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S6 E14: The Grind is Real
98 Plays1 year ago
With Dan gallivanting the world again, Pete & Tom are joined by recurring guest Ed to talk all things games. From the release of Baldur's Gate 3 to Gamescom 23 to the latest updates to the Unreal Engine, we eventually settle in for a deep dive on RPGs in the context of both Starfield being released and Tom working his way through Skyrim (and towards his 100th Plat!)
Beers Reviewed this Ep:
- Cheeky Monkey - Hazy Pale Ale - 4.0%
- Seeker Brewing - HBC522 West Coast Pilsner - 5.8%
- Slow Lane - Woodchip - Table Beer - 3.5%
- Hargreaves Hill - Naughty - Schwarzbier - 5.0%
- Garage Project - Cereal Milk Stout - 4.7%
- Freestyle Brewing - Majic Juice - NEIPA - 5.6%
- Hawkers Beer - Fashionably Punctual - WCIPA - 6.5%
- Hawkers Beer - Trio of Dips (US) - WCIPA - 6.5%
- Mountain Culture & Balter - Anna - WCIPA - 7.0%
- Mountain Culture & Balter - Elsa - WCIPA - 7.6%
- Nail Brewing - Red Carpet - Imperial Red Ale - 8.4%
- Hawkers Beer - White Stout - 6.0%
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Vibe
00:00:30
Speaker
Hello people, it's your standing guest and standing for Dan for your fortnightly Pixels and Pints episode. I'm here as always with Tom. Hello. And Peter. Howdy.
00:00:47
Speaker
And we're going to talk about a whole bunch of shit. We are, we are. And yeah, see what a off the cuff is always trying. Yeah. We're real loose and fast this episode too. So it's going to be an interesting one.
Guest Hosts and Beer Reviews
00:00:59
Speaker
Uh, but obviously with Dan Gallivanting around the world, we thought we'd, uh, we'd get you back onto the show as always. Yeah. Welcome back. Welcome back. Glad to be here. Glad to be a BP bench player. And when coach makes the call, the, the, the, the, the, the start bench warmup will make his appearance.
00:01:17
Speaker
Huh? Something in coach. I'm ready. Put me on. Should we kick off with some bees? Yes, let's do it. Yeah. Well, as the guest.
00:01:30
Speaker
On your bike, son. What are you drinking? I am starting off with a good WABR from the Mark River. Well, they said it from Mark River, but it's bus, which is more bicycle, WA local. So it's a cheeky monkey. Hazy pale ale, 4%. 30 IBU. So it is a new world, hazy pale ale.
00:01:59
Speaker
according to their beer speak. A Raymarie's tropical and citrus, but a funky little, I don't know if you can see it, little kind of... The lighting's probably not the best. Yeah, I cracked a can of this earlier today, and it's nice. It's tropical, it's juicy, it's hazy. They don't tell you too much about it, the hops and everything like that,
00:02:28
Speaker
Yeah, I like it. It's definitely refreshing. I would definitely buy it again. I was thinking before it would be the perfect type of
00:02:44
Speaker
tappy to start an afternoon off. Yeah. Yes. We love a session kicker offer. Yeah. So being 4%, it's a, it's, it's, it'd be a nice kind of get yourself ready for the afternoon and the evening. Um, definitely see that. So yeah, very dark, very dark, but yeah, 4% and does the job, does the job. I'm going to give that a good
00:03:14
Speaker
4.25. Since I'm standing in for Dan, I'm going to do the quarter points. I'll join him on that hill. Good to see he's not alone. That's it. That's it. Tom, what are you drinking, mate? I am drinking a Seeker Brewing West Coast Pilsner and this is featuring an experimental hop HBC 522. It pours
00:03:40
Speaker
Lovely and crisp, it's slight like haze, chill haze to it, but I would say that's probably naturally been filtered out. It is nice and west coasty in terms of like it's a big hit of like bitterness up front, but it's very, very light. Did I say 5.8%? I don't know if I said that before.
00:04:02
Speaker
But yeah, it's it's very enjoyable. Probably I'd rather have one of the cheeky monkey hazy pails to start off before digging into this. The bitterness is quite upfront. HBC 522. I haven't had a real quick it's a new
00:04:17
Speaker
Experimental hop that's part of Yakima chief hops, which are from the US from memory and part of a new breeding hops breeding program. So it's a mix between cascade and centennial hops. Very classic hops.
00:04:33
Speaker
Yeah, and classics for West Coast as well. So it's the perfect kind of thing for that that flavor profile. So yeah, I like I really like it whenever breweries get like a new new hop to play with. And especially when I think the hop hybrid breeding program is fascinating. I love reading those articles when they when they pop up on
00:04:52
Speaker
you know, beer and brew or crafty pine or something. Well, they've got a huge body of research to draw from in the marijuana space. I mean, I mean, crossbreeding, that's that species of plants or at least a relative for a long time to do a lot of different things. Yeah. But yeah, that's that's really, really nice. It's
00:05:13
Speaker
Let me phrase it. It's really, really nice. If you like the West coast style, if you're not, if you're not, yeah, well, but if you're not really big as for the listeners, if you're not really big on that really, um, citrusy bitterness, like almost not quite pithy, but like quite citrusy bitter, it'd probably be a little bit like a fronting for you. Um, but a really, really smooth, nice finish. Uh, I'm going to give that a solid four and a half.
00:05:35
Speaker
That's great off the bat. Well done. Yeah, nice. Very nice. Seeker have been churning out some very quality beers lately. We've had a few. Yeah. Excellent. Peter, what do you got?
00:05:46
Speaker
I've got one that I've been sitting on for a little while and I've gone the same route as Ed and started with something nice and light and refreshing. This is a Slow Lane Brewing's wood chip. If I block my face out, I'll actually focus. This is a barrel aged table beer coming in at a nice and opening three and a half percent ABV.
00:06:07
Speaker
But i gotta say it punches well above its weight the barrel aging process really gives it a. What's the word i'm looking for a heaviness to it that you wouldn't expect that of a three and a half percent table be usually at that kind of low abb you end up with quite a watery be with not a whole lot of flavor it's just got that.
00:06:29
Speaker
It's not quite strong enough to be called like a farmhouse twang, but it's on that spectrum. It's got a bit of a flavor, an unexpected strength of flavor to it for a three and a half. It's actually not the first time I've had it because I bought two of these and I got to say it really does punch above its weight. I'm going to give it a four and a half as well.
00:06:55
Speaker
Now the thing that makes this, um, and I'm just looking at now, so they use size hops. It's a very light.
00:07:03
Speaker
Almost Czech Pilsner in color. You probably can't see it. And so just looking at the malt build and the flavor profile. So they use an ale malt with rolled wheat and rolled oats, sars hops, and halateur mitelfrüx, mitelfrüx, which I think we've butchered before. Dan usually jumps in here and corrects you. Yeah, exactly. And moto eka or moto eka.
00:07:32
Speaker
hops, but it uses Belgian ale and Breton Amisis, which is what's giving it its barrel aged kind of oomph, if you like. It's got that real nice funkiness too. So, you know, for a fucking three and a half percent, you're getting a full flavored beer at a very low ABV. Yeah, I'm very impressed with that.
00:07:54
Speaker
Yes, that chill, that's a nice way to start the show. I've got a corker of an ender. I think I've got a 12 and a half percent I'm considering throwing in at the end. I'm not quite sure. Oh, dear. So I thought I'd just, I'd face myself.
Gaming News and Analysis
00:08:11
Speaker
Anyway, on to some news, I think. We interrupt this broadcast with some breaking news from the front.
00:08:18
Speaker
Yes, let's go into the news. That was my morning, was putting all this news together. I think the big one, just to kick it off, is for those who do use the PlayStation Plus service, there's a price increase, which is kicked in last week, and not an insignificant jump, you might say. No, it's a kick in the balls.
00:08:42
Speaker
I fucking hate companies doing this. They hide, and it's just an opinion, right? There's no attachment to reality, but I feel like, particularly with like COVID, for example, COVID customer service went out the window and a whole bunch of, uh,
00:08:57
Speaker
Legitimate organizations suffered terribly from, you know, from the issues associated with COVID. But it seems like every company for like two years after the COVID event occurred, well, I'm sorry for our slow customer service due to COVID. I'm like, how is it due to COVID?
00:09:16
Speaker
That's fucking horseshit. You got to roll with it while you can. Your agents are working from home and you're in a virtual call center, a COVID done shit. Anyway, and I feel like it's the same here. Prices are on the rise, inflation's flat, mortgage prices are going up a huge amount, and then every company jumps in the bandwagon and says, oh, you know, cost of living pressures, we have to put our pricing up.
00:09:39
Speaker
No, no, no, no. No, cost of living pressures are as a result of you fuckers putting your pricing up, particularly for a synthetic product like this. Yeah. Anyway, it's over. Carry on. For a luxury item, essentially what is what it can be seen as a luxury item. And it's like 20% as well. Yeah. Where if it was kind of if it went up, you know, four or five bucks, you'd be like, yeah, you kind of wear it. But when it goes up like 20, 30 bucks, you're like,
00:10:08
Speaker
out. Well, $45 in the case of anyway, sorry, Tom, we stole your thunder. Sorry, mate. No, that's fine. I'm actually opposite. I'm fine with it. I think the amount of value I personally get out of it. And this is what we all talked about is I've easily already paid off the 200 bucks in terms of the games I'll get like just this month alone. Yeah. So yeah, I think yeah, like I know it really hurts the people who
00:10:34
Speaker
Um, the uni students. Well, no, I'm singing more just people who have to buy PlayStation plus because the games they enjoy have online multiplayer and they need PlayStation plus to play. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the people who get hit the like, even cause they're probably only going to use the essential level for that. Like, and if you're not going to go through the back catalog, you don't need any of the other levels, but yeah, 20% price hike. Just so you can play online with your mates. I think that's the, that's the only bit that I'm like.
00:11:03
Speaker
Come on, sorry mate, that'd be a big... I only have an...
00:11:07
Speaker
for the rare occasion that I want to just kill some brain cells and drive around in a circle in Gran Turzo 7 type of thing. But that's very, that's kind of like, that's one of those games where I'll kind of download it for a weekend because I've got nothing else to do. I don't really want to think about anything, any other type of like, think of a story, anything like that. And then by the time the weekend's done, I'm kind of, it gets deleted. I'm back to back of my horse ready to
00:11:34
Speaker
to get lost in the story. But yeah, I can, I can understand when, you know, someone like yourself, Tom, who'd go off and just absolutely hill foam, um, destroy the back catalog. Cause could I see you? Cause at least someone's like, it's, it's good. Cause yeah, that's it. Like, like if you've got like a, like a long list of backlog and
00:11:59
Speaker
I committed to get through it in a period of time. It has diminishing returns. There's a slump in the middle, in my opinion. If you need to play some really old games, then it makes sense to use the subscription. If you want to play some recent games, it makes sense to use the subscription. But the slump in the middle is where you can walk into eBay games and pick up a secondhand copy of Red Dead Redemption for six bucks.
00:12:24
Speaker
Like, there's a lot of stuff in a lot of people's backlogs that were AAA titles to three years ago. You can get for nothing. So, it is a balancing act. Now, in the case of Tom, Tom gets through like eight games a fucking month, right? Even with second-hand Barkins, you wouldn't be able to- Back in the lockdown days, that definitely was, yeah.
00:12:44
Speaker
But you get my point, like you get your value out of it, whereas I don't. My AAA title backlog, Spider-Man, I think Miles Morales might have been offered as part of the subscription. I don't know, I've deleted it now, so I can't even go and check, I guess. I mean, they may rip it off my console, so that'll turn me pretty quickly. But Red Dead Redemption, I own a copy of. A lot of the AAA titles that are in my backlog that I need to go back and finish, I actually purchased.
00:13:11
Speaker
So for the cost of 200 bucks, I just, you know, I compare that to, so Xbox Game Pass is the equivalent of, well, the tiering's a little bit different, but Xbox Game Pass is essentially what I needed to play Starfield on the day of release. So day one titles, AAA titles, and it's 12 bucks a month, which is the equivalent of 168 bucks, which is slightly more expensive than the top tier of PS used to be.
00:13:40
Speaker
PS plus super duper extra fucking deluxe edition has gone up from 155 a year to 197 a year. And then the essentials gone from 80 bucks to 95. That's a decent price. That's the kick in the nuts. That's the one I think it's the hardest.
00:14:01
Speaker
Like the hardest pill to swallow. Cause if, if unless you are kind of someone who plays through backlogs, like I do and goes looking for new games through those catalogs, like there's no reason to go for the deluxe. You don't get anything else. It's like, even when, even when they do PlayStation, like when you get PlayStation plus discounts on the store, they're universal. You just have to have a membership kind of thing. Um, but yeah, yeah. So for me, it's kind of like.
00:14:28
Speaker
I'm going to use it. But yeah, I definitely think the 20% hike on someone who's just using it just to casually play online with mates or doing that, that's probably a harder justification to continue paying it than someone that uses it like me. And it's pretty universal. It's actually been funny looking at a couple of the trophy groups I'm in and just seeing how it's split down the middle. Some people are like,
00:14:54
Speaker
Yeah, it's fine. And then some other people are like, no, that's it. I'm canceling PlayStation. I'm throwing my PS5 out the window. Fuck this. Fuck Sony. So my decision making. So why have I've gone from the deluxe edition back to the bog standard subscription or the lowest tier that allows me to access online games? Because clearly I play online games or I play single player games with online features in them.
00:15:18
Speaker
But there was no emotion behind it. It was more just, is this worth as much as my Netflix subscription? The answer was no. Which is what we discussed as well. It's like, you know, I've cut out, we've cut out Apple Plus at home because we just weren't using it. It's like, why am I paying for this still? And I've bailed on Stan and I think we're all starting to make those decisions as the world
00:15:38
Speaker
marches inexorably towards charging you a monthly fee for fucking everything. Um, we're going from, oh my God, Netflix, this is amazing. That's only eight bucks a month to I've got 11 subscriptions and they keep bumping the price up every month. And now like, it's more expensive than Foxtel. We all used to sit there and bitch about Foxtel's expensive. Yes.
00:15:57
Speaker
Like that's the whole reason why everyone abandoned Foxell because they just had all those extra channels that charge you more for it. Yeah, or it was all filler channels and you're basically just buying one or two channels for each subscription tier. Yeah, and then now that's what streaming services are like because everyone's worked out that
00:16:16
Speaker
If they go it alone, they can make a heap more money than. Yeah. And then someone will come along, as we've said, and group them all together and it'll be the new version of Foxtel. The cycle continues. So I think it's Xbox Live Gold is your online equivalent of like the starter tier for PlayStation. That's 11 bucks a month. So it's $132. So it's actually more expensive for the entry level tier for Xbox than it is for PlayStation.
00:16:45
Speaker
But the top tier, if you're only playing on console, mind you, is cheaper. It's 168 against 197. Okay. But with Xbox, you get day one releases, don't you? Correct. So it's got higher value and it's cheaper in price, in my opinion. But the one thing that you can do is you can bump your Xbox game pass subscription up to the top tier and it applies to both PC games and
00:17:13
Speaker
console games, so you can play AAA titles on day one of release on your PC or your Xbox. And that's 19 bucks a month, which is fucking expensive. But if you're playing video games across those two platforms, you know. Yeah, if you have a good enough PC, it's a little, yeah, do you like then you need a Steam store? Like kind of thing like, yeah, yeah, exactly. Anyway.
00:17:37
Speaker
Well, that's the first bit of news. So that's 20 minutes later. Oh, no, it must be one of our recordings. So I think Peter was very impressed with me that I've managed to group all the news into little segments, which I give myself a pat on the back for. Well done, Thomas. Next bit of it, I'm going to stick with PlayStation for the next couple of bits. The PS Portal, even though it's releasing on November 15th, it's not releasing in Australia, which is a bit of a bummer.
00:18:08
Speaker
They have said on the playstation blog it will launch in the usuk france germany austria belgium looks in the netherlands italy spain portugal canada and japan. They are the first wave countries that are getting a release of the handheld wifi streaming devices the playstation portal does a portable for i think i did i think i meant i meant to wonder why.
00:18:30
Speaker
I wonder why selective release it considering it's it's Wi-Fi only, so it's not like they. Well, they know that Australian Wi-Fi shit, so they're punishing us. We're not talking about internet. We're talking about wireless. So it's it's Wi-Fi V6 in your house or it's not. But yeah, like if I would understand if this was internet streaming like they've done in what companies have done in the past, they've measured the average internet latency and you know, availability in Australia just gets a big fucking
00:18:59
Speaker
X of death, we're up there with like Southeast Asian countries where, you know, people steal the copper at wiring and your internet goes down. Port Moresby. Um, but wifi, like, come on, man. It's a fucking standard. I, I, I reckon it's them basing it off, uh, those countries that had the better sales of maybe like the PlayStation portal and the Vita. And yeah, I was, I was just going to say, it's got to be some type of kind of sales record they've gone off.
00:19:29
Speaker
Yeah, or maybe they even look like switch sales. That might be another thing because they know people are going to use that size handheld.
00:19:37
Speaker
Yeah, right. But yes, it's a bit of a bummer, but yeah, hopefully we'll get on the second wave of launch. There's no date on that. So if you were planning to get one for someone for Christmas, I would be holding your breath. That's not necessarily going to happen. But hey, we'll move right on. Baldur's Gate 3 had launched recently on the PS5 after a month advance on PC, something like that, three weeks to a month.
00:20:03
Speaker
And I found this pretty cool. The guys at Digital Foundry have stated that the PS5 version is running at the same visual specs as the Ultra mode on PC. So that's pretty good.
00:20:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's had this and this is one of the big games that's launched in the last month, that and obviously Starfield, which I'm sure we'll talk about to death later. At length. Yes. I would say I honestly, I think, and this might get some backlash, I don't know, but I think of the two games, Baldur's Gate 3 is far more likely to pick up the Game of the Year award if it's based on
00:20:46
Speaker
the actual games quality as opposed to the loudness of the fans. And a much smaller studio as well. Larian's made a grand total of three games. Like this is such an amazing success story. From what I've seen for Footballers Game 3 and now that it's released on PS5, I want to check out some footage because I saw something a few weeks ago that the actual, like you can get different camera angles for controller.
00:21:15
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Like it's it's it's kind of like in staffing with a different kind of vision. Yeah. Which is which is because the first thing they kind of put me off with Baldur's Gate three was that kind of top down like divinity exact that type of games because that's kind of yeah, I've never really played too much about it. But seeing that you've got the different angles kind of
00:21:39
Speaker
Well, I mean, yeah, look, let's maybe park. Let's maybe park this, um, like further discussion on BG three, just until we get to our spotlight, which is all about RPGs anyway. Um, cause I've got, I don't have quite a lot to say on BG three specifically, but certain layer, certainly Larian studios and their ability to make an RPG will factor into that spotlight pretty heavily.
00:22:01
Speaker
but on your camera it's not an infinitely variable camera it's if it's anything like the other games it's on a wire so you can you can change your angle around your characters but you go from an isometric view you can smoothly zoom in and it'll scoop at the end.
00:22:17
Speaker
Yeah. But you kind of imagine it on a wire, not really on the camera, but like it's got a fixed sequence as it pulls away. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, 250,000 plus steam reviews market is overwhelmingly positive. It's got to be one of the highest rated rated by gamers games of all time. And yes, stuff. I mean, you've written a million concurrent players on launch day and six million players so far. But yes, but
00:22:46
Speaker
not all the reviews are positive. And then we'll talk about that later on as well, I think. Yep. And obviously onto my favorite bit of news, if you still have your PS Plus subscription after the price hike, the three new games you get for September, the brand new Saints Row is, I've already downloaded it. I'll definitely get stuck into that having played. Some more news at the end on that one. Yeah. See how I linked them together? Well done, Thomas.
00:23:16
Speaker
There's also Black Desert, which is a fantasy MMORPG, which looked a bit survivally as well, added some of those aspects to that one. And then Generation Zero, which is a co-op shooter. You play in the 1980s in Sweden, and essentially it's
00:23:37
Speaker
Basted terminator you're fighting machines and but kind of and it's like a mix between like it's a terminator setting in Sweden and then it's got a bit of like, last of us like scarcity of ammo, you've got to craft your weapons to upgrade them kind of thing. So you can either play that solo or with three to.
