Transcript
Speaker: Yeah, unless you're going to a place riddled with cholera.
Speaker: Right, yeah, don't go to a gas station and pass him around, but you're probably fine otherwise, so that was good to know.
Speaker: Yeah, we're going to leave him on the counter next to the hot dog warmer at a Sheetz.
Speaker: It's what Jesus would have done.
Speaker: It's what Jesus would have done.
Speaker: What Mary would have done with Jesus, I have to assume.
Speaker: I mean, she was a teen mother.
Speaker: Yeah, she didn't have... You think she had her shit together?
Speaker: She did not.
Speaker: She did not.
Speaker: She did not.
Speaker: She was marrying some carpenter dude.
Speaker: She was banging mighty deities like there are no consequences to that.
Speaker: No consequences.
Speaker: None.
Speaker: Saying there's an immaculate conception, I'd say it's just a...
Speaker: godly condom that happened to break.
Speaker: It's true.
Speaker: It's true.
Speaker: Everybody gets unlucky, even God.
Speaker: Everybody gets unlucky, even God.
Speaker: And you know who else is unlucky?
Speaker: Who's that?
Speaker: Hey there, everybody.
Speaker: Welcome back to Pixlet.
Speaker: My name is Kevin.
Speaker: With me as always is Phil.
Speaker: And on today's show, we're doing our Game of the Year episode.
Speaker: I'll tell you who's unlucky.
Speaker: Anyone who isn't on these lists.
Speaker: Anyone who is not on these lists.
Speaker: And you know what?
Speaker: Phil and I are giving you a bunch of games to check out today, basically.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Because our lists this year did not overlap as much as they did last year.
Speaker: I really thought this year was going to be worse because we did play a lot more games at the same time, the same kind of games.
Speaker: And we went through the list together and it's just a few.
Speaker: I was genuinely shocked.
Speaker: Just a few.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think there was probably a bunch of, I don't know.
Speaker: I don't know why it was.
Speaker: I was on a real horror kick this year, but you're always on a horror kick too.
Speaker: I was too.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: I was too.
Speaker: But let me see.
Speaker: Hold on.
Speaker: One, two, three.
Speaker: You know, and not as many of them as you'd think are horror games.
Speaker: There are a couple of horror-adjacent ones.
Speaker: Horror-adjacent.
Speaker: They're kind of iffy.
Speaker: You squint your eyes.
Speaker: Anyway, yeah.
Speaker: So you were saying something about games and how we play them.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Almost all the games on my list are horror games, with the exception of... One, two...
Speaker: Baldur's Gate 3.
Speaker: I've got four definite horror games and like...
Speaker: one or two that are adjacent that have some moments.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: For as many horror games as I played this year, because you're right.
Speaker: I, I, that's, that is kind of my bailiwick.
Speaker: Uh, I, uh, yeah, that's surprising.
Speaker: I hadn't even thought about it until now.
Speaker: That's hilarious.
Speaker: Uh, Baldur's Gate three has horror elements in it.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Without question.
Speaker: And so does pizza tower.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: But other than that, you know, but... Wait, are you seeing pizza towers on your list?
Speaker: I don't remember you being that pumped about that one.
Speaker: Pizza tower.
Speaker: We like, we have fun.
Speaker: We have fun.
Speaker: We have fun.
Speaker: We have fun here.
Speaker: We have fun here.
Speaker: We have fun here.
Speaker: So let's put all these 20 bodies.
Speaker: We got 20 bodies here and we got to put them all in a March.
Speaker: We're like, we're like, speaking of pizza, we're like a guy in an Italian restaurant and we're like, whoa.
Speaker: And we're balancing like stacks of pizza.
Speaker: We're like a waiter.
Speaker: And there's like a guy, there's a couple of guys with like, they're moving like glass.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: For some reason.
Speaker: And there's an old woman with a fruit stand, like a little cart.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's, there's a cat.
Speaker: It's just running around.
Speaker: And there actually is a cat that's running around.
Speaker: There is a cat.
Speaker: On my lap.
Speaker: She does not waste any time.
Speaker: Thank you, Ripley.
Speaker: Welcome.
Speaker: She's like, oh, the camera's on.
Speaker: I'll be right over.
Speaker: I'll be right over.
Speaker: Would you like an extra 20 pounds on your lap?
Speaker: Here we go.
Speaker: Pretty much, Lord, she's gotten big.
Speaker: And now she's got her winter coat and everything.
Speaker: She is just... It's just all fat and fluff.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: But that's what we love about her.
Speaker: No fat shaming in this family.
Speaker: We can't.
Speaker: It's not going to be that.
Speaker: Definitely wouldn't make any sense.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So we're going to put these bodies in the marsh and kick things off with number 10.
Speaker: Cops are saying he's a cop.
Speaker: So I won't look for the cop.
Speaker: Phil, what is your 10th?
Speaker: Best game of the year.
Speaker: My number 10 for this year is Micro Civilization, which now this one is kind of weird, a weird choice for me, not because of what it is, which is a clicker 4X game, because that actually fits my bill just fine.
Speaker: But the fact that it's an early access game and in fact, like really early access, like I think the last patch was like 0.6 or something along those lines.
Speaker: But the fact of the matter is, is
Speaker: There is so much content in there already.
Speaker: They're doing so many things right with it.
Speaker: It's satisfying.
Speaker: It's fun.
Speaker: I love the art style in it.
Speaker: Ripley.
Speaker: It's a really nice way to while away an hour or two while you're listening to podcasts and still feel like you're getting something done.
Speaker: It isn't like one of those clicker games that you could just leave it alone and it takes care of itself.
Speaker: It's definitely not that.
Speaker: You have to...
Speaker: You really do need to pay attention to it.
Speaker: Um, and, uh, and, and the stuff that they ask you to pay attention to is genuinely interesting.
Speaker: Uh, a lot of fun and it hits a lot of the same, uh, buttons that any great Forex, uh,
Speaker: will do in terms of research and leaders and even wonders and stuff like that.
Speaker: So for all of my Civ fans out there, this is a really enjoyable one.
Speaker: I don't have one, but I imagine that this would be a hell of a lot of fun on the Steam Deck.
Speaker: on a plane or on a car, you know, a, you know, a car trip, preferably when you're not driving or, or just hanging out, watching a movie or something at the end of the evening.
Speaker: I could see where this would be very entertaining for that.
Speaker: So I was weird with the idea of it being this in early access and putting on the list, but I can't ignore the fact that I've pumped a lot of time into this one.
Speaker: And so on number 10, it goes.
Speaker: So Kevin, what is, what is your number?
Speaker: 10 my number 10 is the aforementioned pizza tower it's a tower pizza tower is a platformer in the molds of wario um the wario land games so if you don't know especially in the later see i want to say i'm not a wario expert hot cider
Speaker: is a Wario expert.
Speaker: So if you want to learn more about Wario, go to his YouTube channel.
Speaker: He has several videos on the topic.
Speaker: But I believe it was in Wario Land 3 or 4.
Speaker: There was a mechanic introduced where you have to, you go through the level in one direction, right?
Speaker: You have to collect things, get a high score, and then you get to the end of the level and you hit a switch and the level starts basically like collapsing and falling apart.
Speaker: And it's like a little, you know, the Metroid self-destruct sequence at the end of every Metroid game.
Speaker: It's like that, but every level.
Speaker: So you hit the switch and now you have to backtrack your way out of the level, basically speed run back out of the level.
Speaker: in a way so that you get out of there before the timer hits zero.
Speaker: So that's Pizza Tower in a nutshell.
Speaker: You play as, what is his, it's some really Pizza Tower guy name.
Speaker: Pizza pasta?
Speaker: No, his name's Pepino.
Speaker: Ah, Pepino.
Speaker: I'm glad they showed some restraint.
Speaker: Some restraint.
Speaker: Some.
Speaker: You play as Pepino, who is this real twitchy pizza maker.
Speaker: He is in danger of being run out of business because...
Speaker: This entity named, I believe it's, yeah, it's Pizza Head or Pizza Face has built a tower, a pizza tower that is overshadowing his restaurant.
Speaker: So Pepino Spaghetti has to...
Speaker: Wait, is that seriously his last name?
Speaker: Yeah, I think so.
Speaker: Oh, my God.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: Okay, great.
Speaker: Great.
Speaker: Hold on.
Speaker: Peppino Spaghetti.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: His name's Pepino Spaghetti.
Speaker: Pepino Spaghetti.
Speaker: Anyway.
Speaker: Fair enough.
Speaker: So basically, the art style looks as if it's been drawn in MS Paint.
Speaker: But it's so well animated.
Speaker: It's kind of like a really high quality version of home movies.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: It's very home movies in its style.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: You run through these levels and there's a few worlds or a few stages on each level of the tower.
Speaker: And you have to get enough money or points on each stage in order to gain access to the elevator that takes you to the next level.
