his loss. And they really did play on that towards the end, particularly exploring his death and his resurrection and River Song, his daughter, his wife. And then to move into Capaldi through the 50th anniversary, by the way, because they did that massive episode as well.
01:35:40
Speaker
I think Capaldi was designed to be the angry doctor that was like, fuck you, universe. I deserve better than this. And it started off quite well in that space. And just, yeah, the anger really too quickly. Yeah. The angry and sense of like, I was meant to finish, but I'm not finished. I'm back. And it was the entitlement. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then I just, I just really, I really feel bad for like Jodie. She was, she was direction.
01:36:08
Speaker
Jodie Jodie Whitaker. Damn it, I've got a Pete now. Everyone's on a Pete, but Pete, she, her series was, well, her two or three seasons, two seasons, were just directionless. She didn't have an identity.
01:36:26
Speaker
Yeah, but that's the problem is that the Jodie's big thing was overcoming being the first female doctor. That was the biggest hurdle for her to get past first. But it didn't need to be. It didn't. No, no, no. But this is also coming off the back of Peter Capaldi seasons, where he... He was the older. No, he wasn't. He wasn't the oldest doctor. But what was he?
01:36:46
Speaker
As a doctor, like that was, I think that's the thing. So like you needed, if anything, you needed Jodie to come before. As a palate cleanser. You need Jodie to come after Matt Smith and like kind of come in as like, this is fresh. And then maybe go to Peter. Like it's maybe just a case of like. But I don't think, again, I don't think it's, don't think it's about the actors or the gender of those actors. I actually think it's the writing law. No, I know. But I think it's not the right way they were taking the doctor, the way they were taking the doctor was wrong. Yeah.
01:37:13
Speaker
Yeah, the showrunner. I completely agree as well because I watched about four or five episodes into Capaldi and I loved Matt Smith. I watched a fair bit of Tenet, but then Matt Smith absolutely drew me in. And I know the idea is to go in a different direction, but you still need to be compelling in the stories that you're telling.
01:37:35
Speaker
to drive the people and if you're going to change the doctor actually quite drastically when he regens, when they regen, whether it's a him or her, then you need to you need to have the stories to back it up and you need to make it compelling enough for people to want to care about this new doctor.
01:37:56
Speaker
But they didn't reconnect. And I think the thing that they missed, and I don't know how we ended up with a spotlight about Dr. Who just randomly, but I think they missed. It's been about 60 years since you've been allowed to discuss it. I think it's fair enough. Oh, no. I accidentally did. Oh, that's the nitro. Damn it. They missed a trick because
01:38:18
Speaker
He had David Tennant had mentioned that he'd been a woman before and that he had mother children, he didn't just have kids, he had been a mother to children. And I think they really missed a beat where Jodie's character could have reconnected to say, I haven't been a woman for, you know, five regions or ten regions or, you know, I miss being a mother. I don't know, they could have reconnected in some really feministic way.
01:38:41
Speaker
Feministic, not feminism, but do you know what I mean? Like they could have connected that way. And I think they missed. It was just Paul writing. It was just, hey, look at us. We put a woman in. It's like, no, but you like now empower her. It's not enough just to cast a woman. You need to actually write it into the story as to why that's compelling and interesting and empowering. And the problem is now that they probably won't go back to that now for
01:39:10
Speaker
I actually think now, so, so Nakuti, Nakuti's obviously a guy, but I'm fairly certain he's a gay guy in real life, a gay actor. Sex education is his big role. And if he, well, and I don't know where I got that from, maybe I'm talking out of my ass, but if he is quite a feminine, quite a feminine guy, I actually think they could androgynize the character a little better if they explore it properly. And Russell T. Davies,
01:39:39
Speaker
is a very big advocate for diversity.
01:39:47
Speaker
and for equalization of gay rights, particularly in the UK. That's actually what he went off to do after he left. I mean, he did Torchwood, which was very much on that in that vein, and then went off to do other stuff that's in that, like, away from TV shows. So let's watch this space then, like, yeah, just see what happens and come back to it. I just want them to go back to the days where they were exploring what it was to be human. It was quite existential and that's what made it compelling.
01:40:14
Speaker
And I think this is why you got banned from talking about Doctor Who. Yeah, OK. Netflix on the way. Let's go. Yes, there was actually I only put in two here that I thought were the most most applicable to us. But Netflix actually dropped like six or seven anime trailers recently for series. So there's one for Devil May Cry, which is another game series.
01:40:42
Speaker
Um, there was another Castlevania. Uh, there were two or three others. There was one actually that I probably should have included. It was, um, more samurai focused, but it was from James Mangold. Apparently had him a role in the creation of the story. Um, cause it came up as like from the director of Logan, not using the Fox voice, but you know, in that same events.
01:41:03
Speaker
Um, but yeah, so this Tomb Raider is a continuation of the reboot Tomb Raider series. So we're talking the 2013, uh, story where it's the Lara Croft is no longer the just polygonal boobs and, but running around with twin guns thing. This is the one bow and arrows stranded on the Island. I don't know if it's like a retelling of the two rock style.
01:41:28
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, but it's a more realistic one. And that's the one they made the movie about. If you watch the there was the movie version. So it's based around that that Square Enix version of the games. But it's Lara is now voiced by Haley Atwell, who you will know as Peggy Carter from the Captain America films.
01:41:48
Speaker
So yeah, it's good, but it's the same kind of style as it's slightly different. It's not the same studio behind it as say like the Castlevania. So it's slightly different animation, which is cool. Yeah, it looks really, really good. But it's it's a little bit.
01:42:05
Speaker
You can just kind of tell with the outlining of the pen strokes on the way the characters are drawn. It's just like this one, for me, it's a weird description to use, but it's a little bit hazier. It's not as clear cut as, say, Castlevania is. Castlevania is very down the line cut. This is like a little bit more soft. Soft focus is probably a better term to use in film rather than hazy. You tell what I've been drinking.
01:42:29
Speaker
And then the second one was they continuing the He-Man Netflix. Which we knew that we're going to do. Yeah. So this is a continuation.
01:42:41
Speaker
I actually, I told you guys I went back and finally finished the second part of that series. It's starting to look a lot more like the original series. This seems like it's going back towards more of the original one. The 80s. Yeah, this is the clip of it's, so it's post the reboot thing we've watched, Revelations. It's still called He-Man Revelations and then it's- Oh, it's Revolution now.
01:43:05
Speaker
No, no, no, wait, whoa, you had the Kevin Smith version. Yeah, which is the two seasons or the split season, whatever you want to call it. But there was also a side running other version of Heyman. Is this not that one? This isn't the Kevin Smith version. This looks like a derivative of the Kevin Smith version. I took this as a thing of that because it's
01:43:29
Speaker
I don't know. I haven't watched that other one. Yeah. Okay. You guys keep, keep going. You look it up. Yeah. Just because it was in the clip we saw, it's the same skeleton dude who appeared at the end of the second, the second part of the Kevin Smith one. And, uh, the King knows that Prince Adam is he-man. That's where I took it from. Yeah. Yeah. And it's the same, it's got the same sheen, like the, the, the art style is very Kevin Smith series. Yeah.
01:44:00
Speaker
And the, uh, his, his mate, what's his mate's name? I can't remember. It starts with R. Um, he's, he's wearing that almost mech suit, like almost Iron Man suit. Well, that's meant to be, that's his dad. That's the king in that little clip where you say, yeah. Yeah.
01:44:19
Speaker
But yeah, they've dropped heaps, which I quite like a lot of the way that Netflix has done the anime series, and especially like the stories they're telling. So I'm interested to see what they come out with these ones. It's funny you say that because I don't turn Netflix on anymore. Like, unless it's a specific Netflix movie, like I'll go, I'm maintaining my subscription for things like Rebel Moon.
01:44:44
Speaker
bit apart from that. Or the latest Tom, is it Tom Secluna? Stand up comedy show. But outside of that. Yeah. Well, maybe this is, you know, a better, you know, it's another way to use your... Tom Segura. Sorry, I know what Tom Segura. And I always get those two names mixed up, Tom Segura. Moving on, your little announcement trailer, that little teaser trailer.
01:45:10
Speaker
Oh yeah, a little game trailer. Tales of the Shire. This looks delightful. It's relaxing.
01:45:15
Speaker
I don't know what it's going to be. It doesn't look like anything at the moment. It's a feeling. The music really derives that feeling. But it's a combination between the Project Division and Weta Workshop, which is important. Yes. You're absolutely right. Boom. Yes, called Tales of the Shire. I don't know what it's going to be. It could be something like... Just another cash-in. We've seen too many of those recently.
01:45:45
Speaker
Yes, yes, don't get me started on Gimli sending people back to Moria. Why the fuck would he? Bloody sense. But no, no, this looks like it's, it could potentially be like a, this would be the perfect time for a game to be a walking simulator.
01:46:03
Speaker
And I remember I played those games like, welcome to the rapture. We're about to get into my walking simulator. Yeah. But if you just have to go about your daily, if it's Sims in the Shire, sign me up. Sign me the fuck up. I totally see it. I wouldn't play it, but I get it. Yeah. So I just want to touch back on the Hey Man thing. It does sound like it's a following upon the hit Masters of the Universe revelation. This is all new story in the battle for Eternia.
01:46:31
Speaker
Masters of the universe revolution. It doesn't seem like Kevin Smith's involved, but I will keep reading this article and I will get back to you. Talk about the Shire and I said, we're done with that. Oh, well, I mean, on the Shire thing, like I said, smoke a bunch of weed and just, if it's, if it's a stardew valley has clearly slowed your mind. Yeah. I'm happy with that.
01:46:58
Speaker
I don't know if you read that on the back of the, uh, the Dungeons of the Dankness can as well, but they said, and the cheeky hint of the halfling's leaf. That gets into five, baby. That's all fives. Gets into five. Oh, right. Well, are we doing beer four? Are we jumping in now? I think we are doing beer four. Yeah, I am pouring. Um, I will talk about mine then. I fucked mine up. So you dirty dog. We saw. Uh, so I'm drinking dangerous ales.
01:47:28
Speaker
Double Boc. It is great. 7%, which is pretty low for a double, to be honest, but it's in the sweet spot in terms of the flavor profile. It's a lovely, tawny brown, and it's just the right amount of malt for me.
01:47:56
Speaker
It's just beautiful. It's still got quite a lot of hop in it. But it's kind of like the...
