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How to Build a Better Save System | Windbreaker Podcast
7.5k Plays7 months ago
On this week’s episode of Windbreaker, Yahtzee, Frost, and Marty chat about the history of save systems, the games that did it differently, and the ones that dropped the ball.
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Transcript
Introduction to Horror Fiction Podcasts
00:00:00
Speaker
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00:00:30
Speaker
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Off-Topic Media References
00:00:41
Speaker
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Windbreaks podcast. Have a little stand because Marty just put some 3D glasses on without telling us he was going to do that. Not 3D glasses there, he clips glasses. He's lying. He's finally watching Way of Water. The way he got it done during a podcast.
00:00:59
Speaker
Well, yeah, fucking eclipse fascists hogging all the eclipse to themselves over in the Midwest. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's true. Anyway, welcome to the podcast.
The Evolution of Save Systems in Games
00:01:11
Speaker
I'm Yahtzee. I'm joined by Frost and Marty, as always. Hello, everyone. And we thought we'd talk about the subject of save systems in games, the ups and downs, the evolution of the years and some of the approaches to saves we found interesting.
00:01:25
Speaker
This topic came about because I've been complaining to anyone who'll listen lately about the problem I've been having with Dragon's Dogma 2 and its one solitary save slot. Is there any excuse for that in this day and age? I ask you. Listen, there's not one of the weeks you were out. I made the bold claim that every game should have 100 save slots, and for every save slot below 100, it should have a point docked from it. So...
00:01:48
Speaker
I love how you profess that with saying you'd say that to anyone who would listen. So I'm just imagining you asking your grocer. Yeah. I ask you. Is there any reason for this? Sir, how much sliced turkey do you want? I don't care.
00:02:01
Speaker
Half a pound of potatoes, please, and let me tell you about this save system, Pollux. Let's get into them. No, I mean, you're the one with the most unpleasant experience, go on and start her off with the, obviously the biggest pitfall of having a single save. Yeah. Well, because what happens if it autosaves right before something fucks up? Like, say, if you were playing Half-Life and the autosave cracked off just as you were falling down a pit in distant spikes.
00:02:31
Speaker
You just have to continually relive that moment, like some kind of hellish purgatory. I deeply do not trust auto-saving in games. Same. Even if I see the auto-save icon and it says saved, if I can manually save, I will 100% manually save after. Yeah, show of hands, chat. Anyone who manually saves when they stop playing a game, even though the auto-save is ostensibly a few seconds in. Maybe that's a generation thing. Younger people don't. Fuck it, the computer will take care of everything for me.
00:03:00
Speaker
I was kind of... It's just one of those things they don't think about until it's corrupted and then you're like, oh damn, whatever, I'm gonna save. Yeah, I think I was ruined by Half-Life. The original Half-Life was where the first game I remember just automatically auto-saving every few rooms. Sure. And I guess I kind of got used to that because I like a few years back I'd go back and play the original Quake and be playing merrily and then get killed and suddenly, oh, I'm back at the start of the level with no weapons. Shit.
00:03:29
Speaker
Let's freaking imagine. No, not even. It's not even a personal thing. I talked to the autosave after it's gone. It's like, I'm glad you did that, but I'm going to go ahead and manually save mine right after the one that you made. And so it's just to me, is that arrogance? Is that hubris to design a game that it's like, you know, I will save for you and it will be one. I don't know if that's worse than the ones. It's like you will save for you manually at checkpoints.
00:03:56
Speaker
It's not hubris, it's multiple failure points. That's just good engineering. It's good engineering to have one. It's good engineering to have as many failure points as possible in case one of them breaks down, you got all the backups. I think they all break at the same time. It's something majestic like a firecracker. But no, that's what I'm saying. It's like we're not having that backup is that's what I'm thinking. Hubris to go out my game won't crash.
00:04:22
Speaker
Are you insinuating that I don't know how to code? Exactly. You can't predict when a game is going to just fuck up as Dragon's Doctor 2 didn't. But I'll leave that for Wednesday's review. Exactly.
00:04:37
Speaker
Uh, yeah. And like, we're, we're, uh, old enough to remember when saving was, well, I guess Yahtzee and I were probably old enough to remember when saving wasn't a thing in games before it was eventually a thing in games. Um, yeah, back in the day, you just had to start the game and then play the whole thing. And once they, the whole thing, cause games are short enough or they were sort of designed to be kind of arcadey ports, or, uh, maybe they had a password system where you had, uh, Oh, I love those icons or things like that.
00:05:04
Speaker
which was nice because, ostensibly, you could, if you rented a game, you could have passwords in it, you could share passwords with your friends, you could, yeah, that kind of thing made sort of the sharing of that information, I don't know, nice and quaint way.
00:05:20
Speaker
bit of a pain in the ass to type it in every time, of course. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Especially ones that were like symbols and you'd look at it and be like, what did I just draw? Didn't you have those, uh, with some of the Disney games you played recently for us or some of the, um, I wanted to say Rayman did that too, but I don't think it was icons. Yeah. Um, and also starts to get you a little curious though, because you go, how does this know?
00:05:41
Speaker
How does this know what I was doing with this icon here? And then you probably start figuring out, oh, this, this goes to level, this goes to lives, this goes to whatever. And then yeah, a little bit like, oh yeah, uh, sure. I had 99 lives last time I played this. Of course it was that one. Yeah, that was the, that's the whole floor of the system, I suppose. But you know, for people trying to have fun in their own way, why stop them?
Strategies and Challenges in Game Saving
00:06:02
Speaker
Yeah, but before long, of course, the game creators realized they could just save some data to the media to record progress in the game. And I feel like in certain sectors, at least, some game designers were a little bit self-conscious about letting you save willy-nilly wherever you wanted, and started introducing saving as more of a gameplay mechanic that you had to use up resources on, or whatever.
00:06:29
Speaker
Yeah, because I think that's where, if you are saving wherever you want, whenever you want, I feel like you are much more likely to reach a scenario like you talked about earlier with Dragon's Dogma to where you can really put yourself in a corner, right? You could sort of, you know, back yourself into an unwinnable situation because where you saved, whereas if the game is in control over, you can only save in these safe rooms like in Resident Evil or these specific chambers like in Super Metroid. They wouldn't know that.
00:06:59
Speaker
Yeah, I have experience with that because adding the save system to Star Trek Vagabond was a pain in the ass. You can't let them save anywhere because certain data relies on the way the room is built. So if you reload the game inside of room with like all the cutscenes half wired up, then things tend to fuck up.
00:07:17
Speaker
Yeah. So I made it so you can only save while on the ship, and even that's caused enough problems. But of course, the other reason why PlayStation 1 games usually would force you to save at save points, even if you couldn't in other ports of the game, like in Tomb Raider, was because there just wasn't that much room on the cartridge to store information.
00:07:38
Speaker
And if you knew if you could isolate specific points in the game where people would be saving, then you wouldn't have to record map data where they were in terms of X and Y coordinates and everything else. There was a lot less information that needed to be saved.
00:07:55
Speaker
Yeah, even, uh, even games like, uh, uh, that you could save anywhere would oftentimes, like I think of Ocarina time, you could save anywhere, but if you saved in a dungeon, uh, and then restarted, it would start you at the beginning of the dungeon. Like if you saved on the overworld, it would start you like, as I forget,
00:08:14
Speaker
Hyrule Castle or the last zone you'd entered, so it was ostensibly saving anywhere, but not at the exact position in the world. It was sort of at the, okay, let's put you right at the front of this zone that you saved. So it felt like it was kind of best of both worlds-ing, that kind of thing.
00:08:29
Speaker
I do think designers worry about players cheesing it. Yeah, that's the Elden Ring thing. You can jump off in a very specific cliff and depending on where you die, it'll just put you into the next zone. Yeah, he literally did that live during one of our Elden Ring plays the other year, where he's like, oh, I'm going to skip an entire section of this game by knowing exactly where to die so that the game is like, eh, fuck it. I guess you're over here.
00:08:53
Speaker
A lot of math is fun. And how did we get away from that? Now you can have this thing where it's sort of like, I guess, instance saving. Rogue likes to do it very commonly where let's just say, I don't know, your system just closes down for some reason. You boot the game back up and you're exactly where you were before. What? How is that? Because we, I was raised on the whole, like, don't touch anything while this is auto saving. It'll corrupt. You'll get a virus. You'll get syphilis. Don't touch it. But now this is like always saving. I don't know how that works.
00:09:22
Speaker
Yeah, Dark Souls does that somehow. I don't really understand. Yeah, Dark Souls will do that. At worst, if you're inside a boss room, it'll just put you on the outside. Yeah. How does that work? Do you think letting the game quicksave at any point and reload at any point takes something away from the game? Because I feel like some designers think that it does.
00:09:42
Speaker
How's saves coming? What are you saying? Yeah. Yeah, saves coming. Like Half-Life let you save scum. The original Quake, when I play it these days, I practically bind Quicksave to one of the mouse buttons. Sure. I do that with a lot of old games. Like, you know, emulators, you know, using rewind features and pause and save state features where the game doesn't exist. I think there's a concern that if you have that, you can just cheese any of the challenges. And justifiably, somewhat. Do you remember the original Prey? Not the latest Prey, the original Prey?
00:10:12
Speaker
Yeah, with the vagina doors. That had a very weird death system that possibly comes out of the feeling that if you can quicksave anywhere, then it's basically just you're not dying at all. It's you going back like seconds at most. So where you had to go to like the Native American spirit realm?
