God of War, Ocarina of Time, And Other SGF Surprises

Summer Game Fest is over, and now it's time to soak in all the gaming news. Kirk, Jason, and Maddy talk about everything, from God of War Laufey to the Ocarina of Time remake, and plenty of indies along the way.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Jason Schreier?

  It's not summer, there are multiple games, and it's not really a fest. They should call it Late Spring Video Game Event. Welcome to Trip with Kirk, where we bring the games to you. This week, we're talking about Summer Game Fest. I just got back from Los Angeles, where I played a bunch of games, and there's a whole lot of news to get into, so let's do it.

• 0:30Jason Schreier?

  I'm Jason Schreier.

• 0:32Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm Kirk Hamilton.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  And I'm Maddy Myers.

• 0:34Jason Schreier?

  Hello.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 0:35Jason Schreier?

  Hello. Can you guys hear in my voice that I was at Summer Games Fest?

• 0:38Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 0:39Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I was just, I was watching your, your E3 explainer video on YouTube and hearing the, the very familiar sounds of Jason Schreier post-convention.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  But husky, husky bent.

• 0:51Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, post-JW bar.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  Sounds good.

• 0:53Jason Schreier?

  Post, sorry, post-Airport Hilton, as Kirk said.

• 0:58Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, that was a real tragedy that JW wasn't there.

• 1:00Jason Schreier?

  Well, actually, there was like, there's like another bar at the JW that a lot of people were at, and then, get this, in the middle of Summer Games Fest, like, day four that I was there, they reopened part of the JW bar, so it worked out fine.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  Thank goodness.

• 1:14Jason Schreier?

  We're gonna talk about Summer Game Fest, not the JW, but the more interesting stuff that was there. But first, I just want to point out that we are a listener-supported podcast, and that you, as a listener, as someone who is hearing this right now, can also be a supporter of our podcast, like going to MaximumFun.org/join. In addition to making this show possible, you will also get bonus episodes every single month, including one we just ran, that is about, it's about two things. One, it's about the TV show Players, and two, it's about esports in general, and how watchable they are, how viable they are as a business, and lots of other interesting conversations. But you also get a backlog full of bonus episodes

• 1:56Jason Schreier?

  that we do for all of you fine subscribers. One other thing before we get started, Kirk?

• 2:02Kirk Hamilton?

  Yes, last week, I mentioned that the Strong Songs Live show is coming up in July. One thing I didn't mention, because it wasn't finalized- Is that we are now selling livestream tickets for that show.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Yay.

• 2:13Kirk Hamilton?

  So if you are not in Portland and you want to watch, you can buy a livestream ticket at the same place that we're selling the other tickets. We also removed this really annoying restriction that was in place for like out of state credit cards that some people might have run into.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  What?

• 2:26Kirk Hamilton?

  Hopefully, hopefully no one listening ran into that. It was very annoying, but it has now been lifted. So anyways, there's gonna be a livestream. You'll be able to watch it after the fact too. You don't have to watch it live, you know, if you're in a different time zone. So there's still a link for that in the show notes and I hope some of you will tune in online.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  I will.

• 2:41Kirk Hamilton?

  It's gonna be a lot of fun.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  I will tune in.

• 2:43Jason Schreier?

  Very cool. I will certainly be tuning in if not right then and there, at least I will catch it.

• 2:50Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it'll be a little bit late on the East Coast.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it'll be sleepy time for me and Jason, but maybe I'll watch the beginning. I don't know.

• 2:57Jason Schreier?

  For us parents. Okay, cool. So let's talk about Summer Game Fest, which is the annual extravaganza for all things video games. It's funny, whenever I tell people that I'm going LA for Summer Game Fest, I always have to be like, well, it used to be E3, but now it's this new thing that nobody's ever heard of except for like.

• 3:16Kirk Hamilton?

  Now you have a YouTube video you can refer them to.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:19Jason Schreier?

  That's true. Why E3 died.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  I wonder how many more years of our lives we're going to have to preface it with that explanation before people are like, oh yeah, Summer Game Fest. I've heard of that. Probably like another five at least.