01:48:06
Speaker
It's the resin without the citrus notes that you get out of a typical IPA. And then the malt just really shines through. It's got a lot of toffee and caramel character to it. It distinguishes itself from being a red because it doesn't have much bitterness at all. I'm a bit pissy now, actually, now that I'm slurring my way through the review. No, this is a great fucking
01:48:32
Speaker
double bark. Enjoying this thoroughly. I've checked out, like this has totally zoned me out. Bye Pete. This is what we want just before the spotlight. Pete's checking out. This is where it usually ends up Tom. I don't know what he's doing. I'm going to give that a four and a half. That's, that's, that's lovely. Excellent. Really chewy, chewy toffee.
01:49:01
Speaker
Yeah, double box. I mean, that's that should be where they fall. Yeah, did a high, high residual sugar. Yeah. Oh, Tom's got a red sort of double red IPA. Not double, but it's red. What are you drinking, Tom? Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, hello. I'm drinking one drop Madzilla.
01:49:29
Speaker
And I picked this up because of the can and the style. It's a red IPA, 6.2%. But that is a zombified Godzilla on the can. In a desert wasteland. Yeah, yeah. Could you make a can that is more to my liking? I don't know.
01:49:49
Speaker
Um, I'm sure you could, but that really drew me in. Um, so this is a red IPA, uh, has a base of fine NZL malts, plus the addition of five specialty grains. Uh, they've used new us hops, which is why I also picked this for the recording. Um, Sequoia and Lorian.
01:50:12
Speaker
and nods his head knowingly. That is good. I haven't used them and don't know what their flavor profile is, but I have heard of them, yes. And this is the bit that interested me when I did pick up the can instantly because of the label, then I read the back. They fermented out with a hybrid lager ale yeast.
01:50:32
Speaker
And it is, as you can see from my, it's, ooh, ooh, ooh. There's just, there's a lot going on. It's not your classic kind of resinous toffee red IPA. There's like, there is that bready lagerness like coming through at the back and then there's more coming through. It's like a nice spiciness, almost like they, I don't know if they used any rye in it, but there's like a nice rye spiciness coming through.
01:50:59
Speaker
Um, which is really quite sharp and it's sitting really right at the back of my throat currently. And it's like, I'm trying not to cough through it. It's like almost like, Oh, there's a needle in the back of my throat. It's like that kind of sharp.
01:51:12
Speaker
But then, oh, it just came back. Oh, yeah, there's this. That is citrus, really citrusy on the regurg. But it was kind of malted, muted at the start. This is super interesting. Yeah, it's, they say multi meets bitter. That's, yeah, there is a lot of bitterness in that. I can definitely see that, but it's, yeah, that sharp rhinos is really just sitting,
01:51:39
Speaker
If I were just a cross section, it's right there, right there. And it's not in a bad way. It's like, it's just, it's really present. It's really present. Um, I don't know if anyone can look up, I'm not looking up, uh, if anyone can see if it did out of any Ryan, and if they added that there, who knows? Um, what Nick's done, he's, he's crazy. Look it up. Okay. I shall. Yeah. It also like, it's.
01:52:02
Speaker
It's not super boozy. It's quite pleasant. If you don't like bitter beers, you're probably not going to enjoy this. If you want more of that toffee caramel note from your red, which has a little bit of that sweetness to it, you're not going to get it from this. It's real bitter.
01:52:22
Speaker
which is pushing up that score. That's a 4.75. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Uh, it doesn't say. Okay. Um, it does say at the end here, Madzilla is not the enemy. He is protector of the balance. Okay. Chill out Dr. Chihiro. Yeah. So the description on untapped is exactly what's on the back of the can. Yeah. Okay.
01:52:46
Speaker
Yeah. No, that's, that's really, really good and great, great design as well. Um, nice little shiny red can. Yeah. I will be all good digging. See if I can find out if I've got some Ryan at that spice. Whoa. It's a spicy. Anyway, Dan, man, I fucked up. Uh, I fucked up. So I got this because these guys, uh, my, my, my, my current.
01:53:14
Speaker
favorite brewery to try anything new they've got coming out because everything I've had from them is a hit. Uh, and I fucked up. I fucked up. I fucked it. I don't know if you said you fucked up enough. Yeah. Molly Rose crowd. The crowd goes mild. Uh, they have a, an enormous pink thing on the front to say, shake it before you open dickhead. Uh, and the dickhead didn't shake it before he opened. So
01:53:44
Speaker
Have you got a second glass? You can potentially save it if you glass pour into glass pour. No, you can't. The nitrogen's gone. So those... Because it sits on the top? Yeah, so nitrogen is incredibly insoluble.
01:53:59
Speaker
So you need to, like even because they liquid nitrogen dose, so they drop a drop of liquid nitrogen into the can just before it's sealed. So it's not enough time for the gas then to escape. Because it needs to first.
01:54:16
Speaker
Transfer back to being a gas. Exactly. So you drop, you drop. Yeah, that's probably the right word. If you drop the liquid nitrogen in, they're called liquid nitrogen droppers. You drop one in just before it hits the, uh, the, the seal and, uh, it gets seamed up. Uh, and that. Is that true for all, for all nitro beers?
01:54:38
Speaker
No, so Guinness Gilkenny, they have the copyright on the widget, which is the... Do they still use them anymore for the Australian cans?
01:54:52
Speaker
I have absolutely no idea. I can't remember the last time I drank a Guinness can. I will find out. I will do that. I will put my hand up to do that research if I need to go get a Guinness. So obviously Guinness packaged as nitro. It's probably the most common nitro beer out there, right? Yes. So they have a package in there, which is a nitrogen package within the cap.
01:55:17
Speaker
Not entirely sure how it works, but when you crack it, the nitrogen's released into the liquid and then you pour it. And you have to pour it straight away. Nitrogen is notoriously, notoriously chemically very insoluble in comparison to carbon dioxide. There's a lot of zeros in front of it compared to carbon dioxide to how soluble it is.
01:55:40
Speaker
So when they put nitrogen into cans, you need to, we've covered this before. I've fucked it up. Tom's poured it really well. Pete, I can't remember whether you've done nitrogen either way. And I've probably fucked up some and gotten others right.
01:55:55
Speaker
So you need to agitate the liquid. I've got to fully both cans. You've got to agitate the gas with the liquid before you pour it. So you reabsorb quickly the gas with the liquid before you crack the can. I crack the can without shaking it at all, which means instantly that... All the nitrogen has just escaped into the atmosphere. Exactly. And it has a distinct sound to it too. So as soon as I cracked it to really sound like a CO2 pop. It's a long... It's a long gas release.
01:56:24
Speaker
It's longer than a CO2 and it's almost like a pop. It's a higher pitch too. Yeah. And as soon as I cracked it, I'm like, ah, fucked up. Especially when you said before you had a nitro beer. Yeah. And there's no saving it. Once the nitrogen's gone, there's no saving it.
01:56:44
Speaker
I'm not going to rate this because it's not the product it should be. I'm very much enjoying it. It's an English mild. Sorry. Didn't even talk about the style of beer. It's an English mild, which means it's a, uh, a wonderful three and a half percent, dark, multi, mildly chocolatey, nutty mild. And I love miles and Australians don't make them because it doesn't suit our weather. Uh, but I, I really enjoy them. So I was really excited to try this and then I screwed it up. So.
01:57:14
Speaker
Let's say the the Cooper's Brewery disagrees that they don't know what makes a mile to think, you know. Yeah, I don't think them their miles not a mild though. Yeah, I'll have to have another one.
01:57:27
Speaker
You do the Cooper's mild research. I'll do the Guinness research. We'll confer back. Meet in the middle. And Pete, you can just drink whatever you want. Yeah, I'm just chillin', man. I'm in a good headspace. Let's get on with our spotlight. I think it's the right time. Dan, another great idea from Danny has just come back from 11 weeks of gallivanting around the fucking world. I'm sure it wasn't 11 weeks. I'm sure it wasn't, but it felt like it was a long time for us. Very expensive holiday.
01:57:57
Speaker
to drop another fucking great spotlight idea. So we've run through game mechanics and games that we love. Uh, so good game mechanics and what makes a good game great. Uh, and I thought it would be interesting. So Tom just flattened, uh, scar. Oh, spoilers. That was saving that for why are you winning son? I thought you did that last time.
01:58:21
Speaker
Didn't you do that last time? No, he did that on chat in like 11 different channels. He's discord, he's running it on bathroom walls in public toilets everywhere. Pete complete this out and then people can have no idea what this part of the conversation is about. So I jumped back into Skyrim on my PC, I'd reinstalled it a little while ago, dropped a whole bunch of mods on it and decided to jump back in and play it as well because he'd re-inspired me to play it.
01:58:46
Speaker
I got about five, six, seven hours in and actually discovered how much the fast travel within that game really hurts the immersion of the game.
01:59:00
Speaker
There's parts of it that I feel hurt the immersion, but I've downloaded a mod that I'll talk about it on, are you winning sun called open cities, which I think incredibly helps the immersion. I then hit the, what's the house building downloadable content, Tom?
01:59:23
Speaker
I hit that content and I started to build the house and I was standing at the construction table of the house and I needed more lumber. So I opened the map and I fast traveled to the lumber shop, bought more lumber. I opened the map, fast traveled back to the house, and then I kept doing that. And I just, I had enough other resources. Welcome to staff.
01:59:44
Speaker
Yeah. And so Pete, welcome to Bethesda. So we'll cover that. And yeah, I just, I thought that really hurt my experience with building the house because it didn't then force me to move to an area to then fast travel. I think, I think the Witcher three kind of nails that fast travel, but well, activity. Yeah. So let's just, let's be clear, but you're not saying that fast travel is a bad game mechanic. It's just you think you could use better.
02:00:14
Speaker
I thought it would ruin Skyrim. Yeah, I think it can be reconstructed better to something similar to a Witcher content where you need to have to go to a point. You have to go to a point. So RDR does the same thing with it. Each village, each town has its carriage that you then can fast travel to another town. And Witcher has... What was the Morrowind Coaches? Well, the stalker things with the big
02:00:42
Speaker
But long legs, I've never played Morrowind. I'm waiting for, um, the, the Morrowind, uh, the, the Neku Neku leech. No, it's got a weird name. It appears in the, um, Dragonborn DLC. There's one left.
02:00:57
Speaker
in this area you go to. I think that's something more interesting than just opening a map and clicking on a location. And I was doing the same thing. Like I needed more quarried stone and you can't fast travel when you're overburdened.
02:01:13
Speaker
Sorry so i was i was at the house i needed log side fast travel to the lumber mill by more logs i fast travel back to the home i need more courage stone i fast travel to the the quarry where i the mind where i knew there was a an unlimited. Stone content stone quarry right now.