Speaker: And you rinse and repeat and you go up.
Speaker: And then each level of the tower is themed.
Speaker: So there's one level where it's like there's horror scenes
Speaker: stages in it that are, you know, spooky.
Speaker: And every time you get caught, you get a jump scare.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: So, yeah, and there's boss fights and and and all that stuff.
Speaker: It's it's really charming, really, really weird.
Speaker: Just in terms of.
Speaker: what it is and the art style jammed with a genre or a game that, which is Wario land, which is very specific.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Number 10 pizza tower starring Pepino spaghetti.
Speaker: Go check it out.
Speaker: It's if you have a steam deck, it's actually a really good game for the steam deck because it is a platformer.
Speaker: And I feel like platformers really shine on the steam deck.
Speaker: Oh, absolutely.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: Pizza tower.
Speaker: Phil.
Speaker: What's number nine?
Speaker: Number nine.
Speaker: Uh,
Speaker: I was in great danger this year of my Nintendo Switch becoming basically what I play retro RPGs on, because that's what I found myself doing constantly.
Speaker: I was playing Final Fantasy and Pokemon and that kind of thing as the evenings progressed.
Speaker: I've never even plugged my Switch into a TV.
Speaker: I've never done it.
Speaker: I've only ever played it handheld.
Speaker: That's why I wanted it.
Speaker: So I thought to myself, well, there are a couple of games that are coming out that are supposed to be really good that look like they would do well with the handheld kind of thing.
Speaker: And I was absolutely right with my number nine, which is Dave the Diver.
Speaker: This was my Nintendo Switch game.
Speaker: I'm still playing.
Speaker: I have not even beaten it.
Speaker: But it's fantastic.
Speaker: It's kind of perfect for...
Speaker: that level of bite-sized half an hour to an hour here and there kind of adventure.
Speaker: You know, you can go off and accomplish a few goals and pop back in.
Speaker: For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Dave the Diver is a lovely pixelated...
Speaker: role-playing game slash exploration game slash adventure game slash cooking simulator uh not really but kind of and uh it is not an indie game despite uh some of the uh
Speaker: It's been a bit of a discourse recently.
Speaker: Like, by the way, Dave the Diver comes from a major publisher.
Speaker: It's not a major publisher.
Speaker: And it shows.
Speaker: And here's the thing.
Speaker: It shows because it is pixelated.
Speaker: But my god, it's high quality.
Speaker: The animation is beautiful.
Speaker: The cut scenes are gorgeous.
Speaker: A lot of work went into this.
Speaker: This was not some scrappy three-person team.
Speaker: This was a big project.
Speaker: And it's huge.
Speaker: It's an enormous game.
Speaker: Basically, for people who haven't played, you play Dave the Diver, who is an adorable sweetheart of a fat man in either a suit or a diving outfit.
Speaker: I'm not convinced that he isn't me.
Speaker: I do feel like my likeness was stolen.
Speaker: Identity theft is not a joke, people.
Speaker: Not a joke, people.
Speaker: Not a joke.
Speaker: And but he's just he's this constantly he's just this sweet schlub of a man who's constantly kind of put upon by all the people around him.
Speaker: And you have days and there are morning, afternoon and evening cycles.
Speaker: And during the morning and afternoon and evening, you have the option of hopping into the drink, so to speak, and catching fish and finding treasure and their quests they'll take you on.
Speaker: that involve merpeople and, and giant whales and fighting sharks and all that shit.
Speaker: And then in the evening, you can get back in the boat and go across the pond to your friend's sushi restaurant, where he will make sushi out of the fish that you've caught.
Speaker: And you can upgrade and enhance these, uh, menu items.
Speaker: Uh, and while also running around, uh, trying to make sure everyone gets fed and their tea is full and their beer is full and, and, uh,
Speaker: And it's great because those kind of like time challenge games, I like them okay, but I can't play an entire game that's centered around that.
Speaker: And I find that Dave the Diver's section of that is just enough time.
Speaker: craziness to enjoy it and it doesn't overstay its welcome, you can kind of go, all right, that was fun.
Speaker: Now I'm going to relaxingly dive into the briny deep again, uh, with my shotgun.
Speaker: Uh, it's, uh, it's, it's really charming and really funny.
Speaker: And again, very accessible in the sense that you don't have to feel the need to, um, play it, uh,
Speaker: you know, for three or four or five hours at a time, although I could totally see where you would.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I think that this is, and my experience with it, I'm getting so much more out of it playing it on my Switch, or if you had been playing it on your Steam Deck, I think it would have been the same, than I would have.
Speaker: I guarantee you if I'd gotten this just for my PC, and I wouldn't, I just don't see myself sitting and playing it at my desk for hours on end.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a game you play...
Speaker: when you're on the couch.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's casual, but deep.
Speaker: It's a perfect second screen game.
Speaker: Yes, absolutely.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Couldn't agree more.
Speaker: I think that's really what it's intended for.
Speaker: That's how I've enjoyed it the most, in any case.
Speaker: So, yeah, Dave the Diver.
Speaker: I highly recommend it, especially for a handheld of some sort.
Speaker: So, that's my number nine.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: Kevin, what is your number nine?
Speaker: My number nine is Homebody, which is... Yeah.
Speaker: I need to play this.
Speaker: You have gone on my case about this several times.
Speaker: I know I need to play this.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It is a horror game published by The Game Grumps.
Speaker: Yes, those Game Grumps.
Speaker: You know, the publishers of Dream Daddy and also their own YouTube videos,
Speaker: They've got a little channel.
Speaker: They've just got a little YouTube channel.
Speaker: But yeah, Homebody is made by, I believe his name is Jory, who works in their office.
Speaker: It's a game that deals with...
Speaker: So thematically what it deals with is like anxiety and depression and social anxiety and all that stuff.
Speaker: And really does a good job of tackling those topics in a horror setting.
Speaker: And that horror setting takes a lot of inspiration from Alone in the Dark.
Speaker: And Resident Evil in terms of, and actually more, I would say, Alone in the Dark and Clock Tower in terms of stylings.
Speaker: So the basic gameplay loop is your character is going to a house to hang out with her friends that she hasn't seen in quite a long time.
Speaker: And then at a certain point, something happens and it's terrifying.
Speaker: And then suddenly, oh no, it's the, you're back at the, the time, the moment that you came to the house.
Speaker: So it is a time loop game.
Speaker: It does have aspects of,
Speaker: I would say it has aspects of outer wilds puzzle solving in terms you have like a big board of clues that you got to kind of put together to figure out, all right, this thing goes here.
Speaker: I got to go do this thing.
Speaker: And you, there is a, like, you have to hit everything in the right order.
Speaker: per on each run.
Speaker: Um, so it's really hard to talk about homebody without giving out, giving away too much other than if you like horror, outer wilds alone in the dark and, or pizza, not pizza tower clock tower.
Speaker: If you like pizza tower, you'll love homebody.
Speaker: No, you love it.
Speaker: Clock tower.
Speaker: then I think you really should give it a shot.
Speaker: And, uh, or if you just like games that have like the, the static camera, um, you know, angles kind of like in, in the first Resident Evil games and, and, uh, and alone in the dark, uh, it's really worth checking out.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Phil.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: What, what, what,
Speaker: What would you say your eighth favorite game of the year is?
Speaker: Off the top of my head, and there's no way that I wrote down notes on this.
Speaker: My eighth favorite game of the year is Hi-Fi Rush.
Speaker: This one came out in January, and I think a lot of people said the same thing.
Speaker: Because, you know, January is not the time that you put out really good games.
Speaker: That's not generally when you see it happen.
Speaker: Because everyone wants to be on the game of the year lists and everything along those lines.
Speaker: They want to be considered, and it's not a great...
Speaker: idea to put yourself right at the beginning of the, of the year when everything else has happened.
Speaker: Uh, and this was one that I played and finished and I had, I said, I have to make, I have to make a point, a note of this.
Speaker: I have to recognize this one.
Speaker: There's I, if, if this game gets bumped out of, of my top 10, then it's been a hell of a year for games.
Speaker: And honestly, it has been a hell of a year for games.
Speaker: Uh, there was some really good things, but hi-fi rush, uh,
Speaker: just sticks with me.
Speaker: For anyone who hasn't played this one, it's done by Tango Gameworks, which is the same group that brought you The Evil Within, which is kind of hilarious because it has nothing to do with that.
Speaker: It is an action platformer.
Speaker: You play a guy named Chai in the near future, probably near, well, not far future, but maybe nearer than we want to admit.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And you're basically this adorable loser who dreams of being a rock star.
Speaker: And you are labeled a defective by this this corporate government world that's going to send you to the scrap heap.
Speaker: But instead, they they put instead, they accidentally put this kind of like an iPod or something in your heart.
Speaker: And you get a rhythm constantly.