00:23:57
Speaker
For four players in cold so it looks interesting, but yeah, it's I don't know if it's um If it's everyone's cup of tea, but yes moving on from that news. So Saints Row has been made by volition studios so they were purchased by the Embrace a group and unfortunately have shut down after 30 years of making games and
00:24:21
Speaker
We talked about Embrace a group closing down some other recent acquisitions because they got they had all this capital to shut the moon. They bought a bunch of fucking studios and then someone pulled funding and they're like, oh, fuck. Why buy it if you're going to. Well, I don't think that was the plan. I mean, I don't understand that.
00:24:44
Speaker
too well, but yeah, if someone pulls funding, there's not much you can do. So yes, they, they, they said that the only reason they shut down was, um, part of the restructuring of the embrace a group and all their properties. Um, but they've been, yeah, they they've been around for 30 years. Like, uh, the summer series was one of their first, their games that made all the saints row red faction. And if you guys ever played that, which was the destruction on Mars one. Yeah. They made the, one of the great punisher tying games actually wasn't even a tie-in game. It was just a punisher game, but it was like,
00:25:13
Speaker
Like, you went full Punisher. Like, I remember you had to use a drill on someone's head. It was just so stupid and like, Punisher-y. Something hit me in. Yeah, yeah, definitely, yeah. But yeah, it's a real shame. Like, I really like the Saints Row games. Especially if it got into them. They just became so stupid and silly three and four. Yeah, and we've talked about that with the- Speaking of Saints Row, what's going to happen with the PS Plus, the one that's just
00:25:41
Speaker
I mean, it's still up there for the month. I don't think they're going to, you know, they must have signed that deal well before they decided to shut down the studio or something. But the publisher, the publisher is THQ. They're still around. Well, that is Embracer Group. Like, yeah, they're a big part of Embracer Group.
00:26:02
Speaker
So they will continue to, I'm sure that the game will stay alive just because the development studio shut down. The distributor is still around. I, you know, some, some fuckers still making money. Ed, I reckon they'll get in the pockets.
00:26:16
Speaker
What do we got next? E3. E3. Well, apparently it's going to skip 2024 and completely restructure, which it needs to. It needs a hell of a revamp to come back and be relative in terms of the other game presentation. I actually think it was the game studios that destroyed E3.
00:26:41
Speaker
It was E3 is an expo original, originally my recollection and it may be wrong, but my recollection was it was actually about.
00:26:52
Speaker
Presenting the video games for the gamers, and then it started getting categorized into, here's your PS exclusives, here's your Xbox exclusives, oh, and there's so many from Ubisoft, we may as well give them their segment. And then it became five different shows loosely tied together, and then all five studios just went, you want it? Fuck off, we'll do it when we're ready. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone, yeah. Well, PlayStation was the first to pull out, and then Nintendo followed suit, and then one after the other, the others went, well,
00:27:21
Speaker
We don't want to be tied to this one anymore. It might also be like the whole FIFA thing. The EA video game didn't want to be, would have continued pumping out FIFA titles, but FIFA wanted to charge too much. So maybe E3 was just charging a fortune to add the logo to their... Quite possibly, yeah. But it did just become like, yeah, it's like any other game show. It's just like,
00:27:44
Speaker
Well, I'm not going to I'll wait till the morning and wake up at a normal time and watch the trailer dump. Thank you. Yeah, that'll be fun for us. But it's different in America. No, no. I mean, there was definitely something that's all actually going to it. But I mean, you get to go to those kind of things. But yes, so I definitely think hell of a revamp if you want to get general consumer interested in that one again compared when you got, you know, a game show and Gamescom and those other ones. Yeah.
00:28:12
Speaker
Speaking of, Gamescom just happened. We said that was coming up in our last recording. Did you guys watch most of any of it? I watched Bits and Pieces.
00:28:24
Speaker
There wasn't heaps. There wasn't, no, no, I kind of had a love of today and there wasn't anything that like knew that jumped out to me. No, so I mean, I summarized it as there was a lot of it was focused on Starfield and its imminent launch. So like Bethesda went hard on that, um, pushing that and, you know, with, with Xbox behind them, uh, the, I guess cyberpunk 27 seven is getting a base game major overhaul. I find that pretty interesting.
00:28:54
Speaker
from what i've read that's actually like people are very excited to go back in and give it another shot having not played well i played like a an hour of the demo like kind of goes oh well i might try that now um so that's in lane in line with the upcoming dlc with a phantom liberty um
00:29:12
Speaker
So that's the, what else was there? There was, uh, there's another law of the rings game coming, which is returned to Moria, uh, set in the fourth age. It's a crafting survival kind of game, similar to that. Deep galactic one, Dan played the, the, you go into mine and stuff. So it's, it's the premises that Gimli sends dwarves back to Moria in the fourth age.
00:29:35
Speaker
which is a longer topic for me to talk about because you'll never do that, but that's fine. And then there was a couple of remasters. Star Wars Dark Forces, one of the two rock games is getting a remaster, you know, good old dinosaur hunter. And then there were a bunch of gameplay videos, like more walkthroughs. So Alan Wake 2 got a bit of interest. The Robo Cup game we talked about a little while ago. Stalker 2.
00:30:01
Speaker
Lives of P, which Dan was interested to try Souls like game, and then Black Myth Wukong, which we did a trailer trash for ages ago. Yeah, a long, long, long time. Yeah, and it's now come out that that's also really Souls Bornee like, so Souls like game, which is unfortunate to me. It's kind of.
00:30:19
Speaker
I thought it was a bit more action adventure, like not so much hack and slash, but more like God of War and now finding out more souls. I'm like, ah, well, damn it. That's going to be a lot of swearing and it looks, it looks super cool. And it's, um, yeah, based on the Chinese mythology, um, which is always kind of fascinating for me. Um, and then, yeah, the other thing that was announced was a fallout series with prime video and Bethesda.
00:30:48
Speaker
Yeah. Hmm. I watched the shaky cam footage that leaked onto YouTube. I haven't. I refuse to watch it because it's going to, I worry that will affect my opinion of the projects. Yeah. So I'll wait until it comes out. I'm sure it'll come out in the next seven days or so because they can't sit on it now that it's being leaked. No. Yeah. They're going to act on it sooner rather than later.
00:31:11
Speaker
So for anyone who's played a Fallout game, so this one's set in LA. It is for Vault 33, they've said it. One thing you can kind of see in the shaky cam footage was they had a ghoul and a cowboy hat having a shootout in a Western town, and the ghoul looked just like out of the gallery game. So they've done that well. And I couldn't make much sense of the
00:31:40
Speaker
the quotes that was in the article where I found this, but it was talking about how Todd Howard was saying that he really loved. Sorry. I said, fuck that guy. It's just a random burst of outburst of aggression towards him. Sorry. My patience with him is just, more receive him. More, I just want to punch him in the nose.
00:32:02
Speaker
Anyway, he said he worked with one of the guys from Interstellar on the making of this series. So I don't know if that adds any credibility to it. But yeah, look, the trailer was really good and quite realistic in terms of physics right up until the point where it ended up being n-dimensional space and in his daughter's bedroom at the end. But apart from that, cool.
00:32:29
Speaker
Yeah, so yeah, I'm sure that we'll wait and see the real trailer and then we'll get right into it.
00:32:36
Speaker
Yeah, and then the SAG Afra Strike is still ongoing. SAG Afra Strike, yep. Wow. It's right there, man. I'm sure you're not the first one to make that connection, but it looks like now they're going to be starting to include video game capture and voice artists. So there's been some studios in negotiations with the Guild.
00:32:59
Speaker
And the most likely to be affected by strikes, Activision, Blind Light, Disney character voices, Electronic Arts, Epic Games for most interactive, Insomniac, Take Two, VoiceWorks Productions and WB Games. So most of them. I can see why it might be relevant for some studios with some styles of games.
00:33:26
Speaker
But by and large, I feel like it's kind of a me to be careful about how I word what I was going to say. Jumping on the bandwagon more than it is directly. And I don't know, like I need to do some research really, but my uninformed opinion there is.
00:33:47
Speaker
Like, how often are people, are humans being digitized for video games in a studio that's going to then use that digital copy in like five more games? By the time they're producing the sequel, someone else buys the studio and rebadges them and changes them around anyway.
00:34:03
Speaker
And by the time they do a sequel as well, there's that much of a jump in the storyline that visuals and voicing has got to change significantly. All the mechanics of the game are so vastly different. You can't reuse the asset.
00:34:18
Speaker
I don't know it's like if you if you digitally scan somebody for a movie then you can put them in whatever clothing you like in the background as an extra in every movie ever and never pay that fucker again which is the whole point of the strike or part of the point of the strike but in a video game unless you're using the unreal engine and you're scanning for unreal and I know fair enough a lot of games do use the unreal engine but how many of them use extras in the background.
00:34:42
Speaker
Like a percentage of a percentage, but. Yeah, I just think of all the games I've played where every enemy, well, every fifth enemy is the same dude. That's just like, you know, when they choose that one character. Yeah, that's the Bond one and there's the brunette one. But this is a, that's more an argument for why they need to introduce that whole, you know, cause I think Dan usually, or size, but, but AI in video games has a place, a place
00:35:11
Speaker
to give it a 10,000 assets like one of those rotating the old flipbook wardrobe kind of style things and you can have an unlimited number of permutations of heads and bodies and body shapes and then clothing over the top and now you can have completely random AI generated characters in real time like procedurally generated.
00:35:32
Speaker
That's what I can do, along with voice acting, synthesized voice through an AI engine so they don't repeat the same fucking line every time you walk past them in the street. Anyway. I used to be an adventurer like you, then I took an arrow to the knee. Next. All right, that's me done. Next. Oh, Ed's up. Yeah, so I put in, I'm news down.
00:35:58
Speaker
Unreal Engine 5.3 came out last week, Thursday the 7th, caught a bit of an overview of what it entails and after the past few months of kind of dabbling in Unreal Engine,
00:36:18
Speaker
It's pretty significant. So the couple of topics is that they've got nanite landscaping, which is like the poly count before the kind of nanite was just on objects. So any kind of Unreal Engine 5
00:36:34
Speaker
scene that you saw was built up using individual assets. Now the Nanite technology is from landscape. So it's just pretty much like one plane. So it cuts down the number of assets needed to create a scene.
00:36:53
Speaker
Just number of polygons as well no no it keeps the same amount of polygons as the whole thing of it so it reduces the number of assets keeps a polygon so it improves detail and rendering which is pretty big so you're going to see games that are going to become a lot more detailed and
00:37:11
Speaker
everything like that which is pretty cool to go hand in hand with that they've got tessellation so with landscapes you just have a plane and put a mesh on it but the mesh couldn't really be manipulated with tessellation you can put like a stone path and then kind of increase the the height of the stones and make it look all uneven and natural which is which is pretty cool which apparently was in Unreal Engine 4 but
00:37:36
Speaker
now being updated. Volumetrics, which is to do with FOGS, FOG and everything like that, but an interesting, which I thought was really cool, is with Volumetrics is that you can now move individual clouds around.
00:37:52
Speaker
and interact with other clouds? Yeah, so before it was just like, I want fogging or I want clouding and it was just automatically generating. That's what you got. But now you can actually manipulate the clouds in the sky, which is pretty cool. And also with that one there, it's like explosions and smoke and stuff like that before it was just pretty much like a 2D mesh. Now that's all 3D as well. So there's more details.
00:38:21
Speaker
um they've also bought in so you can actually model characters now for rigging everything like that before they had to bring in characters and meshes and everything like that from Lender and Maya and all the other stuff so it's more one-stop shop which is yeah which is which is pretty exciting just means yeah people don't have to import and export stuff and
00:38:46
Speaker
And so I reached out to you when I was generating the new introduction for the update videos. I don't know if you've seen our latest update video to see the final sequence that I put together. But you said that you pretty much abandoned. So I built that in Blender. You said that you pretty much ditched Blender in favor of just learning Unreal? Yeah. Yeah. So I did Blender. What I was fun when I did my project last year at Blender,
00:39:17
Speaker
importing assets. Yeah, like third party assets. Just if they came out really funky type of thing like for the rigging. And I thought for the sake with Unreal Engine, that their actual marketplace to get meshes and stuff like that, there's a lot more available. I mean, for kind of one off
00:39:45
Speaker
projects blend is really good. I mean, for a free bit of software. Well, Unreal is free as well, though. Yeah, and Unreal Engine is free, but Unreal Engine, you need like a higher spec read, but
00:40:01
Speaker
Blender, I could probably put on my laptop. Yeah, so Blender runs really, really easy. And it is quite easy to use, but honestly. Right up until your render. Each frame in that intro sequence was taking up to seven, eight, nine minutes per frame. It's 25 frames a second and there's 19 seconds of footage. That's a lot of hours. Yeah, definitely, definitely. So yeah, I wanted to try Unreal out and
00:40:29
Speaker
Um, yeah, I just found the, the interface a little bit more user friendly. Um, but yeah, it's, I mean, either either, like it's an up late, man. Like honestly, it's definitely for, for like, if you've got a kind of, uh, uh, a run of the mill kind of PCL laptop, want to get into it and it's, it's great. It's fantastic. I don't know how to recommend it, but yeah, I just wanted to try unreal engine. I think with, with UE five and.
00:40:58
Speaker
their kind of roadmap, what they want to achieve just was a bit more appealing for what's coming up. Like with stuff that's going with 5.3 and the metahuman scanning and stuff like that, it's, it's once again, a bit more time with life. It's something I'm going to lose a lot of hours to. I'm waiting for them to come up with a real time caustics engine. It's one of the things that they still haven't figured out with, with 40 years of ray tracing technology, they still can't do caustics quickly.
00:41:28
Speaker
And for those playing at home, because I know Tom knows what caustics are. Caustics are the where you put a glass down on a table and light will play through the glass and create that focal circle of light on the table next to it. So like almost the magnifying glass effect when you
00:41:50
Speaker
You know, didn't torture ants as a kid. You tortured just inanimate dead objects with a magnifying glass. The light on the ground from magnifying glass is called caustics when you recreate them. And they're horribly expensive to compute.
00:42:05
Speaker
Yeah, so with UE5, they've got the lumens, which is your lighting. And there was an update to the lumens as well, the lighting kind of where to, you can actually before with the lumen lighting, you bake it into each scene, just to take the load off your PC. But as soon as you moved an asset,
00:42:30
Speaker
Around you can see there's no longer accurate. Yeah, it was no longer accurate, but they've now kind of Split it. So yeah, the light starts bouncing around a bit more way you bake in your lighting But then it takes away the actual like yeah, I haven't seen too much more about it It was just yeah brief kind of overview, but I think that they're working towards that where the lighting is a bit more Yeah, really see how it actually bounces around and bounces around everything which is which is pretty cool
00:42:58
Speaker
I think we'll move on because you and I will get lost in this conversation quite easily, but I actually think it's probably a topic that we should talk a little bit more about at some other time. And for those at home, even if you've got zero interest in 3D applications, which like 99.9% of the population have zero interest.
00:43:17
Speaker
I would still encourage you just every now and then just type in unreal engine five or five point three or five point four into youtube and unreal frequently release videos of the latest features and it's quiet.
00:43:32
Speaker
Like, one, it's quite breathtaking what they're doing with technology these days. But two, it also gives you an idea of what game developers have at their disposal as a toolkit to make games in the modern era and the direction it's going in and some of the shit to get excited about. They're like, they like video game trailers, but there's no game. It's really just the toolkit.
00:43:52
Speaker
Um, and like, it's, it's quite, quite spectacular in a lot of cases. Anyway, um, I, sorry, you had one last piece that's also now supports Mac and no one cared. Yeah, it's like Mac is, and you are, it's like, yeah, that's it. I was, I was actually, I was like, I better just put that down just in case there are any Mac users that I
00:44:14
Speaker
Give me a time machine and a risk processor and I'll be excited. It's definitely worth a watch because it gives you an appreciation of running around and how it works. Not just video games. That's what I find quite amazing these days is so many movie companies or movie studios are using Unreal Engine 5
00:44:40
Speaker
point two up to do movie stuff now and are using proprietary utilities kind of similar to Unreal, but like to do all the space sequences in Guardians of the Galaxy 3, for example. Like this is where the software has come from and it's all spawned. I mean, these software packages used to be dedicated to this sort of stuff for movie studios, Lightwave and Maya and 3D Studio Max. They were written for the cinema industry.
00:45:10
Speaker
And then you had a fucking video game company come along and say, oh, we need to build our own engine to make a game called Unreal. And then they are now the premier deluxe fucking software app. And it's still free for the cinema industry to use. It's quite amazing. Anyway, last piece of news. This one's a rumor, so it's not confirmed. Don't quote me on this, kids. But Florence Pugh is rumored to have been cast as Abby for The Last of Us season two.
00:45:40
Speaker
Interesting. I can see it. I can see it, but it wouldn't have been who I would have picked. No, but I can see it. I mean, Florence pure is a brilliant actor. Oh, she's excellent. But I really think she could be muscular enough. Oh, yeah. Yeah. She does have a, like a wrestling style frame and I don't want to, I don't need that to say, I don't want that to sound at all negative, but she has the right built. I'm sure if I, she could beat the shit out of me if she wanted to.
00:46:09
Speaker
And on that, I think we'll just move on. Not like that, Peter. Oh dear. Oh dear. Didn't even get a chance. We could all do a little bit of baiting. Oh dear, dear. Where's Dan? I'm calling him from Portugal. That was a multi Python and the holy grail skit right there. Yes, yes. And then for the oral sex. Anyway, we should move on to second beers.
00:46:32
Speaker
Yeah, I do. I do have to grab mine. Okay. You go grab yours and I'll start because I've poured and had a few sips of mine. Let's turn the camera off. Do you have to do a drop roll over the bed to get to the door or something? I always put my commute. There we go. Anyway, so the beer I'm having, yes, there's gonna be some fine editing there. I am having the
00:46:59
Speaker
Probably pretty hard to read in this light. Naughty. It's not the easiest font to read either. Naughty Schwartz beer. Naughty Schwartz beer. And we love a Naughty Schwartz. Midnight Lager. It is from Hargreaves Hill and a collaboration with Naught Distilling.
00:47:21
Speaker
And Hargreaves Hill are Victorian, so I'm assuming not distilling probably a close neighbor of theirs.
TV and Movie Reviews
00:47:28
Speaker
So what they've done for this is they've produced a deliciously dark, you know, dark lager. Schwartz is that black lager. But they've said here that they aged it for a short stint in Naught's Sangiovese Gin Barrels.
00:47:47
Speaker
And I didn't read that. And I'm sure you could go back and look through the footage. I have my first sip and just go like, Oh, it's Ginny. It's so Ginny, like right at the start that it like completely threw me not knowing who without really knowing what they were. So it's like super botanical right up front. And it's still got the standard, you know, really multi really roasty characteristics coming through. But
00:48:15
Speaker
I should probably check how old this can is, but I, I don't know that. Well, that gin flavor is just really taken over the whole thing when I was obviously looking forward to a nice really multi roasted lager. Um, so, so when you say it's got a gin flavor, are you talking just, just really floral? Like the June, like botanical, like when you smell, when you smell gin, you get that hit that flavoring. It's kind of, that's the first thing that hits your time. I don't know if I'd want that in a black beer.
00:48:44
Speaker
It kind of works. It kind of works. It's just it's a little bit too, too much too soon. Like I don't know if it if it if it's somehow and I don't know how you would make this happen. Make your flavors go in order that you want them to. I'm not Noah's Ark like two by two fucking thing. But yeah, if that came through like.
00:49:04
Speaker
Like second, so you got that, that lagerie, black lagerie heat up front, but then you got that geniness second and like that would be, that'd be really nice. And then it's, it's pretty, it drops off. They don't have to mess with the balance. Cause you're, you're, I mean, I don't know. I don't know if it's just, it was when they say short stint, if it was too shortest in, so it's like, yeah, didn't have time to mellow. But, uh, look, it's still good. It's still a really very well crafted beer. And I think it's really interesting what they're doing. And I like, I like the kind of.
00:49:34
Speaker
I don't think I've ever seen another Schwartz that's been aged in gin barrels. So I think that's really fucking cool. Yeah, they said it's it's slightly herbal. It's not slightly herbal.