02:01:34
Speaker
Is there? Okay. Yeah. Oh, I haven't found that one. I did find it every house you can get in that thing. There's a there's a stone quarry and a clay mine. Like there's a spot right next to each. There's three houses you can build. So you don't have to travel. I'll have to look for that. I haven't found the stone.
02:01:57
Speaker
But I found some iron in the area. So iron was fine. And I found the clay too. So the clay was fine. But I just, I really feel like that hurt my, my view on the progression of building the house, because I was able to, after seven or eight hours and hitting this content, I was able to just go bang, bang, bang, bang, bang across the, across the locations, which were only separated by in game, maybe a kilometer. And I, Oh, it's a big map.
02:02:27
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I don't know what you're saying. And I know I could just go don't use fast travel. But you know, if it's fucking now, I'm going to use it. Yeah, yeah. So I just I feel like that hurt my enjoyment of building that house because then now I'm like, fuck it. I don't really care. Like, I'm using it for some storage and bits and pieces. And
02:02:51
Speaker
And I have no attachment to it as we're. Oh, wait till you build the house that overlooks the lake. And then you, you sit on the back porch and watch the Aurora come over the top. The sequinda music plays in the background and Jeremy's soul like sweeps through your entire body and you just go, holy shit, I'm in love.
02:03:08
Speaker
But if I'd also taken time within that world to go between and get ambushed by a fucking dragon that just comes out through a random encounter, like those sort of things forcing me to run to the
02:03:24
Speaker
the loggers and forcing me to run to the mine, even though you say there's one right there, but forcing me to do those things would have increased my immersion and devotion to building a singular house. And I just felt that broke me a little bit. And that led on to a few thinking about bad mechanics in great games.
02:03:48
Speaker
I think it's immersion reducing mechanics in great games. Yes. And definitely is. And that goes to next to my next one, which was obviously patched out in the Witcher 3 enhanced edition was the, like every game that has a weapon choice wheel that you can't just quickly switch between
02:04:10
Speaker
Yeah, Red Dead, definitely Red Dead and getting through to the map on Red Dead. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Those sort of things and the Witcher sign wheel. Uh, so- But how else do you densely pack shitloads of choices into a game like that though? I don't know what the alternative mechanic there is.
02:04:29
Speaker
Well, I think Red Dead had kind of what it had been. And on a console, I think you got to add in the limitations of a console and the buttons you can use compared to like a PC. Yeah, I've got to say, you're right. And there was some early, sorry to cut you off there. No, no, keep going. There was some early complaints leveled at Starfield about
02:04:49
Speaker
how complicated the menu layout is given it is a it's essentially a pc game you have to play with a fucking console controller i've actually done a really decent job of making the menus intuitive if dumb fucks spent ten seconds looking at the bottom right corner it tells you.
02:05:09
Speaker
Press square to go to this menu and press, you know, this to go to this menu. It's actually all laid out pretty clearly. So I don't understand why people leveled that complaint at Starfield in particular. There's lots of fucking reasons to complain about Starfield, but I don't think the menu system is one of them.
02:05:26
Speaker
I think on Dan's point there, he'll come back when he comes back, but just talking about the Witcher 3, I think if we're thinking about the immersion of games and HUD displays are a big thing that a lot of people now in games like to turn off if they really want to immerse into a game.
02:05:43
Speaker
You completely turn off the HUD, but I think the Witcher 3 definitely had one of the most perfect balance ways of using a HUD, unless you really wanted to go that kind of hardcore thing where when you were traveling, it disappeared. If you were just running around like.
02:06:00
Speaker
The HUD, the HUD would slowly fade out. Yeah. I think that's one of the best mechanisms for a HUD that has been used. Yeah. The way the Witcher 3 did that disappearing, disappearing HUD that came back when you needed it, because, you know, some people- Do you have some sort of granule issue? No, I fucking banged my knee on my desk as I sat down. He looks like he just sat on his nuts, right?
02:06:26
Speaker
I've sat on myself. I forgot I turned the camera on too early while I was still in pain. You poor bugger. Sorry, Tom. I interrupted him. Yeah, no, no, I was interrupted in my mind. I was trying to maintain a point and I couldn't because it looked like someone was having a deep scratch of their nutters himself. But yeah, no, just just the way that it like for someone who, you know, there's there's times when I'm playing a game and I don't get to come back to it for five days at a time because of work.
02:06:56
Speaker
Hmm.
02:06:56
Speaker
So to have that ability for the HUD to reappear when I need it, to remind myself, oh, yep, that's that. That's what I have there. That's what I have there. But when I'm running around, observing the views and just having a fun time, like frolicking through the countryside, having that HUD fade out and disappear until I need it, I think is one of the best mechanisms that, maybe not the best mechanisms, but one of the best mechanisms that the Witcher 3 brought to modern games, especially.
02:07:26
Speaker
I think on that side of things, Tom, I think Ghost of Tsushima fucking nailed it. Yeah, I totally agree with that. But it was in game, it was in lore, it was in story, it was all consistent.
02:07:42
Speaker
It was in your field of view. And I mean, the another downfall of the way the... The wind was beautiful too. That's exactly it. I mean, it's like the mechanism for the wind, the guiding wind and to going to your quest points compared to the Witcher 3, where you've got, you're constantly staring at a little dotted line on your mini map to get to your next point. I mean, you need, when they do, where the Witcher 3 really could have benefited from a top screen
02:08:11
Speaker
compass directing you to the point marker would have kept you much more focused on the central character in the middle of the screen rather than looking at the dotted white line in the top corner. And that's where the Ghost of Tsushima with the HUD that your screen is completely clean. Yeah. Until you go into combat and then your health barter and your focus turns off. Yeah, I think I think it's yeah. But it was a game built around the concept of Zen. Yes. Sorry. Sorry, Tom.
02:08:40
Speaker
No, no, no, I'm agreeing with you. I think it's one of the best things to come into some modern games. It's having the HUD's important and there are people who really need the HUD, but you don't need it when you're running around doing nothing. I think a lot of game designers just take it for granted. They just copy and paste from every other game in the industry. And I actually think that's where they went so well with Ghost of Tsushima. Well, they actually sat down, they took a step back from standard game designers said, do we actually need this? And is it consistent with the message we're trying to deliver?
02:09:09
Speaker
Yeah. Completely and understanding the message that we're trying to deliver in and sticking it to it rather than going with the status quo. You'd look at that game and I know it was a, is it triple A or a double A? I don't know what triple A would be. Is it just fall into the triple A? I know it was Sony funded. But the studio wasn't.
02:09:34
Speaker
Was it a huge failure? Suck a punch. Suck a punch is a... Oh, okay. Yeah, so it's a triple A. Yeah. A triple A. So you look into that and to take, I guess not a gamble, I guess they were very aware of what they had when they were creating it and that they were on to something good. But to release that, pardon the
02:09:53
Speaker
into the wild, into the wild of the future gaming. I mean, we need to move people like Bethesda and Ubisoft away from their status quo. They're formulaic. So I'm going to talk a little bit about Starfield in Are You Winning? I don't think you're going to talk a little bit about Starfield. No, actually, I'm going to try and be as balanced as I can. But on the fast travel conversation, there are parts where
02:10:24
Speaker
Even if you're in a ship incapable of jumping between star systems, like if you're in it, so there's this concept of distance between star systems in the galaxy you're playing in. And so if your grav drive isn't upgraded sufficiently, you can't jump between two specific stars because they're too far apart, which makes perfect sense.
02:10:46
Speaker
Except if you have a base on one side of the galaxy and you have a base on the other side of the galaxy and you go to the galaxy menu, you can actually instantly teleport to your base, even if your ship is physically incapable of making the jump.
02:11:05
Speaker
I mean, that was just bypasses game mechanics. Just completely breaks game mechanics. Like you couldn't actually travel there system by system if you did it the slow way, but you can fast travel. You can't do a galaxy hop. Oh, that'd be so cool. Like the Guardians of the Galaxy where you're just like, no, we've done too many hops and they started melting faces. Be honest with what I'm saying. It goes back to what you were saying about breaking the immersion, Dan.
02:11:32
Speaker
Fast travel is so prevalent in Skyrim. It's not the only issue and it's not even the biggest issue, but it's so, so prevalent in, in, in Starfield that you never actually, you get to a point where you never actually get in your ship, climb into the cockpit seat and take off because there's just no value in doing it anymore. There's no reason at all to do it. That's incredibly broken. It's broken.
02:11:59
Speaker
There's just no reason to do it. In Star, in No Man's Sky, you used to do it just because it was cool to see the atmosphere dissipate. You went from the blueness of the atmosphere bubble to the blackness of space and you're like, now I'm in space. And you could actually, you could fast travel, but you'd set a point in the distance to the next, you know, solar body within a solar system and you could fast travel to that. And it was satisfying that if you really wanted to sit back and set your engines on full, you could just
02:12:29
Speaker
autopilot for 15 minutes, come back in 15 minutes of real life time and you'd be there. Can't do that in starfield. It's infinitely distant. Your ship will never travel to the next solar body. You can set it, you can point it at the sun and press go and you will never get there. You're expected to fast travel. Fast travel. Yeah. Ah.
02:12:52
Speaker
And that's, I mean, that just, it's a broken game, doesn't it? It is, it is foundationally, it is broken. Yeah. So I mean, you say that No Man's Sky, you can just set it on autopilot. I mean, you talk about, and I've talked about wanting to traverse the world in RDR before, but you can do the same thing in RDR. Like you can,
02:13:12
Speaker
Get in the car and set that point and then go into cinematic mode and literally just watch the character right across the country in cinematic mode. Get on a fucking train, sit down in a car and there's a distinguishable difference between the first class car and the fucking cattle class car.
02:13:35
Speaker
Yeah. And you can just sit back and watch it. And enjoy the, enjoy the travel, but there's a distinct difference between not wanting to get, not wanting to waste the time to get into the cockpit of your shit, which is going to take you across the galaxy. Yeah. And that sounds to be broken. Um, so sorry, on this, on that as well, the same, same time, not wasting time, but not
02:13:58
Speaker
Not everyone has the ability to sit there 15 minutes and just watch a cinematic like piece of getting. I'm not saying that anyone has ever liked that you would ever want to sit there in no man's sky and watch that shit. What I'm saying is the game mechanic is built around this concept that.