Speaker: And the gameplay works that you have music playing and you have to fight and move to the beat in order to enhance your abilities.
Speaker: And at first when I heard about that, I said, I'm not really a rhythm guy.
Speaker: I feel like that probably won't work out for me.
Speaker: But but it did.
Speaker: And it has a lot of great characters, very anime inspired.
Speaker: I'm not a huge anime guy, but it does follow the one anime trope that I know by heart.
Speaker: And that is the most important weapon of all is friendship.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's that's what this is all about.
Speaker: You've got this lovable team of losers trying to bring down this corporate bullshit, you know, giant.
Speaker: And it's gorgeous.
Speaker: The colors absolutely pop out of the screen.
Speaker: The soundtrack fucking rules that the music on it.
Speaker: It's this great combination of songs I know by heart and stuff I've never heard before, but is now on permanent rotation on my Spotify playlists.
Speaker: Um, it's, it's fun.
Speaker: It feels good to play.
Speaker: Even when you get to a point with some of these, uh, bad guys that you, you, you know, you have to learn how to fight them and you might be getting a little frustrated, but there's something about the rhythm that just lulls you into this.
Speaker: Like, no, we're good.
Speaker: I I've, I've got this.
Speaker: I've got this.
Speaker: It's also incredibly funny.
Speaker: It's a really, really funny game.
Speaker: And it came out at the beginning of the year for 30 bucks.
Speaker: And it is triple A. And it was completely unannounced.
Speaker: Yes, exactly.
Speaker: There was just nothing.
Speaker: They just dropped it.
Speaker: And it was Shinji Mikami's last game.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: As an executive producer at Tango Gameworks.
Speaker: just, and, and what a wonderful way to head out because the game is triumphant and positive and, and fun.
Speaker: It's like, that's as far as creative endeavors are concerned, being remembered for something, uh, I would think, yeah, that, that kind of attitude, that's where you want to go and succeeded.
Speaker: And you know, what's wild is just like, as an aside, Shinji Mikami is, he's like,
Speaker: I don't know if we, if we have like a George Romero in the game industry, it's him, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because it's, you know, you got resident evil is, is him, right?
Speaker: He directs the first resident evil.
Speaker: He's got dino crisis.
Speaker: He's got his later in his career.
Speaker: He tries to recapture resident evil with the evil within, you know, kind of goes back to the, well, sort of like Romero did.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And he also doesn't, he doesn't take himself too seriously.
Speaker: He's very accessible.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think that's a great comparison.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And you know, he's there's also God hand is in there, which is an interesting game.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That one's got, yeah.
Speaker: But yeah.
Speaker: So hi-fi rush, absolutely worth playing.
Speaker: It's, it's, it's too good not to.
Speaker: Fantastic stuff.
Speaker: That's my number eight.
Speaker: So Kevin, where does your number eight bring you?
Speaker: My number eight is the Dead Space remake.
Speaker: Ah, okay.
Speaker: Which I was really high on it when I first played it, and the longer I sat with it, like the lower, kind of it slid down my list a little bit.
Speaker: It's good.
Speaker: It is really good, and it does a lot of good things, a lot of good quality of life updates to the first Dead Space in terms of...
Speaker: Like the zero gravity stuff is based on like the Dead Space 2 zero gravity stuff versus the original Dead Space.
Speaker: Like zero gravity was a bit clunky in the original Dead Space.
Speaker: The remake does a lot of nice quality of life improvements and also does a neat job making the game feel a little bit less linear.
Speaker: But at the same time, it doesn't
Speaker: quite pull that off uh in a really compelling way because it was like oh there's side quests they added extra quests and then there's like there's only like fucking three in the entire game you blink and you miss your opportunity to go do them yeah um so yeah i i i'm not
Speaker: I wasn't too high on some of that stuff.
Speaker: But if you're looking for a really good way, a really good version of dead space, you know, you can play the remake or you can play the original.
Speaker: The original still holds up.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The remake is still is fucking excellent.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: As someone who played the entire trilogy for the first time just last year, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that that's the only reason I didn't buy it, because I was just like, I just played this.
Speaker: I don't I don't know if I need.
Speaker: And I agree.
Speaker: If you had just played it, there's really no reason to to to play the remake.
Speaker: Yeah, and one and two are still incredible games.
Speaker: Two is high on the list for me, like one of the best horror games ever made.
Speaker: It's really, really good.
Speaker: Three, we don't need to talk about.
Speaker: We don't really need to talk about three.
Speaker: I like three more than most people.
Speaker: Yeah, it wasn't the dumpster fire some people made it out to be.
Speaker: What's that line about Ted Cruz?
Speaker: I like Ted Cruz more than most people, and I hate Ted Cruz.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Uh, Al Franken, Al Franken saying it about Ted Cruz.
Speaker: I like Ted Cruz more than most people.
Speaker: And I hate Ted Cruz.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's hilarious.
Speaker: Uh, Ted Cruz, uh, dead space three is the Ted Cruz of the series.
Speaker: Uh, actually, yeah, no, the dead space books are the Ted Cruz of the series.
Speaker: That's way more appropriate.
Speaker: Cause I still found some joy in dead space.
Speaker: Dead space three.
Speaker: I had some joy in there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Yeah, so not much else to say on the Dead Space remake.
Speaker: Phil, we're moving on to number seven.
Speaker: What's your seventh best game of the year?
Speaker: My number seven is what I've been giving this a lot of thought, and I believe that it is the best example of a game to show you exactly how it feels to actually be a space marine, and that is Warhammer 40,000 Boltgun.
Speaker: It is a Doom clone version of the Warhammer universe, retro graphics, what are they called, boomer shooters?
Speaker: Boomer shooters, yeah.
Speaker: Yes, yes.
Speaker: And it does all of the best parts about that kind of genre incredibly well.
Speaker: It's just this kind of onslaught of baddies and rotating arsenal of weapons, and it's over the top.
Speaker: And there is a button exclusively used to scream things about the emperor at your enemies.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Rahul Koji has like a thousand lines that he requests or something.
Speaker: He was just in there for five hours.
Speaker: I hit that button quite a bit and I had not.
Speaker: I don't recall hearing a repeat.
Speaker: And it's fantastic.
Speaker: And it's it is it's not flawless.
Speaker: There are there are aspects of it that get a little samey after a while, which I think any boomer shooter gets.
Speaker: But the fact of the matter is, is I stand by it.
Speaker: Even I haven't played Space Marine, too, which maybe they'll stick to their guns and have it actually come out in the remaining four weeks of the year.
Speaker: And I love I love the first thing.
Speaker: Yeah, it's still listed that.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: But I loved the first Space Marine, and that's the one a lot of people go for when it comes to the authenticity and the feel of being a Space Marine in that universe.
Speaker: And I have no real quarrel with that because I think it's an incredible game.
Speaker: I love that game.
Speaker: And it does a wonderful job of displaying that world.
Speaker: And I think, actually, if you're a first-time 40K person, you want to know
Speaker: what this world is all about.
Speaker: Pick up Space Marine.
Speaker: But I think there's also a very specific age group of gamer who lived through the 80s and 90s of old school, over the top,
Speaker: heavy metal games like Warhammer.
Speaker: And, uh, and this, this is kind of a love letter to them.
Speaker: This is, this feels like it was made very specifically for my age group.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, uh, for that reason, it, it stands head and shoulders above any of the other 40 K games in terms of feeling like that, uh, highly genetically, uh, fucked with, uh, a murder machine that is the space Marine.
Speaker: So that's my number seven, Warhammer 40,000, Bolt Gun.
Speaker: I hope very much that they do some expansions with it, some DLC that they do, throws in some orcs, some tyranids.
Speaker: I mean, there's plenty of good shit you can do with this.
Speaker: I would pick it back up if they did.
Speaker: Yeah, me too, I think.
Speaker: Even though if I was a little bit bored by the end of it, I think I would too.
Speaker: Especially if the DLC added a little variety to it.
Speaker: Oh, absolutely.
Speaker: Just a little more.
Speaker: They did a wonderful job of representing the demonic baddies of the world.
Speaker: But it was longer than I expected the game to be.
Speaker: And I think that was cool.
Speaker: It was really cool that it had more meat to its bones than I expected.
Speaker: But it also meant that certain things did get a little samey.
Speaker: Did it have a boss demon for each of the chaos gods?
Speaker: I remember there was the Lord of Change, which is just the Lord of Change and the and and the of the one for the Nurgle.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Demon thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There was no slanish stuff.
Speaker: And I don't think that there was any corn stuff.
Speaker: If I'm recalling correctly.
Speaker: So there is hell, even if they just wanted to keep it to the demonic stuff, there's still plenty of stuff to expand into there.
Speaker: We're missing the blood God.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: No one misses the blood God like we miss the blood God.
Speaker: So that's my number seven.