00:10:30
Speaker
Yeah, just this gameplay mechanic, when you ran out of health, instead of dying and having to reload a save, you got transported to a spirit realm, and you had to shoot little flying gribblies to restore your health and mana, and then you'd be sent right back to the world, where exactly where you've been, without ever having to die. And nobody really liked that. The game got a lot of shit for that mechanic, even though it was functionally the same as a save scum system. Why'd you think that was?
00:10:57
Speaker
It was save scumming, but with a bit of punishment. And I think it's one of those ideas that on paper or the first time, you're like, this is pretty neat. And then you're like, Oh, I'm going to have to do this every time. Wait a minute. This has gotten way less neat. I mean, I think it's forcing the player to, you know, save scumming takes away consequences of actions. Right. Um, and so it's, I guess, forcing the player to, to deal with the consequences of their actions, whether that's positive or negative. But maybe it kind of messed with the context.
00:11:27
Speaker
It was like, this person within context is immortal. Why is the enemy opposing them? Clearly this is a futile struggle. Yeah, this thing is coming back no matter what we do. You say that, but to me it was more of like a Groundhog Day kind of thing, where I'm immortal. I know I'm immortal, not everyone knows I'm immortal though, and they still act very normally.
00:11:47
Speaker
Well, you don't go back in time when you die. You just respawn exactly where you were standing. So presumably all the enemy aliens would have seen you do in that. I don't like multiple saving. I'll have the auto save. I'll have my manual save. But the first one that I actually had multiple saves on was going back to Thief 2, where it's just like, oh, what do these doors lead to in this other way? And I have the one that I'm consistently saving on. But then it's like, this feels like a branching point.
00:12:15
Speaker
So I'll go ahead and put a save here. Then when it branches over here, I'll go ahead and put one there. And then I'll do my main one and reroute through the entire way. So it feels, uh, yeah, it feels like a metagaming, but also gives us the strange depth of like, I'm a time traveling thief. Yeah. Or like your storyboarding. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Oh, I think, I think it's more fun to play thief two without saving mid mission. Cause that's for the higher difficulty, you know?
00:12:38
Speaker
Well, Thief is a game that gives you a lot of outs. If someone catches you, you could always just run away and hide somewhere, or you could just, like, fight them with your sword and kill them. So, like, you know, there's... You have to, like, do quite a lot to fuck up if you're not playing in, like, super hard difficulty. I think it's more fun to just try and live with your mistakes. I suppose, but I don't know. The world's just so nice. You know, I don't want to break that flow.
00:13:02
Speaker
You ever see that Nicolas Cage movie next? Yeah, where you can like predict the next whatever. Yeah, there's a sequence in that which basically is the act of save scumming captured on film. Yeah. Where you see like Nicolas Cage is trying to like predict the best way to walk through like this maze or something. And how the film portrays that is you see multiple Nicolas Cages split off from him to try every possible turn until he finds the right one.
00:13:29
Speaker
Yeah, I'm Nicholas Cage. I am nexting. You're nexting? Oh no, I'm nexting. I'm nexting. It's funny because there's also games that take that concept and kind of take control of it themselves.
00:13:44
Speaker
I think 13 Sentinels, he just rim did that to where you almost had this flowchart of moments and you could choose to go back to them. I know that 999, which is like a time travel visual novel puzzle game, does a similar thing where like Frost was almost talking about creating his own junction points via save states. Like the game builds those into the narrative and you're purposely supposed to go back and then see oh what happens if you take the other fork in the road and
00:14:11
Speaker
kind of dealing with like the multiverse is both of those things happening simultaneously. Which that's I guess just you know some in a long line of games that did something with saving that was more interesting than just oh okay you're pausing and when you come back you can unpause.
00:14:30
Speaker
Resident Evil is a game I think of as an early example of a game that does something interesting with saving by taking consumable ink ribbons that take up a inventory space in a game with a very limited inventory space and have them tied to the number of times you could save.
00:14:44
Speaker
I think that works for Resident Evil because Resident Evil is like most survival horrors if it's ilk, has very firm progress. Like if you explore an area, solve a puzzle, blah blah blah blah blah, kill the enemies in a certain area, you've made progress. You know you're not going to do anything that's going to be like a step back.
00:15:05
Speaker
So saving doesn't feel quite so frustrating. I remember the original Daikatana, when it originally came out, had limited save gem systems and nobody liked it because the way Romero designed maze-like levels, you were never sure if you were actually making programs or anything like that.
00:15:24
Speaker
And it just doesn't, like, it feels like it makes sense in the structure of a Resident Evil game where it's like, oh, you need to make decisions to, do you carry extra ammo or do you want to save space in your inventory in case you find items or do you want more healing items or do you want to bring keys with you? So it just, you know, compounds those decisions.
00:15:43
Speaker
It also works in survival horror, because it teaches you that you need to be careful about your decisions. You don't need to edge forward carefully, because if you get overwhelmed and killed, you have to go back to the last save slot, chum. Yeah. There's no easy out, you're not just going to reload at the start of the last fight. Yeah. I don't know, it's as much progress in the game through actually beating the game versus just exploring the different mechanics, so to speak.
00:16:10
Speaker
In Thief, I remember one path was you go through and you're essentially being framed for murder when you were trying to murder, sort of. And that was a split. And I was like, ooh, what happens if I like completely surpass this and go all the way around and no one sees it? And that sort of emerged where Garrett discovers the body and is like, oh, damn, what happened here? So it was kind of interesting.
00:16:30
Speaker
not so much it was difficult to do it I really wanted to see that whereas in Disco Elysium yeah I died many times to very like horrible roles but I lived with those consequences because it felt like it was very ingrained into the structure whereas the immersive sim element of thief was more about like this is how the world interacts and I wanted to see all the world interactions more so than just beating it
00:16:53
Speaker
It opened itself up to a different kind of metagame, like with Terraria was one of the ones I put on here. The way it works is your character has a save and your world has a save, similar to Minecraft in that way. But again, it's the character save that's important. So you can have this level 70 character and you can put all this stuff on it and then go to a different world. In the later game, it almost asks you to do so because you need to get specific materials.
Innovative Save Systems and Player Experience
00:17:16
Speaker
and it's very limited materials loading into this world so you are now operating across multiple saves that are interacting with each other or you could just visit your friends and they just start a new world and you're like hey look at all my gear you know and I like that it's sort of like you know what it's more than just a save system it's actually it's a resource itself yeah
00:17:36
Speaker
It's just wacky nonsense. ARPGs do that. They'll have an inventory in the game that can, um, you can access it through any character that you have, but it's very limited, right? So you're like, Hey, I found this cool little item for a thief, but I'm a Barb. I'm gonna go ahead and just put that in there. And if I do a thief character, he can access it. It's like a little love letter to yourself. Do you write love letters to yourself? Do not.
00:18:02
Speaker
I always wondered how much you could do with that as a game mechanic, the ability to sort of open portals to other save files and sort of greet yourself and like exchange goods and say hi.
00:18:15
Speaker
Yeah, we talked about that a couple times. I feel like we talked about that in a call or a meeting once about how could you toy with, what could you do with the concept of save files that sort of recontextualizes them or does something interesting that games really haven't done yet. Because we've seen a recent
00:18:39
Speaker
wave, especially in indie games of stuff like Undertale and, um, Inscription and Doki Doki Literature Club, which, like, use the concept of saving files to your hard drive on your PC, um, as a means of being able to, like, interact with that in an interesting way, which, I don't know, Metal Gear Solid was the first one to do that with Psycho Mantis's, obviously, little, like, barbs if you played other Konami games. Um... Yeah, you can never do much more than, sort of, fun gimmicks with it. Weren't that a fable thing?
00:19:09
Speaker
Fable? Yeah, like if you had a recent, an old save on a different Fable game, what the second one would start you off different or something or other? Essentially you could access your saves. I don't know if it was Fable, it was some medieval game I didn't play.
00:19:23
Speaker
There are things where you can do that, like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, you could import saves from the previous games in the series. Yeah, and even password stuff, handheld games like Golden Sun and the few Zelda Game Boy Color games had things where you'd beat one game, get a really in-depth password, and if you put that in when you started the next game, it almost felt like you were carrying your save file over, ostensibly.
00:19:52
Speaker
Yeah. There's also, it feels like a well-placed or well-created save point also acts as like a bit of a reprieve. I always think of the save rooms in Resident Evil, whether it's, you know, one or even Resident Evil 4 as like moments to catch your breath. Like the music changes. You know you enter one and it is safe. Like it is literally a safe room.
00:20:16
Speaker
They've saved systems as a method for establishing narrative and mood. Yes. Yeah. The couch is in Ico. Yes. Having a nice having a lovely sit down with your girlfriend. Yeah.
00:20:33
Speaker
It has one of the nicest little details where if you close the game and then start it back up, sometimes they'll be on the couch and they'll both be asleep. So you'll be sleeping and she'll have her head on your shoulder and then you'll both wake up and go on your adventure. That was such a neat little detail.
00:20:47
Speaker
Yeah, it's nice when games make lemonade out of lemons that way. Yeah, it just puts thought into something that really doesn't need the thought put in but is appreciated. I mean, I like the save points in Silent Hill 2 as well. How they were literally just red squares and you instantly noticed them because they were the only point of colour in this incredibly drab, miserable world. Yeah.