02:14:16
Speaker
physical space is laid out in a physical kind of way. It has a gravity to it and you can get in your ship pointed at a star, press go and eventually you'll get there. And there's a sense of realism, even if you never would actually sit there and watch it unfold, there's a sense of realism knowing that you could. As opposed to the only way to get from the planet to the moon that's like eight light seconds away,
02:14:44
Speaker
is to fast travel. There's something wrong with that as a space game mechanic. Is that like a loading thing? No, we'll get into that. It's synthetic. No, it's not actually. It's not because there's parts of the game that exposes just how broken the game design is in that specific mechanic.
02:15:11
Speaker
Let's get into it when you talk about it. We're gonna get sidetracked. I'm calling this, I'm flicking the switch back on the train. We were in HUDs. So we were talking about HUDs before and the next one was really about tagging enemies in all Ubisoft games. So you said this, the biggest one we need to talk this about is Far Cry Primal. Tom, can you tag enemies in Far Cry Primal? Yes. Okay.
02:15:40
Speaker
But there's no animus. There's no excuse. There's no excuse. No, there's the witch doctor. It's magic. You get sense. You get you get the you actually I think the way you track animals in memory in Far Cry Primal is that you track their sense. OK, so there is an in game explanation for it. Yeah.
02:16:05
Speaker
When it comes to humans though, there is none. You put a little, little red dot above their head when you go, oh, I've got, I've got caveman senses.
02:16:14
Speaker
As opposed to launching your eagle and your eagle memorizes all of the locations. At least in all the other Far Cry games, you have some sort of binocular technology to be like, sure, if you were looking through those binoculars, you'd be like, you wouldn't be able to follow the tag. I'm sure the US Department of Defense has spent billions of dollars trying to develop that, but it still doesn't actually exist.
02:16:41
Speaker
the whole heads up display, I can tag an enemy combatant through a drone and it appears in AR in real time. In real time. In my fucking goals. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm sure it's all over that. I also had a problem with this, with the Hitman reboot, or no, actually, when was it? Blood Money?
02:17:01
Speaker
somewhere within the third or fourth Hitman games, they bought in basically, they bought in- Or maybe you talk about it. Yeah. Eagle vision from Assassin's Creed. It takes out that element from-
02:17:16
Speaker
From Hitman 1 to, and maybe 3, I don't really remember where it came in, but it takes out that element, that surprise element where you're meant to be an assassin going into an area that you've researched as much as you can, but the unpredictability of human action goes, am I going to walk around this corner and there's going to be a guard on a break smoking?
02:17:39
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it takes out that thing because I can just stand behind a corner and go into my magic hitman vision or eagle vision or whatever Far Cry vision is called. I don't actually know. There is no Far Cry. It's just tagging binoculars. Literally just tagging binoculars. Yeah. And see people through walls and their set paths and things like that as well.
02:18:02
Speaker
It's the same as Ghost Recon, where you use literal items. Or it's the same as The Last of Us Listening. Like, I can listen through walls. But Survivor Mode doesn't have Listening. Correct. You cannot do it, which is why that game in Survivor Mode is such a good way to play the game.
02:18:20
Speaker
Until I shit myself. It's like days of us, days alone. What's it called? Days gone? Days gone. Thank you. In maximum difficulty, there was no HUD. There's no ammo counter. There's no map. If you want to know how to get from point A to point B, you better fucking remember the roads.
02:18:45
Speaker
Yeah, which I mean, we all do eventually. I don't agree with because GPS exists in a modern day game. Yeah, sure. Even if you're in a zombie apocalypse, like just because you're in a zombie apocalypse, the sunlight still works. Yeah, the sunlight's out then. They're not zombified. What is your name? My name is Thomas. What is your surname? Thomas. Okay, Thomas Thomas. Why if I wouldn't, would it?
02:19:12
Speaker
Does the telecommunications networks would go down? It's not Wi-Fi, it's GPS and the GPS satellites would potentially go down. Because at some point GPS satellites, well, we're all doomed and we're all going to die.
02:19:29
Speaker
Depends on how far in the future Days Gone was supposed to be set, but no, GLONUS and GPS would still have been running. You would have still had GPS. But I think the point is tagging enemies is a cheap game mechanic that breaks immersion in a lot of games, including the Assassin's Creed series.
02:19:47
Speaker
Oh, I think the one it's most prevalent is if you guys ever played the sniper elite series, the world two snipers. Um, especially when you can get up to the point where it's, if you play on the hardest difficulty, it's like you have to, you have to, um, factor in the curvature of the earth when you're.
02:20:05
Speaker
But you can still put a little red dot above someone's head in World War Two. Yeah. And then you can shoot through a hit list test again, which is the greatest part of those games. There's six of them. You can shoot through hit list test school in every single one of them. It's the greatest part of any video game ever. No one can convince me anything otherwise.
02:20:26
Speaker
Let's all shoot off Hitler's test. There's no way that. So, okay. So I just looked it up. There's no way you can shoot off Hitler's test. The longest confirmed kill made during World War II by a sniper was 1100 meters. At 1100 meters, you're not worried about the Coriolis effect.
02:20:47
Speaker
That's still a long way. 1.1 Ks is a... I'm not saying I could do it, but the... With a World War II sniper rifle? You're not taking into account the curvature of the fucking earth. You're talking about bullet drop and de-acceleration. Yeah, and bullet drop, absolutely. But basic trigonometry is part of a sniper's fucking core, man. But yeah, choriolis officials are quite different. Tom didn't mean choriolis, he meant bullet drop.
02:21:17
Speaker
I think, again, I just want to shoot off it. That's testicle. So every now and then we play on Friday nights, we play, uh, sniper league two, I think is what we play. And the, we, we play versus modes every now and then. And, uh, the, the most ruckus that ever comes up is when someone gets a testicle shot.
02:21:40
Speaker
I've got to say, okay, so I'll call myself out as wrong. According to Google, Coriolis effect really needs to be taken into, it's essential at shooting distances of a thousand meters and beyond. So the longest shot was 1100 meters. So you had a hundred meters left on that.
02:22:00
Speaker
To take him into account. I wasn't calling you at his wrong time. If before you shot and then Hitler kind of like squeezed up a little and he pulled his balls in. You might miss. The sumo effect. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, moving on. Got a deep breath in, he went suck up. Or he coughs. Yeah, just skims the bottom of the scrotch. Yeah. There's your episode. The bottom of the scrotch. Skims the bottom of the scrotch.
02:22:28
Speaker
Oh, fucking talk to me about Batman Arkham and Arkham Knight. Oh, the bat tank. Oh, the bat tank. See, I don't have a problem with this, but Tom obviously does. So I, I said that didn't. Oh, okay. So I didn't, I didn't have a problem. Put this in. Yeah. I know I did. Oh, okay.
02:22:47
Speaker
Just your reaction there about the Bat-tank. I really enjoyed the main body and the story beat moments within Batman Arkham Knight using the Bat-tank. I thought the coming out of GCPD when it was in lockdown to all of the Arkham Knight forces just fucking there and you just have to be the Batman and take all these bastards out. Yes.
02:23:14
Speaker
I think that is where they should have left the finale of that game and the Batmobile. And everything from there on out should have just been the Batman taking on the Arkham Knight. But you have the... So you're saying you think the Batmobile should have been destroyed in that fight?
02:23:34
Speaker
Oh, yeah. I mean, if at least like shot a wheel off, so disabled. Yeah. Yeah. If it had been disabled there and we played the last part out and we didn't have to take the Arkham Knight on and that tedious get behind him and take out the glowing red points on the tank. I think that part of the game. But Dan, if you consider the Arkham games through time crisis, will we talk about the Joker with the the serum fight at the end of like, it's not like
02:24:04
Speaker
the Arkham series has not done this before. Where they've stumbled right at the end with such a great concept and then just gone like,
02:24:12
Speaker
It's almost like a, it's almost like a Marvel series. It's like, this is really cool. This is really different. But hey, hey, superhero fight. Here you go. Yeah. So I mean, that's, but I don't think that that's not a game mechanic. That's just a, that's a, a segment of that was a choice on how to end the game. It's not a, it's not a, it's not a, it's not a core game mechanic. It was just a, a poor choice, a poor choice on the way to take that series. But.
02:24:43
Speaker
OK, we can cover that at another point, but I just I just think the whole spotlight. Yeah, yeah, it is. Yeah, I think that is that is the point where they and plenty of games have done it before, where they've given you something through the entire game and they've taken away from you because they come up and say, hey, you're about to go into a point now where like you're not going to have access to this shit.
02:25:05
Speaker
Like if you want to have access to this, like finish it off now, because beyond this point, you're not going to have access to the Batmobile before you, like until after you finish the story. I always find that's more like the more for upgrades and side quests though, it's got like, as opposed to call game mechanics. Correct me if I'm wrong. But why not? Like why not? I mean, it was, and.
02:25:32
Speaker
I didn't like it, but it didn't destroy my enjoyment of the game in Arkham Knight. But I think that whole tank final boss fight with the Arkham Knight could have been taken out.
02:25:44
Speaker
It was an overused mechanic and a lot of people have far more issue with the Batmobile than I do. But I just think that is a big one that could have been taken out and did damage the continuation or the finale of that game where it was meant to be so poignant with Jason and how it finished up, but you're forced into this. That was post the Sniper one, wasn't it?
02:26:13
Speaker
There's the sniper predator mission against Jason. Yeah. Well, he's still the Arkham Knight. Yeah. I still haven't played any of these games. No, I stopped at the start of the second Arkham game. Oh, Peter. When he was... You are missing out on masterpieces here. Absolute modern game masterpieces. I played, I platinumed the first game Arkham Asylum.
02:26:43
Speaker
And then back to back, played the second game. I think that's Arkham City. City is the second one. And I just, I was burnt out. I needed a pallet cleanser and just never went back. Because playing, the playman trophy requires perfect execution in those combat zones at the end. Like the free flight combat. Free flight combat 101. I've got that baby. Arkham 9. I've got it. I've got it. Because this is why I do not
02:27:09
Speaker
Chinese Trojans because you've now missed out. The enjoyment of the game. It ruins the enjoyment of the game. We're going to move forward though. I don't know if we are, Peter. We need to talk about the fact you haven't played Arkham City or Arkham Knight.
02:27:25
Speaker
Pete, one of the most enjoyable things in life is standing on the top of GCPD with Batman in Arkham Knight in the fucking rain and just watching those droplets run down that armour because every droplet has a unique path. And then you jump off Gotham Tower and you glide straight down as fast as you can. And about 200 metres before you faceplant into the earth, you call the Batmobile and then you swoop back up.