Speaker: Kevin, hit me with your number seven.
Speaker: Dredge.
Speaker: Oh, okay, lovely.
Speaker: Dredge is just a lovely game about fishing, and there's nothing else at all under the water.
Speaker: There is nothing deeper in the water.
Speaker: Nothing.
Speaker: Dredge is a fun game where you play as a fisherman who is trying to figure out
Speaker: Well, he's not trying to figure out a mystery.
Speaker: He's just trying to fish, but there is a mystery happening upon him.
Speaker: And you as the player slash fishermen are starting to reel it in.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That was good.
Speaker: That was pretty solid.
Speaker: It was good.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I feel good about that.
Speaker: I feel good about that.
Speaker: And so you just, you could play the game a number of ways.
Speaker: I mean, I know some people just kind of used it as their chill out game where they take their boat out and they just go fishing.
Speaker: And you go and you sell your fish to a...
Speaker: to the fishmonger and, you know, you get some money and you upgrade your boat and all that stuff.
Speaker: Or you can just, you kind of keep pulling on threads and you go to other islands and there's people to talk to at the other islands and they tell you things about, you know, Hey, there's this artifact.
Speaker: You should go check that out.
Speaker: And then there's a weird person in the, on another Island.
Speaker: And they're like, well, if you bring me all the artifacts, I can tell you the truth.
Speaker: And the truth is like capital T truth.
Speaker: And you're like, well, that sounds interesting.
Speaker: So you keep doing it.
Speaker: And then, you know, there's, um, there's, there's elder gods at some point.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um, so dredge is a friendly fishing game in which everything else happens.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: right um Phil what's number six for you number six for me uh I'm going with cocoon uh which uh I've talked about a few weeks ago at this point uh this was uh by the uh by I want to say his name is is uh
Speaker: Yeppe Carlson, because he's Scandinavian, and I think with the J it's Yeppe as opposed to Jepa.
Speaker: I apologize to Pim and any of our other friends who are listening to me butcher this, but whatever.
Speaker: He created Limbo and Inside, and both of those games are games I adore.
Speaker: I especially have a real, real fondness for Inside.
Speaker: It is probably the best game he's ever made.
Speaker: It is definitely the most complex.
Speaker: It's the most colorful and beautiful.
Speaker: It is almost too complex to return to.
Speaker: I will say that that is the only downside of this game.
Speaker: It was the puzzles are nuts.
Speaker: And you play a little kind of anthropomorphic beetle person who is...
Speaker: The storyline is very unclear, but very beautiful at the same time.
Speaker: You are going in between these different dimensions through these orbs, and the orbs and the dimensions themselves are actually things that you can hold in your hand.
Speaker: You can hold them as a crystal, and
Speaker: And you have to use each of these dimensions against each other.
Speaker: It sounds weird, but trust me, I'm doing a great job explaining this.
Speaker: And just trust me on this one.
Speaker: Anybody who's played knows exactly what I mean.
Speaker: And it's got this wonderful portal style in out.
Speaker: level of puzzles and it has boss fights, which is the first time I've seen that in any of his games.
Speaker: Um, and it's just charming and beautiful and, uh, absolutely savage in terms of its puzzle difficulty.
Speaker: And, uh, I, I, again, I, I think it's the best game he has ever made and I'm probably never going to play it again.
Speaker: Uh, because it's just, it's one of those things that you're, you know what it makes me think of?
Speaker: It makes me think of, um,
Speaker: Oh, what's the mystery boat game that came out last year?
Speaker: Oh, uh, Ober, Oberden, Oberden, Oberden.
Speaker: It was a couple of years ago.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: A couple of years.
Speaker: It makes me think of that in the sense that I'm like, this is an achievement.
Speaker: It is something that anyone who wants to design games should play and study and pay attention to.
Speaker: Um, and I never want to play it again.
Speaker: And, uh, and it's my number six.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't play by other people's rules when it comes to my game of the year list, by the way.
Speaker: Never.
Speaker: Never.
Speaker: So what about you, Kevin?
Speaker: Where do you find yourself at number six?
Speaker: My number six is a game that started out probably higher on the list and drifted down the longer I sat with it afterwards.
Speaker: Alan Wake 2.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I really loved it when I was playing it.
Speaker: It's a lot of fun.
Speaker: A lot of... And listen, I know it's...
Speaker: Like, Alan Wake inherently as a character and storyline is really fucking stupid.
Speaker: Sure, he's a terrible writer.
Speaker: He's not a good writer.
Speaker: I don't buy for a second that this guy is a best-selling author based on his narration.
Speaker: He's terrible.
Speaker: He is god-awful.
Speaker: And some of the...
Speaker: Some of the assertions that his character makes about the nature of horror stories is like he at one point he says in a horror story, you're either the monster or the victim.
Speaker: And I was like, OK, well, that's a little narrow bit of a narrow view of horror.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay, fine.
Speaker: We're going to, well, I'll let you, you can have that one.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: There's so many cool mechanics that they added to this.
Speaker: Alan Wake 2 is basically what, when I told you I had played Alan Wake 1, and I was like, yeah, it's fine.
Speaker: There's, it's weird because it's a shooter.
Speaker: It's a, where you've got an author who is just shooting his way through, you know, the state of Washington.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Pretty much.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I was like, it would have been really cool if it was more of like an investigative thing.
Speaker: And they did that for Alan Wake too.
Speaker: You have, you're playing two characters.
Speaker: You start out playing as an FBI agent and she is for like the first, I don't know, so two, three hours of the game, you're playing as her.
Speaker: And before you get the ability to switch back and forth between her and Alan Wake.
Speaker: And the, yeah,
Speaker: Her interesting, she has a mind place.
Speaker: Oh, the mind palace.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: It's called mind place, but it's a mind palace.
Speaker: Basically, she has a room in her head where she can see a board of all the clues that you've collected so far, kind of like piecing the storyline together.
Speaker: On the other side, when you're playing as Alan Wake, he has a storyboard.
Speaker: Where he can do with this is he can take a scene.
Speaker: He'll be like, I'm at this place, right?
Speaker: Because he's in like an alternate dimension.
Speaker: I'm at this place and he can take the scene and he can change who, what the characters are in that scene.
Speaker: to changes this.
Speaker: It changes the room that he's in.
Speaker: Like it might move furniture around.
Speaker: It might like fucking fill the room with gore and blood or whatever.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's like, you know, stuff like that.
Speaker: So there's a lot of really cool stuff.
Speaker: There's an amazing sequence in the middle of the game that I don't want to spoil.
Speaker: But if you played the first one and you remember the stage sequence when you're fighting off the all the taken,
Speaker: It's kind of in that vein, but, you know, more metal than even that.
Speaker: But it's one of those games, the longer you sit with it, the it's like the gameplay is really cool.
Speaker: It's just the story begins to feel more and more.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Not as deep as it wants you to think.
Speaker: And it's not as deep as it wants you to think.
Speaker: And a little too much as a little too Marvel in terms of, oh, this is just setting up something else.
Speaker: Okay, okay.
Speaker: Now, I've heard people say that this is, like, actually more related to Control than it is to the first Alan Wake game.
Speaker: Yeah, you could actually call this Control 2 in some regards.
Speaker: It is, like, it's very, very heavily related to Control.
Speaker: The Federal Bureau of Control features prominently in the game.
Speaker: It's just the continuation of Alan Wake's story, but set more in a control setting rather than just like strictly Alan Wake, which is fine.
Speaker: They had already started going that way with control when in the game Control, there's a lot of references to Alan Wake in it.
Speaker: Sure, yeah.
Speaker: But I think the problem I have with the ending ultimately is it just feels like it's setting you up for another...
Speaker: another entry rather than giving you any real satisfaction as to the thing, the story you just went through.
Speaker: Like they did everything, but bring out Samuel Jackson to try and recruit you to the Avengers.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I wanted to talk to you about the control protocol.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I feel that.
Speaker: So Alan Wake was probably when I played it, it slipped from like a top three down to where it is.
Speaker: Number six.
Speaker: That's how it is with a lot of games.
Speaker: You know, even after you're done playing them.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You just kind of rumble them around in your head a little bit and you're like, uh.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: But that's enough about Alan Wake 2.
Speaker: What did you got for number five?
Speaker: Number five.
Speaker: The halfway point.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Well,
Speaker: This is basically part of, I'm just following the law here because I have a legal requirement that I've agreed to with Capcom since 2017 or so that anytime they release a new Resident Evil game, it will appear somewhere in or close to my game of the year list.
Speaker: And that means that number five is Resident Evil 4's remake.
Speaker: I stand by it.
Speaker: No, it's funny because we talked about Dead Space and just last year I had played those three games for the first time.
Speaker: I also played through the original Resident Evil 4 for the first time last year.
Speaker: So I honestly thought that I wasn't going to... No, we're going to... Hold on one second.