00:49:47
Speaker
Yeah. And spicy hops. Yeah. Um, but yeah, no, it's, it's good. I'm going to give it a four. I'm going to give it four. Um, I mean the color alone is worth, worth three and a half of those points, deliciously black. But, uh, yeah, that's, that's me. Who's up next? Peter. I'll go next to give, give, uh, you've had a chance to taste his beer properly. So I'm, I'm having garage projects, uh, cereal milk stout, which is not a new beer. So good though.
00:50:17
Speaker
It is, but it's also like it's a milk stout. It's not.
00:50:29
Speaker
They're not doing anything spectacular. It doesn't blow your socks off. It's not trying to be more than it is. It's just it's nice and roasty and a little bit of chocolate, a little bit of coffee notes, but it's not overpowering either, which is why I like a milk stout. It's not as loud as a Russian stout.
00:50:51
Speaker
Yeah, it's uninspiring, I guess, but not terrible either. And it's on Nitro, so it's pillowy smooth in terms of mouthfeel. But is it a case of keep it simple, stupid and do it well? Yeah.
00:51:04
Speaker
Yeah, it is. It is. I'm not knocking it. I know that probably sounded very negative, but I was, you know, garage project, I guess my brain associates with experimental out there loud, obnoxious, at times overbalanced. And this is just a very reserved, finely made milk stout. And so I guess I'm kind of surprised. And I don't know, I didn't get what I was expecting, but at the same time, that's not necessarily a bad thing, if that makes sense. It's fucking well made milk stout.
00:51:35
Speaker
I'm going to give it a four, kind of on the fence, but I'll stick with a four. If you want one of their, they're far out there. If you want that. Yeah. If you want one of their far outstouts, one of their, their, their gabs be as they canned, which is their, their coffee, um, nitro stout. And it was my highlight of gabs and I saw it in a bottle shop today and I was.
00:51:59
Speaker
If I hadn't been going for an hour-long walk in the park with Jasper, I definitely would have grabbed it to bring home. I love to keep an eye out. I'm due for another order too, so it might work out. Excellent. Ed, what are you drinking, mate? I'm drinking a Freestyle Brewing Magic Juice Neaper.
00:52:18
Speaker
Magic juice. Have a go at that can. Oh man, they've gone down there. They're from Basandine and Perth. The sticker looks like it comes right out of Basandine's skate park. It probably did, man. It probably did. It probably did. So freedom is freestyle. Malt is pale oats wheat. Pops are El Dorado, Citra are mosaic.
00:52:45
Speaker
The yeast is East Coast ale. Yeah. So nothing out of the ordinary there. No, no. And I'm going to say, like, I generally don't kind of gravitate towards neighbors. Probably there'd be that I don't drink too much often. There's no particular reason other than I like to stick to my own little kind of hobbit hole when it comes to beers. But I have to say,
00:53:15
Speaker
It's a lovely way to put that. I like that expression. That's the color. It's like an orange juice. And I tell you what it is that I was a good head retention. Look at that. Yeah. And Pete actually used exactly how I was going to describe it. The mouthful feel is very pillowy. Very smooth. It's 5.6%.
00:53:37
Speaker
I can tell you what, I could see myself. It's a 500mm can as well. Just don't let Dan have a look at the sticker. Because it doesn't kind of line up. But it is, I'm digging it, I will go back and get more.
00:53:59
Speaker
start kind of going on the unexpected journey of neighbors. Um, so I am, I am, yeah, I'm impressed. I've, for somebody who doesn't drink too many of them, um, I'm going to give that a four and a half. Yeah. I really, I'm really surprised as said, it's not a style of IPA that I go to. I generally go to the hazy palails, not so much Imperial, but, um,
00:54:28
Speaker
Yeah, I thoroughly enjoy that. Well, if they've nailed the pillowiness, that's a big thing that a lot of like neepers miss. And that's when they just become a hazy IPA. The Neepers style really had that super soft mouthfeel. Yeah. Yeah. It's fantastic. Four and a half. Yeah. Once I
00:54:52
Speaker
venture into a few more Neepers. I'm going to definitely go back and try it again because I think there's probably half a mark once I actually know what to look out for. But as a beginner to Neepers, that's, you know, two and a half, even though I said 500 mil can, I'm basically going to drink that or drink it all. And if I had a second one, I would go back for a second one. Nice. That's spot on.
00:55:20
Speaker
Yeah, good. Yeah, let's go into some mini reviews. Yeah. Well, I mean, how many have you got? Eight? Eighteen? No, no, no. I'm the quick mentions. Like I'm not actually going to review them because we're in the middle of seasons. And I think that's probably not appropriate. These are these all half like mid season reviews, are they? Okay. Well, I'll kick off because I just watched the ending again.
00:55:41
Speaker
Um, I, I decided last night to watch 65, which we review. We trailed the trash a while ago. So Adam Driver, uh, crash lands on earth and fights dinosaurs with a gun. There is nothing more to that film. Like, and not in a bad way. It was, it was a great little popcorn flick. It made me, Adam Driver has the biggest fucking hands I've ever seen.
00:56:09
Speaker
He's a weird looking dude, like I mean, no disrespect, but he's a funky looking dude. Oh, just something I noticed, like he's absolute oven mitts of hands in this film. Look, it was fun that the dinosaurs were cool. It kind of felt like a few a few scenes were very
00:56:31
Speaker
very Jurassic park, like straight, like straight cuts, like not even like a homage. It was just like, you rip that straight from the Lost World. There's like a shot. We got darts in here. Nobody cares. No, no, it was even worse than that. It's literally like they're looking up through the glass and the T-Rex is biting it. I was like, come on. Is there like a whole grab of like the DNA strand in the corner?
00:56:57
Speaker
No, there wasn't, there wasn't dano DNA. Unfortunately that would have been great. Um, look, it was, it was, it was cool. The special effects were great. Um, the, the, it just, the story just like, it's only an hour and a half long, so you can literally smash it out. Um, but it's just, uh, it just became a little bit confusing towards the end. It's like, what do you want to be? Do you want to, it's trying to be slightly heartwarming.
00:57:25
Speaker
But then it's also like these dinosaurs. I mean, you wouldn't expect it, but there's this whole thing about family and like, you know, the adopted daughter kind of thing. Just have a second make the film as a popcorn film. Like the best that one of the best scenes was there's a moment where he dislocated his shoulder and it's like.
00:57:45
Speaker
As they're being attacked by dinosaurs and the franticness of that that was probably the one scene where I was really like oh shit what's gonna happen. But then it all it literally coincides like it's a countdown like cuz it coincides with the media that crashes to earth to kill the dinosaurs.
00:58:03
Speaker
It's like perfectly set. Look, watch it. Have a couple of beers have a laugh. Like, enjoy enjoy enjoy dinosaurs getting attacked with a shotgun. He definitely at one point he definitely shot through one of the dinosaurs ankles and I was like, fuck yeah, well, yeah, it's exactly what you would do. Yeah. Does does does it come across as a 420 film? Like design? No, no, no, no, no. It's it's meant to be, I wouldn't say like,
00:58:33
Speaker
high concept sci-fi, but it takes itself a little bit too seriously in parts. Right. Yeah. But then it adds this whole like, this whole, yeah, this undercurrent of like, quite touching family story. And it's just kind of like, I just, my one complaint is there wasn't enough guns on dinosaur violence.
00:58:54
Speaker
That's why you're there for that time movie, isn't it? You just want to see... Yeah. Cowboys versus alien stuff. Exactly. That's a film. Now that's a film. But look, it was enjoyable. I said I felt like, be due to outside circumstances, I fell asleep watching it last night, but I wanted to go back and finish it to see what happened. And look, that's actually the last 20 minutes is the most...
00:59:23
Speaker
And that's where he shoots the ankle out. So it's like, I'm glad I went back and watched that. I would have been disappointed if I'd missed it. But yeah, it was on, I watched it on binge, if you're looking for it. Yeah, hour and a half long. Well, like hour and 20 minutes when you don't factor in the credits. But yeah, definitely worth, you got nothing else on and you just want to put something on.
00:59:44
Speaker
You can even, yeah, you could easily sit there and do scroll while watching it and like go. Interesting bit. Okay. Okay. He's talking. Yeah. Um, yeah. How did it just, I think it would be, it would benefit if they'd gone down the prey route. Yeah. Yeah. It needed to be a bit more burn, a bit of a slower burn. They, yeah, they rushed, they rushed some things, but yeah, anyway, so that's 65. Give it a shot. Let me know what you think. Well done. I don't know to sort your own life out.
01:00:14
Speaker
Sheldon. Roger Wilk. Yeah. I'm not your dad. I can't tell you what to do. It's all fucking random. Pete, do you want to jump in here or do you want me to keep going? Keep going, man. Okay. The next two ones have been already reviewed by Dan, but he's not here, so fuck him. So fuck him. But I did go back and watch his reviews today through our YouTube channel. You should like and subscribe.
01:00:38
Speaker
So I there in episode five episode seven for those playing at home so the first one talking about carnival row season two. Dan talked at length about the love crafting aspects of that and changes to the pacing of the story and how the first part of it's bit like.
01:00:55
Speaker
Hurry up and get over this thing to move on to the next thing. I 100% agree with him. The thing he also touched on when he did a recap of the series was that it's the English versus the Russians, the Russians are the pact who you spend a lot of time with in this season.
01:01:15
Speaker
And it's a it's a full spoiler, I guess. Yeah, there's like a sub sect called the new dawn, which comes up. And it's just communism. It's plain and simple communism, even with really bad Russian accents. And there's no such thing as bad accent. Oh, it's 100% that it's 100% that and they just call everyone comrade. And you know, comrade, do you have some solution? Yeah. Oh, like,
01:01:42
Speaker
I love terrible Russian accents. It just felt like a bit too lazy writing, but it was. Yeah. And then it's, you know, the communist train infiltrate English society. It's like, oh, there's a red under every bed kind of like thing. Yeah. So, but he's 100% right in the monster creation for this one.
01:02:05
Speaker
Uh, is like the first season, the, the, the big monster that you'd like Orlando Bloom's trying to fight, um, is, uh, is very. Squiddy Lovecraftian. This one's flesh and bone and like.
01:02:21
Speaker
very straw, it's like almost like a weird vampire like creature. It's very cool, very well done. I really love the design of that creature. Cara Delvane, Elanda Bloom are great. Again, the guy who, I've probably written down his name, but that's, he is like the
01:02:41
Speaker
Mr. Millworthy is his character's name in the show. He's like the political advisor for the politicians in this. He stands out and he's not a well-known guy. I looked up his IMDb page to see what he'd been in and the only thing that I, and I didn't even recognise him in it, was he was one of the house elves in Harry Potter. He was a creature. What was his name?
01:03:11
Speaker
Uh, I will have to find it for you as no, no, no. What's his character's name? Sorry on the show. Mr. Millworthy.
01:03:18
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. Simon McBurney. That was it. Yeah. He's outstanding. And like for someone who's not as big as some of the like, there were definite scenes where he, he stole the show. Yeah, right. That said, though, as we got through, like 10 episodes, hour long episodes, as Dan said, but you kind of, you knew when he was going to do which face he ran out of faces to use, like for some of his like,
01:03:49
Speaker
Um, but yeah, the, the character, the, yeah, the, the costume design, the character creation is, is amazing. There's, um, it's, it's really, really cool. And yes, to answer my own question, I asked Dan in that episode, cause I did go back and watch them. I asked if when Orlando Bloom fought the troll, if there was a chain, there isn't. So there was no, uh, uh, Lord of the Rings throwback to that. Um, but yeah, really, really good. I've definitely worth a watch. Um, we, Emma and I smashed through it in like a week.
01:04:12
Speaker
Ooh, we're gonna do this face and then like...
01:04:31
Speaker
So yeah, see, that's, that's season two. And as Dan said, in his review, that is the final season. They're not renewing it for a three. So it was a nice rounded out story. You got to the end of everyone's arc. I think so. That was, that was good. And then Banshees of Inner Sheeran. Dan talked about this in our in-person episode. Spoiler free, please. Yes. Yes. Just watch it. It's beautiful. It is a, it is a,
01:04:45
Speaker
You know, there's almost there's almost no chance that he didn't make it at least a joke to other people on set at the time. Don't worry, guys. I've fought trolls before.
01:04:58
Speaker
A loving ode to the Irish landscape. Some of the most beautiful shots you'll see, even when it's, you know, you can tell how fucking miserable the weather is there and it's raining sideways and it's like, but, um,
01:05:15
Speaker
Yeah, I really agree with Dan in terms of the, the, you laugh up until the point where you go, oh, fuck, I shouldn't. It's funny until it's not. Yeah. What streaming service is that on again? Because I remember Dan talking about- That was on Prime. Yeah, okay.
01:05:31
Speaker
I was so hoping you'd pirated it so you could come up with something to respond there. Like, what streaming service is it on? A horror of my heart is. Long John Silver's cave. Yeah, no, it's, it's, I'm not, I don't want to spoil it at all. It's, it's, it's a very slow burn, but a beautiful slope. But it's a bit, as Dan described it, it was a movie about inter-social interpersonal conflict and social
01:06:00
Speaker
hard wiring in the human race. I assume it's quite existential in that respect.
01:06:07
Speaker
It's, you could probably read that much into it, but it's also very plain and simple. Like it's like the whole premise is that one of the blokes doesn't like the other bloke anymore, just because he finds him dull. That's, that's the whole thing. He's like, you're boring me. I don't want to hang out with you anymore. I don't want to go down the pub and sink pints with you anymore. We've done that for years, you know, but then it just go like, I think Dan said about halfway. I think it's more like.
01:06:34
Speaker
two thirds the way through, and then it just switches to like, holy shit, that got dark real quick. The one thing Dan didn't talk about, which I would love to make a point about, and I, you'll notice it, it's glaringly obviously in it. But I don't know why he didn't mention it. I really, really enjoyed the lack of music. There was a lot of
01:06:59
Speaker
negative space in the audio sphere. Atmospheric silence. Yeah. That kind of like negative space can be done really well or it can be done really badly. This is done beautifully well. So it's good to use, I'll definitely have to go back and watch because when it's done really well, it just
01:07:21
Speaker
It's poignant. But like a classic example of it in this film is, you know, there's a scene in the pub, they're talking, it's obviously you
01:07:30
Speaker
We almost had to put subtitles on because of the thick Irish accents they use, and they use a lot of Irish words in that. But in one of the scenes when they're talking in the pub, and it basically rolls around the pub in terms of it is quite play-like in the way it's shot. It's kind of like a one-set kind of thing. But that said, then they go and there's beautiful shots of the landscape. But it's so subtle yet so loud in when
01:08:00
Speaker
that two of the characters are talking back and forth, back and forth. And it's like, you can kind of hear like the wind howling in the background. And then someone opens the door and suddenly it's, and it's like the wind volume just goes straight up. And that really sold the film for me. Like, it's just like, one other was, I was just like, yeah. And then I started paying more attention to those, uh, atmospheric sciences. And yeah, it just really added to the whole thing for me. And the, and the endings, it's,
01:08:24
Speaker
like beautifully sad, like, but it's just a really, really well done film and it's it's the.
01:08:34
Speaker
director and then Brendan Gleason and Colin Farrell's, it's their first time reuniting since In Bruges. Yeah, right. Yeah, they all go back together. That was a fucking spectacular movie too. Which is a fantastic film, yeah. It's so not what I expected when I sat down to watch that film. No, no. I was at my parents' house and like, oh, we're going to put this on and it's, you know, it's called In Bruges and it was, and then it ends up just being this fucking crazy-ass violent action film out of nowhere. Yeah.
01:09:00
Speaker
And this is not an accident. When Colin Farrell's good, he's fucking good. Yeah. It's like, what is it? Phone booth. Oh, yes. That was fantastic. I can't believe like the next movie that he did was just side. He was probably Bullseye in Dead Devil. Yeah, like it's like, I'll have to go back and watch him because yeah, it's um,
01:09:26
Speaker
Well this is a perfect example of a film where you can tell these guys are properly trained. Like they're properly trained actors and they have a stage presence and this could easily have been a stage play that you would go and sit and watch. 100% check it out. I know you've written it down on the list and you've probably forgotten about it because that's what you said last time Pete.
01:09:47
Speaker
No, no, no. It's on my list. It's very much written. You have to be in the mood for something slow. Yeah. Yeah. I think. Yes. Yes. Cool. But yeah. And if we're going to give scores to that easily, it's a five out of five. It was brilliant. Yeah. Yeah.
01:10:04
Speaker
I've got some quick honorable mentions and by honorable mentions I mean I don't think it's fair to properly review these shows just just to throw them out there that they're in progress and going from the bad.
01:10:18
Speaker
the bad communism of Carnival Row season two to the good communism of Star Trek Strange New Worlds season two. I'm about halfway through season two. And I got to say it's as good as any Star Trek
01:10:34
Speaker
series ever has been. It feels very at home. They've settled into a lull. The actors interaction with each other is really good. It's well acted. You're cozy and comfortable with the Captain Pike now. And there's still enough references to the rest of what you know is going to happen in the enterprise when, because it's set as a prequel to the original series, essentially.
01:10:59
Speaker
Right so Kirk is a lieutenant who doesn't have his own captaincy yet he's on another ship doing some shit and Kirk's brother is on the enterprise and pike is the captain which was established in the law you know.
01:11:14
Speaker
in the original series that Captain Pike was in the film. And it's just so there's a lot of continuity there, but the acting is excellent. The stories are really interesting, good character building. Yeah. Really enjoying that.
01:11:32
Speaker
Wheel of time. I panned this when it, I don't know if you've, have you been watching it season two, Ed? No, no, I have to go back and watch season one. I probably don't. Just do a recap. Just do a recap. No, I actually think, I think it will, it will be rewarding to watch season one first. Yeah. I want to go back and watch because it's there, I've got to watch it first. Cause otherwise if I go straight into it,
01:12:01
Speaker
Season two, it's like kind of a row like I've started watching kind of row Yeah, but why I've got the way and it's always want to go back to it, but just bear down and watch this If there's a season one, it's got to be watch you don't go off Don't go off and watch Empire Strikes Back without watching a new hope. Oh, no, that just doesn't yeah, but So we're only four episodes in a wheel time season two
01:12:26
Speaker
And I've got to say... Is it weekly dropping? Yes, yeah, every Friday. Same time as Foundation 2 shows that you won't watch, Tom. I've got to say, I'm impressed by the turnaround.
01:12:40
Speaker
Wheel of Time season two, first of all, and I think I said this at the time that we've finished talking about season one, because it was the same time of Rings of Power season one. The costuming and set dressing in Wheel of Time season two shits all over Rings of Power, shits all over it.
01:13:00
Speaker
Like there's been quite a few times where I've kind of looked like kind of stepped away from the storyline for a second and just really appreciated how intricate and traditionally built the garments are. Yeah. And then the the set dressing and the white tower, like it's it's called the ivory tower or the white tower of Amherlin kind of interchangeably in the books. But it's actually not pure white. It's made to look like ivory.
01:13:28
Speaker
It's got this beautiful marbling effect in the background and the way the light shines through when it goes from being a white from the outside to when light's coming through. It's quite a dark, deep brown marble. It's just some of the effects are brilliant. The acting, they've settled into a rhythm and there's a lot of chemistry between characters. The way that they've combined books two and three into one story instead of because in the novel series, book two and book three is basically the exact same thing told twice.
01:13:58
Speaker
They're different stories. It's not like told this. They're not. He never intended to tell the same story from two angles. He basically just repeated himself. Did he have a stroke while he was writing it? And like, and there was some subtle differences, but at the same time, they're trudging across the landscape towards the MacGuffin and they almost reached the MacGuffin. And then in the next book, they trudge across the landscape chasing the other MacGuffin.
01:14:22
Speaker
They've kind of matched. They're on fetch quests. Yeah, exactly. They exactly are. The Horn of Valire is the MacGuffin, the fetch quest they're after. But they've quite craftily combined the two books into one story. And now you have
01:14:39
Speaker
Because there was always a big cast in the books. You have Rand Arthor, you've got Perrin and Tom, the three mates from the two rivers. Then you have the two girls, Gwen and Nynaeve. So you're at fucking five. And then you've got Moraine with Lan, and they're kind of one, two piece, but they also split up quite a lot. So you've got seven main characters and they're equally important. You can't have the books without any one of them.