02:27:54
Speaker
and land in it and then you flip off everyone in around and they're like up and around the street. Kevin Conroy as well. Other than Kevin Conroy's I Am The Night, I Am The Vengeance, I Am The Batman speech, the single best line Kevin Conroy has ever uttered in any Batman media is evening the odds.
02:28:19
Speaker
when you first get to call the Batmobile in Arkham Knight. He's just like- Because he's speaking in Oracle and she's like, what are you going to do? He's like, even if you're the odds. And that's just like, it's just so cinematic and beautiful. It's just, it gives you fucking chills. It does a close up on the brake pads as they start pulling down. I don't even know that I can go back now because- You can, you can.
02:28:43
Speaker
Can you play it on PS5? It's a PS4 title, and they've remastered both the original ones for PS4. Yeah, right. The Return to Arkham. Yeah, right. Okay. The last game mechanic in our spotlight. I'm going to pee and get a beer. Okay.
Gaming Mechanics Critiques
02:28:59
Speaker
The last game mechanic in our spotlight was also... Oh, yeah. This is a good one.
02:29:05
Speaker
Also, and it's not just Assassin's Creed, but stealth based solutions or stealth based games where there's either no stealth based solution to a particular mission problem or it's so unimportant and so unrewarding that you just stop bothering.
02:29:24
Speaker
And the AC games that moved into the open world freeform RPG are definitely a, you know, have committed this crime. They haven't just committed this crime. I think they wrote the book on this crime. There was just, there was no point in sneaking around anymore, but Horizon, the second Horizon game was far less stealth based on the first one.
02:29:45
Speaker
Yes, no, 100%. Yep. I suck at these stealth base. I hate it when it's, like Spider-Man's a perfect example. I hate it when you have to do a Mary Jane spider, spider stealth based mission came along. Cause I'm just like. Whereas I enjoyed that. That's how you do it. Yeah, but I'm a little, I'm a little Leroy Jenkins just wants to run in charge. Like.
02:30:08
Speaker
I'm fucking Spider-Man. Why am I being Mary Jane right now? I could flip everyone. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you're right. Sometimes they put them in and it's really out of place though. Like, especially in most modern day games. The Mary Jane missions were fucking annoying. They were out of place. Yep. Yep. 100%.
02:30:26
Speaker
But I, yeah, I was, I was more referring to, to even if you wanted, if you were dedicated and committed to playing the stealthy assassin in any of the last four AC games. I'm trying to think of one in Odyssey, cause that's obviously the one I played.
02:30:41
Speaker
where it really mattered. It doesn't matter though. Cause you can just go head to head and just kill everyone. It's just, it's so much faster. And once you got the ability to throw the spear and just use that as a teleport item. It's, it's just no longer a, yeah, there's, there's no reward for being stealthy anymore. I'd love the spear of Leonidas in, uh, in, uh, Odyssey, Odyssey. I just, I just think that is the,
02:31:11
Speaker
Because that has weight. It has weight in the same way that the Kratos' Axe has weight in the new God of War games. Oh, that's a big call. I don't think it does, but I like the mechanic of. Different weights. I'd like to point that out there. Yeah, that was different weights. But I think you throw it with, there's a certain gravity to throwing it. Oh, the way he did that first throw, which is kind of like a backhand throw, and he threw it out like that, that definitely, that carried weight. That carried weight.
02:31:41
Speaker
But my point was I just don't build stealth mechanics into a game or don't build a fucking Assassin's Creed game, which was predicated on the concept of stealthy assassinations. And then don't reward me for playing stealth. And Horizon.
02:31:59
Speaker
Forbidden West was exactly the same. Yep. Yep. And Hitman is exactly the same. The new Hitman's where they punish you for doing things in certain ways. Yeah. And I fucking hate that. Like don't give me, don't give me a little.
02:32:16
Speaker
They give you will they don't punish you but they go well fucking he wouldn't do this so they give you a little negative score on your top corner no don't fucking do that i want to play the game what the way i want to fucking play it not the way you want me to play is at least give yourself a cry if you took out the entire base stealth you got bonus points for it.
02:32:37
Speaker
If you did without anyone noticing and you start from afar or... Well, Hitman, Hitman, you do as well. If you do like the stealth assassinations and what do they call them? Environmental assassinations where you hide the body and things like that. You get the bonus points for that. But don't punish me.
02:32:56
Speaker
but playing it how I want to do it. If I want to if I want to be the ruthless hitman and get to get to my objective the way I want to get to it, then I want to get to it that way. Don't give me a negative score. And if people want to chase scores and things like that in games like that, that's fine. It's perfectly fine. But allow me to turn that off.
02:33:17
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, totally. Totally. Don't have it as a core mechanic. But yeah, sorry, that was my interruption. No. That point you were making. But it's utterly on point. Yeah. And in the case of the AC games, the last three games, Origins, Odyssey, and whatever the last turd was. Valhalla. Valhalla. You can spend an hour and a half silently killing everyone in a large fortress.
02:33:46
Speaker
And it nets you absolutely no reward that walking in the front gate and finding everyone at once doesn't. So why the fuck would you? And Valhalla almost... It rewards... It doesn't quite penalize you for stealth, but... Well, it doesn't, but it's a... Not for the time penalty. It gives you the... It puts you in the mindset of road riding, because they're called raids. Yeah.
02:34:12
Speaker
So the Vikings didn't raid by, well, I mean, some points they did, but, but the whole idea of that game is row your fucking boat to the shore, get out, kill the fucking monk before he rings the goddamn bell.
02:34:26
Speaker
Yeah. And just annihilate everyone. But that was a game that punished you for killing civilians and priests. And it's like, and I think we talked about it when it first came out, like, fair enough civilians, but priests? No, no, no. I'm pretty sure that was the whole fucking goal for a lot of those raids. Well, it was because they were worshiping not your God, so you didn't care about them. Not only that, but where were all the riches concentrated in that age? In the fucking church. In churches.
02:34:54
Speaker
Yeah. Because everyone else was poor. That was, that was where the Catholic church originated, originally got its power by concentrating wealth where everyone else was poor. The Viking Age is, the start of the Viking Age is determined by the raid on Lindisfjall.
02:35:13
Speaker
I mean, that is literally where they start. The historical age of the Vikings. So, yeah. Which I'm pretty sure was the start of one of the Vikings. Tom's mate on Instagram is probably going to correct me on that. Chris will probably correct me on that. And now that you're back, Tom, I'm going to go take a look. I was going to say, if you want to talk about where the Catholic Church took power, I think that was when they started taking the children out. On that note.
02:35:43
Speaker
The devil's letters takes on a whole different meeting in that time. Yeah, something else about the bush and the toxic Avenger. Tom, Tom, are you winning, son? I am so sorry. I spoiled this. I thought you talked about it when Ed was on.
02:36:01
Speaker
No, I was very close to being finished when we, we, I'm assuming we're moving on with the spotlight then. Yeah. Oh, no. Have you got more to say? No, no, I was just, you know, we get sensitive about if we move on without him, you know, his approval. Oh, okay. If we got any more to add here. I mean, I'm sure there is more.
02:36:19
Speaker
But I mean, those are the big ones. I mean, they're the ones that we talk about a lot. They're the triple A ones where I think people have the studios and missteps. I mean, you take in Ubisoft and EA that have made these big titles and these ongoing franchises that have continuously put these things in that people go, come on, man, like seriously, like fucking wake up to yourself in this
02:36:47
Speaker
in this and we're not we're not talking now or we are talking now we're the the the the general age of the people playing these games with the disposable income to continuously buy them on day one and that we're not talking about 18 to 25 year olds now we're talking our age we're talking 35 to 35 to 50 now the people that have grown up with the growth of the gaming industry yeah so for these for them to
Game Developer Disconnect and Fan Reactions
02:37:16
Speaker
arrogantly ignore the comments of people is incredible. Are we talking about Todd Howard? Oh, well, he's the prime example. He's absolutely the prime example. He's so disconnected from his fan base. But you see these people get... Yeah, because he used to be a god and now he's, you know, he's just... He fell from grace from his own fucking mouth, man. Like that's no one's fault but his. No, that's true.
02:37:41
Speaker
He's just an arrogant piece of shit anyway sorry what did I walk back into. Think about what's his name from Activision like that goes to the same thing he thought he was God's gift to gaming. Bill mayor from from Sony back when ever quest to was was a. No he's the late night guy.
02:38:05
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, you walked in with exactly the right point. You just read like you just reinforce my point that we've all made comments and it's been very vocal even in in gaming displays. I mean, the first one comes to mind the Diablo immortal when they announced that as a mobile only like they doubled down on Diablo being mobile for a little while and nobody nobody
02:38:34
Speaker
actually said. Nobody cared. Nobody cared. Literally, it was the start of Jurassic Park. It was like, we got Diablo on mobile, see? Nobody cares. Nobody cares. It was just, they were booed on stage when they announced it as mobile. It's like, don't double down on this shit, man. I'd actually go back and go, you know what, guys? You didn't like this. You
02:38:57
Speaker
You and tod Howard with the same when he was talking about some fall at seventy six and they know and online game people just wanted full at four you didn't want a microtransaction thing but they back this to the end it was a fucking disaster when it came out.
02:39:12
Speaker
And then I just never played it. But that is a fucker who is just perennially just, just holding himself down the Nile. Yeah. He's that guy stuck in denial indefinitely. I thought you were about to say he's just having a lovely punt on the Thames. Like just, he's just having a lovely boat ride. But I really like where you went with it. That was great. That was so hard. No, it worked on so many levels.
02:39:35
Speaker
For someone to so so so a a fan and he wasn't a detractor he was a fan asked him during a recent asked me anything on reddit. You know he basically accused starfield of not being optimized for pc.
Skyrim Reflections and Anecdotes
02:39:52
Speaker
And Todd Howard's response was, maybe the problem is your PC is not optimized. Ah, he's done a Villanoo. What an arrogant piece of shit. Ah. What a shitty thing to say to a fan. Anyway, we should move on. Dan, are you winning, son?
02:40:08
Speaker
Oh, I went to Tom and I apologise while you were gone for Tom, for spoiling Tom. I just didn't know if we were ready to move on. That's all. That's all right. We're ready to move on and we're rolling into Tom because I, oh, it's all these big news. All right. Well, no, you didn't spoil my big news, but yes, I finally done it. I Platinum Skyrim the other week. It was, it was.