00:21:12
Speaker
Wasn't that? What was it? That new Amnesia game. Couldn't you only save in the middle bunker? Yes. Yes, that was like that game's gimmick. It was immersive sim adjacent. And there was only one save point right in the middle of the game. And you just had to like go on expeditions out to the furthest reaches of the game and then hope you could get back alive. Slightly less traumatized. Yeah, I mean, I enjoy that.
00:21:37
Speaker
You can only save these locations for a bit of reprieve. Depends on the game, I suppose, if it's not an absolute trudge that you're doing. Like, I guess Ignalis, that did not vibe with that save system. It's very similar to the Silent Hill 2 save system. Yeah, I think it was much. Like, weirdly so. Like, that's why it makes me think that Ignalis was made by someone who just assumed that the way Silent Hill 2 did it was how you were supposed to do it.
00:22:02
Speaker
The way things are is the way things are. The game has to be a pain, so when they save, it feels good. Yeah. I mean, there's also like save systems do, can feel like a reward. You know, I play a lot of Metroidvanias and when you're going in an uncharted area and you're like, man, I'm running low on health and like running low on supplies and I could use
00:22:24
Speaker
It's a bench right now in, you know, uh, in Hollow Knight, or I can use one of those sort of energy revitalization chambers in Super Metroid, or those fucking, what's this, Caspianas, those like tetrahedrons, those like weird 3D shapes. It's weird that I never really understood. Weird d20 things. It's weird to say that a save file can be used as a reward, considering it is like a fundamental and necessary aspect of games these days. Yeah.
00:22:51
Speaker
Yeah, but I guess it's the same as like, I don't know if you're, if you're on a long trip and you're, you're driving through like the Nevada desert and you're like, Ooh, I'm getting like under a quarter tank. Seeing a gas station will feel like a reprieve.
Save Systems and Game Difficulty Balancing
00:23:04
Speaker
Like, even though you're going there, if I can pay money to fill your car up, um, that's what it kind of feels like to me in those games. I love how you went for gas here. I was thinking like you just busting for a piss, you know? And it's like, it'd be nice to get to a gas station, but I will just pull over and have a go. That's true.
00:23:19
Speaker
It's the equivalent of saves coming. The interesting approach that Dark Souls takes is that it sort of differentiates saves that you go back to when you quit the game and go back in, and saves that you go back to when you die. Yeah. If you quit the game and go back in, it just takes you right back to where you were, as you said. It's pretty much saving all the time somehow. Kind of the last action you did. Yeah. But when you die, you go back to bonfires.
00:23:48
Speaker
Because having to quit the game or pause the game because it's time for dinner is something that you can't help. Whereas death is very specifically a punishment for fucking up. Yeah. I think it's probably the best approach to differentiate the two. But would a game like Dark Souls would lose a lot if you were allowed to
00:24:16
Speaker
save whenever you want, wherever you wanted, how many times? Like, I got the sense fortress. I'm just going to save scum to get myself through these fucking snakes. Well, if you could, well, yes, if you could save scum, it would be kind of ruined. But if you couldn't quit at any time because you could only quit while you're at a bonfire, that would just be annoying because you might get called away. Like some, like your grandmother might fall off a ladder and you might have granny granny, get off the ladder.
00:24:43
Speaker
I'm going to swiftly get off the computer and help her. And that's not anything you or the game can help. This is more an argument for Dark Souls having a pause than whatever you want. Well, actually, well, true. I mean, yeah, the non online from software games have pause and I tend to relish it. Oh, yeah.
00:25:07
Speaker
I'll just, I'll play Sekiro, I'll just pause when I don't need to just because I can. Just winding up. Yes. Yes, you're all dancing to my tune now, asshole. I like, uh, there's, there's also games that, um,
00:25:26
Speaker
Use their save points as their own internal risk reward Devil Knight had checkpoints throughout the levels that you could either cross and they would just act as a checkpoint or if you were confident you could destroy the checkpoint and You'd get a bunch of money for it, but you wouldn't have a checkpoint
00:25:43
Speaker
And so it felt like one of those small tweaks to difficulty that was player by player. Do you value being able to restart the level halfway through or do you just want to kind of go all in and really push your chips in and take it? Yeah, it definitely feels like a wager.
00:26:01
Speaker
Yeah. Like that one boss find Undertale where you can score extra damage if you wager that you're not going to get hit in the next round. I kind of like those things in games. I like when it gives you like, you don't have to do this, but if you're really cocky and, or if you have a crippling gambling addiction. Yeah. Always snap pieces. I always snap. First thing, never, never done me wrong. Doesn't, uh, already do that. You have save resources.
00:26:30
Speaker
Yes, that's almost a unique approach. You can use a resource to plonk down a bonfire, if you will, at any time. I thought that was really true. So you could use your own save points. Yeah, it's funny how the sequel didn't have it because it was like the main unique selling point, I'd say. Well, there's something with it though, right?
00:26:52
Speaker
Did it just have more liberal checkpoints I guess throughout the level? I think so, yeah.
Player Strategies and Save Systems
00:27:00
Speaker
I do like the idea of like this thing is a real pain in the ass and I finished it so I'm gonna fucking put down a checkpoint right here because I don't want to have to deal with this one obstacle again which everyone has those in games. Yeah.
00:27:14
Speaker
Yeah, there's another there was a 3d platformer a few years ago an indie one called demon turf that did the same thing I think you could like place three checkpoints throughout levels and You know, you could choose when and where if you wanted to use them early, you just wouldn't have them late Final Fantasy 7 the original also weirdly has you know, like a lot of RPGs it has Set save points or save on the overworld, but you get one
00:27:38
Speaker
portable save point that you can place down in the final dungeon since the final dungeon is pretty long and you can choose where in the final dungeon you want to place it so you can place it halfway down or you can wait all the way till right before you fight Sephiroth. It's yeah it's kind of weird that it only uses it once which are you know that I bring up JPGs for a lot of things but there was a few examples when I was thinking about save points of games that
00:28:03
Speaker
did something neat with them, Chrono Trigger, which Yatsu, you played the other summer. There's one section where you go into a sewer, and it tells you there's monsters in the sewer, and you gotta be quiet. And so there's a couple things you could do. There's trash, and if you kick it, the monsters will come out. There's certain graded floors, and if you run over them instead of walking, a monster will come out. But at the end of it, there's a save point. And if you go up to the save point, the game gives you the save point chime, like the little blink, and that noise summons the monster.
00:28:32
Speaker
And so it's like the one part in the game that does it to where it's like, oh, every other save point is safe in the game, except for this one. Like this one will fuck you up if you, if you touch it, which I always found really cute. That's kind of fun. Yeah. I don't know. Games that fuck with save points that fuck with you. Like I was just wondering how people would react if Dark Souls had a bonfire mimic enemy.
00:28:54
Speaker
Yeah. Could you imagine, like, my ideas? Could you imagine? Nothing is sacred, then. Like, oh, the amount of trauma you'd cause. Yeah. How many games now? Those bonfires have been trusted. Granted. How are you doing? Lords of the Fallen has those. Oh, really? Yeah. What time they mix? Absolute dixos are in. You just, like, I can't trust anything. Anything could just eat me in this whole game. I think it was a bonfire. I'm not sure what it was. Anything can eat me.
00:29:24
Speaker
But I'm not sure how I feel about this sort of, you're essentially not incentivized to save if you don't feel the pressure of the game sort of weighing down upon you. But what if then it crashes, but you were oh so good, you got to like the halfway point without saving, you're like, damn. How was I supposed to, you know, assume that the game would just crash on me?
Reliability of Save Systems and Player Impact
00:29:44
Speaker
When I pay for these games, they tend to be finished. Well, save early, save often. That was the old Sierra Credo. Yeah.
00:29:54
Speaker
That's why I say there should be a distinction between having to leave saves and just getting punished for dying saves. There you go. It does feel like they're two different things, right? And I guess Dark Souls handles them differently a bit, but... Yeah, I don't know, like... Any time I go back and play an older game...
00:30:14
Speaker
on an emulator and even like Nintendo's official emulators on Switch for the NES and SNES have rewind and safe state features that just like they even realize like listen the way games are designed and the 80s and 90s a lot of them we understand is frustrating as shit so if you want to get through the game here you go like a lot of those Disney collections and stuff have those things and honestly I guess only way I can get through those games yeah
00:30:39
Speaker
Because a lot of the games from that era were designed in the arcade tradition, which stayed within mindsets for way too bloody long. Yeah. Where everything had to be stealing your quarters. They should still do that. The next, the side of the Switch 2, you can put quarters into it. Works real lives. It just gets heavier.
00:31:01
Speaker
Well, you jest, but I'm sure there are a lot of games where if they had like save items and then lock them behind micro payments, a lot of people would just sort of accept that these days.
00:31:13
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, there's even, I always, I don't know if Pokemon's still like this, but Pokemon, uh, when I was playing it growing up, had a single save slot on each, uh, on each, uh, game pack. And that always to me felt like them knowing, oh, if there's two siblings who love this game, you're going to buy both versions for them because they're going to be fighting over the save slot. And that always felt grimy. That's a blue. That's why there was a red version and a blue version scenario.
00:31:42
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And then they'd have to work together to unlock all the Pokémon and all the family comes together and it's a wholesome story. Ah, so they were actually trying to create bonds between the family and not sell an extra $35 game. It seems like that's the sort of thing they would say they were doing. Yes, yes. And then say, excuse me, I'm still counting money.