01:15:06
Speaker
And at points, all seven characters have their own storylines. They follow in parallel. And the TV series is doing a brilliant job so far of following seven storylines. Actually, you're following six. I did get up to episode five of the first season out of the eight. So maybe I should just go back and finish it. Yeah, I would recommend you do because look, I have seen a lot of comments saying how much better season two is.
01:15:33
Speaker
I'm happy that it is as good as it is because number one was just such a bit of disappointment. I'm not saying this isn't going to fall on its face after three seasons and just not wrap the story well, but it's settled into a rhythm which I think is cool. Foundation Season 2 are about halfway through that as well. I think we're five or six eps in.
01:15:54
Speaker
I'm still thoroughly enjoying it. The storyline's quite different from the season one. They're still talking about math, Tom, in terms of predicting the future. But it is also, it's getting really interesting in terms of the artificial intelligence, some of the commentary on modern society.
01:16:13
Speaker
You know, essentially his psycho history algorithm is almost artificially intelligent in the sense that you can see into the future using extrapolating the past. And then he hands it to a fucking the last robot. Like there is one AI robot in existence in the galaxy that they know of.
01:16:33
Speaker
All the rest were destroyed in the cyborg wars and for whatever reason, a previous emperor kept one alive. And you know that from the very beginning. And so when he hands the algorithm over to Harris, like from one artificial intelligence to another, it's quite a cool nod. And yet the story has gotten simpler and yet it's still on a really big grand stage. It's no longer time hopping. Season one time hops.
01:16:59
Speaker
And it's cool in the sense that you've got three emperors, Dawn Day and Dusk, who are in three life stages, but are clones of each other and have the same memories and the same consciousness and the same thought patterns and all the rest of it. And so they could time hop while maintaining continuity of actors, which I think is awesome. It was a very cool mechanic.
01:17:22
Speaker
And then the other characters that aren't clones of each other in order for them to still be relevant to the storyline, they go into hypersleep for various reasons. So, yeah, it's quite cool. Season two, all that settled down kind of like Witcher season two, you're just in one timeline now and it's just telling a really interesting interstellar war story and it's
01:17:43
Speaker
Very cool. Uh, and the last thing is invasion season two, which I've only watched the first two episodes of. I'm going to eat my words, actually. I didn't say great things about season one. I got to say, going back to it, even watching the first episode of season two, the love story did take too much focus away in my opinion in season one. Yep. I remember saying that. Yeah.
01:18:07
Speaker
But watching season two, episode one, I kind of remembered how intricate and establishing in terms of, you know, the world has ended essentially for most people. And so it was a post-apocalyptic.
01:18:24
Speaker
Um, ambience in the background, they've done quite a good job of creating that dystopian world. Like the world building has been impressive. And I never really appreciated it when I first watched it. I was probably doom scrolling while watching some of these EPs, I guess. So I almost want to go back and rewatch season one before I continue with season two. I've seen, I think two episodes. Keep it on your list is my opinion.
01:18:49
Speaker
Do we want to finish with a soaker or just skip a soaker and do it properly at the end? I mean, we can do a mid-season review now. We're at the mid-season break. We are. Yeah. Cool. Go on, Peter. Go say your thing. I never responded to it. I'm sorry. I apologize in advance. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I gave you a little bit of a rant in our group chat.
01:19:12
Speaker
I just, I'm not, I've not been impressed. It's not that it's bad. There's nothing patently wrong with the soaker. I'm just, I'm assuming Ed you're caught up as well. Yeah, I'm caught up. I'm just not being all that impressed by it. Um, there's some cool nods to law, but at the same time I found, and this, this was my rant. There's some really broken bits when it comes to law. Like we know these characters, these aren't.
01:19:41
Speaker
peripheral to previous storylines, they're central to previous storylines. Yeah. And so when you have Sebel, when, when Ahsoka, first and foremost, she's, she's not force sensitive, but she's being trained as a Jedi, the fuck.
01:19:56
Speaker
Like, you know, and you're just waiting for her moment at the end of the first season where she's suddenly going to have force powers. But I still find it. I didn't mind the doctor's description of her force ability. I can't call him the doctor. I'm glad he said the doctor. When I found that out, he was a voice hacker. I was like,
01:20:17
Speaker
Fuck yeah, that is like- He was the voice author in the Rebels version of that character too. Yeah, true, true, true. He's always been playing, yeah. He does a great job, great job. He does, he does. But the thing that really bothered me was she- Ahsoka throws the blast helmet to her.
01:20:36
Speaker
And she's like, well, how am I going to train with the blast helmet on? I'm not going to be able to see. And it just infuriated me instantly. This is a character who literally watched the entire training program from start to finish of a Jedi. She stood next to this kid while he had a blast mask on and he was being trained in the ways of the Jedi. And then for her to just not know why she would be throwing a blast mask in this, I just, it really fucking pissed me off.
01:21:04
Speaker
I'm sorry, but if you're going to use a well-known character, then she has to come with all the memories that we've already established in all the other shit. They're just really not all the memories. Not all the memories. I actually, I did go back and reread your message because I definitely agree with 90% of it. I thought it was pretty lazy writing to throw the blast helmet and not be like, everyone knows what this is doing.
01:21:29
Speaker
Well, she knows what it's not just everyone. It's like as, as watches. She knows. But, um, it just raised, it's kind of a separate point, but it just raised something for me that, um, I've not really seen from us, but heard from before from other people. Um, I always find it really kind of, um, it takes me out of the world when we expect characters to have like almost photographic memories of their entire life.
01:21:59
Speaker
in terms of there are so many ways, like we forget shit all the time.
01:22:04
Speaker
And so I actually find it more realistic of a character when it's like, we know they should remember something because we're watching them from the outside, but they don't remember it in character. I think it makes it more believable. I think you're, I understand where you're coming from. I think you might be being too forgiving in that particular example. I'm not talking about that particular example, but it just, it triggered a point, a point to remind me of. When we're talking about the blast helmet, I a hundred percent agree with you. I didn't write back to you because I was
01:22:34
Speaker
I'm very exhausted. Which is completely fair. It just really broke continuity for me. There was no reason to use Sabine. Let's be clear, there's no reason the Ahsoka series needed to have a sidekick that we already saw out of Rebels.
01:22:51
Speaker
Except for the fact that Floney came out and said it's basically Rebels season. Season five. Yeah. But he didn't have to make an Ahsoka series that was Rebel season five. When we saw Ahsoka in Mandalorian, could have gone anywhere. Yeah. Right. Yeah. They could have told a completely unique story with the unique characters as sidekicks, but instead they chose to focus on Sabine Ren and Hera and Ezra and all of that sort of stuff so that they could use it as a plot device to bring back. I mean, they should have just made Rebels season five, but just made it live action. They should have.
01:23:21
Speaker
like kind of got Matt wrote. Yeah. I think I put it in the chat that like after the second episode, it makes me want to go and watch Rebels because I've never had the chance to go back and watch it because and it still feels like that. It feels like a continuation. Like I'm enjoying the series, but yeah, there's, there's, there's, I don't know. I feel for someone that doesn't know the lore as much as you guys do, there's,
01:23:48
Speaker
It doesn't have a unique feel to it. Yeah, you kind of. Oh, it is. Look, I would, if I were you, and if you've got the time and the patience, I actually would genuinely recommend you go back and watch Rebels. Yeah, and it's definitely on the list today. You'll know in the first two or three episodes if you connect with it or you hate it. Most people prefer Clone Wars.
01:24:10
Speaker
I preferred Rebels. I connected with Rebels instantly. I found it was a new and interesting story that I hadn't seen before. New characters, not connected to any previous characters, although they do mix in other characters. Now, the reason why Ahsoka is built around Rebels is they needed an excuse to bring Thrawn in, and Rebels ends in a storyline around Thrawn.
01:24:37
Speaker
And that's what I get. I get it. It's timeline driven. Yeah, I get a feeling that it's timeline driven. What I would have what I was expecting out of Ahsoka was her kind of when she was in briefly Mando is that kind of period of time when she's roaming out by herself.
01:24:59
Speaker
Yeah, whatever she was the lone adventurer kind of yeah, that's what I was expecting. But in saying that to have Sabine have the master apprentice, the Padawan type of storyline is the I find it enjoyable because it goes back to a traditional kind of Star Wars kind of base that we know. But yeah, it just kind of
01:25:25
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. Did either of you play through the story missions in Battlefront 2?
01:25:32
Speaker
Did you play Star Wars Battlefront II? You don't remember? I genuinely don't remember. The opening of Ahsoka Episode I took me straight back to one of the missions where you play as Luke Skywalker post Return of the Jedi and you are hunting for secrets of the Force. And in this particular thing, he's found one of Palpatine's stashes, a bunker stash, and he's going through it because he needs a particular compass. And it's all part of him trying to rebuild Jedi temples and stuff.
01:26:02
Speaker
Which we've seen in Mando, which has been, I mean, if you go back to any of the expanded universe, legends, it's not legends, it's the real canon. Yeah, fuck you, Disney. That's all, that's one of his big focuses, is rebuilding the Jedi Order, starting his temple on the oven for having the time of his life. The opening of that episode, when Ahsoka's trying to find the map,
01:26:25
Speaker
made me year like hardcore yearn for a Luke Skywalker post Return of the Jedi hunting sick like cross between Indiana Jones hunting for secrets of the force on old planets that that that like opening sequence was fantastic. I really like I like the pacing of it. I've said I really liked the the soundtrack as well. I think it's been fantastic. Oh, it's fantastic. But yeah, that really made me go ha shit like
01:26:52
Speaker
And it's something, I guarantee it's something that Filoni would love to do, would love to do a Secrets of the Force, like really delve into this. That'd be great, but a serious watch. But especially focused on Luke and then Sebastian Stan could just waltz on in, put on the blonde mop.
01:27:11
Speaker
I got to say, look, you know, seeing, seeing some of the stuff I've been watching in the Rebels cartoons come to life was cool in live action. Like I recognize the, the environments that are in on Lothar and that was cool, but I don't know. We'll see how it plays out. I've just been, it's just been one of those things. I'll watch it in the week when I get some time, but I don't race to watch a decision on launch day. I'm just not that excited for it. I mean, I'm, I'm the opposite, but you know,
01:27:39
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, fair, fair. And the other thing is, I cried in the last episode, I'm not gonna, I'm not afraid to admit it. When, when, you know, in the last scene. Yeah, no, exactly. I fucking Emma turned and looked at me because I had my headphones. I'm watching it. She's like, Are you crying? And I was like, this is so fucking special. There was there was another, yeah, another appearance scene. Another character.
01:28:05
Speaker
that turned up, that I was like, yes, like a returning character, like, yes, come on, get in, get in. I was like, I was like, yeah, I was pretty, and that's what I'm like about this. There's certainly parts of like, which keeps me coming back and enjoying, but yeah, it's definitely a,
01:28:22
Speaker
I'm not at all going to mention it, but I just wanted to close by saying I also have noticed the continuation of Disney pushing a specific agenda. I just won't talk about what that agenda is because it'll get political quickly, but I just, to me, it has been noticeable in Osaka as well.
01:28:37
Speaker
Well, that's mysterious and in no way, uh, for as well. Um, I also have to say that I really dig the, uh, the, um, uh, outfits that they've chosen for the dark. Let's just say dark Jedi, uh, really old Republic armor. Like,
01:28:56
Speaker
It's a straight out of some of those old republic like CGI trailer such a shame he passed away. He's he's what a fantastic way to go. Oh, it's so like the body of it's so cool. Same kind of a saber fights.
01:29:14
Speaker
Yeah, I've been spot on. He reminds me of Vader. He's fighting star reminds me of Vader because he's such a tall, powerful dude. And that's one of the vibes that we get from the original kind of Twitch easy game.
01:29:29
Speaker
There's no finesse. There's no dancing. There's no dancing. It's just. Well, that's the perfect Anakin change into Vader. He had to go from, he was a twirler. Like he's literally, he was like Geralt, like how Geralt's meant to fight where he dances around his opponents. So he's been like, I'm so mechanical. I have to be just power strikes. And that was Bayland's goal. And like, yeah. Yeah. I think that's that for me, that's, that's what I'm really enjoying about it. He says he's a whole little kind of nods to,
01:29:57
Speaker
The clash of styles to go from Asian martial arts sword fighting to like battle sort, like, you know, medieval power strikes. Yeah. Also, can we talk about Star Wars Spitfire ships that have now appeared? Those Morgan Elspeth's fighter jets? They're Spitfires. They're fucking cool. I want one badly.
01:30:22
Speaker
Yeah, I want I want Lego to release a circus. No, but it's a shitty. It's on its way to me, but it's one of those smaller models like six pieces. Yeah, I look to get it because when I left my last show, I've got a hundred dollar Lego.
01:30:40
Speaker
Yeah. And I'm struggling, like you guys know that I love my Star Wars Lego, but the current Star Wars Lego after like the Justify and the Mando stuff. It's aimed at a younger audience. But there is the Imperial that just released a new, or about to release a new Ultimate Collector's ship, which looks
01:31:10
Speaker
freaking cool. Um, I can't think of it off the top of my head, but it is, um, I'll send it in chat, but it's, uh, shuttle, shuttle Tiderium or, um, star destroyers. While you, while you look that up, I think we might take a break cause we do for a break as well. Yeah. I need new beers. Yes. Ditto. All right. We'll be right back after these messages from our sponsors. No, none at all. They hate us. If you want to sponsor us.
01:31:47
Speaker
Well, fuck a doodle doo!
01:31:52
Speaker
And on that note, welcome back. Let's crack some cans. Oh yeah. And we're back. Uh, yes, let's crack some cans. Has anyone tried their beer? Has anyone organized or are we all just winging this shit? I poured it. Well have a bloody taste of it while I pour this delightfully golden, beautiful looking, foamy headed piece of amazingness. Okay. So who's going first? I think Ed was.
01:32:21
Speaker
talking. Yeah, fuck I gave you enough time. Jesus. Jesus Christ. All right. I am trying for my third beer. Finally managed to get a new East Coast beer on the West Coast and I've gone for a hawkers. Fashionably punchable. Punctual.
01:32:44
Speaker
So it's the West Coast. Many comments I could say about some people I've met who worked at Hawker's over the time. They are facially punchable. I should just reread the label correctly after buying the CSR. I thought it was facially punchable. I thought that's an interesting name for me, but it's facially. So you're right on time. So it's the West Coast IPA late harvest. Six and a half percent ABV.
01:33:11
Speaker
uh nelson dry hopped uh yeah i i can add something to that if you would like there it is part it's a part one of two so it's a dual release yes yes and i did see the other can there and i should have picked one up uh
01:33:30
Speaker
have two from two. But yeah, build the honour notion that hops are significantly impacted by terrier, fashionably punctual is an experiment in the influence that the grower has on the hops. While climate, soil and latitude play an important role, the influence doesn't stop with the land. This installment in our experimental series compares the harvest state for the same hop varieties from the same farm
01:33:55
Speaker
working with the Freestyle Hops of New Zealand. We're using the same bass beat to contrast early verse late harvest, Nelson Hops. Yeah, again, this is a, I haven't delved too much into West Coast IPAs. And I'm enjoying it. Oh, and that's a good start. It is. Yeah, it's,
01:34:21
Speaker
Yeah, it's, it's a lot sharper than the neighborhood just had it. But in saying that I'm liking the sharpness, it's, it's, it's like a very, very clean tasting. Yeah. Um, and yeah, again, I could, I could see like after a couple of mouthfuls, um, I should have picked up the other can.
01:34:48
Speaker
Well, that's a tomorrow problem. Yeah, that's that is tomorrow and I know they've got some in socks So I will go back there during the week It's like enough the new bottle shop that I have that I got these from that I have found at both of them and I'm enjoying I Am definitely enjoying it. I am going to give that But he got a 4.25 and I
01:35:15
Speaker
The consistency, Dan will be happy with how this label has been lined up. Excellent. He will be happy compared to the other label. It's not quite a hundred percent, but it's a lot better. Yeah, I am enjoying it. That's a nice West Coast IPA. Very good. Peter, you're on mute.
01:35:40
Speaker
Well, fuck, pantomime. Do you want to go next? Do you want me to, mate? No, go next. Okay. I need to go get another glass. Okay.
01:35:54
Speaker
Because not because my beer is bad. Let me just stay out of the senate. I've got, uh, I have the two of the two part series I'm trying side by side. Right. And I've had the first and the first sip of the first one. And now I need to try the second one while I'm having it. So I might even just skip this round and do both in beer four. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. I will be back.
01:36:14
Speaker
All right. All the momentum. Uh, so I am also having a hawkers beer, which, uh, Tom's unfortunately not going to be here to hear me just rag on him. It's not his fault. It's just hit the company that he works for. So this is hawkers trio of dips United States. So basically this is an experimental series of, uh, dry hopped West coast IPAs. Um, which I am very partial to. I do love a good.
01:36:42
Speaker
West Coast. It's a six and a half percent beer. And what they've done is they've made three beers in exactly the same way, from the same brewery is my understanding, using the same hops, but the hops were grown. So it's Cascade, which is a classic West Coast hop. But they've grown the Cascade hops in three different countries, in Australia, New Zealand, and America. Which is why the beer is called the trio of dips.
01:37:11
Speaker
Now, I ordered this online. I ordered two of the three because there was only two of the three available to purchase online. And instead of sending me the two countries, which was the US and Australia, they sent me two copies of the US beer. Sorry? Australia, New Zealand and UK, for the three available ones.
01:37:33
Speaker
There's only three of them total and this has got the US. So where does the UK factor in? Yeah. No, there's no Australian one. The other two in New Zealand and UK. Right. Got it. Got it. Got it. Okay. That makes sense. Right. So, um, I ordered two of the three. I got two copies of the same fucking beer and then, uh, very, very nicely Tom has put the other two aside for me, but I don't have any other beers to try. Yeah, I fucked up. All right. I fucked up. Hey.
01:37:59
Speaker
It wasn't even Tom's fucker. But this is a West Coast by itself. And so unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to get to compare them side by side as design, right? The idea is you have all three beers, they're all made exactly the same way, same rough ABV, same hops, same everything, except the hops are grown in different countries. So the experiment is, do they taste different? And I don't know, I'll never know, unfortunately. But as a West Coast, stand-alone West Coast- Don't you kick one of the other ones?
01:38:29
Speaker
No. Oh. Well, you knew the other two were coming. I know. I know. But I don't have any other beers. I've got a Japanese quad in the fridge and that's it. And I don't want to get completely obliterated at the end of this episode on a school night. I got to work in the morning. Monday's rough enough. Anyway, this is a great West Coast. It's pithy.
01:38:50
Speaker
Lots of lots of orange pith, almost a grapefruit juice flavor to it. It's got a nice solid bitterness. Yeah, I'm enjoying it. It's I mean, look, you know, it's not a groundbreaking West Coast, but then you don't want your West Coast to break any grain. You just want it to be good. And this one is in comparison. That's the yours is so much darker. Yeah, I was going to say it's a different different color altogether type of thing.
01:39:20
Speaker
Maybe it's the sunlight in WA. You are close to the surface of the sun. Um, yeah, no, I'm going to give that a four and a half. That's, that's fucking brilliant. Tom, what are you drinking, mate? I'll tell you what I'm drinking, but I'm going to review them both later. Um, that's right. Yeah. So I will show you exactly what I'm drinking. Uh, I think the artwork is quite
01:39:43
Speaker
delightful. It is a dual collab from Mountain Culture in Malta. It is brand new, literally only hit shelves Thursday. So it's fucking fresh. Yeah, these are the two there's Anna and Elsa. For those who have children, you might recognize those names from the hit Disney movie Frozen. And there is a very good reason for that. These beers. There's another one from deeds. I
01:40:11
Speaker
And someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure they're the first three beers to utilize a new hop preservation technique. These are frozen US like hop harvest hops.
01:40:27
Speaker
So when the guys snap frozen essentially yeah so when the. Guys from mountain culture in balta went over to the Yakima chief harvest in the US they selected these hops.