• 3:31Kirk Hamilton?

  How long will we have to refer to X as formerly Twitter? I guess it's kind of a similar.

• 3:36Jason Schreier?

  Always, always.

• 3:37Kirk Hamilton?

  Right. So maybe the answer to this is also always.

• 3:39Jason Schreier?

  Well, the thing about Summer Game Fest is because it doesn't have the whole spectacle of the LA Convention Center and thousands of people and like news cameras there. Like TV cable stations, TV news would go to E3 and cover it. They're not covering Summer Game Fest. Like no one gives a shit about like the live streams except for hardcore enthusiast gamers.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Like us.

• 3:59Jason Schreier?

  But yeah, I mean, there was a lot of cool stuff. So if you missed it, we can kind of recap. Just kind of, I've, we, we don't have to go through every single showcase, but just to kind of refresh people's memory and maybe break the news to people who didn't catch up on every single press conference. There were four big ones. Essentially Sony had a state of play last week where they talked about Wolverine and announced a new God of War game starring Faye, Kratos's dead wife, who wakes up and is like, what is this bullshit?

• 4:35Jason Schreier?

  There was the main Summer Game Fest showcase last Friday night, which had the announcement of a Resident Evil Code Veronica remake, Final Fantasy VII Part III called Revelation Tupac is back to life, apparently.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  I like how it sounded like maybe Final Fantasy VII was gonna be called Revelation Tupac.

• 4:56Jason Schreier?

  Revelation Tupac. Well, Final Fantasy VII is bringing one person back to life, and then Stranger Than Heaven is bringing back another.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  So true.

• 5:04Jason Schreier?

  There's an Xbox showcase, which had a new Spyro game, Persona 6, and Gears of War going exclusive, among other things.

• 5:12Kirk Hamilton?

  Console exclusive.

• 5:14Jason Schreier?

  There's a Nintendo Direct, which had Ocarina of Time getting remade, a bunch of release dates, a bunch of other random stuff. And then, like, a total, like, hodgepodge of other live streams, some of which had notable game releases. But yeah, let's get into all of it. I mean, first of all, let's start by talking about, like, the stuff we thought was coolest. So Kirk, why don't you start off? What are kind of some of the announcements and games that you were most excited about?

• 5:42Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, there's a bunch of smaller games that we can maybe talk about later. I was excited to hear that Persona 6 exists, though I would have liked to see a little bit more of it.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  It was really short.

• 5:52Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, didn't we? We knew it existed. That trailer was just such a waste of time. It was so pointless.

• 5:58Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it's not totally clear.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Artsy shots of humans standing in darkness. I don't even know if they were people, heads, and then it was like P6.

• 6:09Jason Schreier?

  Can I just say, I think in a world where everything leaks in advance, game publishers just should not do teaser trailers anymore. Because like, when the, if the point of your trailer is just to say this game exists, and it always leaks ahead of time, which all of the announcements this weekend leaked, every single one. If you don't show gameplay, then there's no point, which is why the coolest announcements were like Final Fantasy VII Revelation, where it's like, here's a solid 15 minutes of the actual game, which was just so cool to see. So I feel like these kind of teaser trailers are just a waste of everybody's time.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:41Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I agree. And I guess I'll throw out there then, let's just talk about God of War Laufey, because I thought that was an incredible demo.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, also long.

• 6:47Kirk Hamilton?

  And I'm really excited for that game.

• 6:48Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, you guys, you guys were jazzed on it? I thought it was really cool, too.

• 6:51Kirk Hamilton?

  I thought it looked great. I just, yeah, I thought it looked like a great game and was incredibly impressed by its visual fidelity. It just like was one of the few games where I really felt like, oh, man, this is a futuristic game. Like, if you'd shown this to me 15 years ago, I would have been like, damn, wow, video games have really gotten amazing looking.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, it looks really fun to play as well, which I think is sometimes hard to convey in these really long gameplay demo showcases. But they showed so much of Faye fighting, and it just looked so kinetic and cool. And she was swinging that magical sword around. And that just looked like, I mean, I'm remembering how fun God of War is to play. And I'm like, oh, I can kind of picture what kind of moves, what buttons I'll be hitting to do all this. And it's gonna feel really good. And I don't know, that made me excited to see.