02:40:31
Speaker
Bit of sweet. I really wasn't, I love that game. You would have been emotional about it. I was actually a bit numb. I was actually bit numb because I was so elated to have gotten my hundredth platinum. So I've hit my target. Um, I have a special way to celebrate huge fucking effort, man. I do have a special way to celebrate. It's not the playing a game of Centurion on a podcast. So we, um, sorry, man, I'm not going to do a hundred shots in a hundred minutes and absolutely derail an episode. Uh, I have another way to celebrate kidneys.
02:41:01
Speaker
That'll be fine. My liver's, every time I go to the doctor, they check my liver and they go, well, you have such a healthy liver. And I'm like, your equipment's wrong. Your equipment is wrong. Hey, who was the last time you reconfigured your fucking MRI? Hey, they say you don't use it, you lose it. And like, mine is a marathon athlete.
02:41:25
Speaker
Absolute marathon athlete. Also, did you guys crack a fifth different beer? Yeah. Did you want to talk about it? Correct. Yeah. Okay. Well, we'll do it after this because I cracked one too. No, no. So yeah, no, I got to the end of Skyrim. It was bittersweet because I was just, I was so happy to be back there. It was, it was, I loved that game. I loved that world. Skyrim is a beautiful game.
02:41:50
Speaker
I love everything about it. I understand where you're coming from, the fast travel. I think it's definitely detracting in that thing, but other times it's, I agree. I wish it had a Witcher 3 style system. They do have the carriage travel. If you go to major towns, you can book a carriage to go from major city to major city. Why bother? When you can fast travel, why would you? Yeah. 100%. Can I ask, this is going to be really random and left field. Go.
02:42:16
Speaker
Unlike all your other questions. Yes. Have I, have I told you guys about my experience with Arena? The original. Oh, yeah. The original. Yeah. Elder Scrolls. No, no, please. So what, so I played Elder Scrolls Arena when I was.
02:42:31
Speaker
Eight or nine. Yeah, I actually, I would have to go back and figure out when it was released to figure out how old I was, but I was really, really young. And the reason I say that is you would start the game fresh and you would start in an area like a zone of the game and I would, I would inevitably perish. There was no way I could, I could really play the game properly because I'd get to a point where I would just eventually die in the desert. And the reason is I was so young that I-
02:43:02
Speaker
I was so young that I'd, so I would have been 14, 13, somewhere in that space. Um, I was so young that I didn't understand the concept of fast travel and Morrowind was a game where you needed to fast travel to the main city to be able to continue the storyline. Elder Scrolls Arena. Sorry, I said Morrowind. Yeah. Um, I just didn't understand the concept of fast traveling and I couldn't figure it out as a teenager or as a young teen.
02:43:27
Speaker
And I just, the game was unplayable to me as a result, but I've, I've played the original Elder Scrolls around. Yeah. Proud to say that. And it beat me because I didn't understand faster. I think we all went back to when we were 13, 14 playing games with, there's a fair few that beat us. There was a lot of beating going on. Is that what you're saying, Tom?
02:43:47
Speaker
Absolutely bashing myself. Um, but yes, no, as I was talking about Skyrim, so yes, no, it was, it was just, I've, I've been in love with that world since the game came out. I remember it was, it was about 11 years ago now when it first released 10, 11. Um, cause they have released the 10th anniversary. Um, I remember exactly where it was when the game released. It broke street day.
02:44:07
Speaker
It broke street date because I was working at EB games at the time and my boss called me. She said, Hey, just let you know we've got reports that people are selling Skyrim. And I was with my housemate Pat and we looked at each other and I went, Skyrim's Skyrim's out early and we dropped everything.
02:44:24
Speaker
We will go and secure a copy. No, no, we had pre-order copies, but to go and pick them up to the point where, and I am proud of this, we had a double date dinner plan that night and we canceled it to play Skyrim. And the both of us sitting in our opposite rooms in the house played until like three, four in the morning. We were in so much trouble, but we couldn't have been fucking happier. It was one of the greatest things ever. And since then, like.
02:44:49
Speaker
I, you guys know, if I, if I can't sleep, I put on my Skyrim ambience hour long thing and I'm out like that. It's beautiful. I've been in love with the game. I can't get enough of it. So to go back and make that my hundredth. And I had some really good games over those hundred platters. And that's, that is a, that is a drop in the ocean of the amount of games I've actually played. Um,
02:45:13
Speaker
So I've talked about this before, but I have my gaming music playlist on Spotify. And I went back and tried to think of every single game I've played since the
02:45:26
Speaker
pre-64 up until a PS5. And it's over 500 games. And I haven't finished all of them by any stretch of the imagination. Most of those games, it's like, finish the story, move on. But to actually go through and do 100 of those games and go through the tasks and challenges, my proudest one is still Star Wars Battlefront II, having to do the multiplayer online. That, to me, especially being a Star Wars game,
02:45:57
Speaker
getting that final hero ship kill as an assault fighter. I remember being there in the house. We were in Queens Park at the time. Emma was working on some essay paper to the right of me, and I'm there, and I've screamed. I've just fucking bellowed. Just like, I've fucking done it! Yes! And that was it. I was hooked then. That was really the game that got me here. I was like, no, no. If I can do it with fucking Battlefront II, I can platinum any fucking game on the planet.
02:46:26
Speaker
Um, that is a lie. I cannot. There are so many games I would never be able to find them, but you know what, you know, it was, it was a boost for me. I can, I, yeah, I can totally relate to what you're saying. So yeah, to finally get there and with one of my favorite games of all time was really special moment. I'm very proud of myself. Um.
02:46:42
Speaker
But the best comment I got, got a shout out. She's not gonna listen this way, this far into the episode, but dad will. Mum referring it to the having the same feeling of when she was studying for her masters at the con in terms of the hours I've put into playing games and the hours she put into piano playing. I was like, they are not comparable at all. Thank you, mother. I very much appreciate that. That was, you know, especially for her to go, you know what,
02:47:07
Speaker
Like she was one of two connect turn off that bloody gaming machine get off it She doesn't sound like that, but she does with them right to her voice But you know it's for her to be yelling at me constantly to get off the center a lot like John Cleese then yeah Yeah for her to be you're constantly being like get off the gaming machine You know turn off the idiot box and go back and do something to be like no I'm actually proud of you for what you've done the dedication you've done Batman a lot and
02:47:33
Speaker
Um, and yeah, I've, I lied to everyone as well. I've got to apologize. I did say I was going to not go straight back into a PlayStation game. I went dove straight into Trek to Yomi, got halfway through, got halfway through the first mission, had to turn it off because I was not in the right frame of mind to play it. And I really want to give it the time it's due. But even in that first half of that, like first mission, I was like, this is really cool. And it plays like an old samurai film. Like.
02:48:01
Speaker
So definitely going to go back to that. Instead, I went to the complete opposite spectrum and I've been playing wreckfest, which is a racing destruction derby game. And it is the dumbest fucking thing on the planet, but it's so much fun. And I'm literally just driving around American muscle cars and blowing them up with other idiots online. And it's great.
02:48:27
Speaker
And I'll do a day. But yes, no, I do have a special celebration for getting my 100 Platinum's, which I will book in and eventually show you guys once it's on my skin.
02:48:39
Speaker
I'm going to jump in here, Pete. I just want to reiterate what Tom said about his housemate at the time and grabbing Skyrim, because the age difference between me and Tom isn't a huge amount, but it's enough. My housemate at the time was James, that we all know, and we had the very similar experience with Oblivion.
02:49:03
Speaker
I didn't know what the Elder Scrolls was. I had very recently, well, not recently, but I'd had a PC for a while, but it wasn't for PC solo gaming. It was about traveling out and playing lands with Sui and a few other friends with Call of Duty. Carrying your CRT 1-0 to 1-0.
02:49:28
Speaker
Strap the CRT into the front seat, monitor screen against the back and put the fucking seatbelt around it and plug it in. And that's how we rolled. I'll never forget, just interrupt for a sec. I'll never forget discovering that I could get my two 21 inch CRT monitors and would touch edge to edge in the back seat of my lancer. It was exactly the width of my lancer.
02:49:56
Speaker
21s were like you rich fuck spending all your money on screens at the time.
02:50:01
Speaker
So, James and me lived together at the time and he had played, I think he played Elder Scrolls since Dagorfell? Dagorfield? Dagorfold? Whatever the second one was. The second one was. And then he was in love with Morrowind. So he was telling me about Morrowind and how Oblivion was coming out. And this was really close to the release date of Oblivion, like days. He wouldn't be excited by Oblivion.
02:50:28
Speaker
And Patrick should as the emperor. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and then he's, he's telling me about oblivion and I had a PC and it was like, well, well, fuck, I gotta, I'm going to have to play this as well. I mean, this sounds incredible. And he's like,
02:50:43
Speaker
I have, and me and James, we shared a study. So, which was, Pete was the back room at Icarus. And James was up against the far wall and I was right next to the door and we were both playing Oblivion. And it's like, it's like at the same time, I think he might've started a day or two before me, but we were like, I mean, such a huge world. You weren't that far behind each other unless you really got lost. And it's just like,
02:51:08
Speaker
we just got lost in this world. And it was just, he was telling me about it. And then it was just this enjoyment of understanding something with somebody else in the household. And it just, just playing through this game and talking about it. And it was, it was not the first big fantasy RPG that I'd ever played because that was probably. Oh no, that came years later.
02:51:34
Speaker
Yes, I didn't I played Witcher 2 before I played one. And when I played two, I went back and played one. James will be very happy to know then that in the the if he hasn't played it in the Dragonborn DLC, when you go to the Morrowind Island, it plays some of the soundtrack from Morrowind.
02:51:50
Speaker
Oh, he would be very happy with that. I'm sure, but he doesn't have a PC. So he's, I think he's got, I think he's got an Xbox 360, but which you could probably still play the dragon board DLC on it. Oh yeah. It'll be there. Yeah. Yeah. So I have a very experienced of a similar experience to you with the, uh, with the, the, the, um,
02:52:11
Speaker
the precursor to Skyrim with Oblivion. Well, I actually bought my, the TV I had for 10 years, I bought for Skyrim when it first came out on PS3. I bought my 42 inch, it was my first TV that I'd bought that I hadn't scavenged some fucking massive CRT off a council cleanup in the local neighborhood. And then the second TV I've ever bought was when I bought for the PS5. So that's how long I had that TV for and how many games that took me through. Incredible.
02:52:40
Speaker
What are you winning now, Dan? Because we completely avoided that subject. Yep. So, modded Skyrim. So, obviously, I spoke about earlier, Tom inspired me to jump back into Skyrim. I had it installed, but I hadn't actually gotten through it. Tom randomly sends me the, oh, you're awake, or whatever the intro just got, randomly sends me these things.