01:40:42
Speaker
And they were frozen fresh off the vine. Um, and then they shipped an entire frozen shipping container of these hops to Australia, um, and have some, and then have gone together. They went and brewed a mountain culture, I believe, and brewed these two beers side by side. So Anna is a West coast. Um, and then Elsa is a, uh, new England IPA. Um, so the two kinds of opposite ends of the spectrum of the IPA for the, for these ones from two brilliant IPA makers.
01:41:14
Speaker
They both showcase Citro Mosaic and Simco, but it's literally just a different style. So exactly the same recipe up until the point where they changed the style from going west coast to east coast. But yeah, everything else is the same. So I'm going to sit on these, sip them side by side, and I will come back at BF4 and review both.
01:41:36
Speaker
Cool. That's pretty fucking amazing. Like for them to have kicked hops in the US, which is back in April is like the hop harvest. And then they've been frozen and then used to brew to release in what? September. Yeah. Let's kick up with some trailer trash.
01:42:02
Speaker
Let's go. Do it. And first up is one from it actually. Yeah. Castlevania Nocturne, which is the latest, um, cartoon series on Netflix, which gets released on the 28th of this month, um, end of the month. So he follows like, um, every kind of Castlevania TV, uh, Netflix series and
01:42:29
Speaker
Same animation style. Same animation style. Almost same voice actors they used, I think. Yeah, but it follows a different... Belmont. Belmont. So this is... Wickdote, who apparently is the last Belmont. And it looks... the business. Like, I've got to go back. I've just re-signed up for Netflix.
01:42:57
Speaker
may catch up and go through the line. This is coming to go back and watch the first couple of episodes again, seasons again, because it looks like your proper kind of adult cartoon full of swearing, ultraviolet, kind of like you.
01:43:13
Speaker
There was even some Aeon Flux kind of moments in there, in terms of the drawing style, in the trailer. Now, I haven't watched any Castlevania. It's on my backlog of things to watch. Yeah, I've watched the first season and
01:43:36
Speaker
Really enjoyed it. Um, yeah, again, life got, it got in the way and I've missed, I think there's season two and maybe a third season. Um, but yeah, it's, it's well worth the watch. They're kind of like the typical half hour episodes and just like, again, growing up playing Castlevania games as a kid. Um,
01:43:59
Speaker
It's, it's, yeah, it's fantastic. It looks, it looks, yeah, it's super cool. And again, the first manga that I ever watched as an eight-year-old is my brother showing me Akira. So I am very partial to the ultra, which is weird, like the, like the, like the, the, like the ultra bond cartoons, it's, yeah, it's just. It's got its place. It's got its place, but soon, like, yeah, made me watch like a Saw movie. I can't do it, but
01:44:29
Speaker
I watched your violin Castlevania hit monkey Akira style cartoon. I watch every day of the way. Yeah. But yeah, it's, um, yeah, looking forward to it. Looks good. Looks good. Yeah. If you haven't checked out those original Castlevania Netflix, like I've, I've watched them, uh, haven't finished the entire series, but I'm also.
01:44:50
Speaker
came to go back and rewatch them all because it's it's just it's that good and it really like it's very very well voice acted and the yeah if you can put up with blood and guts flying everywhere and sword flashes and uh you know obscenely long swords in some scenes like it's just like that's ridiculous um but you know it's it's fun yeah it is yeah i mean look that is very manga right i'm
01:45:15
Speaker
Yeah, I've read novels that are very similar with it. They carry around like an eight or a nine foot sword and you just, yeah, like it's just so impractically stupid. It just, to be honest, and it was written by a Western writer, it was Will White.
01:45:31
Speaker
before he wrote the series that I've raved about. He wrote the Travelers Gate series and one of the things, like it was an otherwise brilliant series of books, but one of the things that really broke it is this guy carries around an eight or nine foot sword. I'm like, no, he doesn't. That's just fucking stupid.
01:45:49
Speaker
Final Fantasy laughing somewhere in the background. It just breaks me out of immersion. Yeah. Anyway. Um, but yeah, just lastly on that, on that Castle Bandy, if you like Castle Bandy, I've said it a number of times, he's, he's watched Heat Monkey because they are doing it. I do have to watch Heat Monkey. I haven't got into it. It's again, it's, it's, it's again, cause Heat Monkey is,
01:46:17
Speaker
Marvel as well. But yeah, because I have confirmed Season 2, which I know Dan's super excited about as well, it's well worth watching. It's the same style and you get the archer feel for it, but I highly recommend that as well if you're Castlevania's jam.
01:46:38
Speaker
into that is, is yeah, they're definitely, and they're from memory, they're like, they're like 27 minutes or 24. So they're kind of, you watch over dinner, they're time fillers, time fillers. And then next minute, you're kind of three or four. Or if you just, you know, you're sitting at home with a laptop in bed and you can just watch three or four episodes and be like, yeah. And that's it. That's, that's the good thing about it is, is even though they're short length, you can kind of
01:47:07
Speaker
very addictive. So you do three or four episodes. You can easily build them into a session. Yeah. Next. Next. Weird. The Al Yankovic story. I don't know if you saw this. I don't know if you guys are interested. This has been coming out for a while. I've been waiting for this one. Yeah. I didn't realize there was a new, new trailer, but yeah, I've seen a few trailers of the past. I've not seen anything about this movie and I was pleasantly surprised.
01:47:35
Speaker
I see me riding dirty. Daniel Radcliffe is fucking ripped. He looks good in it as well. He does. He does look good in it. I must admit. It's going to be great. Also starring Deidre Bader and Rainn Wilson, who plays Dwight in Office Space. Office. The Office, rather. Not Office Space. It's got a ring. Dwight, you ignorant slut.
01:48:00
Speaker
It's one of my favorite quotes from the office and we have it on a pillow in our house. Oh, fuck. Sorry, what were you saying, Ed? I was going to say that the castle that Al Jankovic looks, it's great. And I think that from what I've said, that the performances look like it's going to be a really enjoyable one.
01:48:24
Speaker
Yeah, it's actually written by Weird Al Jankevich himself too. Now, I don't know how much of a piss take of it being his autobiography or how serious he's taken. It's hard to tell because like you could easily believe that he's clearly on the spectrum, right? So his life could be crazy or it could be all made up bullshit. You just don't know. Is it going to be a piss take on a piss take? Yeah.
01:48:49
Speaker
Directed by Eric Apple, who has done episodes of Silicon Valley, Brooklyn Nine-Nine. He's never, he also directed a shitload of episodes of Die Heart, which I never watched.
01:49:03
Speaker
Die Hart. Yes. I've heard of it. Which was a piss take. It's a ROKA original piss take with Kevin Hart. With Kevin Hart. I've seen that it's popped up and I'm just like, what is this? A lot of amazing actors in that series. John Travolta, Gene Renno, Ben Schwartz, all star cast. So clearly he's got some backing behind him, but I've not watched it. Anyway.
01:49:29
Speaker
This is a random thought that goes in my head every time I think of Weird Al Yankovic is the movie The Vitiate. Vitiate. And Spatula City.
01:49:40
Speaker
spatula city kids we need a new spatula and they go to um yeah check it out it's a great it sounds like a fever dream bro oh dude dude no go and go and find yourself for 20 minute for 20 minute it's um I think it's called the video but oh it's
01:50:04
Speaker
You look at Spatula City, it'll come up. Spatula City. Never thought I'd be typing that in, and it is not in IMDb, man. Oh, there it is, there it is. Yeah, so Spatula City's an ad that pops up during the movie. Right. Okay. Moving on. Moving on. As we digress, it's just, yeah. We don't, yeah, I'm pretty sure it's weird out as well, but yeah. Well worth the watch for like a tacky shit 80s movie. Yeah, yeah.
01:50:34
Speaker
Okay. We're going to drag ourselves out of the mire and into bike riders. Yeah. Bike riders just popped up on, uh, as a suggestion on YouTube for me today. Um, but it's, it's Tom, Tom Hardy, Austin Butler and Jodie Comer in a 60s, 60s Chicago biker film. Um, so if you, you know, if you were really missing your sons of anarchy, uh, fix, this is like,
01:51:03
Speaker
It felt like a mix between that and Goodfellas. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was curious. I guess it's probably the best way I'd put it. Yeah. Yeah. And a good cast. Good cast. That's great. Yeah. Jodie Combs is brilliant too. Jodie Combs has been in a bunch of stuff and she, she's very, very good. And then I haven't seen any of the stuff that Austin Butler's really been in, but I've heard great things from people who have seen him.
01:51:28
Speaker
Yeah, look, if you want to watch, uh, you know, it looks to be a story about a guy who's in a motorcycle, part of a founder of a motorcycle, maybe even the founder's son. Um, and then he meets a girl who wants to pull him out of that life, but he keeps getting drawn back in and it's, you know, I, I never watched Sons of Anarchy. So I'm sure it's, you know, there might be some parallels to that, but, um, yeah, it's, uh, that's, that's the new one coming out. That's the first, it's just popped up. There you go. Yeah.
01:51:56
Speaker
Yeah, fair enough. It looks decently shot. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Probably one of those ones you'll wait till I'll wait till it's streaming and then go, go watch it. That's exactly what I'll do. Yeah.
01:52:09
Speaker
Yeah. Um, but yeah, could be interesting. Uh, it could be an interesting film and then game trailer. Yeah. Yeah. I came across this today when I was looking at games con. Um, so the first. Yes. Um, looks like a, like a war frame destiny. Kind of fantasy game, which is fantasy sci-fi. Yeah. And it looks, it looks super, super cool, but I put it in because they've got.
01:52:39
Speaker
It's one of those very few games that has like an open beta that comes, that's like, I think it's like the 19th and the 28th of this month.
01:52:48
Speaker
Right. So it's one of those games where like, like they always had the trailer at GamesCon, but with an open beta, it's one of those things you may as well give it a shot, get the odd chance to see whether you like it or not. Yeah. I said, I don't know too much about it. It looked pretty cool. Like the design, like the world design looked really cool. The world design looks super, super cool. So yeah, it's one of those ones that
01:53:17
Speaker
Yeah, given that it's gotten better to kind of jump in, have a bit of a kind of. It looked very, very JRPG to me. Yeah. It's, it's just one of those ones where you kind of. It's not, it's not an RPG, but it just, it looked very.
01:53:33
Speaker
The character design was very Final Fantasy and then it was mixed with the sci-fi of a lot of Western games. It was like an interesting mismatch. Japanese sci-fi, it reminded me more of Japanese sci-fi than Western sci-fi. It's very high tech, but Battle Angel, Elita style high tech. It's all cyber tech. And then the actual gameplay looked like a mix between a Souls-esque game and
01:54:03
Speaker
and almost destiny. You couldn't tell if it was spammy or...
01:54:20
Speaker
like Souls-esque in those boss fights. Cause they're like nine foot tall and you don't know if they're, you don't know if it's a timing based Souls-esque style. I'm going to get whammied here. Or if it's just mashed the fucking buttons. They're just going to be bullet sponges. So that's what they'll see in there. The batteries from the 18th or 19th of September. That kind of tickles your fancy. Tickles your pickle.
Starfield Deep Dive
01:54:50
Speaker
get half a chance to kind of test it out and away you go. Yeah, cool. Sorry. Um, do we, did you, I'm nowhere near ready for my next beer. So do we want to move into the spotlight? Yeah. Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm actually, uh, yeah, I'm still very in between these two beers. Yeah. Okay.
01:55:11
Speaker
So our spotlight is going to be a bit, bit kind of all over the place. And I'm not that it would be the first time, but this one's kind of by design. So obviously with the, with the release of, of starfield, um, you know, it's a, it's a massive RPG from Bethesda. Um, so I kind of wanted to talk about my initial thoughts after, I dunno, 20 odd, 30 hours, maybe.
01:55:35
Speaker
on the game and get some ideas from Ed because he's really the only other person in our...
01:55:43
Speaker
Podcast sphere of influence that we talked to on a regular basis playing the game And then you're playing Skyrim at the moment Tom, which is obviously very similar but quite different and then it's kind of kind of wanted to draw the lens back if we have time and talk a little bit more about RPGs more generally because it's not the only style of RPG and about what makes RPG and I'm sure that we've all played and
01:56:07
Speaker
More than a handful yeah yeah and also it just seems to line up really well with bg3 which is also another. Another ipg but also very different style of ipg yes one might argue the more traditional style of ipg from a video game standpoint in some respects yeah yeah.
01:56:27
Speaker
So, yeah, do we want to kick off with Starfield? I think you two should start waxing lyrical about Starfield. Let's go one at a time though, not at the same time, because that'd be confusing to listen to.
01:56:40
Speaker
Yeah. Do you want to go first, Ed? Ed is the guest, guest goes first. I'm about 12 or 15 hours into star fields. That's rookie numbers. You got to pump those up, baby. It is rookie numbers and I'm touching to be playing another RPG at the same time.
01:57:02
Speaker
But the, I'll touch on Starfield first. So I'm finding that I am getting lost in the world of Starfield. In a good way? In a good way, yes. Because the way that I, when I say... Not lost in the UI. No, not lost in the UI. And when I say lost in Starfield, for an RPG, for me, the biggest thing about a good RPG
01:57:31
Speaker
is being immersed and getting lost in the world that it has created. And for me, I said in the chat that I was always going to be a space pirate scallywag. Like I've chosen the- A scoundrel, if you will. Yeah, a scoundrel, if you will.
01:57:54
Speaker
You can choose your attributes. I chose gangster and street rat. I've been arrested for fucking stealing foam cups. What does that mean in terms of those character traits? I'm just pure criminal.
01:58:18
Speaker
That's not scoundrel, that's just because scoundrels kind of hand solo walk the line, they're morally ambiguous, but on the right side of the line. At the same time, I've committed a crime and I've had to go off and do a job.
01:58:35
Speaker
committed a crime that I've been told to do and that I've come back and the guy's being like cross-examined by like a chance lab and I've thrown that dude on the bus within a plane. And man, it is fantastic. Like I'm really like, I haven't really touched
01:58:56
Speaker
the main story. I've just been doing side quests and learning how to build the ship. Like I got stuck on, I keep on turning up like I spent last night and started just frog on the podcast. Finally destroyed the ship. It was like a level 26 ship and I'm like,
01:59:14
Speaker
level two kind of like basic upgrades. It took me ages, but it was just like the fact of like I had to go off and get like ship parts. So I could actually heal my ship in the middle of the mission. So I had to go off and do some side quests. So I had enough credits to go off and do that then kind of upgrade. I need to just steal the ship parts.
01:59:35
Speaker
What kind of criminal are you? Yeah, well, I had to go up and do these donkey jobs so I could get the credits and all that type of stuff. And every, every dead body that I've come across, I've searched and stolen their credits and everything like that. Um, yeah. So for me, for, for it being an RPG and being an RPG is, um,
01:59:59
Speaker
you know, fully like burst myself into the world that it's intended to create. Me, it's doing a perfect job. I'm happy kind of running around just doing side quests, kind of working out where I've got to buy stuff.
02:00:17
Speaker
just interacting with characters, NPCs, and I'm not concerned about the main story at all. I'm just happy to go in there and just fly around to each of the planets and do what I've got to do and pick up some resources and explore. Explore and just feel like I'm living in
02:00:44
Speaker
The world that is starfield. So what this is saying to me is that if you were given the choice, you would be a cold hearted criminal without there was no repercussions and you can save and load. Exactly. Because it's a role playing game and in real life.
02:01:04
Speaker
I cannot lie to save my life. So for me, the perfect role-playing game is me being a character that lies, that cheats, that does everything frickin' wrong. And I get away with it. No, I mean, that's actually the most pure form of RPG play. And it's the pure form, and I was thinking, I was like, that's what it's meant to be, because it kind of, I've touched on it a bit after we had this discussion about
02:01:29
Speaker
um, saw filters about me having a chronic addiction to part of fantasy 14, which is again, getting lost in a world that you kind of like escape from. Cause that's the other end of the scale of, I've got, I go, I go, I spent an hour or two of being like the ultimate hero and being good at two shoes that I go just, they just can't even lie straight and bad. And it's just, that's what RPGs are. It takes you either they're meant to take you away from
02:01:59
Speaker
I think that's one aspect of it. Yeah, I mean, yeah, really messy. Yeah, but yeah, for Starfield and I'm learning how it all kind of like the yeah, being the first real Bethesda game that I've that I've played is Oh, really? Wow, I've played a little bit of
02:02:22
Speaker
See, that's a significant comment in terms of contextualizing the game for you. Yeah. And that's another big thing for me because I've kind of, and I think with Starfield, the ability, which we kind of talked before about was, and it might have been off air, was having the different views, like first person shot games for me, don't do anything for me.
02:02:50
Speaker
So the ability to have that kind of third-person view, that's why Starfield was... Yeah, okay. But in Say That, I do third-person running around when I'm actually on a planet, but when I'm actually
02:03:05
Speaker
in my spaceship. It's first person cockpit because that's fantastic. I'm the exact fucking opposite. I will run around a planet first person, but if I get in a ship, it needs to be third person. I'm 180 man.
02:03:21
Speaker
I just find there's something about being in the cockpit and he's just like, I'm 50-50, so I'm first person on the way. I'm first person on planet and in cockpit.
02:03:38
Speaker
You've not played any Bethesda games. This just suddenly got really fascinating. So, do you have any criticisms that you would level up? Would have been good to know that before this discussion as well. To keep a surprise. Also, I'm a virgin.
02:03:55
Speaker
I don't like long walks along the beach. I was going to say, my favorite thing about Bethesda games when you're playing an RPG is that if you're talking about like completely diving into that thieving outlaw character, is that when I get into a bed in a Bethesda game and I sleep for hours, I wake up fully rested and that does not happen in real life.
02:04:13
Speaker
Yeah. Also I own property. I own several properties. I'll touch on my heart. I did. So, okay. Do you have any, do you have any criticism of the game so far? I am finding, um,
02:04:37
Speaker
that I do have to go and teach myself how to do something. Like it took me a couple of guys to work out what I had, like going off and like modding the ship. That was, that was very much self-taught. There's, there's. Yeah. And, and whether I missed something, cause I'm kind of, you didn't,
02:05:04
Speaker
There's no tutorials, there's very little in-game help. Yeah, so I was like, there you go, but insane, that's the criticism that I got, because I'm so used to kind of like, with RPGs or any type of game, it's like, here's how you got to do this, and they take you through that kind of tutorial, like really into the tutorial, but insane though.
02:05:25
Speaker
It's it's to a point where I'm happy to go off and learn how to do it because I'm having so much fun. Yeah. And look, I got to be I got to be honest, the the the mechanics of shipbuilding are quite intuitive. So whilst there are no instructions, you can't exit the builder without seeing the warning message that you can only have one reactor and, you know,
02:05:48
Speaker
your engines don't give you enough maneuverability to take off and so there are some some basic requirements that they want to see yeah exactly there's a basic kind of tick and flicker of what's gonna happen but, yeah i said i went off to this but i was i did go through this mission where,
02:06:07
Speaker
the ship was level 26. So I was, I was extremely under, I was extremely unexpected. But it was kind of like, I was like, okay, I've done this, there was a lot of trial and error, but doing that trial and error. And, and that, again, is another component of what makes an RPG. Good is that if you're happy to go off and do that trial and error,
02:06:33
Speaker
kind of process of going off and crafting and kind of grinding out some missions so you can get some credits to do what you want to do. And then it's the satisfaction of like when that ship blew up. Yeah, with like, it was just like, we've all fought enemies 17 levels above us that we shouldn't have fought. So how far in, how far in are you?
02:06:59
Speaker
In terms of the main story, have you, what have you, what was the last thing you did? It sounds like there's no spoilers you're that early into the game. Yeah, no, no. I pretty much just like, I did the first mining mission. Yep. Got to New Atlantis and then they're like, oh, you've got to go wherever.
02:07:15
Speaker
And I haven't gone there yet. And you went a big double bird. I'm going to go over and rob that guy because he's asleep. I went for the next Sonic thing and I keep on going for Sonic thing after Sonic thing. You're a magpie. That's what you are. I'm a magpie, bow, bird. And I like I know what's going to happen. I'm going to do all these side quests. I'm going to. Yeah. But that's every Bethesda game ever. That's why it's important to know that you're a Bethesda virgin. Did you ever play No Man's Sky?