00:32:05
Speaker
Yeah, they still do that, that's fucking dumb. Short games with a lot of width to them, very horizontal layered sort of like Stanley Parable, right? That way those are the kinds of games I like to have a lot of saves in. I have Dishonored,
00:32:23
Speaker
I'm just curious because I think at some point it was in the loading where it said be careful because if you're being a naughty one then there will be a lot of rats so now I'm just here like okay I want to see what happens if I'm really good and what happens if I'm really bad. I'd be super nice this one run and then go back for catharsis and murder everything.
00:32:41
Speaker
I don't think it's that long, you know? So 2 is pretty manageable, but like having to save files for like, I don't know, Baldur's Gate, dear God. So for some people like you, to be able to freely save is like a fundamental aspect of the enjoyment of the game. Uh, for RPGs. Allows you to experience it the way you want to. Oh, look at that. Absolutely. With a fork.
00:33:05
Speaker
There's also I mean a game can sort of take that into its own hands like Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth when you finish it opens up not only chapter select, but you have kind of different
00:33:20
Speaker
Values for each chapter. So there's like famously a scene where cloud goes on a date with a character at the gold saucer and who Whatever character you've built a bond with you go on a date with them and it could be like hot and heavy date or a friendship date And when you finish the game, you can go back to that chapter and choose Okay, I want to replay this chapter But I'm going on the hot and heavy date with Barrett or I'm going on the casual bit with with oh, yeah with Aerith
00:33:46
Speaker
I wondered if that was the case, because I was playing it, and I assume it was the date, just like clouds in his room, and there's a knock on the door, and Aerith was there, and Aerith was like, hey, let's go hang around at the theme park, because this game couldn't create a sense of urgency if it was staring it in the face.
00:34:08
Speaker
Uh, coming, coming through the full Ray Momatic Final Fantasy 7 rebirth. And I was wondering if that was much like in the original, uh, a different character would have been there if Aerith hadn't been the character I had the height. Yeah, there's, uh, this one kind of makes your relationships a little more obvious. Like you do things with characters and they get little smiley faces above them, whereas the values are more hidden in the original game.
00:34:30
Speaker
Yes, I heard that. Yes, it does a very telltale sort of, ooh, Aerith will like that you did that. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, I've got a bit of a throaty cough. Oh, sick again. I should reload the save from back before I had a cough.
00:34:49
Speaker
Waka Waka. Do you want to go to Super Chats? I know there's a bunch of things I have to say bouncing. Yeah, let's go Super Chat nuts. Yeah, and thank you to everyone who's already donated. We appreciate it. Thank you to everyone who supports us on here, on Patreon, on the Ko-Fi.
00:35:10
Speaker
who just puts money in little cracks and buildings and knows that we're going to find it. We appreciate it. We love having your money. We do. It's great. It's great. We spend it on shit. Yeah, things. 3D sunglasses. All right. FoxD is the first one I have.
00:35:29
Speaker
Saying, Super Mega Baseball 3 has the best save system ever. Auto saves after every pitch. One save, Iron Man mode. I love it. Jesus. I like that a baseball game is intense like this. This is like fucking hardcore, grounded mode in The Last of Us, but baseball.
00:35:45
Speaker
Yeah well the Japanese are pretty baseball mad and you know how they like to inject drama into things. I don't mind those again it just comes down to like what if the game crashes because if it crashes outside of my era then I will resent that game. I do like the roguelike solution of like it's instant save so if something crashes you're right back to where you were but if you die it's over.
00:36:08
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. The two different kinds of reload. Yeah. Well, that's interesting. Like, your save and your consequences are separate. Also, the name FoxD reminds me of how FoxD reminds me of FoxDie, which is in Metal Gear. And Metal Gear had the kind of interesting, you'd have to use your codec to call up Mei Ling. And she'd be like, all right, I'll save your game. But I also want to tell you a parable.
00:36:34
Speaker
about your adventure yeah they really weren't trying to keep that fourth wall intact no no those games were they yeah because i currently would be like hold down the analog stick snake hold down hold down the a button etc i remember one bit of dialogue where he's talking about the tech he's given you and then he goes and remember snake all of the tech we've given you is based on currently existing technology and i was like well i should fucking hope so
00:37:02
Speaker
I kind of, what's the alternative? Oh, this is technology based on our thoughts and dreams. The past technology. In Metal Gear Solid 1, there's a part where you have to change discs. But then when you go back to Shadow Moses and Resident Evil, or in Metal Gear Solid 4, when you hit that point, Asla calls and is like, ah, you don't have to change your discs here because we're on a Sony Blu-ray. And Snake's just like, shut the fuck up.
00:37:31
Speaker
Ocelot or Otacon. Otacon, not Ocelot. Oh, I said Ocelot, I'm sorry. Fake Metal Gear Boy. How could you get that wrong? Fake Metal Gear Boy. Solid Snakes, you know, Hetro. Otaku Convention. His beloved husband who made up to the child. Do you think there are Ocelot cons, like conventions for Ocelot lovers? Surely.
00:37:52
Speaker
You know, I was watching like YouTube videos from like a reptile expert about his favorite spiders. He was talking about how you can go to spider expos if you're looking for this specific breed of Goliath Bird Eater and not one of the two knockoff breeds that they are literally available. Why would I want to go there? Because you're really into spiders. That sounds so scary though. It's right next to the Arachnophobe Con. Like right next door too.
00:38:15
Speaker
CES used to be held simultaneously with the porn convention in Vegas. So there'd be all like the sweaty tech boys with all the pornography employees. Time to be alive. Yeah. I would imagine there'd be quite a lot of crossover. Yeah. A lot of cranking. A lot of sweaty cranky people. A lot of cranking.
00:38:36
Speaker
are the more gives for 99 us and says first time catching this life, but it's because I lost my dog this morning. Frowny face. Thank you for the entertainment and distractions. Yeah, distract yourself from it by telling us about it. I don't know. Good idea. You know what? It's called, it's called grieving and we all do it in different ways. Yeah. I don't know if the best way to grieve today is to stare at the eclipse. I'm sorry. I lost a dog. Uh, it's, it can be very sad.
00:39:07
Speaker
Robonop the snob gives 20 euros and says, only excuse for the single save I can give, making the choices you make irreversible. Frustrating? Yeah, but I respect a dev that wants players to make decisions they can't change just because they didn't like the outcome.
00:39:19
Speaker
Yeah, but on the other hand, ribbon of the snob, crashes, as Frost keeps saying. If it crashes, sometimes I'm like, bud, your game's not that hardcore. You don't need to go like this. There's other ways to put in difficulty. Was the Hellblade thing real where they said if you die enough time, you save just eats itself? No, no, no. I created it. There's tension. I loved it because everyone was like, oh no, I got to win this fight because the corruption's coming. Yeah.
00:39:49
Speaker
They just lie to people and give them all the saves. Yeah pretty much. They literally just lied.
00:39:56
Speaker
There was also, I'm sure we've brought up this game before, but Steel Battalion was a mech game that came with a $200 controller that was an entire mech console with knobs and buttons and all that shit. But the whole thing with the game was if you died and you blew up, it would just delete your save. That is it, one and done. However, there was an eject button that you had to press. And if you press the eject button, you would lose your mech.
00:40:22
Speaker
But your character and your save would still be alive. You have to buy a new Mac to continue. So that was a true risk reward of, do I think I can pull this fight off, or do I run away and try to live to fight another day?
00:40:37
Speaker
That's interesting, yeah. Tiny King had this thing where if you fell off from a great height, right, you can still save yourself because you had the little parachute thing. But then you had to make it all the way back so it was actually better to just kill yourself, like lay yourself just land on your head and then spawn right back at the top.
00:40:54
Speaker
I don't know. Yeah. Jackson Jewel gives $5 because I always saved twice if playing Bethesda games you never knew when it was just going to randomly corrupt. I think most of the times they corrupt in a funny way though. Like characters like disappearing into the floor. Oh yeah.
00:41:12
Speaker
Are there like, are there like developers or publishers that you just trust less when it comes to saving? And so you're like, well, I'm giving you, like, Ubisoft, you're getting the old three save from me. Whereas like Nintendo, I kind of trust you. Usually you have polish, so you, I only need one save to know I'm good.
00:41:28
Speaker
I think you'd be well advised to keep your save files ordered in Skyrim because they do have a very janky air and if you aren't saving regularly in a game that feels very janky then if things fuck up it's kinda on you.
00:41:45
Speaker
It's like driving a car with no floor and complaining that your shoe leather gets worn off by friction. Cause I think, well, what did you expect? Either car doesn't have a floor by a car that does have a floor. Idiot. Yeah. Like starfield feels like a double saver. This is just by the look over, you know, RPGs and any game that feels like my PC is huffing a little bit. Like, all right, just, yeah, that car doesn't have a floor or a ceiling or two of the wheels. Yeah.
00:42:15
Speaker
about. It's a unicycle. Well, it's a bicycle. It's a bicycle with a chassis. Built for two. Shanks a poster, gives $5.99, and says, three saves per campaign is perfect if you screw up Marty, it's skill issue, Marty. One main and two backups in case games does Ubisoft and fails. I feel like a lot of that was directed at me.