02:53:02
Speaker
I shuttered to log into Instagram and say how many messages. I stopped a while ago and I figured you weren't on Instagram anymore. I stopped sending you things. I haven't logged into Instagram for about three months, three or four months, maybe even longer.
02:53:18
Speaker
Uh, 16 versions of someone like doing a video and like they drop the camera. That's my favorite one. There's some dude drops a phone camera down a flight of stairs and then you follow the phone camera. And as it flips, it flips in the last thing and it cuts the opening sign of Skyrim. Oh, Hey, you're awake. You're awake. It gets me every time.
02:53:39
Speaker
So I just dropped some incredible mods on Skyrim. I dropped some lighting mods, some updated lighting mods, just some bits and pieces, some more quality of life stuff than anything else. And the biggest quality of life... Inventory management? No, I've started to look at inventory stuff. I really didn't like the lighting mods, but yeah. Can you play mods on the PlayStation? Yep.
02:54:07
Speaker
Yeah, Creation Club mods you can access the mod store. So when I played Skyrim, Skyrim is my VR game. Yes. My one and only VR game, really. And there was no mods. There was no option for mods. Yeah, on the PS5 version I played, you had access to the mod store. If you accessed any mods, if you had them active, it would disable trophies. Yeah, it does on the PC as well.
02:54:37
Speaker
Yeah. Right. I actually, I actually found them. I didn't like the mods. I used a couple of lighting mods when I finished and went through and had a little like play around and I found them, some of them were too realistic in the lighting and it was like trying to run around at night. It was like, I actually can't see shit. Like this is not fun yet.
02:54:54
Speaker
Anyway, yeah, so I dropped like just some forest and foliage mods on which increased the density of the foliage. My PC doesn't even skip a beat with these mods on so I need to I need to bump it up a little bit more because those mods are out.
02:55:10
Speaker
They've been out so long. Yeah, of course. They're super efficient. So the most, the best quality of life one I put on is it's called Open Cities and it's no more loading into cities. 100% agree with that. It's wonderful immersion. You just walk up to the city gate, you hit E to open it and it just opens both ways and you just walk in and everything's loaded already. There is, I did discover that there is another one for some of the keeps that are within cities.
02:55:39
Speaker
which blend them into the open city mods for Windhelm and the first city. White one. There is one that blends them into the open city mods as well. Blue colors for Solitude maybe? Maybe, yeah I haven't gotten to Solitude yet. If I'm a good boy maybe I'll get that.
02:56:04
Speaker
So that's my quality of life. And that was kind of one of the ones that really increased my immersion for walking through the world unbroken. And that's where the fast travel really snapped my brain. So I'm thoroughly enjoying just
02:56:25
Speaker
once again, as Tom said, just being in the Skyrim world. And I engaged some bandits on a catwalk the other day. And all of a sudden in the background, I hear this fucking dragon scream and this dragon just allude through and tried to grab the bandit off the catwalk. And then it just ended up as a three way battle between me, the bandits and the dragon. I mean, it's just been the beauty of those games since day dot is just so random.
02:56:54
Speaker
And more with Skyrim and the introductions of the dragons and their inclusion in the world at random intervals, not outside of the tombs, but just in the world. Pete?
02:57:10
Speaker
I am because it's the same developer. Before you get real sad, real sad. I've looked at what Pete's got written on the run sheet and I'm like, Oh, I get it now. I get it.
02:57:31
Speaker
All right. Who's drinking what? Fucking lay it on me. I am having... I definitely say this is a brewery we have not had on the podcast before, Pete. So that's why I picked this one. We're at four hours, by the way. Good. Good. Fucking lucky. It's a Labor Day long weekend. Alice Springs Brewing Co. Yeah, right. This is their stout.
02:57:56
Speaker
What's it called? No, no points for guessing where they're from. Um, it's literally just called stout. Okay. Um, this is their easy drinking stout. Yeah, it is. Um, yeah, it uses, uh, uh, Columbus Citra and, um, fuck these nuts. Nelson. Uh, no.
02:58:13
Speaker
It's 4.2%. Um, it is a look, if I was sitting in Alice Springs, uh, you know, desert, like, you know, it's really hot during the day, but cold at night. This is perfect. It's a really light stout. Um, it's nice and chocolatey. It's very roasty. Um, four points, 4.2. Yeah, right. Yeah. Um, but yeah, brew down now. Um, and it's, yeah, it's, it's quite light. It's quite, uh, quite delicious.
02:58:44
Speaker
Um, a very easy to sit on little, little, Oh God. Um, sorry. Very, very easy to sit on. Yeah. Nice. You don't usually get low ABV stats. Seems everyone wants to push a stout up to 7% minimum. Look, they literally either do a, a, you know, a 4.2 is pretty regular ABV like, or it's, it's, it's either six and above or it's, it's a four point something. Yeah. Yeah. Out of five.
02:59:14
Speaker
Oh, I would definitely give that a, that's a four. It's a really enjoyable session. We'll stay up. Yeah. Nice. I could have a couple of those. Yeah. What are you having, Pete? We've lost Dan. So I'm drinking. He's reading. Yeah. He's Gandalf in the, in the chasm of Minas Tirith being like the year 34, 34 second age. No, we're not doing the fucking place. Not bad.
02:59:42
Speaker
Yeah. No, we're not doing the fucking island jam from Dayton. Dayton beer. This is the Tropicana milkshake Neepa. It looks thick in your glass.
02:59:56
Speaker
It was very thick. I have not much left to say about it other than it leaves a residual on the glass that is like I pulled tropical fruit juice into my glass and drank it and smelled the glass. That's that's all I've gotten all the way through.
03:00:14
Speaker
Milk Shape Nipah. Look, it is soft on the tongue. Like, you know, I wouldn't say it's pillowy, but it is kind of in that spectrum.
03:00:27
Speaker
Yeah. 32 IBU. So not too, not too bitter. Um, 6.7%. It's just been a nice background beer. It hasn't been loud and in my face. So. I mean, that's good for a milkshake knee, but not be loud in your face. Yeah. Yeah. It's been exactly what I wanted, actually. Uh, I'm, I'm going to give it a, uh, give it a four. Four. Well done. Well done, Dean.
03:00:57
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. I always find hit or miss. It's always great or it's like, what the fuck am I doing? Yeah. So I've got Seiko cruising for a good pine lacto nipa. Cruising for a good pine lacto nipa.
03:01:17
Speaker
Pete, you were talking about tropical fruit juice in the glass. That's really what this is. It's got a kind of a light sound as to it, but it does actually have quite a sweetness to it. So I was just trying to see if it actually had some lactose in it, which I think it might. To call it a lactone, I better fucking have lactose in it, just saying.
03:01:44
Speaker
Well, lactobacillus, so that would be lactobacillus would be the sourness. So if they're going both ways.
03:01:52
Speaker
lactic acid and lactose. I don't know. It does come across that way that that's exactly what they've done. It's a pale though, isn't it? As opposed to IPA. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a 5.6% and just tropical fruit.
03:02:14
Speaker
It was exactly what I wanted to finish on after my fuck up of the pour of the mild or the mid. I was really disappointed there. So I'm glad I came through and finished on this one. It's a nice way to finish. It does say it contains lactose. It does. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's got that sweetness to it and it's got that tropical fruit all the way through. So yeah, it's really nice. 4.25.
03:02:43
Speaker
Beautiful. Hey, do we need to crack some lighters up or something? Like, you know, hold them up and wave them as you do this? It's been a high scoring beat. No, I'm talking about his review of Starfield. Do we need to like put the lighters up? No, it's not that good. No, no, no. Oh, and Dan fucked off anyway, so, you know. He needs to poop after the lactose. And because of daylight savings, it's still light outside.
03:03:14
Speaker
Yeah, so am I winning, son? Yes, I am, but not really. I lost. And then now I'm winning. I'm segwaying myself out of Starfield, which I've nicknamed Loading Simulator 2023. And I actually can't. You've seen loading or loading screen? Loading screen. OK. I want Dan back for this because he brought up earlier and it's just so
03:03:43
Speaker
It's so synthetically broken and I don't understand what the fuck the game designers were thinking when they built Skyrim. Jesus. Starfield. Keep drinking, Pete. It's kind of the same. Fallout had a few minor differences to Skyrim, but I still think of Fallout 4 as a
03:04:06
Speaker
wasteland, wasteland, or oblivion, yeah. Talk us through it. The humor in the main storylines, and I haven't actually played very much of the main campaign at all, because I know the main campaign is only like four or five hours long. So I've been doing all the faction quests and they've been fun, but I managed to break the game.
03:04:30
Speaker
Using standard game mechanics, I've broken the game to a point where while I'm playing through main missions, I'm constantly frustrated. So there's my first complaint.
03:04:40
Speaker
How I built broken. Yeah, so it's got a quite a complex outpost mechanic built into the game where you can build factories and you can mine for resources. You can build these cargo links that send the resources from planet one to planet two. And each planet can have up to six
03:05:01
Speaker
uh links to six other planets or you can have two planets linked six ways if you wanted to do it that way but basically you can move resources on aircraft on spacecraft
03:05:14
Speaker
And each outpost can have up to six links to other app posts, whether that's one or six. Which sounds like Fallout. You used to have that in... Yes, it's a copy of Fallout 4's home state mechanic. Settlements. Settlements. Settlements mechanic.
03:05:32
Speaker
Except i've got so you can have up to i think it's twenty four outposts total i think is the maximum caps out and each outposts can have up to six links obviously with only.
03:05:48
Speaker
What, Dan? No, that's just the multiplier is huge. Yeah, I was trying to do the maths in my head and it didn't work. But the multiplier only applies to the rest of your outposts. So, at most, you can have six links times 24, sure, but they can only ever talk back to your other outposts, so you have to divide that by two. Okay, gotcha.
03:06:11
Speaker
Right. So it's 144 divided by two. You can have up to divided by two, divided by two. I'm doing the math 72. You can have up to 72 links. Right. I have 12. Okay. And the game calculating which ship is moving which resource where, but 12 links.
03:06:34
Speaker
is so inefficient that I can't walk through the main town doing nothing related to my outposts without lag, stopping me for solid five seconds, have three frames, stop for another second, have three frames, stop for another solid five seconds. Five seconds is a long time to lag a game.
03:06:55
Speaker
That's horrible. And it's every 30 seconds without fail. It has a pattern of five seconds of lag, two seconds of lag, one second of lag, five seconds lag, three seconds lag. Play the game for two, three minutes. It's game breaking lag.