02:07:45
Speaker
No, but it's on my list of wanting to play. Yeah, that's ruined it for you, man. Just so you know. You fucked it. True. You played it in the wrong order. Yeah, true. Yeah. There's no way that you will be able to go to enemies. There's no fucking way. I had a feeling like I kind of like when I kind of pulled the trigger of like, all right, I'm going to pre-order Starfield. It was kind of like a week before it came out. And I was like,
02:08:14
Speaker
I just had this sinking feeling like I should have actually, like when a new starfield was coming out, I should have played a bit of No Man's Sky. Then inside of that. Yeah. Look, is there anything else you wanted to add or do you want me to jump in? No, I was just going to say, apart from that, I'm going to touch it on you when you sum. It's enjoyable. I can see myself going to work.
02:08:42
Speaker
getting home from work, I can log into my Final Fantasy 14, do my running around. And then as soon as I do that, I can see myself going straight into Starfleet. I can see my evening of just chomping into RPGs, and that's what RPGs are, that escape from
02:09:04
Speaker
Yeah, you're absolutely right. You're not laughing at the fact that my fiance just crawled through the back of my screen to say hello to my dog. And now you're on screen. Get out of here. Get out of here. Get out of here. This is men's time. It's supposed to be in the cave. The man cave. I was like, I'm a man. I'm just a nerd. Why are you laughing at me?
02:09:29
Speaker
No, you're right. That is exactly exactly what a good RPG is about. But I would also say, and we're going to get into this meta discussion about what is an RPG. I think it's actually quite important to kind of for us to baseline our opinion on that topic after I.
02:09:44
Speaker
go through Starfield and then Tom, you talk about Skyrim, but like all video games are about escapism. And so you can play a non-RPG and still kind of get immersed in a world. And I would argue that the game's not worth playing of any genre unless you're immersed in that world. But you're right, RPGs do have that special place of being driven around that kind of content. They're especially immersive. Yeah, they are. They should be. So, okay. So I've,
02:10:12
Speaker
I've kind of, I've tried to be meta. I've tried to be kind of step back and look at this. Cause I want to go, go balls to the wall, do it. Balls to the wall. Right. I'll give you the good, the bad and the overall. Yeah. And one of the, one of the quotes, I want to start with a quote cause I actually found this really interesting. Um, to be, or not to be. Sorry. That was the question. Um, Kotaku's Zach Zweizen. It's what a fantastic name to Zach McCracken. Do you know my thoughts about Kotaku? Fuck him.
02:10:45
Speaker
Imagine a game, it's soon to be hero of unknown but mutable name and gender, awakens with a start only to suddenly be thrust into a grand adventure in a larger world. The budding hero doesn't miss a beat, quickly becoming powerful, joining various factions and solving mysteries and completing quests across the land.
02:11:03
Speaker
Along the way, they explore a massive open world filled with enemies to kill and loot as well as cities that contain guards, peaceful NPCs, merchants and taverns. Also, weirdly, a lot of the time, this extraordinary individual never accomplishes what they set out to do, instead getting lost building settlements or grinding out their cooking skills.
02:11:23
Speaker
What game did I just describe? Basically every Bethesda's game studio RPG ever released. Sorry, it's not on the switch and it's not on the left. It's not fucking on the ring. But it is absolutely true though. It is Bethesda. Yeah, if it's not right, don't fix it. They do make it formula. But you know what, Tom, I completely agree with that sentiment except when fuck with
02:11:50
Speaker
game studio developers make statements like this is the most important RPG ever released.
02:11:56
Speaker
And then you go, yeah, you're full of shit and you're trying to sell games. In the same vein that he says, this game has benefited from being an exclusive title because it allowed us to really hone in on the Xbox hardware. Get fucked. It allowed you to hone in on the exact same make model and brand of hardware as he's running in the PS5. What a load of horseshit. That Ron guy, is it Ron?
02:12:22
Speaker
Ron Howard. Yeah. Okay. So the good from my perspective, it is like Skyrim in space, which is why I wanted to say that. Is it Skyrim or Oblivion? Cause I've read a review that said it was more Oblivion than Skyrim. Oblivion is a reference to kind of the, the weird world hopping you do at the end of Oblivion. It's more of a reference to the story.
02:12:50
Speaker
I think oblivion was more in a reference to, yeah, like the oblivion gates would randomly open and people would just like enemies would pour through randomly as opposed to like in Skyrim when you're running around, there's like a single dragon will come down. Yeah. Look, mechanically, it is. It is one of the powers you had. Like you got the special shout powers in Skyrim, but you didn't have those in oblivion. You had your it's closer to Skyrim.
02:13:16
Speaker
I don't want to drop any spoilers, Ed, but I've got to say I did the exact same thing as you did. I started playing the game. I got immediately distracted after I got to New Atlantis. I went and did a whole bunch of other shit I'm about to talk about and I've only just gone back to do.
02:13:33
Speaker
One of the, because you do your tutorial quest, you meet the faction that you're a part of, that you're forced into. And then after you complete the tutorial mission, he gives you three missions and you can run any one in any order you want. I picked one, I picked one and finished that. That's as far as I've gotten. And I got to say, it genuinely surprised me the end of that mission. It introduced a game mechanic I never expected to be in this form of game.
02:14:04
Speaker
And that's all I'm going to say on that topic. So it's, it is more like Skyrim than it is about, uh, than it is oblivion. And it's also closer to Skyrim than it is Fallout. Okay. Yeah. Okay.
02:14:15
Speaker
Um, there, but there's always some random distraction or side quest or some other mechanic in the game that feels really rewarding and kind of hits that serotonin beat, but it just, it just drip feeds you. Yeah. And that's what I'm finding as well. It's kind of like, it's, it's, you're reading quests and like, you'd be like, go and speak to this person. Go and speak to like, we want you to do this. He like.
02:14:39
Speaker
That's just enough to keep me interested and actually follow that through. But the thing with, so there's a couple of things with Bethesda you wouldn't have kind of like, contextually, you wouldn't get. Bethesda has a very specific sense of humor. It's usually quite dark and fucked up in a sense of, it's like Murphy's Law.
02:14:57
Speaker
turned into a humorous game mechanic, right? Oh, there's some NPCs, which I'm like, that is very much, that's got to be. Yeah, how's your devoted fan going? Has he found one yet? Oh, no, I found one and then I came across today Trevor, who's this, like, this Aussie fucking minor and he's such, like, living in WA,
02:15:20
Speaker
I mean, Queens, yeah, that's a little bit close to home, isn't it? You come across these guys all the time and the accent and how he talks is just like.
02:15:31
Speaker
That is a dude that does FIFO to a T. But there's a reference to, Tom was making a specific reference to a Skyrim character. Oblivion character. I've heard of it. Which is one of the traits. And neither red nor I chose. My dad picked that trait and the guy follows it. The noise is shit out of my dad.
02:15:55
Speaker
So so the other part of the good. So so, you know, my good points where it's like Skyrim in space and it is a good thing. The other good point is the scope. So the game mechanics take parts of the actual scope of the rifles you're talking about or the scope of the game, the game. OK, the game. That's fair. It's a space shooter. Yeah, true. The game takes the game mechanics out of
02:16:21
Speaker
A whole bunch of other games and melds them together quite seamlessly. So there's an advanced construction engine in this game. You can build out posts that I will get into in a sec that can get very fucking complicated. And there are whole genres of games. There's whole games.
02:16:40
Speaker
That that are built around exclusively that there is no rpg engine in it there's no storyline there's a question just go and build a space factory in it. You know and you collect resources and you use those resources to create like power supplies that.
02:16:56
Speaker
Power harvesters that pull resources and you have to store them and use those resources in Builders or factories to make parts and those parts make other things. There's whole games built around that Yeah, um satisfactory is a good example. There's a few ones where you're in space. I can't remember the name of it Dad was dad was playing it for a long time and I think we've might have talked about it before on the podcast We build space stations out of these component parts
02:17:22
Speaker
That whole concept is baked into this game, but so is the Lego like shipbuilding interface that you were talking about before it. There is a gap in that in that Lego shipbuilding interface in that you and it's not intuitive on an Xbox. It's probably much easier with a mouse and keyboard, but you literally.
02:17:43
Speaker
build parts and you put parts on a screen and you kind of construct it together. You've got your shields and your bridge where you sit to pilot and you've got your landing struts and your engine and your reactor core and you need your helium-3 gas tank so you can warp space and travel into interstellar.
02:18:03
Speaker
But you also have things like hard points and just cowling to make the ship look pretty and structural points that really have no function. They're more about form and it's actually really well laid out as a shipbuilding mechanic, but.
02:18:21
Speaker
There's no internal, there's no mechanism to see what the internal layout is of the ship as you're building it. So you can build a ship that's completely convoluted to get into. So you walk in through the landing, you go up your hatch and then you have to go to the other side of the ship, up a ladder to back to the start of the ship, up another ladder to finally get to the fucking cockpit. Like if you're dumb or you're not thinking ahead. Okay. Yeah.
02:18:45
Speaker
You can really plan out a poorly structured ship in terms of internal layout, and the game doesn't show you any of that until after you've committed and spent the money. You have Wing Commander S Space Combat. Now I say that, I don't know that Wing Commander is the game I'm thinking of, but there have been plenty of space combat games where you have to manage power, like power management. I put all my power in shields. The original TIE Fighter did that, but I'm fairly certain the first game that I can remember is Wing Commander.
02:19:14
Speaker
You have No Man's Sky style planet exploration and resource gathering. You bound around, the planets have different gravities and your jetpack boost works differently depending on how strong the gravity is. You've got flora and fauna that are procedurally generated. And then you have frantic fallout combat.
02:19:36
Speaker
I wrote down, though blissfully less clunky than Fallout Gun Combat. So it's as frantic and urgent as as Fallout Gun Combat, but it's less clunky and broken. When you say this, what do you mean? This intrigues me because I've obviously plotted Fallout 4, but I never used the VAT system when I was using combat. I actively avoided the VAT system and just kind of went to like straight first person shooter.
02:20:05
Speaker
Sure. There's a lot of the AI mechanics in Fallout 3 in New Vegas. I didn't play 4 all the way through. I didn't play 4. I played at 3 in New Vegas and I got about halfway through 4.
02:20:21
Speaker
Um, the, the AI can be really stupid in Fallout games to a point where you can exploit the stupidity of the characters. You know, that they're going to, and Skyrim is the same, by the way. Oh yeah. You get someone trapped in a, between two posts and like a statue and you can just arrow them till they die. Yeah. Until they die. You can just, yeah. Yeah. And, and so there's a lot less that I've noticed. Yeah. Okay. All right. But I've got to say they don't do a brilliant, perfect job of.
02:20:51
Speaker
a lot of those mechanics but i don't know how many other games have all of those mechanics in one game. Yeah so i've put that in the good quality yes i thought the same thing i thought there was there's. There's no kind of mechanic that they've got a lot of mechanics and there's no mechanics the reader.
02:21:10
Speaker
Fantastic. And there's no mechanics that are super bad. It's like, which is impressive because, yeah, the mechanics they've got is they've just, I was going to say, you want any more? What can I say? Um,
02:21:34
Speaker
Yeah, anyway, the mechanics... It was when you sifted and just went... And then just tried not to muke. There's your dinner paint. So here's the bad. That was the good, right? Here's the bad. There's no quality of life polish in the game at all.
02:21:53
Speaker
It was like it was never fucking beta tested. You have over a thousand planets that you can visit, explore, scan, set up bases on. And yet, and this is in a galaxy and it's quite hard to navigate the galaxy in the galaxy map. And yet there is no interface we can search for a star or a planet you've already discovered. There's no database that shows you can instantly jump to a list of your bases. Okay.
02:22:19
Speaker
There's no UI interface where you can just go, hey, go to my second base on Rigel 5 and it just takes you there. There's just none of that. You have to manually find the star system that you drop the base in. So, to me, that's QoS, QOL, Quality of Life. There's no... Is that mean there's no, like, any sort of fast travel system?
02:22:41
Speaker
No, there's this fast travel. We'll get to that in a second, mate. And it's probably the most controversial point. No, no, no, no. It's just, it's probably the most controversial point I'll make, but- Okay. No, it's more- But you can't, you can't go from, I'm thinking of the Skyrim map- You can't, you can't-
02:22:58
Speaker
You can fast travel if you can locate your base on the star map. You can open up the solar system and it will show you all the planets in the solar system and you can fast travel to the planet. But you have to find it on the star map first. So you can't do the thing of... So I'm talking purely from playing Skyrim right now, which is previous Bethesda game. You have a mission that takes me to Falkreath, the town down south.
02:23:27
Speaker
I can go show, there's no show on map button in your, in your quests log, but then it takes you to the map and it zooms you there and then you go fast travel. So there is a show on map button for quests.
02:23:41
Speaker
OK. There is no show on map button for planets I've previously discovered. And high bases. Or bases I've previously built. OK. And the universe is big. I mean, a thousand planets is... You can pretty much visit. In every solar system, there are at least one planet. You can land on any planet that is not a gas giant. So any planet that has a physical, like a ground, you can land on and explore. Crust, if you will. A crust. Or moons.
02:24:10
Speaker
There's no settlement maps at all. So when you're in a large town and it's a multi-zonal town that you have to load into various segments of the town, there's no map. Yeah, I mean, the town map for Skyrim was pretty shit. You just have to remember where you had to go.
02:24:27
Speaker
Well, there is there is no map whatsoever in this. There's no item lock to prevent you selling shit in a very complicated inventory that's categorized. So each of your items is in a category and quest items get locked or not. One quest item I found so far did and one did not.
02:24:47
Speaker
Oh, that's, that's a- But I can't, but I can't even, like, even if I put my favorite guns on my, I favorite my guns, I put a little heart symbol on them and they're, they're quickly accessible through the D-pad. Yep. I can sell those accidentally anytime I walk into a, to a-
02:25:04
Speaker
Yeah that tracks with Skyrim and Fallout. Sure but to me these are quality of life improvements and I don't want a Skyrim set in space. I want a 2023 video game not a 2015 video game in space. You want to sell junk?
02:25:19
Speaker
Action kind of thing and then so many hundreds of favorite favorite stand over here outside of your general backpack. Then you've got these quests now. I love the fact and I agree with you, Ed. I love the fact that I can literally stand somewhere and overhear a conversation that results in me getting an item in my quest list to say, go and investigate what those guys were talking about and that could lead to a full-blown quest.
02:25:47
Speaker
Find some questions, just poorly written and dead ended. So I found this quest, it was really cool. I overheard this lady talking in this town that I just landed in. She was complaining to herself. I spoke to her and she said, look, I'm a slag pilot. I'm doing my first mission for this new company. I just had to fly a shipment of slag metal from point A to point B. And now all of a sudden I've got this tracker after me. He's a bounty hunter. I don't know what the fuck is going on.
02:26:16
Speaker
Can you? My name wasn't properly registered against the shipment. Just my surname, not my first name. Would you mind, you look very capable, pretending to be me, the bounty hunters in the bar in the same city we're in. Can you pose as me and just get to the bottom of this ship?
02:26:34
Speaker
Just deal with it for me. And you go, yeah, okay, cool. Of course you do. Go into the bar, there's a guy with a fucking cowboy hat on, which is cool to start with, I've got to say. Space Cowboys are awesome. And you talk to him and he goes, oh! This is a song by Tesla. He's a cowboy. You walk up to him and you mention something about a drink and he goes, can you leave me the fuck alone? I'm in a bar, I've got shit to do.
02:26:57
Speaker
And you go i can't remember how you hook into the conversation you basically walking in the conversation say what i'm blah blah blah and yes i would like a drink. Any goes you're the guy i'm looking for.
02:27:10
Speaker
You go, well, you know, I'm here to hunt you down. There's a bounty on your head. I'm going to have a shootout with you, basically, in the bar. And you say, but you seem like a decent guy and I haven't done anything wrong. Can we just sort this out, civilized-like? And he goes, you stole pharmaceuticals from a charity organization to save a bunch of kids and you killed like 50 people on your way out of town. What do you mean you did nothing wrong?
02:27:36
Speaker
And you're like, what the fuck's going on? Clearly this lady set me up. Yeah, that sounds like a Bethesda quest. Clearly this lady set me up. So I convinced him to let me go and he goes, fine, I won't kill you, but I got to tell you, I got to warn you, like you go through a persuasion mini game.
02:27:52
Speaker
And he says I gotta tell you, others will come after you though. Like this isn't the last of it. I'll leave you alone, but there'll be other bounty hunters. You go back to the lady and you say, I sorted it out. This is what happened. By the way, there's some weird shit going on. Do you want to tell me the real story? And she goes, okay, thanks very much for sorting it out. I'll see you later. And that's the end of the fucking quest.
02:28:09
Speaker
I was like, but what about the children and the pharmaceuticals and are you a no? That, and sorry, that feels like from someone who's played a lot of Bethesda games. Is she going to come back later? I don't know. No, no. There's potentially a conversational piece. I checked. I checked. As soon as I finished the quest, I checked.
02:28:29
Speaker
I didn't miss anything. I did everything. Yeah, because normally they like, if they're going to do that, then it's, it's like, you missed one, you picked the one point wrong or something. Yeah, but no. Um, outpost building is broken. Okay. Now I don't want to spend 15 minutes. I don't want to spend 15 minutes explaining this, but so I'm going to try and do it really quickly. Yep.
02:28:52
Speaker
There is this very complicated mechanic in the game where you can collect resources off the periodic table of elements like iron and chlorine and phosphor and all the rest of it. You can combine those elements.
02:29:04
Speaker
You can combine those elements to build one of 250 base building objects. You can build habitats, you can decorate those habitats. Do you have to do a couple of quests to have the ability to build this house? No. But it is an expansion of the Fallout 4 homestead system.
02:29:29
Speaker
but in a very, very complicated way so your base can build up to three cargo links which are like shipping, shipping landing pads and they link to your other outpost on the planet so your other planet might mine iron ore and aluminium ore. Yeah.
02:29:47
Speaker
You build a cargo link over there and every five minutes a starship will come and collect all your iron and aluminium ore and drop it over to your main planet. It's a caravan system from Fallout 4.
02:30:04
Speaker
It's fundamentally broken, so it's like they've built this amazing level of complexity, but they didn't test it and it's buggy as fuck. So, so I'm collecting, so the way that they've limited it is, you can only have up to three cargo links in your, in any given base. Right.
02:30:23
Speaker
So my first my main base links to three other bases those three bases might mine one or two resources each but they've got two more cargo links they can build so they can go and link to two other bases each.
02:30:37
Speaker
Now in my fleet, I've only got six bases total. I've got maybe 15 different resources I'm mining. But because the ships, I'm collecting these resources at different rates. The ships don't balance the resources. So sometimes I get a shipment of 500 kilos of iron and no chlorine and no gold and no silver. And that silver, gold and chlorine is just building up in the other station.
02:31:03
Speaker
Yeah. And then the next shipment I'll get five kilos of aluminium and I'll get five kilos of, it's just this most random, there's no way to set filters. There's no way to set limits. So you can't select, say, I want equal parts of it. It literally just randomly picks. And so I've spent, so Ed, you talk about doing your side quests. I've spent almost 80% of my total time played building outposts. Yeah. I, I, I, I, I, I came across outposts the other day. I mean,
02:31:33
Speaker
Oh, maybe Friday. And I've looked at it and straight away I was like, the fuck is going on here? Like I just I kind of got the gist of it. But I was like, that doesn't interest me at the moment. I just thought there's something a little bit kind of
02:31:51
Speaker
What about the house building and like outpost buildings always been a bit weird though. I think of the difference between the fallout system and the Skyrim system. So in Fallout there's, you know, there's.
02:32:06
Speaker
same kind of mining things. You have things delivered, you have chains between your outposts otherwise to things. But it's literally just, hey, build a pretty house. It's a pretty house. Yeah, no. This is core to the game. I think that's actually important to understand. Excuse me. You can't succeed in the game.
02:32:31
Speaker
Without doing research and that into gun mods and spaceship mods and spacesuit mods. But you can't research. Forget crafting. You can't even research the items without resources and then you can't craft those items after you've researched the resources. This is a core game mechanic.
02:32:54
Speaker
And what i'm so what i'm dropping the show notes and i guess for anyone watching the youtube video you'll see it as well this is this is this is my base. And the other thing is i broke the game so. In the game you've got you've got a couple of key resources in your base ones power and you can create these power stations they might be solar or they might be wind and i thought it was cool that.