00:42:41
Speaker
What do you think about games that judge you by how many times you saved over the course of the game? This is something that Silent Hill games used to do a lot. You get a star rating at the end, and the best way to get the highest star rating in Silent Hill 2 was to only save twice in the entire course of the game? Yeah. Nah. It's like going on an all-you-can-eat buffet, and they start looking at you funny on the sixth serving. I'm like, is that all you can eat? You put the same point there. You wanted me to only have four, then let's say four plate limit.
00:43:09
Speaker
Well, that's on you, bud. Yeah. Yeah, that's the... That meme, my brother in Christ, you made this game. You literally control everything I'm capable of doing here. I think those are very...
00:43:21
Speaker
to me those feel of akin with the Japanese centric design of grading you after battles in like character action games because the games I think of that sort of do that are like Metal Gear Resi Silent Hill all do the thing at the end where like ah you saved this many times and you died this many times you fight this many bullets so you are a zombie dog that is your rank this time well done yeah it's it's not really like a
00:43:51
Speaker
Serious thing, though, it doesn't- No, I think it's for the kinds of people who are gonna replay a game five times to get every ending. Yeah, it wants to get, like, the Fox speedrun. Yeah. How fast it takes to get the Fox rating.
00:44:05
Speaker
Anyway, Alex Armstrong gives $5 and says, do what the Crash Bandicoot remake did. Three manual save files and one autosave for the casuals. Maybe even throw in a reminder after every other hour to save. So yeah, I'm there with Marty. I would like a hundred, mostly because you've got the autosave, the four that are mine, and if somebody else wants to play, they need another save. The one that's not mine. I mean, there's no real reason why you couldn't just have as many saves as your hard drive will fit.
00:44:33
Speaker
Well, Jay says it'll eat it up real quick. Jay knows more than me, but I feel like he was overestimating how big a save file is. I'm probably underestimating, because I think it's one kill, but... It depends on the game. This can't be that big. There's not that much to remember. Yeah, you are such a downloader in the game again. Yeah, you just have to remember, you know, how many levels you've beat, which crystals you got. How many Wumba fruits you got?
00:44:58
Speaker
Yeah. Does it save how many lives you got? Because I know Mario doesn't. Crash? Mario Galaxy didn't save how many lives you had. So if you, like, quit Mario Galaxy and came back in, if you had, like, 60 lives before, you'd be starting off with three. Yeah, they didn't care though. If you lost them all, they're like, oh, no consequence for you. Yeah, Mario games that still keep track of lives feel weird to me, because it'll just be like, it's game over. Well, what happens now? Well, that's why they start you where you were.
00:45:23
Speaker
That's why they stopped keeping track of lives in Mario Odyssey. I think the only reason they kept it in was that they could keep giving you one-ups and treat it as a reward. One-up mushrooms are iconic in Mario. You can't just not have them.
00:45:44
Speaker
Yeah. I am a big fan of continuing to lie to children though, so that seems good. Yeah, we can't. So much if they're not there. When else are you going to play the funny little jingle that you get when you collect a one up? Every time I look at this toe. That's where. Stop at this toe on a corner. That one. I don't know. It's a nice little one.
00:46:09
Speaker
Lampe gives 10 British pounds and says, end users can't be trusted with manual saving. Giving them the power to save whenever, Will calls them to lose four hours of progress when they get used to save scumming and select load instead. Oof. I've done that. Oh, God. I've done that! It was a humbling moment. A genuinely humbling moment. Yeah, I mean... Are you sure?
00:46:35
Speaker
Fuck off. Yeah, I'm sure. No, I'm not sure. I wasn't sure. You're not like, Oh, same button. Yeah. Tap for save. Double tap for load. There's just be buttons on my desk. I could probably set that up where there's like one button. That's the save button and one button. That's a load button. Yeah. You know, that's one way you can discourage, uh, users from saving too much is just make it really long and arduous. I mean, I remember saving an earth pound where you'd have to call your dad. I thought that was nice.
00:47:03
Speaker
And he would tell you how much money you had in your account. Yeah. I need, but it would like be 500 light little text boxes. Do that token bond at the end where he tells you to turn the computer off and go to sleep. Yeah. Work hard. Don't work too hard. I don't want to say it because I have to talk to my dad. Imagine.
00:47:21
Speaker
It was great. Your dad, you never meet your dad in the game cause he's just always at work. And so like your mom's always at home and you have to call her or also get homesick. And then your dad's just like, oops, yeah, sorry. I, uh, I'm at work, but I put some money in your account. So go beat up some more dogs to buy more baseball bets. Yeah. I noticed it doesn't alleviate homesickness to talk to your dad. Yeah. You could tell where the relationship is there. You use your dad for money and you use your mom for love. That was even some kind of salary man.
00:47:52
Speaker
Oh, now I'm just picturing your dad as like a fucking Yakuza character. That's great. He's probably getting very drunk in the evenings like most Japanese salarymen. Sleeping on a bench. Shai supposed to give a side note to 99 euros and says going into RPG game should lock choices campaign wide till game is finished and credits roll. Play it again for different outcomes like true gamer.
00:48:17
Speaker
It better be a whole different game. I don't want all that. Yeah, I don't know. It's rarely that consequential. I also think that if you just buy something like... I don't know, if you buy a DVD, you can choose... You can go to chapter select. And I guess that's like a whole different like can of worms of like, I bought a game so everything should just be unlocked at the beginning, but like... I don't know. I think...
00:48:43
Speaker
I can sell the food, but what you do with it and how you shove it up your own ass is your prerogative. Let me tell you, there's a lot of ways to shove it up my ass.
00:48:57
Speaker
I'm struggling to think of ways to shove things up your own ass beyond the basics. Get a running start. Stick it up dry, lube yourself up. Yeah, stick a funnel up there first. Phone a friend. 50-50. Anyway, Thinker gives five US dollars and says, I personally like having save points in the overworld because they act like chapters stroke pages in a book where it gives a clean place to stop playing.
00:49:27
Speaker
Yes, that's the PlayStation 1 game save points thing again, I suppose. If you can savor those specific points, it's like trying to find your place when you stopped reading at a new chapter in a book, rather than trying to find your place when you stopped reading mid-paragraph.
00:49:47
Speaker
Yeah. It at least gives you somewhere to regain your, your footing when you jump back into the game. Uh, and you're like, okay, I'm in a safe room and I now know where I am as opposed to like, I stopped in the middle of a fight and I need to immediately ramp the action back up as soon as I start again. Right. Yeah. Especially it's good on the book analogy. Cause I'm like, sometimes I need to, I found where I was, but I still go back like one or two pages. Just give me a little running headstart. Yeah. Like in the groove of things. Yeah.
00:50:16
Speaker
Dr. Theo gives two dollars and says, got nothing to say, just my weekly donation to you. You know, there's a easy way you can do that, Dr. Theo. It's called Patreon. You're my favorite, Dr. Theo. I don't know many Dr. Theos. Maybe Patreon's against the Hippocratic Oath. And Dr. Theo can not break the Hippocratic Oath. Okay. Well, that would mean using Patreon is in some way harming us.
00:50:40
Speaker
You disclose other things, like, you know, you can't give information, and they're just... Yeah. Maybe you can advise the pierogies to cop your ass. Is he worried that the money is corrupting us and making us want to push pierogies up our ass? Could be. HumaneShield gives $1.99 and says any game with lockpicking is going to abuse saves. Yeah, especially if the lockpicks break, because if you do the minigame wrong.
00:51:05
Speaker
Yeah. And you need to like break a bunch of lock picks in order to sort of get the flow of the mini game. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's like certain things where like there's fun difficulty and there's fun consequences. And then there's like, oh, fuck off game consequences of things. Um, you know, if something's going to feel like busy work or punishing you for the sake of punishing, it's kind of like, I don't, I don't need to deal with this. Like I have a job, I pay taxes. I don't need to deal with this.
00:51:34
Speaker
Oh, Skyrim you only get one lockpick as far as I'm concerned. Yeah. I guess I take the position that it's on the game to impress me, not the other way around. Yeah, I'm just like, is this the hill you want to die on? You know, this lockpicking game you put in here?
00:51:52
Speaker
Alex Armstrong comes back with our dollars and says, password saves are broken because you can look them up and skip to the end of the game. One advantage is you skip hard levels in games like Mean Bean Machine. Oh, Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine. I absolutely would do that all the time. Talking about The Lion King, there's like the
00:52:13
Speaker
before the stampede level. I think it's like literally the second level of the game. I'd be like, I can't do this level. So you gotta like jump in the heads of all the drafts and shit. And I'm like, I can't, I can't, I just fucking can't handle this level. I can handle the rest of the game. I can't handle this level. Do you think let's plays ruin the password economy? Cause now you could just watch the game. What do I need passwords for?
00:52:31
Speaker
If you needed a pass, you needed to take a little quiz every chapter of a video. I guess what we learned from Let's Play is that they don't really take anything away from the game if you're not actually playing the game.
00:52:47
Speaker
Because it turns out most people are perfectly happy to buy a game if they see someone play it and want it. That's the strength of video games. It's like trying to ruin a roller coaster with a video. It's a different experience. Yeah, pretty much. FoxD gives side dollars and says building arbitrary randomness into your game is just begging players to save scum. Looking at you, Fallout 3 speech checks.