Speaker: We're going to nip that in the bud.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: Get over there.
Speaker: They've got a little...
Speaker: Scratch pad that has a rolly ball that goes around it.
Speaker: And I'm just not letting, I'm not even going to let that start.
Speaker: We're not even going to, anyway.
Speaker: Yeah, it's, it gets loud.
Speaker: So yeah, after, after I'm done, I'll turn it over again, sweetie.
Speaker: They speak English.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: But I think this one was important for me to actually get into because I really loved the first three Resident Evil games, that era, the twin stick era.
Speaker: And then I kind of dropped off for four or five and six and all the other stuff that happened around that time.
Speaker: And then I got back into it for its new kind of like, I don't know what you do, like this dark new direction that they've been going in since seven years.
Speaker: which is my favorite.
Speaker: I love the direction they're taking it in.
Speaker: I love how much fun they're having with it.
Speaker: They're broadening the world.
Speaker: Resident Evil Village is a masterpiece in my mind.
Speaker: Same for Resident Evil 7.
Speaker: And they basically took...
Speaker: All of my complaints when I played the original Resident Evil 4, which mostly had to do with controls, I just couldn't get used to the controls.
Speaker: And gave them this new coat of the new era of Resident Evil paint
Speaker: And it basically turned Resident Evil 4 because it was a game that everyone's like, this is the greatest Resident Evil game that was ever made.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: It's certainly the most influential, all that stuff.
Speaker: And I played it and I went, I guess.
Speaker: I don't get it, though.
Speaker: It's just not quite reaching me on the same level, possibly because I'm not...
Speaker: uh playing it when it first came out and you know it's not affecting me for that reason um and then i got this coat of paint on it and it not only made me appreciate it more it made me go oh i totally fucking get it i totally get it now um so it made it a little more accessible for me and it made me appreciate things that i learned about it when i played the original so it weirdly retroactively made me enjoy
Speaker: the original more if such a thing even exists.
Speaker: Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker: And I think that's pretty impressive for a remake because it's more than just a reskin.
Speaker: They really had fun playing with that sucker.
Speaker: And I finished the DLC for it and everything.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, that's something.
Speaker: I still need to get back to the DLC.
Speaker: It's good.
Speaker: It's good.
Speaker: It's just another five hours.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's fucking excellent.
Speaker: Everybody's best girl, Ada.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: She calls Leon a good boy at some point, and I feel weird inside.
Speaker: It checks all the boxes is what I'm saying.
Speaker: So Kevin, what about you?
Speaker: What's your number five?
Speaker: My number five is My Friendly Neighborhood.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: My Friendly Neighborhood is a first-person shooter, and it's like a Resident Evil 7-like.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's a very specific type of Resident Evil-like game.
Speaker: It's first-person, very Resident Evil 7.
Speaker: Basically, you play as a guy, a repairman, who is dispatched to a...
Speaker: TV station, which has started.
Speaker: It's a closed down TV station, which has started broadcasting old episodes of a Sesame Street like show called My Friendly Neighborhood.
Speaker: And they're like, yeah, you got to go there and shut it down.
Speaker: Like, because it's annoying, you know, it's interrupting people's shows and stuff like that.
Speaker: So you get there and the entire station has been overrun in the absence of people and
Speaker: has been overrun with sentient versions of the puppets that...
Speaker: We're on the Sesame Street show.
Speaker: So when you start out, you basically just have a wrench and then you get a letter gun.
Speaker: It's basically, it is what it is.
Speaker: It's a game that, it's a gun that shoots out letters.
Speaker: And you have to knock, the wild thing is you cannot kill the puppets.
Speaker: They won't die.
Speaker: The only thing you can do if you want to keep them down is knock them down and then tie them up with duct tape.
Speaker: And that lets you move freely through an area.
Speaker: So they're out of commission permanently at that point.
Speaker: They're out of commission at that point.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I hear a kitty.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Give me one second.
Speaker: I'm going to move this thing.
Speaker: I'll be right back.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Guys, I made it more appealing to them for some reason.
Speaker: I don't know how that works.
Speaker: I didn't know that turning it over would just make it a whole new toy for them and they would have to investigate it that much harder.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Sorry.
Speaker: Clawing at the underside of it or.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He was just like clawing it and trying to turn it over.
Speaker: I think it's he's, he's a real smart one.
Speaker: I love your little cats.
Speaker: They're, they're hysterical.
Speaker: They are strange animals.
Speaker: I love living with them.
Speaker: Okay, so sorry.
Speaker: Keep going.
Speaker: Yeah, My Friendly Neighborhood.
Speaker: I really recommend it.
Speaker: It's like five to six hours long, I think, if you're playing through it.
Speaker: And it's got a lot of puzzles in the Resident Evil vein.
Speaker: So you're backtracking, going back and forth.
Speaker: It's a blast.
Speaker: And it's probably...
Speaker: Oh, the other thing about it is it was made by the Szymanski brothers.
Speaker: Szymanski brothers.
Speaker: So not the one, not the brother who made Iron Lung.
Speaker: There's three brothers.
Speaker: There's three Szymanski brothers.
Speaker: One of them made Iron Lung and is working on Gloomwood.
Speaker: And the other two worked on My Friendly Neighborhood.
Speaker: And we look at the credits.
Speaker: It's a relatively small team that put out a product that was really, really polished.
Speaker: So, you know, a lot of... They do a lot of credit for this one.
Speaker: That family's got...
Speaker: some real kudos to them, to their names.
Speaker: They can make some fucking games.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that's, that's my number five, Phil.
Speaker: What's your number four?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: We've made it all the way to number four before we get our first overlap.
Speaker: My number four is dredge.
Speaker: There we go.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't have a lot to add.
Speaker: I remember playing it for the first time and actually thinking maybe this was going to be my game of the year period, simply because, uh, it's,
Speaker: They're finding ways to be loud.
Speaker: They said, we don't want to be playing with that toy back there.
Speaker: We want to... If you'll excuse me one second.
Speaker: They found...
Speaker: candles that we placed out and they're round and they said well i want something to roll while i'm out here and these will have to do they are so they're like we're in the mood to roll that's exactly it that's such assholes okay uh oh
Speaker: Father, we must throw things.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Oh my God.
Speaker: And then I'll turn off the camera here and I'll go, here, here, play with those now.
Speaker: And they won't have any interest.
Speaker: None whatsoever.
Speaker: So as I was saying, I remember playing Dredge for the first time and thinking it would probably, I remember honestly thinking this might be my number one game of the year simply because it had that perfect combination of fisherman's life with horror.
Speaker: And they do the cosmic stuff and the Lovecraftian stuff very, very well.
Speaker: But they also do just the fishing simulator aspect of it really well.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Uh, it's, I I've come to find now that I'm in my forties that my favorite games are games that challenge me, but also let me sit as far back from the chair as possible.
Speaker: Uh, or you can just lean back and this is perfect game for that.
Speaker: Uh, I'm getting a lot out of it.
Speaker: I'm, I'm engaged.
Speaker: I'm,
Speaker: getting all kinds of cool little storylines and that sort of thing.
Speaker: But I'm also just like, well, let's just go out and see what kind of fish we can catch.
Speaker: Let's see if we can make a profit today.
Speaker: Um, and the new DLC came out and I, I picked that up.
Speaker: I have to, I have to try that out.
Speaker: It takes you to kind of an Arctic area.
Speaker: So that'll be cool.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Uh, get some mountains of madness shit, but yeah, I mean, but that's, that's my number four dredge.
Speaker: I fucking loved it.
Speaker: I loved it.
Speaker: What about you, Kevin?
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: My number four is our second overlap, and that's going to be Resident Evil 4.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I really can't say much else about Resident Evil 4 other than I...
Speaker: I just loved every minute of it.
Speaker: It's such a fun game.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: It really did a good job.
Speaker: Like, if you go back and you play Resident Evil 4, the original, I remembered going back to it, and it has a certain level of jank that came from it being the game that kind of spawned the third-person shooter.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: In a way.
Speaker: So it has a certain level of, like,
Speaker: not really sure how to make this.
Speaker: It feels, it's like at the time it felt amazing, but after 20 years of playing third person shooters that have really refined the, the, the movement, it's, it's, it can be hard to go back to.
Speaker: And I know some people are saying, well, I go back to it every year.
Speaker: I'm like, well, good for you.
Speaker: I'm proud of you.
Speaker: Proud of you.
Speaker: Proud of you.
Speaker: Resident Evil 4, the remake does a really good job refining a lot of that stuff while also keeping, um,
Speaker: what made the original so special and did a number of things better.
Speaker: Like it took Ashley Graham and made her from kind of an annoying, just side character to someone who was, uh,
Speaker: uh, funny and interesting to, to be around.
Speaker: Their relationship is wonderful in the game.