02:33:20
Speaker
Solar panels produce less energy the further away from the sun the planet happens to be. And wind generators or wind turbines only produce energy if there's an atmosphere and they produce more energy if the atmosphere is more aggressive. I thought that was cool too.
02:33:40
Speaker
But you link items that consume electricity to electricity producers through these invisible red lines, which you're seeing in the screenshots. And you basically go into base building. Is that what they are? I literally thought you had so many automatic gun turrets protecting your spaceship there. So there's two things here. There's two things here. So first energy goes from a reactor or a solar panel to a harvester.
02:34:08
Speaker
And that's what one red line will be and they're like spiderwebs in the game and you only see them when you're in base building mode when you're in walk around mode you don't see them. The other thing is you have this mechanic we can send resources between items so I've got a bunch of storage units and you say one storage unit and they stacked four tall.
02:34:29
Speaker
And the bottom storage unit forwards all resources to the next unit up and the next unit up and the next unit up and then zigzags down. And basically you can pour items into the first storage unit and it will just move them down the laneway.
02:34:45
Speaker
Except once you get to about 400 items on your base and the build limit is this, you can maybe build 5,000 items and you can see from the screenshots, I've got quite a few. The spiderweb of red lines is so complicated that the game just fails to load. So I've gone into my outpost into building mode and I can no longer go into the helicopter view that it provides you with because it's too complicated for it to process. I've fallen through the world trying twice.
02:35:13
Speaker
Right. So this is a game that. Well, that's a patch. Yeah. There's some other fundamental flaws in the game building mechanics that I like. It requires me to go into a lot more depth and it's not, it's beyond the scope of a podcast, but to me it's just.
02:35:33
Speaker
Whereas I'm laughing in a chest that has 800 dragon bones in it just like going. It's called the ball. I'm glad you went down that rabbit hole, Pete, now. It's impressive in scope. Yeah, it's when I first like I worked out for a little bit the other night. Kind of.
02:35:56
Speaker
I had around with it a little bit, but I looked at it and I'm like, I'm not going to spend my time on something like this, which is
02:36:07
Speaker
You will have to. You can't play the game without it. I will have to. I don't understand that. You will be. But it's definitely something to get super involved in it when you're not even out of the first quest line. I'm like, I will deal with that when I get to the quest line and maybe the magpie I get distracted.
02:36:31
Speaker
Well, the time I get to that. It's distracting in the most amazing way. Yeah, yeah. And it's very much like an endgame type of thing. It's one of those things. That's a feather in Bethesda's cap is the way they interact with these things. I could see, like when I, and that was probably the biggest point when I started looking at mine.
02:36:50
Speaker
I've got to stop myself because as soon as I start going down that rabbit hole is that that's all I'll be doing. I spent three days building houses in Skyrim that I have no real use for. I'll just get to a point where I would have achieved what I need to achieve out of that.
02:37:13
Speaker
And then I'm going to go way past it. Like I lost like three days the other week. I know 1800. I was just building it.
02:37:22
Speaker
Let me wrap this so we don't get too far. I'm just about finished. I was just going to say there's a couple of other basic things. I wanted basic criticisms. I want to level it. Then the big question after that. Also where the actual fuck are my vehicles? There's no, there's no on planet vehicles. Yeah, no, they did. They did say that that's a big concern out of.
02:37:44
Speaker
They said after the fact, oh, we consciously took them out. No bullshit. No, I'm sorry. 10,000 people asking you where they are. And your answer is, oh, we built them, but we decided to take them out. For PC, Bethesda signed another exclusive deal beyond the Microsoft exclusivity.
02:38:02
Speaker
Bethesda signed another exclusive deal with AMD to support their upscaling to 4K technology. And there is a mod, and I'm going to download my first mod so I can get the video. Yeah, you have to download them. So the technology built into AMD video cards to upscale from 1080 to 4K is integrated into the video game. But the same technology support for the drivers for Nvidia and Intel are not there.
02:38:30
Speaker
There is a third party mod that added older support for the older implementation for Nvidia, but he put it behind a paywall if you want the latest technology. So Bethesda are just signing exclusivity. Also, is installing a mod disable achievements slash trophies? I don't know. It's PC. So there is a lot of
02:38:56
Speaker
mods that do, but there's, and I've got to do a research before I actually get the right mod, but there are a few people that have come up with mods for DLSS, which is the Deep Learning Super Sampling video, that you can install that mod and it bypasses the
02:39:23
Speaker
be anti-cheating. So I didn't want to bore people with DLSS. But DLSS is up to- They're still working on that. They're like, it's unfair and unconfirmed. But as soon as- But they're up to version three of that API and the mod that you're talking about only supports DLSS too. And he put three behind a paywall and people have now hacked his mod. The last thing I wanted to say, which is the controversial one, is that there's no actual traveling in this game.
02:39:53
Speaker
There is no, it's all loading screens. Everything is a fucking loading screen. You want to go from, so the main city, the first city you go to is about 12 different loading screens, depending on where you go. There's like segments of the map and then you go into a lift and there's like four different items and that's a loading screen, or you get on the tram and that's a loading screen, or you go, you get on your ship
02:40:20
Speaker
And you go to space, that's a loading screen, you travel into, into, into solar system from one planet to another. It could be a moon of the planet you're already at. That's a loading screen. You go into galactic. If you literally, you load up to your sphere. Fade to black.
02:40:37
Speaker
But if you select that that moon or if you physically. If you were to point the ship at the moon and go full pelt, you would never get there. The only way to get there.
02:40:54
Speaker
The only way to get there is by loading screen. When you're on a new planet and someone complained about this and we talked about it very briefly. There was a rumor that a guy walked for 10 minutes and hit a wall. That's actually a real complaint. I've walked to the boundary on the map. Oh, you did it?
02:41:12
Speaker
Because I was, and I did it for a specific game mechanic reason too. I was looking for some resources and the game that each planet split into biomes. I got lost in the wilderness looking for gold. Each planet is split into biomes, so you might have like volcanic mountains with two resources plus a rare resource.
02:41:31
Speaker
And then you might have Sandy Desert, which is two resources plus a rare resource. And if you land in the right spot, you can actually pick the dividing line between the two biomes and get all six resources in one spot for your outpost. Except if you don't pick the landing spot, you walk for 15 minutes and you hit a wall and it says, you cannot go any further. And you have to get back on your ship and then you can land right next to that ping and keep exploring.
02:41:58
Speaker
I think, and this is me being the kind of, I can understand that people can paint about their wanting to actually be able to walk around a planet and not have those wars, but it comes back to what is... How are you going to fill it? If you're going to go into a... You guys keep talking. I'm going to let you go to the bathroom really quickly. I'm going to answer that question when I come back though, Tom.
02:42:27
Speaker
All right, I'm waiting. Yeah. So if you go and load those assets into here, he's gone down. He'll listen to this when he edits it. But if you, if you, if you go off, if you want that whole, like, I don't know, I agree with. Wand around into the wilderness thing. Yeah. And the loading screens. However, to put all that, all those assets and all that distance into an engine,
02:42:57
Speaker
that the amount of time- It probably wouldn't run on your shiny little black Xbox, Peter. Exactly. It was like even to go into like an Unreal Engine or a Blender, any of those kind of engines, just to actually sit there and move around your landscape, you've got to dial down the FPS that's in your viewfinder.
02:43:27
Speaker
And like I've got a high spec PC and even in a high spec PC, even if I have that, if I have that above 30 frames per second in that viewfinder, my PC sounds like it's gonna actually lift off.
02:43:45
Speaker
I'm talking about the fact is that about putting all those assets of being able to free travel paid into a blender or an Unreal Engine. As nice as it would be to... We went to a very weird place because there's only six polygons in these objects, whereas there's 6,000 in your blended object. Yeah, but I want to say is if you like understand the complaints of like the
02:44:10
Speaker
the latest frames and the same command as well. It'd be nice to actually get into this. But they've done this before. Yeah, but I think with Starfield is they've definitely bitten off a lot more
02:44:27
Speaker
Then they can chew. They can chew and they should never have come out and gone. We've got a thousand planets because it's like, you fucking idiots. Like, everyone's going to be like, I want to shoot the moon and let people know. I promise. Over the liver, man. Because I was just having like, fuck you. I'll be able to run around and be able to fly between seats. But they're procedurally generated. So that's my answer to your question, Tom.
02:44:53
Speaker
So even within the scope of one planet, it's repetitive as fuck. There's only a couple of different planet level traits like this. There's probably two dozen traits that you could pick from, but the planet is rocky, snowy. No, no, no. Things like a gravitational anomaly and you walk up to this area and you discover it and there's this weird arch of broken rocks just hovering in space. And that all that looks cool, except as you explore the planet, there's like 6,000 of them because that planet has that trait.
02:45:22
Speaker
OK. And then you might go to like an abandoned factory and it might be two or three rooms filled with space pirates and you kill them all and you loot it. But the planet is littered with that exact building or that exact style of building. The layout might be different and the space pirates are all the same. It's procedurally generated is how they feel. No Man's Sky does exactly the same thing, but No Man's Sky, you can smoothly travel from planet to space.
02:45:49
Speaker
You can walk from one side of the planet to the other. It would take you probably 48 hours real life with a rubber band on your controller. But you could walk, you could circumnavigate the planet. Because the scale of life is much bigger. Around the world in 48 hours. The scale of life is, you know, and get, you know, solar systems are humongous. Yeah. I get it. But so what I wrote down was, and No Man's Sky is the easiest comparison for a game of this scale, but No Man's Sky had no quests.
02:46:19
Speaker
This is a game that has Bethesda's treatment of quests. It's got a lot of fucking content in it. You can't do that procedurally. It's a curated game. So my overall opinion is it's got all the hallmarks of one of the most amazing games I've ever played, but it feels more like it was an early access
02:46:44
Speaker
And while it might be groundbreaking in vision, it doesn't really push any boundaries in delivery yet. I've seen everything the game has to offer. I've seen implemented better in other games. But the vision is to tie it all together seamlessly into one game and no one's ever done that before. It just doesn't yet deliver on that. And so it's all going to come down to developer support.
02:47:08
Speaker
for DLC and ongoing releases, ongoing content dumps. And if they do that, which they will, they might do, you know, one or two DLCs or they'll do like four jointly dumps. It's one of the two. It's Bethesda. They will do like two or three years of patch notes and all that kind of stuff. And then a couple of months down the line, they'll release
02:47:33
Speaker
I want vehicles, DLC 1, DLC 2, and more factions, because the faction system's awesome, and the factions are interesting, and so far the quests are actually enthrallingly interesting. Yeah, I think that for an actual vision, it's fantastic, and I think that
02:47:55
Speaker
they if they managed to pull off everything they promised, yeah, it'd be fantastic. But then I mean, you do pick up a lot of the kind of the what is lacking. But I think that at this stage, with all that kind of little kind of questions, they've given each other, given everyone enough, or at least for me anyway, enough shiny things through each of the planets to distract myself. So I don't have to go down and
02:48:23
Speaker
Yeah, you have the choice to go chase those things or the choice to go and yeah. So I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got some issues. I'm just going to go off and focus on the Chinese stuff. But that's Bethesda, man. Like, and that's why it's hard. Well, this is my next thing. And I'm going to jump in now because you guys talk to the fucking starfield for the last 16 years. Um, no, I love, I loved her a second ago, but I have a real question for you, which is something that links back to my Skyrim play through and back to this subject as a,
02:48:54
Speaker
When you think about an RPG and this goes back to probably Baldur's Gate and D&D for you Pete and the old strict
02:49:05
Speaker
roles you play. Yep. So when you play a, uh, this is from my very limited view and you can correct me if I'm a hundred percent wrong, but when you play like a D and D game or which is Baldur's gate is heavily D and D. I think I know where you're going, man. I think you might know where I'm going, but like the roles you can play are very strict. So you can do this. You can do this. Yeah. There's no strictness in Bethesda games.
02:49:29
Speaker
No, so like Skyrim is a perfect example. I am a sword wielding destruction mage. I shouldn't exist in the traditional sense of RPG. There's no consequences for choice. And I would. In terms of your upgrades. Correct. Well, you're not locked into traditional RPG things. Is that a good thing? Or is that a bad thing?
02:49:55
Speaker
Good thing, badder thing. I think it's less of an issue with Star Citizen. Oh, I'm going to get myself in trouble for saying that. The most expensive flop of the game ever built. Starfield. It's less of an issue with Starfield because you can be everything. You can be the superhero that maxes out skill points and everything. But I did the math the other day and you have to be level 368.
02:50:21
Speaker
to hit the level like the point cap on everything and so for all intents and purposes. To get the point cap in Skyrim you need to be level 267 and it requires legendary several skills multiple times. Yeah so you can be the all singing all dancing hero if you put in 600 hours into the game.
02:50:42
Speaker
But at the same time, Ed's character is probably going to have early skill point allocations in completely different areas than I have. And they allow me to specialise in outpost building and resource management. And he's a thieving jackpot. But I've got no social skills and I've got no weapon skills and I've got physical skills. I've gone straight from to max out my
02:51:05
Speaker
oxygen to my carry abilities so i can run away from people as fast as possible with all this shit as many foam cups as possible you have all the foam cups you want big boy but the question i have for you now pete is compared to jprg's and the roles that you play in those.
02:51:27
Speaker
Does any of those skills compute like horizontally in terms of the way you build? Like I think of the way I built my final fantasy characters in 12, 10, and 15, like the ones I've really invested in. But like when you're talking about a massive RPG or a JPRG, do, do those, the way you build those character kind of models.
02:51:52
Speaker
Like do they sideways leap or do you think about it in a different way? As the guy who's from, from our three of us who's played more JPRG's than anyone. Completely different, completely different. I think with, with, with JRPG's is the, how they build those, those RPG's where it's very hero driven, very, very good versus evil. But do they have roles?
02:52:22
Speaker
Yeah, they do. Yeah, if you look at the builds for Final Fantasy, they have... Yeah, so then you've got the builds. So for me, for those builds, and up until recently,
02:52:38
Speaker
And, and, and actually still like dominant is I'm very, I'm very tanky. I'm very Leroy Jenkins. I'll just go for like the, the most outrageous stats and just, um,
02:52:59
Speaker
The RPGs can slot into different categories. You talk about JRPGs, but World of Warcraft and EverQuest 2 were very role-oriented. Diablo is very role-oriented. And I think this is probably, yeah, I find with Starfield, it's something we kind of touched on before and probably had this conversation across to is that
02:53:25
Speaker
between like the JRPG kind of genre and the builds is very different to Bethesda. Because in Bethesda, what I'm finding, and correct me if I'm wrong, is the little kind of nuances in it. It's about, you can be like a sneaky, sneaky Snowy Snowy space pirate. So you've got all these little different kind of offshoots that you can do. Whereas, yeah, JRPGs and those,
02:53:54
Speaker
It's more siloed. It's not jrpg. It's just a lot of it was just more. Did you see more of a correlation between the two styles like behind them very, very differently. I said I've gone from.
02:54:13
Speaker
I go from Final Fantasy to being like the worry of light and the hero, to going to Starfield and just being the... Yeah, because I just think back to like Final Fantasy 10 and 12 and I guess in Away 15, you kind of got like forced into the roles you had to put certain characters in. Like you can't put, you can't make Tidus in Final Fantasy 10 a pure mage type.
02:54:41
Speaker
No you can't, you kind of. Whereas with the Bethesda game, you have more of that freedom. Yeah. And there's lots of other RPGs like that. That's true, but I'm just thinking of the ones that we know best. So Final Fantasy did actually venture into that kind of, like they're branched out in
02:55:01
Speaker
like what roles you can actually choose in 14. And that's an MMO, so you can have the one character and you can be a tank DPS or healer. Or ranged DPS or ranged magic. But that's MMO, so that's like World of Warcraft.
02:55:23
Speaker
Diablo. But in 16 say, like what happens in 16? 16 is purely story driven. However, the one game, the one Final Fantasy game that's come out recently, is that you have a character that you can change from being a tank to a healer to
02:55:46
Speaker
DPS actually changed your actual character style is Final Fantasy Strangers of Paradise. Oh, yeah, okay. Right. So, so you've got like, you unlock this massive skill tree that unlocks different classes. So you can actually then go off and choose the style
02:56:11
Speaker
of character that you want to be. Compared to being locked in like you were. Compared to being locked in. And on top of that is you can be halfway through a mission of Stranger of Paradise. Yeah. And then changed from being you might have like a paladin, like a tank, melee DPS combination to a healer and magic.
02:56:38
Speaker
Well, whereas I think of like Dragon Age, which, you know, I'm struggling to get through the nightmare play for a four still for 17 years. But, you know, but the guides I read say, oh, you should have played that as a range. But it's like, I'm never going to play.
02:56:55
Speaker
How dare you assume that I'm not going to run in there, swords blazing. Tom, you are the textbook definition of a hunt art. Everything I know about you, you are a World of Warcraft hunter.
02:57:10
Speaker
who accidentally, he's like, I got this guys. I got the longest range in the game. Don't worry. I'm going to pull aggro for just the mod, the ads. I won't get the boss and then pulls the whole fucking dungeon. You're just, and I say that in the most endearing loving kind of way. That's the thing you've ever said to me. Yeah. Yeah. So like I've gone from being a tank in Final Fantasy 14 to a machinist, which is your hunter, but it's like the long range. And the thing is, as soon as soon as the tank goes down,
02:57:40
Speaker
You're all fucked anyway. But it's just like, it's just that- That's World of Warcraft. So I think kind of tying this back, cause we're going to talk about fourth bees and we're going to run out, but tying this back, I think Bethesda specifically, it's not the only studio, but they make RPGs where,
02:58:01
Speaker
There are no builds. You can put points in whatever the fuck you want. You can put 10 points in gunplay, 10 points in melee, and 10 points in lockpicking, and you don't really fit the paradigm of this stealthy assassin who doesn't really kill anybody apart from backstabbing because he's full of guns and stabby stabbies.
02:58:23
Speaker
Whereas other games would make you a thief and you would have a very stylized role to play. Bethesda games just don't go down that path. It doesn't make them any less of an RPG. No, I originally played the Skyrim Thieves Guild playthrough, like the whole quest playthrough in full Nordic, like heavy battle armor.
02:58:47
Speaker
Yeah. I love that in, um, in. Cause I just cast Muffle on everything and then I moved silently. You know, the, the, the one thing, the one thing we're going back to Starfield and being like, when you talk about the, like the costumes, paint, have you got the, have you got the, the, um, the mascot, Aileen outfit? No. You do, I've, I've done a quest where they give you an Aileen out, so you scared tourists?
02:59:17
Speaker
And you get this like- In Starfield? Yep. So I've got it and I can wear it and I can run around as a deep fucking alien. I love the terramorph. Oh, there's, look, the one thing I will say that Bethesda has always done very successfully is nods to pop culture.
02:59:35
Speaker
Right. And I've already, I've already played a quest, um, that was, uh, Dodgson and, uh, Dodgson and Newman. So it was a letter from Dodgson to Newman, which is a reference to, uh, both Jurassic Park and the actor that Dodgson's talks talking to who plays Newman in Seinfeld. And it's just pop culture references like that. They're quite tangential. You've got to, you've got to excel at that. Yeah. You've yeah. I mean,
03:00:05
Speaker
Critical Role was the best example, Tom, of
03:00:12
Speaker
Role playing the fact that they're in plate armor and always fucking running into a room. Everyone else is trying to be stealthy, stealthy. And then clank, clank, clank, clank, clank, clank comes along the paladin in plate armor and perfectly played by the lovely lady from who plays, um, L in- The thing in the critical role. No, L in, um, Ellie in, um, The Last of Us.
03:00:38
Speaker
What's her name? Ashley Eckstein? No, that's a so called. Ashley Johnson, thank you. Oh, close. Pretty close though. You were close, you were close. Well done, brain thing. So Ashley Johnson, her character is the dwarf paladin in Critical Role's first thing. And she always just fucks up every fight because everyone else is trying to be stealthy and she's clink, clink, clink, clink, clink. And everybody say that. Yep. Anyway, we should talk about fourth beers. We should talk about fourth beers. Yes, because I'm just about done.