00:53:10
Speaker
I did hear about that, people were complaining with Baldur's Gate 3, where it's like, it feels a bit out of character for my, you know, very well-built, strength-maining character to suddenly just get a 1 and flub it, like it's almost ruined by immersion. Well, welcome to my arguments with Jack Parker whenever he fails me with a natural 1 when I got the Silver Tongue perk. Maybe if you'd said please, he'd let you.
00:53:34
Speaker
No, he just likes fucking with us. He's mean like that. Sounds about right. How do, uh, how does safe scumming work in a, in a thing like an XCOM where like shots are, uh, percentage based or whatever? Like, is it the same percentage? Like, has it already decided what the percentage is? Or can you take a shot? That's 90% miss it, reload, and then take the shot and make it. And imagine old games like that are seeded.
00:54:00
Speaker
Well, if you have a seed, then, um, sure. If you fire once and then reload and fire again, uh, then it's going to be different. But if you fire once and then, uh, do something else random and then fire again, then it keeps going. You've just gone to the next sequence. Hmm.
00:54:25
Speaker
Eric Weihart, who could just talk to us, I mean, he's the producer, but he just likes giving us money for some reason, gives us 50 arses and says, who needs saves when you can rewind X amount of minutes? Looking at you, Pikmin 4, but the mechanic of returning to a previous day, Pikmin 3, is cool.
00:54:41
Speaker
I do like the fact that time is the time is rewinding is what separates like the sands of time time rewinding salvation gimmick from the just come back to life salvation gimmick in the original prey it's the time has to rewind we have to try again it's not just no consequence back to where you were yeah hmm
00:55:05
Speaker
I like games that give you a little bit of that to sort of like allow you a little wiggle room for fuckups. Fire Emblem, three houses at least, had a kind of a rewind mechanic to where you're like, oh man, I really, I was playing this battle really well for 15 minutes and then I made one dumb decision that it was a, you know, cascade of fuckups after this. And so you can rewind to that decision and be like, all right, I mean, instead of redoing the whole battle, I'm going to go back to this and you know,
00:55:35
Speaker
Everything will be fine. If we go back to a time when I was younger, why is this... No, I was younger, but I was still naive. Yeah, I hate why I've become useless. And then Eric donates because for some reason, he's bugged out and always shows his fifth anniversary of chats for every chat he puts in. I don't know why. Every fifth anniversary. Yeah. Peter Parker SL gives $5 and says, I used to avoid any games that didn't let me save whenever. My life's too hectic to say, wait till I get to a save point. I'm guessing you were a PC gamer back in the day, Peter Parker SL.
00:56:03
Speaker
Yeah, I guess that's the other part of this conversation is I feel like if you were growing up playing PC games, I'm sure you handled saves very differently throughout the 90s and whatnot then console players then
00:56:16
Speaker
Uh, Killaville gives $19.99. And there's congrats on the book release, Yahtzee! I picked it up and started listening, and before I knew it, it was 3 in the morning. I've already finished it. Also, I can't make the stream and listen to it later. Hi, future me. Hi, Killaville. I'm glad you enjoyed the book. I'm glad you're such a savvy consumer as to pick it up. If only everyone watching this were as savvy a consumer, I could also pick it up from audible.com right now.
00:56:42
Speaker
for absolutely no cost if you've got any audible credits. No, the print version's coming out later. Maybe it's like probably about a year or so. Are you going to release their own vinyl? No, that would be dumb. I want to go to the thrift store and find your book there.
00:57:05
Speaker
How much data can you put on a vinyl? Like in like bytes, do you think? Oh, in bytes? I don't know. Two. You could put like 30 minutes of music? Yeah. What's that worth in computing games? Yeah. Are there, can you run a game on vinyl?
00:57:24
Speaker
30 minutes of music? That's gotta be like, whew, maybe two megabytes. Yeah. I know. A CD is basically just vinyl, but with like space tick, right? It's the same principle. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Laser vinyl. Sure. It's like rings of data that is read by a needle or some such. It's the same like fundamental principle. It's just miniaturized on a CD.
00:57:51
Speaker
Anyway, RoboKnop the snob gives 10 euros and says, is save scumming the issue or is it a symptom? I feel some people save scum because of issues that make save scumming the only solution, e.g. save states in emulated RPGs because of unskippable cutscenes. Well, that goes along with by Gabe Newell's quote that there are no pirates, just dissatisfied consumers. Yeah.
00:58:12
Speaker
Uh, like, uh, like the old Uno on the Uno Twitter account once try to remind people of the rules for, um, the plus four draw card thing. But obviously saying that we were all doing it wrong, but someone responded saying, thank you for the card game. We'll take it from here though. And I'm like, yeah, that's my attitude. Yeah. Thank you for the lovely game. I'll take it from here now. Well, that's admirable. I'd say.
00:58:51
Speaker
But again, we're pretty sure that was just an empty threat.
00:58:55
Speaker
Which worked. Security breach absolutely does just disable saves at the last part of the game, and I have no idea why. It's very dumb. It just made me instantly want to stop playing. It's very dumb. I'm not going to go into spoilers, because it's a very amazing moment. But Nier Replicant, which is the remake of the original Nier game, has a thing that happens at the end that is like one of, it like takes the
00:59:24
Speaker
idea of saving your game and imbues it with emotion, uh, in a really, in a really incredible and effective way. So we'll not spoil it. Um, we'll only say that. And that is not satisfying to anyone who does not know what I'm talking about. Is it like that thing in the old heroes TV series where the dude goes into the future and leaves his girlfriend there and then travels back in time and prevents that future from happening. So his girlfriend is just disappeared.
00:59:53
Speaker
No, I don't remember that many heroes though. I remember heroes. There's a cheerleader, there's a time traveler. This was after the show started getting shit. Oh, I think I stopped watching by then. Anyway, underscore X1A gives 10 Canadian and says, Marty, your optimism is aspirational. Frost, your pragmatism demonstrates great strength. Yahtzee, your cynicism is an expression of passion on the subject of love letters. Well, that was just really nice.
01:00:22
Speaker
That was incredible. Is that how a dynamic then? Apparently I've been called pragmatic many times. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, it's just the voice. The funny thing is I'm not, I don't consider myself an optimistic person. Well, I didn't consider myself a pessimistic person. A cynic is a pessimist who can help.
01:00:49
Speaker
Well, in the original like classical definition, a cynic is just someone who questions everything. You do that a lot, yeah. What's pragmatism do? Well, the pragmatist just adapts, I suppose. There you go. Yeah.
01:01:10
Speaker
Hjorth87 gives 50 Danish krona. It says, which of you would respectively be the good, the bad, and the ugly in the old movie? I tried last week, but you answered with your waifus. Well, it was a waifu chat. That's why. Your waifu chat? I have not seen that movie. Can I bag Z bad? Sure. Yeah, he's kind of got like a black hat, man in black kind of vibe to it. Which one's the eastward? The good. And the ugly is kind of like the wild card.
01:01:39
Speaker
But he was the ugly. No, he's good. Eli Wallach. I think we're getting away from the important debate, which is which of you two is the ugly? Who is the ugly? Well, the ugly wasn't ugly because he was ugly. They call him the ugly because he was a wild card. I'll take it. Yeah. Gladly. Very Charlie Day. Wild card. Ooh. Yeah. See, not ugly at all. Look at how handsome he is. Eli Wallach over there on the right. Lee Van Cleef in the middle. He looks like Charlie Day, but what? Yeah, he does. He does.
01:02:09
Speaker
Lee Van Cleef is a man with too many Lee's in his name. Yeah, Aaron sort of called him something else. They were being redundant. I should watch that movie. Isn't that like the third in the series? Well, yeah, because it follows the Clint Eastwood character and if it's full of dollars and for a few more dollars.
01:02:25
Speaker
It would be like a Mr. and Mrs. Galilei calling their son Galileo. There you go. Why don't they name games like that anymore? That's so good. A fistful of dollars and a couple more dollars. I want that. Instead of just a fistful of dollars and a fistful of dollars, too. Oh, it was an old text adventure game way back in the day called A Mind Forever Voyaging. And I love that title. It's a title that flows like an Arabian carpet.
01:02:52
Speaker
I think it's beautiful. I've never seen an Arabian carpet. You never saw a lad? Who had magical properties? A whole new world. No, I didn't know if it was conditioned or if it was magic. I believe Mel Brooks originally was going to make a sequel to Spaceballs called Spaceballs 3, the search for Spaceballs 2.
01:03:11
Speaker
Yeah well in Spaceballs 1 he makes a gag how he'd call the sequels Spaceballs 2 the search for more money. Yeah. Oh that Mel Brooks though history of the world part one never comes out of the part one right off the rip.
01:03:26
Speaker
Yeah but the actual film's shit. Yes it is. Aside from the most bit. Mel Brooks has been really up and down in my view. I think I've talked about this before. Blazing Saddles, the producers, A+, Dracula dead and loving it. No, in the bin. Young Frankenstein.
01:03:46
Speaker
A plus again. I think someone once told me that if you like it, if you consider yourself a Mel Brooks fan, chances are you're just a Gene Wilder fan. That's me. Yeah. Sure. I do like, uh, I like Robin Hood men in tights though. Ain't no Gene Wilder film. Wow. Rude.
01:04:09
Speaker
Uh, FoxD comes back again with another five dollars, and says, an exit save is a chance for some cheeky writing. The option should be called, time for work, or mum is yelling at me. Lean on the fourth wall. Oh, that would be like that tiresome thing the old doom used to do, where every time you quit, they'd throw off a message. There was something like, like, they'll, yeah, sure, just leave. Next time, I'll be waiting with a baseball bat. Yeah, it's like, fuck off, I paid for you. Upnegging me.