• 7:39Kirk Hamilton?

  I agree. I like that they emphasize the juggle-like aerial stuff so much.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:44Kirk Hamilton?

  It made it look a little bit different in a way that I could immediately kind of feel under my thumbs. Watching it, I was like, yeah, I know what this game is gonna feel like to play. This looks great.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:53Jason Schreier?

  Yeah. And I think because you're playing as Faye, she's gonna have magic and embrace magic in a way that Kratos doesn't. And I think that like, what we saw is the first 20 minutes of the game or so, right? That's how it was presented, at least.

• 8:04Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, and she only awakens her magic toward the very end, right? The idea is, yeah, that she will develop that much more.

• 8:10Jason Schreier?

  Well, does she do, what do you mean she develops it at the very end?

• 8:12Kirk Hamilton?

  She keeps trying to summon her magic with the right trigger in all the cutscenes. But it's kind of been muted because she's in the afterlife or whatever.

• 8:19Jason Schreier?

  Oh, at the end of this demo, you mean?

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:20Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, the demo. And then she finally pulls it off.

• 8:23Jason Schreier?

  Exactly.

• 8:23Kirk Hamilton?

  It seems very likely that it's gonna be this sort of mix of magic attacks, sword attacks. And like, some enemies are vulnerable to some of the, you can imagine it having played some of these games.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  And maybe the magic will get stronger throughout the game via some sort of skill tree even.

• 8:37Kirk Hamilton?

  Right, it's possible.

• 8:38Jason Schreier?

  Yeah. And so I got the sense that like, even though that first 20 minutes looked a little bit more akin to the God of War games that we've seen already, I feel like it's gonna change a lot as you start juggling magic as part of that, too. I've also heard that like the cube is gonna do some stuff that it feels a little different than just like having a Traeus like next to you.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  It already looked really different because one, it's a cube. There's a cube. There's a talking cube.

• 9:04Jason Schreier?

  There's a talking cube.

• 9:05Kirk Hamilton?

  A quaid cube. Not just any cube, but the cube voiced by Jack Quaid.

• 9:09Jason Schreier?

  Which by the way reminded me of Esoteric Eb's gelatinous cube. The classic D and D monster.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  People have been speculating, I don't know if it's been confirmed, that that's the quote unquote mythology that the cube is from, is from Dungeons and Dragons. I don't know if that's actually intended or not.

• 9:25Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, so the idea is like, maybe this is a like blended up afterlife for all different kinds of mythology?

• 9:30Speaker 02

  Correct, because you can already see there's like these ancient Egyptian gods in that trailer as well.

• 9:34Kirk Hamilton?

  Sure, and I guess Kratos is a Greek god. It totally makes sense. I hadn't even thought about that, but that would be really cool.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'd also seen a different theory that it was like a ideal form like in, you know, Socratic Platonic forms. You guys know what I'm talking about? Remember reading?

• 9:49Kirk Hamilton?

  Like a cube is whatever like the ideal.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know. Who knows what the cube is? But there's a talking cube and it cracks jokes and also does cognitive behavioral therapy with Faye so she can use her magic. And who wouldn't, who wouldn't want that?

• 10:02Jason Schreier?

  I feel like it's gonna turn out that it's like some cursed dude who's just like, now I'm stuck as a cube. I wish I wasn't.

• 10:07Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, and I would imagine a cube like that kind of unusual shaped NPC helper would be helpful in puzzles. And that's something we didn't really see in the demo, but something I was reminding myself of as we watched Faye shred the student have this huge boss fight. These games always start with the epic spectacle boss fight. This seems like, that seemed like they showed us that one for this game. There will be a lot of puzzles. There will be a lot of kind of cool gameplay systems and stuff. I mean, a thing I had kind of, I don't always think about is how God of War Ragnarok added this Valhalla mode. They added like a lot of really cool, there were those mist, the like mist realm that you had to explore in the first, the 2018 God of War. They have a lot of other cool stuff too. So not only

• 10:49Kirk Hamilton?

  will this be, you know, a narrative action game, they have a lot of cool ideas and a lot of puzzles and things that go outside of just the slashing and the stomping.