03:01:08
Speaker
Yeah, so I've got Anna and Elsa. I am this far through both of them. Yep, they were both 500 milk cans and they have both disappeared. They're very, very well made, which is the only thing you'd really like if you walked into two beers that had both been made by Mountain Culture and Volta, you'd probably go, you know what, both those beers are gonna be really well made for an IPA style.
03:01:37
Speaker
Not one glass, two glasses. No, no, no, it's definitely not two girls, one cup. I said it, I
Beer Comparisons and Reviews
03:01:45
Speaker
said it, you're referring to it and I just went there. I think that's episode title. Two beers, one glass. Two beers, one glass. Definitely not the episode title. Jesus fucking Christ. Two cups, two beers.
03:01:59
Speaker
Oh, no. One guy. No. Stop. Stop. Everyone stop. Okay. So we're going to talk about the Anna West Coast. Shut up the two of you. Mute yourselves. You muted fucks. Lemonparty.org. Yeah. Best bookmark I've ever put on my mate's computer. So Anna is the West Coast IPA. Like the can design itself is really cool in that it's, um,
03:02:24
Speaker
Not quite just the direct opposite of each other don't you see that so the the the white top flips, but then the inside of that they've cut the image out for yeah cool so it's the silver can on the on the neighbor is the bottom where is it's the silver middle there. Yeah very very cool design so the animal west coast IPA is slightly less it is seven percent as opposed to seven point three pieces.
03:02:52
Speaker
It is super piney, it is very citrusy. Of the two having them side by side, I think I would lean to saying it's more balanced. The bitterness is really subtle, but it then comes through.
03:03:09
Speaker
It's almost like a slow build for that bitterness coming through from your West Coast style. But it's a really long finish. The beer doesn't die off as soon as you swallow the beer in your mouth. That lingers on, which is very much what I look for in a beer. I really like a long finish, especially in a West Coast IPA. I want that bitterness to hang around. When I turn to the Elsa, which is the Nipah,
03:03:39
Speaker
straight away, the nose is so much more powerful. And I don't know if this is a reflection on the style or the way the hops play with that style of beer, but it just hit me straight away how it was super aromatic. And then as I drank it, the hops seemed so much more pronounced
03:04:01
Speaker
Not to say that it was out of balance, but I think just from the way that you use the hops in Anipa compared to a West Coast, it's just, it's a lot more in your face. Super pillowy, like the mouth feel was, it was drinking clouds. It was literally just like, it was super soft despite the like intense-ness of the hoppy characters coming through compared to,
03:04:28
Speaker
Not like a sharpness of the West Coast. The West Coast was well rounded. It was very flavorful, but it wasn't as soft and smooth as the Nipa was in terms of the two.
03:04:44
Speaker
Oh, look, the West coast was cleaner, but the Nipah was fuller. It is really splitting hairs between these two, like the way they brewed them. They made two amazing beers. I mean, that's not. Yeah, they've made two amazing beers, which you would expect anyway, but the way there are such little subtle differences that like play against each other. It's almost like watching the same movie directed by two different directors.
03:05:14
Speaker
And I don't know which one mountain culture led and which one bolt led, which is really cool. That is really cool. Yeah, that's kind of, yeah, that adds. I know having the extra point point 3% in the Nipah probably added something to it. I reckon, I reckon they would have turned on its head. I reckon mountain culture being known for their Nipah's would have done the west coast.
03:05:39
Speaker
Yeah, the bolt is known for them too, which is, yeah. Um, look, I, I, I. I'm sure we can reach out to. I'm sure we can ask them and yeah, they'll probably reveal it as well. I don't think they can try to keep it secret. I don't, I just don't know. And I, I like the fact that I don't know. I am leaning towards the West coast. I love a neighbor. I love West coast. Uh, look, they, uh,
03:06:06
Speaker
If I have to pick one to be a winner by a quarter point, Anna is a 4.5 and Elsa is a 4.25. I just think the balance-ness of Anna is the West Coast just takes it past the Nipah.
03:06:24
Speaker
Yeah, nice. I would really love good old Portugal Dan to be able to taste these two because I'd love his brewer's opinion. I'd love many brewer's opinions on these. But I also know how quickly these beers sold out. I got the last can of Anna that was on the shelf at the union where I got the two.
03:06:46
Speaker
Like I literally walked in and the dude was grabbing for it. I was like, fuck it. Like, get out of my way. Yes. They're both, they're both very, very, very, very well brew beers, which you'd expect from two world-class brewers. But yeah, just really feel like that West coast. Just, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But amazing, amazing display of same beer, same hops, just different styles. Yeah. That's cool. That's very cool. Yeah. Ed.
03:07:15
Speaker
Um, I have got another WA beer, which is Nail Brewing. Um, good on Nail. Yeah. So they're, they're limited release red carpet. So I said, they're imperial red ale. Um, so finishing strong. So with this, they say we set our famous Nail Red to Hell and the devil sent it back stronger.
03:07:42
Speaker
tread carefully between sweet caramel malt flavors, balanced citrus, floral, and a hopes of romance. And I read that description after I pretty much, I got that much later. And like,
03:08:00
Speaker
Fucking nine and a half percent. How are you going? Eight point six. It's only seven o'clock over there. Eight point four. APV. But APV. But it is like you get that. You know, when you eat a caramel, you get that kind of coating in your mouth. I get that.
03:08:22
Speaker
with the kind of citrus you get from like a pale ale, you get the hoppiness. And it is just, as it's warmed up, it's one of those beers where you can just sit there and sip on and I should have got a few more of those. Well, you wouldn't want to drink them in one sitting.
03:08:44
Speaker
No, no, no, no. It's definitely the nightcap where you can sit around. It's only 9.3. What are you talking about? What's the ABV? Because I'm getting conflicting information. You've got a can that says 8.4. An untapped says nine and a half. Yes, but untapped requires the brewery to update it when they do a new version.
03:09:15
Speaker
They changed it. It's September, 2023, man. Yeah. ABV 8.4, solid and pure red, IBU 50. Yeah, right. Okay. Um, out of, out of five, with your chewy, toughy, toughy goodness. That is, that is, that is, it reminds me of the, um, the, the outside, the, the oats and caramel, the running with thieves a few years ago. Oh yeah. Yep. The one that I did on the, on the five year anniversary and it's, um,
03:09:46
Speaker
Yeah. Score, man. Stop rabbiting on. Stop padding. I'm going to get big 4.75. I'm liking this. Big dog, big dog, big dog. The end of the night kind of end of conversation. This is, this has been perfect. Sounds like a conversation starter. If anything, get me a fucking can of that post taste. But yeah, it's, um, yeah, I, yeah. Um, it's almost perfect.
03:10:16
Speaker
Hmm. I'm leaving point two five off. Um, so that dogs can improve. Anyway, what are you drinking? I'm drinking Hawker's 2023 brew of the Imperial. Sorry. No, it's not Imperial. The bourbon barrel aged white stout.
03:10:41
Speaker
So the can looks like that. It's got Krampus on it. Can is beautiful. Krampus. Krampus. He steals your children, replaces them with coal. I go straight to American Dad. Yeah, Krampus. Beer is fantastic. It's a pleasantly light, vanilla and chocolate white stout.
03:11:09
Speaker
Doesn't have that traditional multi-fullness to it. It's quite light and refreshing in being a white stout, but you still get all of the stout flavors, which are, you know, there's a little bit of coffee right on the edge, but mainly it's vanilla, it's white chocolate.
03:11:27
Speaker
It's not that, that real carobie chocolate. It's just that, that nice smooth blended chocolate. 6%. No bitterness to speak of. Yeah. Wow. I'm glad that I ended up with the 6, not the 10.
03:11:45
Speaker
Um, cause I'm a bit pissy now, but thoroughly enjoyable. I like a white stout cause it's like you get all of the flavor profile of a, of a traditional stout, but it's, it's a little lighter, little, little, little more refreshing, a little less heavy. Yes. So yeah, no, I'm going to, I'm going to give that a very high score. I think, I think I'm going to give it a four and a half.
03:12:13
Speaker
hot, diggity fucking damn. Yeah. That's an excellent B to finish. I'm quite, I'm quite happy with that. Uh,
Final Fantasy 14 and Farewell
03:12:22
Speaker
6%, four and a half, write it down before Pete forgets. Well, while he writes that down Ed, are you winning son? I am winning. I, I actually won big.
03:12:35
Speaker
on Thursday night. This is not a pokey's story. There's no, there's no pokey's in WA apart from, uh, start casino. I think it's, I don't know. Wow. I did not know that. Didn't you know that? They're a good, they're a good state. Which is fantastic because you totally changed the dynamic on pubs, right? Yeah. Thing is like you come to WA, your, the beers are a little bit more expensive, but insane that
03:13:02
Speaker
You walk into a venue, there's no fucking pokies and you feel good. It's great. It's right. Coming from Queensland, coming from Brisbane. Sorry, I totally derailed that. I just did not know that. Sorry. Also, most of the pubs I went to when I was in WA were made of sandstone and that was delightful. Yeah, it's, uh, you haven't crossed this one. The mean diddler. Um, but there was no diddling involved. Um, so am I winning? Not on this trip.
03:13:30
Speaker
After three years of playing Final Fantasy 14, my one thing that I wanted was a large housing clock. Right. So starting off the first 18 months on the Japanese servers and the old kind of housing plot system, there was fricking zero chance of me ever getting one. Australian servers,
03:13:53
Speaker
So you had to fight for the chance to build. Yes. So it was the same as the Australian rental market. Okay. So you had to sit there. If one became available, you had to sit there and click a button. Wow. It was all like it was a window opening. So you just had to be lucky enough that you click the button to quit.
03:14:14
Speaker
buy at the right time that the actual like the RNG said it's up for sale, but it had like a window, like a seven day window. Right. It had to sit there and can be clicked by, by, by, by, by, by, by, by, by, by. This is Final Fantasy, which, which 14? 14. Correct. Which is the massive, this is the MMORPG. Yeah. So anyway, so anyway. So you got some land. So started last year, they opened up to
03:14:44
Speaker
Did they all just build more land? No, no, they wouldn't. It is digital land. It was fucking elusive, right. So anyway, right. This is the Rolex of video games. Yeah. So, so, so, so they, they, they, and can we just point out, did you have to pay
03:15:06
Speaker
actual world money? No. Okay. This is, I had to pay, I had to, I had to give a jerk off enough digital monkeys to get it all blown away. I had to do freaking daily quests. I had to do all that shit. Um, but anyway, so they, they opened up the, the Australian service and they changed it so as an actual pottery. So like so many people fight to give them
03:15:27
Speaker
Oh, okay. Yeah. So anyway, there's no gambling in WA. So no, no. So anyway, so I after that was like, so last year, but like a large
03:15:43
Speaker
A large plot. A lot is 40 million gil. Yes. And then you've got to, then you've actually got to have. And how much per quest gil would you earn? So, so you like, if you did like, I've been doing like one or like one daily, like roulette dungeon and some dailies, just, just enough to keep this. I like this episode.
03:16:09
Speaker
Same. Just to keep it enjoyable as well. So yeah. The roll goes over. I worked out that I was kind of like, you do about 50,000 guild per day. And that was like about an hour and a half of gameplay time.
03:16:34
Speaker
Right. So it's like. So it's still a substantial amount to earn, but not to the point where you're, you're spending a year and a half. Yeah. Like it's pretty, it's pretty much me getting home at home in a bay, then logging in, kind of just chilling out. Do a quest or two. So anyway.
03:16:59
Speaker
Won the lottery for this large plot like three weeks ago because I was one entry. So you literally just won the lottery for the plot of land. And I won it because I was one of one. I was like, yes, I can't lose. That's good stats, baby. I like those odds. And then I had to go off and earn, I had to go off and buy a building permit.
03:17:29
Speaker
Which is like 3 million guilds. Wow, this is really role-playing here. You're going to go through a council and approve your build before you can put it in a pool. Filling the form in triplicate. Yeah, so this is going back to RPG, because I was like, fuck it, I'm just doing extra. And this is like full-blown RPG. Anyway, I'm crying about like, on Thursday, I'm like, I have like 300,000 guild left to go.
03:17:52
Speaker
I'm sick of this shit. I'm sick from sickness. I'm like, I'm like, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got my, what's his fricking. I've got his nose. No, it's like, do I have to work? Do I have to stop working the streets or what? So anyway, get these, get these, get these, get these, get these letters in the, um, in the, in, in, in my mogul mail. Right. What the fuck is this?
03:18:21
Speaker
So a dude from my guild, sent me free meal in guild. So I could have the, have the, have the, have the, like- This potentially sounds like you're prostituting yourself for a part of land. This is, this is pretty much, pretty much, and this is, this is why, this is what RPGs do. They take you out of- This is what JRPGs do, specifically. They take you out of your reality and put you into another reality.
03:18:48
Speaker
The grind is real. The grind is real. Just putting it out there. The grind is very real. That might be the other title for the fucking episode. I think that could be the title. I've got a Henrod pillow for a reason, all right? I can't put that as a title. Sorry, short. Long story short, I've got a large pool of land and I've got a house.
03:19:17
Speaker
Which is, that's taken you how long to achieve? Three years, since I've planned the game. That's, yeah. Well done. Well done. Yeah. Big ups there. That's three years. Fuck, man. I think of all the time I lost into Destiny and Destiny 2. I could never do that. To just literally buy a fake plot of land to put my house on. Yeah. I absolutely salute my hat to you. Yeah.
03:19:41
Speaker
That I mean I've taken time off that's kind of like I've gone I'm not going to send myself nuts and played nonstop. But the serotonin dump is is also real so so I've talked about this before and I'm not going to talk about now because the episodes already way over but.
03:19:58
Speaker
What a war craft is a grind ever quest to put you to hunting ram mobs for a piece of. Yeah. Yeah. Ed. You're clearly winning. You didn't even mention star field, which is somewhat surprising.
03:20:17
Speaker
No, Pete, just get yourself another way and talk about how you're winning in that. I'm lost. Sarfield is a good transition, so I can move on. You can go fever house from someone. I can still lie, cheat. Dog. Just do everything that I can. Peter, how is Sarfield? How is Sarfield treating you?
03:20:40
Speaker
I'm like I said, I'm thoroughly enjoying it. I mean, I'm critical of it because I want it to be the game that I think it could easily be. As a framework, they've done a fucking magnificent job of tying together very different game genres into one contiguous, seamless game.
03:21:00
Speaker
Yeah. It needs some quality of life fixes and it needs continuous content dumps. And I mean, every month they need to be releasing net new content, not just fixing bugs, not just release note patches. They need to be adding, here's another 50 outpost items, whether they're mechanical or just pretty like furniture mods, whatever. They need to add vehicles to Overland.
03:21:26
Speaker
in a few months' time. They need to add quests in six months' time. If they can support it that much, it really could be the RPG of the century or whatever their fucking stupid ass claim was. This is the most important RPG to drop. It could be that. It's nowhere near that yet. Okay. If they can jam everything they're promising into that game,
03:21:56
Speaker
It will be John changing. They need to prove it. For the first net new intellectual property that Bethesda have developed in over 20 years, I really hope they do. I really hope they do. No. Yeah. Yeah. Fact check that in my mind. Yeah. You're right. Okay. Yeah. Tom, are you winning, son? Of course I'm winning. I'm still playing fucking Skyrim. I'm the king of the world.
03:22:22
Speaker
Yeah, I said to you guys as well, I dive straight into the Dragonborn DLC, which I've never played before. And it's very Lovecraftian. So yeah, if you really love the latcraftian world, this is definitely up your alley. It's a new island. It's takes you back to Morrowind. So if you played the series, it's a nice little
03:22:43
Speaker
kickback, um, even to the point where they play some of the more I mean music I've noticed, which I think is really cool. So they've gone, they've gone back to that. Um, but yeah, the, uh, I sent one to Dan the other day cause he never played it, but it's like one of the monsters you fight now is called a sega and it's just Cthulhu.
03:23:00
Speaker
You are literally fighting Cthulhu and Dan was like, holy shit, I'm so aroused. Um, because he loves, loves crafting. Yeah. So it's, it's super cool. I'm right in the middle of that. Um, and then it's, uh, look, I'm sitting at, what is it? 76% of my way through the entire Skyrim and DLC, all the trophies. I'm looking forward to that.
03:23:25
Speaker
Well, I don't want it to finish. And that's what I've been thinking, like, Tom should have finished this, but now he doesn't want it to finish. I actually haven't touched my PS5 controller this week, and I am very sad. I am so sad. I hate everything. Everything sucks.
03:23:42
Speaker
Just very randomly, Tom, just on that topic, I went through a pair of AA batteries in my controller in one weekend and I am very glad. I haven't done the math on the break even, but I paid $35 to Amazon on the spot for two lithium ion rechargeable battery packs for my controller and I've not looked back.
03:24:11
Speaker
Cause it's like 48 hours, like two days. Yeah. And then I've spent a lot of hours playing the game through the course of the week with the lithium ion pack. And I haven't had to recharge. So, you know, fuck Xbox with their really nice controller. I can't believe they've still got, they've still got double A batteries. They see double A batteries. Oh, I can. The rechargeable pack is like an Alibaba brand and it fucking lasts like a hundred hours and you can,
03:24:39
Speaker
USB-C charge it while you're playing gives you a 10 meter cable.
03:24:43
Speaker
So why not just include it in the fucking pack, you dopey bastards. Also, just quickly, the Starfield controller has lovely texturized rubber backing controller. Is that a pro controller or not? It's just a regular one. Just a regular controller, but it's Starfield themed. But instead of using the hard plastic sandpaper that I fucking hated on the back of the original Xbox controller, it's got this lovely soft grey rubber.
03:25:11
Speaker
Yeah, it really affects your emeralds. Yeah. Yeah. So I got one of those pro, the, the, the Xbox pro controls from a national carrier for free. Um, and the, for star fields and PC gaming. A national carrier. A telecom telecom. Right. Right. Right. Right. Got it. No, I'm just curious, please. They just dropped it off to him for randomly.
03:25:37
Speaker
Yeah. Um, is he really saying that he used these Qantas points? I can't. No, no, no, no. You get, you get, um, you get, um, so I found out 12 months ago. You sign it with Telstra with their fucking silver points or whatever. Yeah. Apparently I had a heap of points. I'm like, what am I going to spend it on? Because I want to buy something. And I was like, I'll try one of those controllers for my, when I pay on PC. And I'll tell you what.
03:26:05
Speaker
It makes a difference. It makes a difference for playing games on PC compared to a PS5 controller. I jump on a PS5 and I still... Yeah, but you get native Microsoft driver support in the operating system through the Xbox controller. It makes perfect sense. I got a similar notification about my LEGO points that were about to expire and I had 20,000 VIP points and I logged in
03:26:34
Speaker
And there's nothing I can spend them on. There's literally nothing. You're not add them to a purchase? No. Points with purchase? No. What the fuck? No, you make points from purchase, but unless you're in America and you've got you want tickets to their Lego world, there's nothing you can spend the points on. Anyway, how good is Tom's cabinet?
03:26:53
Speaker
It looks really good. It's, it's overexposed at the moment. And at that almost as an introduction to your cabinet, that works better. The hammer looks. Yeah. Yeah. I'll put some yellow cellophane on the lights. Anyway, I think that's us. I think we're silly enough. Yes.
03:27:21
Speaker
Thank you everyone for listening. Thank you, Ed, for joining us. We very much appreciate it. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure as always, mate. Yeah. From the other side of this very large country. It's only like three o'clock in the afternoon over there, isn't it? I wish, I wish. In 1945. Yeah, I was going to say 70, 70 years in the past. It's still World War II over there. Yes, well done. Those goddamn Nazis.
03:27:50
Speaker
Well, I mean, that tracks with the modern day. I can't believe you did that math in your head instantly then, Ed. And you said 77 years. That was pure luck. Well, it was 78 years between 1945 and now, but that was pretty fucking close. I'm going to take the red carpet because that was pure luck. Magic carpet at this point. Pretty much.
03:28:14
Speaker
Well, thank you very much for listening as always folks. And we'll see you. Sure. In the very near future. Thank you again, Ed. We really appreciate you coming on. Thanks. Thank you gentlemen. Good night. Good night. Fuck you Peter.