01:04:39
Speaker
Because back then, the game's more of a captive audience, I suppose. That's true. Gives £1.99 and says, what's the word of the day? Let's go with Fremulous. According to Merriam-Webster, it's fatuous.
01:04:55
Speaker
Oh, I was, I was, I was pretty close. Yeah. To describe something such as an idea or a mark as fatuous is to say that it is foolish or silly rather than psychological. Yes. Thank you. I know if this is fatuous means it's not for you. It's not for you. We're teaching. We're teaching our students. That one guy in my comments will, I'll say a word and explain it. And they're like, I already knew that word. It's not for you. I personally, I'd go back and forth between fatuous and facetious. I like facetious.
01:05:24
Speaker
You know what I like about facetious? What's that? It's one of the few words I can think of. Uh, 10. It's one of the, no wait. Nine. What about for fajitas?
01:05:41
Speaker
As I was about to say, facetious is one of the few words I can think of that contains all five vowels in alphabetical order. Get the fuck out of here. That deck in the roof. See. See is a vowel. I was being facetious. Oh. And so if you're being facetious, see.
01:06:03
Speaker
You can, you can toss the, you could toss the wine, the sometimes wine there too. I can only think of one other word in which that's the case. And I'm not going to say it till the end of the podcast to give the chat a chance to figure it out. Can you tell us what it starts with? No.
01:06:20
Speaker
You're looking for a word that contains all five vowels that appear once and only once and in alphabetical order. Eric's got it right here. Abstemius. Oh, you spoiled it. It's abstemius. What's that word all about? Abstemius. Yeah. Is that like abstaining? You know what? I'm not sure. Yeah. Abstaining from wine. What?
01:06:51
Speaker
Okay, sure. Incredible. Moving on. Lampe gives five pounds and says, what is using 800 gigabytes of space on my hard drive? It's completely full. Marty with 2000 FF7 saves if they unlocked it. I don't think they're sad. I don't think it takes up that much space. I'm gonna go look.
01:07:09
Speaker
I thought you would. Did you like to replay games? I can't imagine it needing to take as much space because most of them are just text files with data indicating where everything is.
01:07:27
Speaker
Yeah. But as games get more complicated, I imagine that... Well, even so. I mean, what do you need to record, say, where you are in, like, a Ubisoft sandbox? Just where you are in the plot? Your X, Y, and Z coordinates? Your inventory? Which missions have been completed and which haven't? That shouldn't take more than a couple of pages of text. Pages? Oh, I was thinking, like, how could it be? You know, just a picture of Goofy or something?
01:07:58
Speaker
They just need to start optimizing. That's what they need to do. No, none of us are triple A developers. I would not compress if you pointed me to it. All we can do is speculate. Fox D is idol. It says Fox die. That's what I haven't heard before, Marty. Usually it's Mulder from the X files or the fantastic Mr. Fox. I just think a Fox giving someone the D. Oh.
01:08:23
Speaker
I think I'm thinking of Fox Nye because I just replayed Twin Stakes. Um, but I, uh, I do think about the X-Files a lot. So you can also be Fox Mulder who has a pornography addiction on the show that they just hint at every couple of episodes, which is pretty funny. Was, wasn't that a reference to the fact that David Duchovny was in softcore porn before he like, he's also, he was like a sex addict. Well, aren't they all too much cranking for a boy Fox D. Oh man, him and Kennedy. Okay.
01:08:52
Speaker
Well, you know, if you're a handsome man and you're a sex addict, that's just, you know, that's the worst. Being an alcoholic in a bar. I mean, at least it means the sex can be nice to watch. It benefits us.
01:09:13
Speaker
Anyway, Gabe Brockhausen gives $5 and says, it's eclipse day! Also, Yahtz, my boyfriend's crush on you has only intensified after the newest Yahtzee tries video lol. What kind of stuff did you do in that video? I took all my clothes off and jerked off to camera since you ask. Incredible. I did ask. I feel like that would have got brought up in a meeting at some point. It wasn't during Pepper Grinder and Frog Monster, I'd take that.
01:09:36
Speaker
I suspect it was the bit where I did a supercut of all the times I made a stupid grunting sound every time I failed in a difficult game about climbing. You could probably use that to dub over some very suspect footage indeed. There you go. Add that to the XCOM mod. There you go.
Technical Issues and Gaming Experiences
01:09:58
Speaker
Alex Armstrong gives $2 and says, crashes equals bad hardware you bought and owned.
01:10:05
Speaker
That can't be true. Is it? I feel like we're victim blaming at that point. Bit of a devil's advocate position Alex Armstrong's taking there. The devil's got enough advocates. Fight for an angel or two. And my hardware. It's not like all PCs have the same hardware, you know? That's a problem. If only we could all play in consoles, everything would be better. Dr. Theoguestripe dollars and says postal two would make fun of you if you saved more than once within like a minute. My grandma can beat the game if she saved as much as you do.
01:10:35
Speaker
That sounds cute, and I guess it would be a pretty easy thing to keep track of. A lot of games will tell you how long ago the last save was. Yeah, in a game like that, it makes sense that it's like... I like games that do unexpected things in response to the player's actions, because it's always fun. Like, do you ever used to watch, like, the Strong Bad emails on Homestar Runner?
01:11:01
Speaker
No, a sea of blank faces. No. I'm sure several people in the audience did, though. Two of us, like a puddle. Well, what they did with those, because they used to be like flash movies, so they'd always be like little Easter eggs you could click on. Oh, those things. Most of the cartoon went along. Yes, those things. Yeah, I remember that. I was like, what's with the lucha door? Yeah. Yeah. And then there was one episode of those where towards the end, like, there'd be a long pause after he finished talking. And then he'd go, uh, no, stop looking for Easter eggs. There aren't any. We couldn't be bothered.
01:11:31
Speaker
I want to see more of that in video games, like responding to ways the player is playing in ways that sort of pull them out. Like the, like the, uh, psychomantist thing. I think it's a bit of a cop out for some like, uh, NPCs. I'll go through the whole dialogue and then they're like, I promise there's nothing more here.
01:11:52
Speaker
leave I'm out of dialogue please continue playing video yes that's max of an extremely exasperated dialogue writer red dwarf 42 gives five dollars and says f5 is mostly always quick load do you think a quick save should be f8 or f9
01:12:12
Speaker
I think you got it backwards, Riddle42. I would bind F5 to quick save and F9 to quick load or possibly F6 to quick save and F7 to quick load because that's what it was in Half-Life. And just bind it to your left mouse button, right mouse button. Do away with it all. Super efficient then. Playing Quake 1, I feel like you do need to do that. How do you shoot?
01:12:37
Speaker
by pressing the tilde key, I don't know. Space bar. Love a nice tilde key. Oh, and then red door 42 kills sacrifice dollars and says, I got that backwards somehow. I blame insomnia. I am not operating heavy machinery. Well, that's good. Five is a scary one because I do be refreshing a lot of web pages just in general. Oh, also shouldn't the buns be very far away? Yeah, I was just thinking. Yeah. Yeah. You're more likely to accidentally press quick save. Yeah. Tab and number lock.
01:13:09
Speaker
Count A gives 2 euros and says how much are beans in Mexico? They're free joles. Beautiful. That was beautiful. That's because in Spanish beans they're called the free joles.
01:13:29
Speaker
I feel like we could do more with the pun there. Like free holes. There's not holes, it's holes. Yeah, but you could still pun it off holes. Father, son and hole is ghost. Did you think anyone's ever called them free joles?
01:14:09
Speaker
I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do.
01:14:13
Speaker
Tarell007 is a member for three months in Ad Free Podcast says, I saved scum to the F out of Disco Elysium to get my story. Yay or nay? See, that was an interesting one to see how I failed. Very interesting. You to you Tarell007 live your best life. Yeah, I was also short enough to where after I got done with the one, I was like, Oh, I want to do another play through. But this time I'm absolutely just a big muscle head. Yeah.
01:14:38
Speaker
I don't think there's any right or wrong way to play them. And if you're only playing to play something once, then, you know, and you want to get your desired outcome out of it, then treat it that way. Yeah. But what is your desired outcome? Maybe, uh, try and let it surprise you. Yeah. Because maybe by not sort of engineering it towards one thing, you might find something surprising that you like. Yeah. Unlike in Skyrim, where if I pick a lock, there's probably just going to be cabbage in there to take. Probably going to be cabbage. Yeah.
01:15:07
Speaker
By back in the old days of TV, sometimes you'd watch the show you wanted to watch, then you'd just leave the TV on, and maybe something else interesting would come on, and you wouldn't have thought to stay up and watch it, but you're glad you did. Yeah, so I always knew a show was good. My dad would, like, stay there standing, watching it with whatever power tools he was doing as he was passing by, and he's just there. That's it. If it stops your project, it's good TV. Humane Shield gives 4.99 and says, the term software will handle it is the tech-pro equivalent of I have faith in Jesus.
01:15:37
Speaker
Yeah, there you go. All right. Yeah. We're just appreciating your witticism there. That was clever. It didn't need any building up on. There you go. So we should just have a little laugh track sound, like a fucking radio DJ or something. Yeah. Little soundboard. Oh no, don't tell Nick. He'll bring the soundboard back.