Speaker: It's wonderful to watch it unfold.
Speaker: It's, it's just well done.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And she acts like a, she acts like the, the young woman that she is when at like, there's, there's just this one point where, uh,
Speaker: Leon jumps down from somewhere.
Speaker: It's like a 15 foot drop.
Speaker: So like he, he jumps down and he, he does his landing and then he, he gets back up and he's going to catch her and she jumps down and he catches her and she says skills.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: She's charming.
Speaker: She's not.
Speaker: She's charming.
Speaker: Annoying little twerp of a kid, you know, she's.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's fun.
Speaker: And they did the same with Leon.
Speaker: They gave Leon so much more of the dad jokes and stuff like that.
Speaker: It's.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Which I think was necessary to keep you from getting the impression that maybe they were going to like hook up or something like that.
Speaker: Like he.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They really pulled that back.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They made it very clear.
Speaker: He's a dad, not a, not a boyfriend.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: even though Leon is in his, what, late 20s, I guess.
Speaker: Oh, it wouldn't have been crazy inappropriate, but I don't know.
Speaker: It would have felt weird.
Speaker: Yeah, like, he's more Ada's speed than Ashley.
Speaker: Yes, yes.
Speaker: And, yeah, you don't get in the way... You don't mess with Ada's man.
Speaker: I don't want to see anything bad happen to this young lady.
Speaker: But also, there's, like...
Speaker: Lewis is really refined into a, like, he looks creepier.
Speaker: He looks more rundown than, than the original version of him.
Speaker: But as a character, he's like a lot more sympathetic, you know?
Speaker: And like, he, like, there's, there's a, there's a moment with him that I was like, oh man,
Speaker: He isn't just some random Lothario kind of character or whatever.
Speaker: It's just, yeah, there's something to it.
Speaker: It's nice.
Speaker: So, yeah, Resident Evil 4 is my number four game of the year.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: I feel like we're going to have some overlap in these next few, I think.
Speaker: I think so, too.
Speaker: And I think this next one.
Speaker: Yeah, it might be an exact overlap.
Speaker: It might be.
Speaker: Well, what's number three for you?
Speaker: Well, I believe that number three for the both of us is Amnesia the Bunker.
Speaker: That's correct.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: In my opinion, probably the best horror game that was released this year.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And I, I know this, I think it might be Fractional's best entry in this particular series, even, even better than the original.
Speaker: I'm not one of these people who, who, you know, looks down their nose at the whole quote unquote, you know, walking simulator genre or anything like that.
Speaker: Um, but,
Speaker: But I do think that this is the game where they really struck the sweet spot of story, atmosphere, all that shit that made all the other entries so memorable.
Speaker: But they also give you genuinely exciting, scary, thrilling things to do.
Speaker: Hold on, I have to interrupt you.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's breaking news.
Speaker: Breaking news?
Speaker: Yeah, breaking news.
Speaker: Henry Kissinger is dead.
Speaker: Oh, thank fucking God.
Speaker: How?
Speaker: How did, how is...
Speaker: God, he lives so long.
Speaker: I'm just happy that Jimmy Carter outlived him.
Speaker: That is that.
Speaker: You know what?
Speaker: You know what?
Speaker: That's pretty good.
Speaker: That's pretty cool.
Speaker: Yeah, that's pretty cool.
Speaker: God damn it.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: I'll expect to hear from you.
Speaker: That's not breaking news for the people listening to this podcast.
Speaker: No, this is old news by now.
Speaker: It will have been like a month before you hear this episode.
Speaker: We were recording this when the news broke that Henry Kissinger had died.
Speaker: That is good news.
Speaker: That is good news.
Speaker: As Anthony Bourdain once... I want to look up his exact quote.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, I get the quote.
Speaker: Anthony Bourdain Kissinger...
Speaker: Once you've been to Cambodia, you'll never want to stop beating Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking.
Speaker: Witness what Henry did in Cambodia, the fruits of his genius for statesmanship, and you'll never understand why he's not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milosevic.
Speaker: Fuck Henry Kissinger, RIP Anthony Bourdain.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: All hail Saint Bourdain.
Speaker: Anyway.
Speaker: Anyway.
Speaker: The bunker.
Speaker: What can I say about the joy I experienced from playing Amnesia the Bunker that can't be summarized with the joy I experienced from finding out Henry Kissinger is dead?
Speaker: LAUGHTER
Speaker: It's a very parallel emotional rollercoaster of joy, fear, anger, you know, just that kind of thing.
Speaker: Hunger.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Speaker: I could go for a sandwich.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: I loved this.
Speaker: I thought that the...
Speaker: gameplay is so good and the storyline is so good and neither of them detract from the others.
Speaker: I felt that the, the, the main downside to a game like amnesia dark descent was that when you just, when you started going, you'd stop and have to read or listen to like 15 minutes worth of storyline or something.
Speaker: And, and it just, it could get a little dull at times.
Speaker: Um, but,
Speaker: Whereas the bunker, the bunker, I feel like it's them finally hitting that sweet spot.
Speaker: It's the best in the series as far as Soma still is their best game as far as I'm concerned, but I loved it.
Speaker: So what about you, Kevin?
Speaker: How did you feel about Amnesia?
Speaker: Oh, I loved Amnesia.
Speaker: It is terrifying in all the best ways.
Speaker: It doesn't, it's not reliant on jump scares at all.
Speaker: It's, it's all about the tension, right?
Speaker: You know, just the, ugh, the dread of knowing that this monster is out there just and around the corner and you don't really have any means of fighting it.
Speaker: This is a different, like the other Amnesia games, from what I understand, this is the first one where they actually, they're like, okay, you want a gun?
Speaker: Here's a fucking gun.
Speaker: Yeah, that's what people have been begging for since the first game.
Speaker: And it somehow makes you feel less powerful.
Speaker: Yeah, because you can shoot this thing.
Speaker: It's not going to... It might scare it off for a little bit.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But that's about it.
Speaker: And if you fire and it...
Speaker: wasn't there, then, uh-oh, you've just attracted it to you.
Speaker: Good news.
Speaker: And you probably only had two bullets at most in the chamber.
Speaker: One for the monster, one for yourself.
Speaker: Yeah, good luck.
Speaker: Hope everything works out.
Speaker: So Amnesia, the bunker, amazing game.
Speaker: I know they did some, they're releasing some updates or they have released some updates, some randomization updates and things like that.
Speaker: Yeah, they released something around Halloween.
Speaker: I know that.
Speaker: Yeah, stuff for like replayability and like harder difficulties for the people who are like really into the challenge of...
Speaker: uh, dealing with, with this creature.
Speaker: It's not an easy game.
Speaker: It's not an easy game.
Speaker: And, um, I know that there's, uh, I, it's, I'm almost tempted to go back and get some of the achievements that I couldn't get.
Speaker: That day is coming for me.
Speaker: I know that there's like, there's like some achievements for like, you know, you, uh, save the prisoner without letting the monster eat him or something like that.
Speaker: Um, you know, stuff like that.
Speaker: Uh, but it,
Speaker: It's wild.
Speaker: You have this game where you're scrounging for your guns and ammo and stuff like that.
Speaker: And there's only two encounters, two antagonists in the entire game.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They're all rats.
Speaker: So, yeah, I agree.
Speaker: Amnesia the Bunker, number three with a bullet for me as well.
Speaker: So, Phil, we're at number two.
Speaker: This one's going to frustrate some, maybe present company included.
Speaker: My number two is Baldur's Gate 3.
Speaker: How dare you?
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: LAUGHTER
Speaker: It's a masterpiece.
Speaker: It's an absolute masterpiece of a game.
Speaker: I'm not going to say anything about it that other people haven't already said.
Speaker: The branching storylines, the characters, the memorable characters they created.
Speaker: I think the greatest thing about this game was how effective of a fuck you it was to all the corporate bullshit people out there who have been saying no one wants to play a single player game.
Speaker: that there's nothing to be gained from making single-player games.
Speaker: This is not just a single-player game.
Speaker: It is a classic role-playing game style game.
Speaker: It is a niche genre at best, and it blew everyone's head off.
Speaker: It was fun, horny, and scary, sometimes all at the same time.
Speaker: the characters, I'm still thinking about them, and you spent an inordinate, inordinate?
Speaker: Inordinate?
Speaker: Inordinate.
Speaker: Inordinate.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Amount of time in this world.
Speaker: And it takes you all over the place.
Speaker: You get, it's every, it's basically as close to the experience of an actual D&D campaign with a decent character
Speaker: dungeon master as you can possibly get in a video game.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It feels sometimes like they thought of everything and there are so many ways to play it.
Speaker: So many different builds and I'm not that guy.
Speaker: I went with my role playing games.
Speaker: I just want to play the game.
Speaker: I want to play.