• 10:57Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I think we were a little bit down on Ragnarok, but even despite that, I feel like, I feel like we were down on it because the bar for Sony's Santa Monica games is pretty damn high.

• 11:08Kirk Hamilton?

  And for narrative reasons. It was pretty rushed. It felt like they kind of crammed two games into one game. It wasn't really the combat. It was that the story was not that satisfying or just felt rushed.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  And it like really meandered to some weird places near the end, as I recall.

• 11:21Kirk Hamilton?

  Right. I guess rushing and meandering.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:23Jason Schreier?

  The metervania stuff they did in both of those games is so cool. And like, the action is so cool, the puzzles are so, like, these are great games. My only hope is that the cube doesn't spoil all the puzzle solutions.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  I was thinking that too, but I feel like they will probably include an option to turn that off, because that's become such a common feature in the options menu for games now, which thank goodness, where you can go in and be like, please, if I'm staring at this puzzle for longer than five to 10 seconds, don't have the cube tell me, it looks like I could go over there and do this.

• 11:55Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, this was actually something that James Bond, that 007 did a few times that really annoyed me, was that same thing where the character says, oh, you know what I should do is hack into that computer over there.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  It's like, screw you, I'm not gonna do that.

• 12:08Kirk Hamilton?

  I was kinda glad in 007's case, because a lot of times I was like, I have no idea what I'm supposed to do. So maybe that was more necessary.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I actually feel like they waited long enough in that game typically, before he would finally make a suggestion. And I'd be like, you know what, James? I'll take your point. I will, in fact, try hacking into that computer.

• 12:26Kirk Hamilton?

  Anyway, Na'Vi looks great.

• 12:27Jason Schreier?

  So a couple more games to talk about. So Resident Evil Code Veronica, I'm pretty excited for that. I got to see a little bit more in a presentation that the developers gave backstage at Summer Games, as Play Days, which is the media event after all the kind of the live streams go up. And the developers, they said a couple of things. They wouldn't tell me. I asked them how many Resident Evil teams Capcom has. They said, that's a secret. But they told me that they, the Veronica team, is the team that made RE2 remake, Resident Evil 2 remake, and Resident Evil 4 remake. And their presentation was interesting. Basically, they framed it as like, Resident Evil 2 is kind of the basis for a lot of this. And then Leon's story continues with Resident Evil 4, and then Requiem, which came out this year.

• 13:09Jason Schreier?

  Whereas Claire's story continues with Code Veronica. And now we'll get to see that, for people who didn't play Code Veronica, such as myself, we'll get to see that in this remake, which is pretty cool. And one of the things, remember, the three of us were talking when we played that remake for the pod and did the spoiler cast on it, we were talking- Talking about how like the point of it is that Claire is looking for her brother, but that barely comes up. And then at the end, she still hasn't found her brother. Presumably that story continues in Code Veronica. So yeah, really excited to see that remake for sure.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's how the trailer starts is with her looking for Chris.

• 13:45Jason Schreier?

  Exactly.

• 13:46Kirk Hamilton?

  Matty, have you played Code Veronica?

• 13:47Speaker 02

  I, no, I don't think so.

• 13:49Kirk Hamilton?

  Okay.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:50Kirk Hamilton?

  I haven't either. So none of us have played it.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  None of us have played it.

• 13:53Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm somewhat familiar with it and I'm excited because I like Clara Redfield as a character and

• 13:57Speaker 02

  Me too.

• 13:57Kirk Hamilton?

  Looking forward to playing her. Did they say, Jason, whether it's going to be a combination first and third person or just first person?

• 14:03Jason Schreier?

  Just third person.

• 14:05Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, just third person?

• 14:06Jason Schreier?