01:16:04
Speaker
Tinker gives our dollars and says, I need a rewind feature because I will forget. Looking at me rewinding every time in Persona 3 reload, I go to Tartarus so I can get my fortune.
01:16:15
Speaker
Yep. So three reload has a nice thing to where you can rewind, um, to like the past couple of like, uh, yesterday night, yesterday afternoon, yesterday morning, like that kind of thing. So if, yeah, I used it a few times playing where I would wake up on a Sunday and run out and do something and then forget like, Oh shit, I should have checked the TV to see what they were selling. You know, what the item of the week is cause you do something good. Yeah. I think that more than once playing that game,
01:16:45
Speaker
Robo knob the snob who gives five euros and says Marty if you had to pick one the save file ending in near replicant or the second set of opening credits from automata The automata one was probably more surprising because that was my first near and so by the time near replicant came out I kind of understood what they were going for but the save file ending in
01:17:09
Speaker
in Replicant really, really, really hit me. Really emotional. Did it give you a near-death experience? Oh my God, it did. Those games are great. Those games are great. Let me tell you, that man knows how to make video games with cool stories that intertwine their mechanics and also feature skit to the Cloud robots. Yeah, and that's what using a save file literally is. It's a near-death experience. Yeah, that's beautiful.
01:17:37
Speaker
Yeah, I know. I got stuck once forever in Skyrim. I manually saved in front of a bear that was mauling my ass. Right as I went to save. Yeah, I don't know. That's a perpetual near-death experience, that one. I mean, that's an extreme case, but I kind of liked it when I, like, would just try to live with my fuckups when I was playing something like Half-Life. Because there's a lot of health in that game anyway. So, uh... If I just, like, accidentally blew myself up and got myself down to 30 health,
01:18:07
Speaker
I'll just be like, yeah, you know what? I'm going to live with this. Gordon Freeman is a klutz. Yeah. And now he's tread careful. Now he's going to have to play conservatively for a bit. Yeah. And that's, that's what you lose in the games where they just regenerate health after every year.
01:18:23
Speaker
Yeah, you just find a box to hide behind and wait till the shield goes up. Oh no, I feel like Nick could have appreciated a save system. He was playing the old card one and that was not regenerative health. And he would like get through with like 10 health and there would just be one bullet just right before he got into the building so that the save would actually activate. Yeah. Poor bastard. Well, hard.
01:18:46
Speaker
cod. It's a kind of fish. It is. Yes. Let's make a game called, um, cathartic heroism under bravery. Just so we could have like a bunch of themed fish acronyms in video games. I think someone made halibut once. I don't remember what it stood for, but it was, it was do something with it. Leave that one with me. Uh, harassed Android likes integrating
01:19:17
Speaker
Bread under that turbulence. Well, it always comes back to Thatcher. It's always Thatcher with you. Yes. Those androids had a tough time under Thatcher. Yeah. And the Irish and the Irish. Yeah. And the Irish and the androids. That's that's what we forget about. Yeah. Oh.
01:19:41
Speaker
Seven letters, incidentally. Halibut. No, that doesn't say Patcher. Well, no, no, Patcher's eight letters. Oh, one last Supercharger, so I was about to start wrapping up. Adam Karchner gives five dollars and says, Hey, guys! Following since the escapist and finally got to donate. Missed the discussion, finals week. I just want to say, I appreciate what you do.
01:20:02
Speaker
Adam, thank you very much. I hope your finals are going well. Is it finals week for everyone? Spring break, I believe, Celia. Aren't finals usually in May? I thought they were back for spring break now. I don't know. I haven't been in school in over 10 years. I haven't been in school. I think my kid was on spring break last week. We haven't been in school for long.
01:20:26
Speaker
Yeah, I definitely know people who are in school. Well, that's true. I have a I have a child in preschool. So do I. I tell you what, you Americans are really spoiled with your summer vacation.
Cultural Comparisons and Media Releases
01:20:41
Speaker
I'm not American. We should have worked three months. We should have three months. Yeah, you get three months. We've got six weeks in the UK. How many bank holidays do you get?
01:20:52
Speaker
Okay. We had a, we had a few half term week breaks scattered throughout the year, but still, I would actually rather have that. I'd rather have like a mini, mini breaks throughout the year than three months by the time you're in like the end of July, beginning of August. Like what am I doing with my life? Yeah. Yeah. But like I've completely forgotten everything I've learned in school. Yeah. It's like, don't you guys get like the good Friday and then the Easter Monday for some reason off other places do that. We don't. I was the weekend.
01:21:18
Speaker
Yeah, we get an Easter break, we get like a couple of weeks for Christmas. Yeah, well, thinking about it, adding them all up will probably get about the same amount of time off school. But still, we don't get it all in summer when the weather's nice, and it's nice to go out and have fun. I blame Disney. There you go. Anyway, Robert Knopf stop gives two euros and says donating just to keep listening to these jokes.
01:21:43
Speaker
Oh, good for you. And then Robert of the song gives another two euros and says, been editing for hours and I need the company man. Just go out and make friends. No, he's editing. Well, get into a discord. Join the discord and chat with people there. We've got shit to do. I got to start the sun. See what's going on out there. Yeah. Mine looks bright. So I think this might be a lie. I got 20 minutes before this eclipse comes through. You guys aren't stopping me. Yeah.
01:22:12
Speaker
Fair enough. Well, I guess we'll wrap things up then. Thanks for listening to Windbreaker's podcast. I guess we didn't really reach a point on this one. Hey, save systems, they exist. I think that point is, don't make your shit crash. And then I'll be fine. If it's a perfect game with no crashes, I'll take whatever save system you have. Wise words for Rizal. I guess that was it. Crazy sound board. It sounded like chickens at first. I didn't know it was clapping.
01:22:41
Speaker
I was a little thrown for a second there. That was terrifying. I hated it and I thought someone was injured. No, we're getting rid of the soundboard on this one as well. No soundboard on this one. This is the second podcast I've banned the soundboard. Exactly. Now that's the sound you play when someone kisses someone. Oh, when I bring out my adorable dog. Hang on.
01:23:08
Speaker
Yup, he's a sluggy vet today. Jesus, can you pull him from deep in your coat? Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
01:23:34
Speaker
And Marty Sleever. Yeah. And if you want more stuff from me, I've got a lovely, lovely Dragon's Dog for 2 fully ramblimatic episode coming out on Wednesday. And I'll be, and just as you're reeling from that, I'm going to have another semi-ramblimatic coming out on Thursday. Can you tell us what that one's on? It's about the moment in a game where they introduce other monsters.
01:24:02
Speaker
Woo-hoo! First encounter. Nice. You talking about Rezzy? Amongst other things, yes. Yeah. And of course, don't miss the Yahtzee Tri Stream on Wednesday afternoon either, where I play new games and comment on them on the first impressions. Yeah, and the edited videos are back. So, the edited video from the past two weeks went up this weekend. Yes, one came out last Sunday. Check that out if you haven't seen it yet.
01:24:30
Speaker
I think some folks were asking for him to go back and make edited versions of all the other streams we did during that, and I don't think we're gonna. Those are just gonna exist in stream form. Well, if Jesse wants to, I don't think any of us would stop him. I can't stop anyone from doing anything, if I'm being honest. I have no power here. I just want to go stare into the sun until it's baked into my eyes. I mean, as long as I don't have to go back and write reviews for all the games I did. Remember this game you played? Remember Penny's Big Breakaway? Talk about it. Yeah. Can't be bothered.
01:24:59
Speaker
Uh, yes, so that's that. What are you guys going to plug? Either about every Monday, got a fresh new cold take. There's a lot of melancholy, a lot of on we, a lot of dooming and glooming in the industry. How's about the bright side of things for once? Next week you get more doom and gloom, but right now let's have a nice, nice light chaser. Nice little positivity. No, nice.
01:25:27
Speaker
Excellent. And then, yeah, we'll have the normal schedule all week. Hidden Gems crew will be back this evening playing more Void Strangers, which they started a few weeks ago and got to a juicy part. And then all the normal streams, I think there should be Bully and Firelink and Call of Duty and Devil May Cry. And Frost will be joining Nick and I on Wednesday at noon central. We'll be doing a special watch-along to the Triple-I Initiative indie showcase.
01:25:55
Speaker
So like our normal showcase, watch along, but it's going to be a lot of cool upcoming indie games from the developers of indie games that you've enjoyed over the past few years. Will we get a Hollow Knight release date? Probably not. Tune in to be disappointed anyways. Yeah. Well, speaking of indie games, something I forgot, actually, is we're finally putting out some of our GDC footage today. Oh, yeah. That should be going up shortly after this. Yes. So if this will have a video summarizing all the lovely stuff we did at GDC.
01:26:24
Speaker
because of the embargoes are finally up. No barcode bust in here. Not at all. So I look forward to that. I think we've got edited videos every day this week. I believe so. Yeah. I think we got backdrop. We got fully, we got semi, we got design delve. Holy Moses.
01:26:42
Speaker
We're too good to you people. You don't pay us enough. Next week, it's going to be a real bad week. We're going to do bad shows, bad, bad streams. It's going to be great. Yeah. I'm just going to click these signs at the camera for five minutes. I'm just going to smoke heaters in silence. And Jamie Doole, thank you so much for joining the tip tour. Thanks, Jamie. Bye. Thank you. We'll be off now. Bye. Thanks, Eric.
01:27:21
Speaker
you