03:07:13
Speaker
Do you think that's a result of the Xbox being shit? No, no. Well, I mean, Todd Howard tells me it's because the Xbox isn't, isn't fucking. Cut that Phil Spencer, you dick. It is actually a mechanic that has broken Xbox Series X and has not broken 40, 80 and 40, 90 players on PC.
03:07:40
Speaker
So it is a calculation engine issue. Right.
03:07:44
Speaker
Yeah, but 40, 80, 40, 90 players, they're graphical cards for those playing at home. I'm sorry, I use that term. They are graphics cards, yeah. They're graphics cards, but they're the modern graphics cards that are like two grand each or something. 2,600 for a 40, 80 and $3,000 for a 40, 90. Yeah, so I'm running a 30, 70. Yeah. Yeah. So you'd have the same problem I do. So I've not been
03:08:11
Speaker
Like, like I said, you can have up to 72 cargo links and I've got nine and it breaks the game. That's, that's fucked. And I, you know, those nine cargo links, I've got this series of factories. Cause I thought the building. Is that cause they're running constantly in the background kind of thing. Yeah. It's trying to calculate.
03:08:28
Speaker
Yes, so like, if you're extracting resources out of a planet, you have to, like, there's these random zones on a planet where you can, like, you'll be able to see with your scanner, that area has nickel under the ground. And you can, in that area, you can drop nickel extractors, which are like these big factory machines that pull nickel. Yeah, they're extractors.
03:08:50
Speaker
And those extractors can point to storage boxes and those storage boxes can then point to the cargo link and the cargo link takes your nickel to another planet that uses that nickel in a factory machine to develop parts. So I might mix gold with silver to come out with this thing called zero wire.
03:09:10
Speaker
And zero wire, it's funny because I've got this factory setup where a machine and it's a 3D printer. You walk right up to it. The graphics are amazing. You walk right up to this machine and it's literally 3D printing this thing in real time in front of you. And I've got 20 of these in a row.
03:09:29
Speaker
They take all the gold that I've extracted from the planet I'm on and all the silver I've extracted from another planet that I shipped in and it produces this zero wire and then zero wire gets stored in this warehouse and then gets inputted into another machine that gets added to some other resource I'm extracting this plant. Long story short, I've got like, like I said, I've got nine cargo links moving resources around so I can make this shit that I can sell.
03:09:59
Speaker
Yeah. Breaks the fucking game. And then you get into the loading simulator part of the game. So.
03:10:08
Speaker
In a mission that I did recently, the main city, the first main city that you go to is this place called Jemisin. It's a planet you go to. And to get from the main starport zone to the military zone is a loading screen. So you get off your ship, you walk through, you get on a monorail. The monorail is a loading screen to get to the next zone.
03:10:36
Speaker
Then you walk into a lift and as soon as you click on the lift button, it's another loading screen to go up to the floor that you're on. And you do this mission, you talk to this lady and this lady says, oh, you've been signed in as a citizen, come up to this other place and I'll swear you in. You then load another time to get to the top of this fucking zone that you're on. And you're on this top, you're on top of a building.
03:11:01
Speaker
And while she's talking to you, you've now loaded four times since you got off your ship just to get up there. And while you're on the top of the building, you can look down and you're a million miles up, but you can see your ship. I thought, I wonder how broke the game gets if I just jump off the fucking cliff. I've got a jet pack. I can land safely. It's all good. So I jump off and coast along with my jet pack and I land on my ship seamlessly.
03:11:31
Speaker
So four times I have loaded to get from my ship to where I started and yet I can smoothly fucking land on my ship without loading again. The moral of the story is to fly up.
03:11:47
Speaker
I was commenting and I forgot I was on mute. That's crazy. That's 100% synthetic. That's also, that's Skyrim on launch. It was loading screen after loading screen every time you went through a door. That's just a Bethesda game on launch. It's just a sad thing, but yeah, I understand your frustration.
03:12:07
Speaker
Yeah, so if you look at Jemisin, if I look at two zones, there's two shops in each of the two zones and there's four zones in Jemisin. But there's two zones with two shops each. The first zone, you walk into the shop and it's open space. You literally just walk smoothly from your spaceship up to this lady, standing behind a counter and you can talk to her and she sells you shit. You go into the next zone and you walk to the edge of the, like you walk up to the door of the shop.
03:12:35
Speaker
and it loads you into the shop and the shop is only one room. It's a standing area and a bench area and the lady. There's no difference between the size of the sizes of the two stores in zone one versus zone two, but arbitrarily zone one is all open space and zone two, it's three loading areas total. It just makes no fucking sense.
03:13:01
Speaker
And then you add that to the auto load, auto, like the travel point system. I can get from one side of the galaxy to the other, as long as I've got bases on both planets, I can instantly travel. I don't even have to get in my ship. And then there's one last piece that really tops it off for me, and that is the procedurally generated
03:13:26
Speaker
areas when you land on a planet randomly and the layout of those procedurally generated bases that you can invade and attack and explore, there's only five or six of them. And then it just repeats. So I've been, I've now gone to the same base with the exact same layout, with the exact same backstory, with the exact same storyline 50 fucking times. Yeah.
03:13:55
Speaker
Because the procedurally generated bases aren't procedurally generated, like there's a base seed. It's a game that you can see the potential in.
03:14:10
Speaker
But it has not delivered. And this, I think this rolls back to the Skyrim thing. It just, is it up to the modders to fix these things? Like open cities. I mean, Bethesda's never released in open cities, but the modders do open cities and it was just a simple... Well, I think Bethesda's probably sitting on their laurels being like, we don't need to release in open cities now because the modders don't, so someone else can patch in and play that.
03:14:35
Speaker
A few people have asked that question. Is it like, can these guys get away with half, like half finishing a game and just expecting the modder community to finish it? Is that fair? Will they do it? Yeah, they fucking will. Is it fair and reasonable? It's resting on their laurels because the modder community has done that for the last, what, six, seven games of theirs they're released. But at the same point, this is, this is a game with half the campaign length of Fallout 4. It's a very, very short campaign.
03:15:05
Speaker
Kind of glad it wasn't released on PlayStation now. So I moved from that to Baldur's Gate 3. Hey! It's exactly the game I had hoped it would be. Yeah. I've been reading nothing but good reviews about Baldur's Gate 3, so I'm glad you're on. Maybe we should park it, because we're at four hours 20 or something in that range. Maybe I'll talk about BG3 next episode. We only want a couple of hours in. Eight hours, you said?
03:15:34
Speaker
Yeah, 12 hours into the game, I think. But Dan and I have played everything Larian Studios has made. So it's interesting to see the game mechanics that Larian invented from scratch versus implementing D&D fifth edition rules into the game. And they've done such a great job that you can see the flaws in the original D&D fifth edition rule set.
03:16:05
Speaker
I really mean that. I really mean that. There's a core flaw in the game mechanics which they've now expanded around that the BG3 hasn't, their expansions haven't kind of added all these extra rules. It's a base game implementation, but the base game of fifth edition D&D, the resource handling in the early game is terrible.
03:16:32
Speaker
You have to fucking have a short rest after every fight. You have to have a long rest after every second or third fight. And so when you play the game, you're like, the fuck, like I just killed three goblins and now I have to sleep. That's not a problem with the game. That's a, that's a problem with the actual rule set. So yeah, we'll, we'll talk more about that in the next step. I think that sounds good. What are you going to say, Dan? No, you're about to weigh in, but you can, you can see the hour of.
03:17:03
Speaker
No, I'm perfectly fine. I'm trying to order pizza for me and Louise for dinner at the same time, as well as paying attention. I think the Baldur's Gate is a bigger discussion. I'm happy to have it. I'm more than happy to have it now because I think there's pros and cons. I've played the beta, I think I've said like three times I played through the area that was allowed because I had to.
03:17:28
Speaker
Man, I looked something up on the internet yesterday because I was completely, I was at loggerheads. I looked something up on the internet and the response was from 2021. Yeah. That's mental. Well, I dislocated my elbow in January 21. So I started playing Baldur's Gate 3 in early access at least May
03:17:54
Speaker
21. And this is a game that's gone to full release last month. Yeah. In 2023. Yep. Two years of early access. That's crazy. But I mean, you can't fault them for doing something like that. I mean, they don't, they've done that and then they've released an amazing product. I mean, I feel bad for all the fucking beta testers. Wasn't it a tiny studio though? It is a absolutely tiny studio. It's their third ever game. Yeah. Yeah.
03:18:22
Speaker
I think, uh, Peter, it'd be a good idea for you to get a fair chunk into it and then report back our investigative reporter and the bolders gate three Peter. All right. I think that's, that's all I got. Still ordering Peter still ordering.
03:18:44
Speaker
Old man uses technology. Yeah. Yeah. Old man uses technology. Old man yells in cloud. Yep. Yep. Yep. Excellent. Well, thank you everyone for listening in for a, yeah, it's been a little while since we've done a big long episode like this surely. I don't know. Um, yeah. Hope Dan enjoys his pizza.
03:19:08
Speaker
Yeah. It's painful. I just did it. Yeah. Well done. Very good. All right. I'm going to go. Sorry. It is. We've just entered daylight savings and I was meant to cook dinner after a four hour episode and I just, that was never going to happen. Well, if we'd finished an hour ago, it would have happened or even 30 minutes ago. We're now bordering quarter past seven where we should have been quarter past six. Is it?
03:19:37
Speaker
What year is it? It's too dark to be quarter past six. No, it wouldn't have been. It's cool enough now to take the dog for a walk. It should have been quarter past six. It's now quarter past seven. So it's too late. I'm going to go to the pub. Oh, and you're going to take a Jasper to the pub.
03:19:55
Speaker
No, no, he's not allowed. Oh, why not? Jasper goes to a pub and he infiltrates a kitchen and he ends up with food. I've gotten complaints from kitchens in our local area about Jasper coming in and getting food from local. Right. Is he ahead of the food or is he climbing up on counters and stealing food? Call me, call me. It's also a dog in a food preparation area. Yeah. Yeah, I get that. I get that.
03:20:23
Speaker
Ah, fuck it. It's only a dog. I mean, that's the nanny state Pete was talking about earlier. I mean, people in Australia need to pull their head out of their asses. I mean, there's a lot more dirty things than a dog in an area. Hell yeah. Oh, he has no health and safety training. His handling of the world is horrible. He pulls it straight down the sink. He's like, no, no. He needs to be pulled up. Don't get me wrong. They're right. Anyway, on that note. Thank you for listening. Goodbye.