  The trailer was a fake out.

• 14:07Kirk Hamilton?

  The trailer they showed was first person. Oh, okay. That's like the beginning of RE3, I guess, is kind of that.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  But also they didn't want us to see Claire in that trailer. I get it. They, they wanted to not even have it be clear that it was a Resident Evil game at first, which you know what? I like that kind of gimmicky theater. That's, that's what Summer Game Fest is for. I will admit, I was very excited. I saw the letters come on screen. I was like, oh, sick. They're going to remake this Resident Evil game that I, I feel like I don't know what happens in it, but I'm now going to get to find out. That'll be fun.

• 14:33Kirk Hamilton?

  And that makes sense, given that, you know, RE2 and RE4 remake were both third person because the original game was third person. It would be a more radical change to take one of those games and make it first person. I was curious if they were doing that, but that does make sense.

• 14:44Jason Schreier?

  It's only the newer ones that are first person, right?

• 14:47Kirk Hamilton?

  Yes.

• 14:47Jason Schreier?

  Like starting with seven, right?

• 14:49Kirk Hamilton?

  Seven was the, yeah, first one.

• 14:51Jason Schreier?

  We also got to see, I was most excited about this. Final Fantasy VII Part III. It's called Revelation. It's coming out in the spring. It has a high wind that can go anywhere and your team parachutes off of it Fortnite style and says, where are we dropping, boys? Midcar. And it has a job system, which is wild. And it looks friggin incredible. And I can't believe that they're releasing it three, just three years after Rebirth.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:19Kirk Hamilton?

  Man, I'm bummed that it's called Revelation, partly because that

• 15:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, we gotta get into this.

• 15:24Kirk Hamilton?

  Mix is one of my predictions and also because I think Revelation is a bad name.

• 15:27Jason Schreier?

  Oh Kirk, I asked, so I spoke to Naoki Hamaguchi, the director, and he had said in the past that they were narrowing it down. They narrowed it down to two names, one of which being Revelation. So I was like, hey, what was the other name you narrowed it down to? And he was like, I don't want to say right now, maybe later. And he offered to tell me off the record, but I was like, no, I don't want, I don't want to know because I don't want to like slip up on the podcast or something. So down the road, I'll get him to tell me, or maybe he'll say publicly what the other name was. And we can find out how close you are to getting your prediction right.

• 15:58Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm picturing if he has Revelation and Return in a document and then he's listening to our predictions episode and then he just X's out Return.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Delete, delete, delete.

• 16:05Kirk Hamilton?

  Does a strike through in real time.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  I don't think so. I think it might be Resolve because that was one of the words that they said on stage when they were describing.

• 16:13Kirk Hamilton?

  That would also be a bad name. So I think Revelation is such a bad name. There are like three other games. It's such a common subtitle for games and also so often Resident Evil Revelations, Assassin's Creed Revelations, there are no actual meaningful revelations in the game with Revelation in the title. I just think it's a totally overused name.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  Okay, but in this game, we do know there will be Revelations because we played the 1997 version and.

• 16:37Kirk Hamilton?

  Right. It's not to say that there won't be any Revelations, but it, but that it's, I think, a very weak name.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  Like maybe this time it actually makes sense that calling it that.

• 16:45Kirk Hamilton?

  Nah, but it's, it's just overused. I think it's not a good name. But I don't want to, I don't want to dwell on that too long. The game actually looks great.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  It looks so good.

• 16:52Kirk Hamilton?

  And, and just, I don't know, like after playing Rebirth, I kind of cooled on that game just because there was so much of it. It was kind of exhausting. I finished it. We, we've talked about this. Like it didn't make my top 10 list that year. I mean, it was still great. I liked it a lot, but there were just other games I liked more. But then every time, they get me every time. I hear the music, I see Tifa and Barrett and I'm like, hell yeah, I can't wait. Let's go.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  It's my friends. I'm gonna hang out with my group of friends and we're gonna save the world together. Yeah.

• 17:22Jason Schreier?