Speaker: I want to play the character I want to play.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: I have been thrilled to look at all of these different builds people are coming up with and it makes me want to play the game again and I don't have that kind of time.
Speaker: time on my hands.
Speaker: Uh, and, uh, but I, I've seen all these different kinds of builds.
Speaker: People are talking about, I said, why don't I play that?
Speaker: Um, and I can't wait for any DLC and, uh, increase in level cap, uh, that might come with it.
Speaker: Uh, this is a game that I feel like all the other, all they'll need to do for the next five or six years is just add DLC to it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um, this is like Witcher three level hugeness.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So yeah, that's my number two.
Speaker: Kevin, what's your number two?
Speaker: My number two is the System Shock remake.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: It is... So for those of you who don't know, System Shock is one of the first M-Sim style games.
Speaker: It's not like...
Speaker: You can see it's really fledgling in terms of that genre.
Speaker: System Shock 2 is the one that really took it further.
Speaker: But System Shock is a wonderful game.
Speaker: It's definitely another horror game.
Speaker: So many fucking horror games on this list.
Speaker: By the way... It's one of the most influential games of all time.
Speaker: Every game that I've listed on my list so far, save for Pizza Tower, and even Pizza Tower has an entire level dedicated to horror, is a horror game.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You out horrored me this year.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: It's fucking wild.
Speaker: So System Shock, you play a hacker who's caught hacking into some database thing for a company.
Speaker: And then the CEO is like, hey, if you are able to hack into this AI that we own and take care, take down its safety features, we'll give you, we'll do a surgery on you that, you know,
Speaker: ups your hacking ability, you know, install a new deck or whatever into your brain or, you know, one of those, one of those shadow run bullshit things.
Speaker: And so you wake up six months later because that's the convalescence time for the surgery on a space station and,
Speaker: And, uh-oh, the AI that you helped unleash has taken over the space station and has unleashed hordes of robots and mutants and all that stuff onto the space station and is planning on destroying Earth.
Speaker: So it is up to you, as the hacker who started this whole thing, to put a stop to it.
Speaker: Uh...
Speaker: As it often is.
Speaker: As it often is.
Speaker: It's a lot of fun.
Speaker: There's a lot of puzzle solving.
Speaker: You're going back and forth between a bunch of levels.
Speaker: There's...
Speaker: You know, a lot of fun guns in it, things like that.
Speaker: A lot of fun enemies.
Speaker: I'm looking forward to the remaster of System Shock 2.
Speaker: And I know Night Dive, who made the remake, I believe is going to be doing a remake of System Shock 2 in the future.
Speaker: So I'm interested in seeing that as well.
Speaker: But that's my number two.
Speaker: And before we get to our number ones... Yes.
Speaker: We got some honorable mentions.
Speaker: Phil, why don't you tell me what your honorable mentions were for the year 2023?
Speaker: I've got a few.
Speaker: First one, Blasphemous 2.
Speaker: Not quite the experience that I got out of the first game, but still a time in that world, an extra bit of time in that world is still really great.
Speaker: Still very grim, still very gothic, a lot of fun.
Speaker: Underground Blossom, which is the new Rusty Lake game.
Speaker: Every single time those people come out with a new puzzle game, I'm in, I am in, I am in.
Speaker: I love their aesthetic.
Speaker: I love the way they come up with these puzzles.
Speaker: They're getting a little more challenging as time goes on.
Speaker: And I had a blast.
Speaker: I spent an afternoon playing that one, and I loved it.
Speaker: Bramble, which I think is a great example of how important it is to remember that you can, in fact, combine whimsy with abject stark fucking terror.
Speaker: Great stuff.
Speaker: Fairytale stuff.
Speaker: Very German.
Speaker: Very, very, very, very, very Nord.
Speaker: Just grim and lots of trolls and wizards and fairy kings, birds that talk and fish that sing.
Speaker: All that kind of good stuff.
Speaker: And finally, and this one just released the other day and it's looking good.
Speaker: I haven't, I've only played the demo.
Speaker: so I feel like this might have made it onto my list if I hadn't played, if I'd played more than the demo and that's a last train home, which is a fantastic game about a underserved kind of time period.
Speaker: You don't see a lot of people trying to escape the, the, the whites and the reds of the Bolshevik revolution.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: And it, it has a really intriguing combination of real time strategy and like,
Speaker: Civ builder in a way because you're building up your train.
Speaker: And it's very cool.
Speaker: And I know I'm going to come back to it.
Speaker: I just did not have time.
Speaker: Kevin, what about you?
Speaker: What are your honorable mentions?
Speaker: My honorable mentions are Void Stranger, which is kind of a it's a one bit color Sokoban game with weird
Speaker: There's like weird stuff happening.
Speaker: If you ever know anything, if you've ever heard anything about Frog Fractions, which was like a game that had a game hidden underneath it, Void Stranger has like a lot of stuff hidden underneath it.
Speaker: And I know I've beaten the game once, but in all honesty, I know you have to beat the game a bunch of times.
Speaker: You have to like...
Speaker: keep coming back to it.
Speaker: There are people who've been put 50 hours into this game and they still haven't found all of the weird stuff hidden in this game.
Speaker: So it's probably something I've, I've beaten it once.
Speaker: So it'll go in the honorable mentions.
Speaker: I'll see how many times I come back to it and kind of see where it goes.
Speaker: Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 slash rogue city or yeah, or not rogue city, phantom Liberty.
Speaker: I wrote, why didn't I put rogue city?
Speaker: Phantom Liberty is a
Speaker: I put that on there.
Speaker: It's a massive update and DLC to Cyberpunk 2077.
Speaker: I beat Cyberpunk 2077 not long after it came out and really enjoyed my time with it, but I knew it was jank as hell.
Speaker: The 2.0 update is kind of the culmination of a bunch of efforts that CD Projekt Red have done to clean up the game, and Phantom Liberty is this huge DLC.
Speaker: It's got Idris Elba in it, so...
Speaker: I thought it was worth a mention.
Speaker: Blasphemous 2 is also on my honorable mentions list.
Speaker: Same reasons.
Speaker: It was more time spent in the blasphemous world.
Speaker: Just didn't do enough for me.
Speaker: Killer Frequency is in my honorable mentions.
Speaker: A fun visual novel horror game where you are a radio DJ trying to keep people alive.
Speaker: The radio DJ doubling as a 911 operator and you're trying to keep people alive as a masked serial killer is running loose in the town.
Speaker: That's a really unique one.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Warhammer 40K bolt gun.
Speaker: You've already talked about it and I agree with a lot of things you said.
Speaker: World of Horror has been out for like five years now in early access.
Speaker: It just got its full release.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: A couple of weeks ago, as of recording this episode, the 1.0 release, do yourself a favor, go out and check out World of Horror.
Speaker: If you are interested in two things, specifically Junji Ito and Carmen Sandiego, two tastes, tastes great, tastes great together.
Speaker: See, I've been meaning to go back to that one.
Speaker: And now that you put it that way, I have to.
Speaker: That's really, oh, okay.
Speaker: It's basically Carmen Sandiego with Junji.
Speaker: Like, you know, Carmen Sandiego is like, for those of you who don't know, before it was a game show, Carmen Sandiego w as a video game released by Broderbund.
Speaker: Um, and they, you, you were just like figuring out clues.
Speaker: It was, it was like, it was an educational game, but it was probably one of the better games to hide the educational part of it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It made the pill easier to swallow.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Without question.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But yeah, you had to figure out where Carmen Sandiego was going.
Speaker: It was a point and click kind of mystery thing.
Speaker: That's kind of the vibe I get from World of Horror.
Speaker: I mean, there's more to it than there ever was in any of the Carmen Sandiego games.
Speaker: Don't get me wrong.
Speaker: But that's just the general vibe.
Speaker: Finally, RoboCop Rogue City.
Speaker: That's why I wrote Rogue City earlier.
Speaker: Yeah, that's why I was thinking of RoboCop.
Speaker: No, RoboCop Rogue City, my seven out of 10 game of the year.
Speaker: I think that should be a category.
Speaker: Yeah, my 7 out of 10 game of the year.
Speaker: Speaking of 7 out of 10 games of the year, why don't you tell us, Phil, what your number one game is?
Speaker: Yeah, I was about to say, that's kind of the perfect segue.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: I mean to tell you people, when I told Kevin this, he reacted exactly the way I expected him to.
Speaker: My number one game of the year, 2023, is Aliens Dark Descent.
Speaker: It went from a game that infuriated and pissed me off all the way to the top of my list.
Speaker: I played through it three times.
Speaker: I've invested 115 hours into it.
Speaker: And I still haven't played the new game plus, which was just released about a month ago.
Speaker: So I know I'm going to go into it again.
Speaker: I've gotten 46 out of 50 of the achievements.
Speaker: It just, it's so, it is janky.
Speaker: It's a very janky game, but it gives me so much of what I wanted.
Speaker: It's got, it does the XCOM vibe, the strategy vibe, and it gets the universe, the Aliens universe really, really well.
Speaker: I think Alien Isolation is the best Alien game.
Speaker: And I, honest to God, think this is the best aliens game.
Speaker: I think it summarizes the squad, the Space Marines aspect, because it isn't like other strategy games where you're just stockpiling ammo and just absolutely taking out waves upon waves of foes.
Speaker: You have to choose your battles.
Speaker: You can't just...
Speaker: You have to sneak around sometimes, you can't just take everybody down, you have to hide, you have to decide when it's worth it to blow things up and when it's worth it to run and hide, and both of them are equally valid.
Speaker: I think it has a lot in common with games like Darkest Dungeon in the sense that you are going to lose people, and it's probably the first strategy game like this that I've ever played that was actually scary.
Speaker: It is a horror game without question.
Speaker: Not quite, but it is, and it's enough of one.
Speaker: It's just a really, really unique game.
Speaker: Well, you know what?
Speaker: I take that back.
Speaker: It's not unique in the slightest.
Speaker: It wears its inspirations on its face, very, very obviously.
Speaker: Anyone who goes into the marine customization section knows exactly what I'm talking about because this basically ripped whole cloth from XCOM.
Speaker: Um, and that's fine.
Speaker: It does all of those things well enough.
Speaker: It has some jank to it that you're going to see with these kinds of studios, but I, it's well worth it to me.
Speaker: Uh, and I just keep coming back to it.
Speaker: Uh, it is like, uh, that X who ruined my life.
Speaker: And I just keep coming back for one more squeezer in the back of my Chevy Malibu.
Speaker: Uh, it's, it's a motherfucker and aliens, dark descent, uh,
Speaker: Number one game of the year.
Speaker: Done.
Speaker: Just so you know, everybody, Phil actually has multiple exes that have ruined his life.
Speaker: Oh, God.
Speaker: Like so many.
Speaker: And I was there for a few of them.
Speaker: Yes, you were.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You were there.
Speaker: So I'm immune to this kind of shit.
Speaker: I'm a nerd.
Speaker: You can't fuck me up, Alien Star descent.
Speaker: In fact, I love you.
Speaker: How about that?
Speaker: Oh, God.
Speaker: So, yeah, my number one is Baldur's Gate 3.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: The choice of most respectable human beings everywhere.
Speaker: No, I get it.
Speaker: I played, you know, 30 seconds of Alien's Dark Descent.
Speaker: So I understand where you're coming from.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: It crashed on me, I think.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I'm not sure I even bothered playing it again.
Speaker: That sounds about right.
Speaker: Jesus.
Speaker: Uh, no Baldur's Gate three amazing achievement by all the folks at Larry.
Speaker: And I know it's, um, it Baldur's Gate three is such a heavy release that it is such a big gravitational body that it is generated a number of discourses just on its own.
Speaker: Um, but I think the thing that can easily get lost in all of this is that Baldur's Gate three is an amazing achievement and it took it a, um,
Speaker: It took a genre in CRPGs, which, you know what, and it doesn't do anything really special with that genre other than, hey, we're going to make it look good.
Speaker: We're going to make all the characters hot.
Speaker: We're going to give them all great voice acting.
Speaker: And we're going to plan out just about...
Speaker: every conceivable option that the... That's the big achievement, is that it was thoroughly...
Speaker: mapped so that it actually responds to almost every conceivable option that you could choose at any given point.
Speaker: I remember people posting something like where you could, there's this part where there's a halfling threatening to blow everybody up with this like powder or whatever.
Speaker: And there's a way where you can like have one of your people steal the powder while she's talking about it.
Speaker: And she'll be like, and now we all die.
Speaker: And then she'll look at her hand and be like, what?
Speaker: Just little things like that.
Speaker: I love that.
Speaker: And I think the other thing that's really been cool about it is that they have been very amenable to feedback in terms of great bug reporting.
Speaker: They're constantly working on patching up the game, making sure, because it's a...
Speaker: I mean, I just can't imagine.
Speaker: It's a monster.
Speaker: It's a monster of a game.
Speaker: And keeping that monster of a game bug-free has got to be a task in and of itself.
Speaker: I can't believe how clean it was.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's crazy.
Speaker: I mean, the third act probably had the most clunkiness out of all of them, of all the parts of the game.
Speaker: But in terms of, like, you know, a really solidly finished product from beginning to end, I mean,
Speaker: It was really good.
Speaker: And I think what I think, there was some discourse around like, you know, people shouldn't be too used to this type of game.
Speaker: I don't, like I didn't agree in terms of this type of game in terms of like a big, you know, fun CRPG.
Speaker: I do agree that it like, don't pin your hopes on a company sitting there and mapping out
Speaker: every potential choice that you can make in a game.
Speaker: I think that might be, that's kind of where some of that criticism comes from in terms of expectations, because it's like the game is basically an immersive sim in terms of the things that you can do.
Speaker: Like there's so many ways that you can get around obstacles.
Speaker: You can go and collect a bunch of barrels and you can just stack up the barrels and climb over them and get over a wall that way instead of like anything else.
Speaker: Instead of fighting your way in or whatever, you can, you know, build some, put some barrels up.
Speaker: It's a game that wants you to be clever.
Speaker: It wants you to be clever, which is the mark of any good DM.
Speaker: Big time.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And Amelia Tyler is my favorite DM, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Whenever she says, what does she say?
Speaker: When the thrall power activates and it's like one word.
Speaker: Oh, fuck.
Speaker: Is it domination or...
Speaker: She just has this one word that she says when you can just mind control somebody.
Speaker: And I'm just like, ooh.
Speaker: She's got a beautiful voice.
Speaker: She does a wonderful job.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Team Carlack forever.
Speaker: Team Carlack.
Speaker: Best girl Carlack.
Speaker: Best girl Carlack.
Speaker: Come on.
Speaker: Come on.
Speaker: Though I have dated everybody.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Asterian, you little bitch.
Speaker: He's adorable, though.
Speaker: I didn't like him at first.
Speaker: I turned around on him.
Speaker: Oh, God, yeah.
Speaker: He's just a little half-elf.
Speaker: Full elf.
Speaker: He's not a half-elf.
Speaker: He's a full-elf vampire.
Speaker: And who could say no to that?
Speaker: He's just a slutty little guy.
Speaker: Just a slutty little guy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Just innocent men.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Just normal vampires.
Speaker: Just normal vampires.
Speaker: Just innocent vampires.
Speaker: Oh, God.
Speaker: So that'll do it.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: That's a games of the year.
Speaker: And this is Phil's going away episode for a little bit.
Speaker: Yeah, not permanently, but not permanently.
Speaker: Briefly.
Speaker: When he's back, he'll have a fresh, fresh new baboo.
Speaker: Yeah, I got like a week or so on my hands before I have a son.
Speaker: So that's going to take up a little bit of my time, but Kevin's going to take very good care of you guys.
Speaker: We've got all kinds of cool guest spots coming up.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: A lot of people that have never been on the show before, so that's exciting.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: It'll be good times.
Speaker: So in the meantime, if you'd like to send us some money...
Speaker: to fund Phil's diaper funds.
Speaker: Yeah, there you go.
Speaker: You could do that on patreon.com slash pixelitpod.
Speaker: We have three tiers.
Speaker: $1, $5, and $10.
Speaker: And $10 gives you a shout out at the end of every episode.
Speaker: And it's that time.
Speaker: It's that time.
Speaker: Friendly friend.
Speaker: You know what time it is.
Speaker: Oh, friendly friend.
Speaker: Oh, friendly friend.
Speaker: Thank you for being a friendly friend.
Speaker: So yeah, go to our Patreon.
Speaker: Do that.
Speaker: Patreon.com slash PixelitPod is too many words, too many letters.
Speaker: Just go to PixelitPod.com and you'll be redirected to our Patreon page.
Speaker: Otherwise, at PixelitPod on all the social medias that you can think of.
Speaker: Uh, go follow us there.
Speaker: And we have a discord.
Speaker: Join our discord.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Join the conversation.
Speaker: A lot of good stuff talking about, I mean, we got, that's how I found out that Henry Kissinger died.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's, it's, you get all kinds of important information through our discord.
Speaker: I've come to find is our friend, Tim just posted that Henry Kissinger died.
Speaker: And I was, you know what?
Speaker: I knew we could count on Tim.
Speaker: I'm glad I found out through him.
Speaker: That's that, that seems appropriate.
Speaker: I found out through Tim.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Yeah, so that'll do it for tonight's episode.
Speaker: Thank you guys for another wonderful year.
Speaker: And I really can't wait to see where 2024 takes us.
Speaker: Hell yeah.
Speaker: Hell yeah.
Speaker: Have a good night.
Speaker: Good night.