  I mean, this is like, okay, the last two games have been setting up all these weird changes and kind of. Their toe in the water, at the very least, and timeline changes and alternate universes and whatnot. In this one, we finally will see how it all pays off, like how many years of setup finally pays off with Zack, with alternate versions of Arith. So even like from that, from the, for the story alone, I'm excited to see what they do. And I'll be disappointed if it's just like, psych, it's back to the original story.

• 17:55Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I mean, a video game series has never spent many years setting up a huge grand finale, only to blow it at the last minute. It's never happened. So it's good that we can know that it won't happen.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's keep our hopes really high and then we will definitely not be disappointed and it'll be fine.

• 18:11Kirk Hamilton?

  I mean, honestly, it is better to have high hopes. Like, it looks exciting.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  Why not? It's fun to have high hopes. They did say on stage as well, when they were talking about the trailers, that it would be a big open world or some phrase like that. And that definitely gave me pause because I was like, that's actually the stuff in Rebirth that I started to get a little bored by. But that's okay, you know, didn't need to play every single little game at the Golden Saucer. There was just a heck of a lot of stuff to do in that game and I, that, that worried me slightly. But hey, I'm sure I'm gonna enjoy all the actual mainline story stuff because that was also largely how I felt about Rebirth.

• 18:48Jason Schreier?

  Hamaguchi has had fewer mini games.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  Good, good.

• 18:52Kirk Hamilton?

  Notably, this game is also coming to PC and Xbox at the same time as PlayStation this time, which is cool. I will totally play this on PC.

• 18:58Jason Schreier?

  And Switch.

• 19:02Jason Schreier?

  There's also Stranger Than Heaven, which I actually got to play and it's a weird, weird feeling game. Got used to it.

• 19:09Kirk Hamilton?

  Is that like a Yakuza game? What is that game like?

• 19:11Jason Schreier?

  It does not control like a Yakuza game. And I did not get to play the parts with Tupac, but there was like a combat, combat demo that I got to check out. And it's really weird. You control your left hand with the left bumper and left trigger and you control your right hand with the right bumper and right trigger. And you kind of like punch with both hands or use a weapon in one hand and punch with the other. And then to guard, you have to kind of like hold down the circle button or, or cancel button, whatever. B button, whatever it is. And then, uh, like hole and then press one of those bumpers to like guard with one hand. It's kinda, it feels kinda fighting game-ish. It's very interesting. I, it took a little while to get the hang of, but once I did, it felt pretty good.

• 19:53Kirk Hamilton?

  It sounds strange. Would you say that it is stranger than heaven?

• 19:56Jason Schreier?

  No, not quite stranger than heaven, but definitely stranger than hell. Like somewhere between hell and heaven.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Strangest spectrum, which is one we're all familiar with. Yeah. I, I mean, the Tupac of it all, I feel like really stole the thunder of that announcement because I just saw so many people immediately reacting with discomfort. So.

• 20:16Kirk Hamilton?

  Walk me through this. What is going on exactly? I missed that part of the stream. I saw like the images later, but what does it mean that Tupac is in this or a rendition of Tupac is in this game?

• 20:26Jason Schreier?

  We don't really know. I mean, essentially they just said, hey, Tupac is in this game. They'd already said that Snoop Dogg was in it. And then he took the stage to reveal that Tupac would also be in it. We don't really know what that means. And it makes no sense because this game is set like way in the past. It's set in, it's set across.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  I guess that part makes sense.

• 20:45Jason Schreier?

  It's set across various.

• 20:47Kirk Hamilton?

  Tupac was still alive.

• 20:48Jason Schreier?

  Well, yeah, I guess.

• 20:49Kirk Hamilton?

  Jason means way in the past.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  I see what you're saying.

• 20:52Kirk Hamilton?

  The pre Tupac era.

• 20:53Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, no, Matty, I'm talking about like it's set across five different decades. I don't remember exactly what they are, but it starts off in the like late 1800s slash early 1900s and goes up through the.

• 21:04Kirk Hamilton?

  Who's to say Tupac was not alive in the late 1800s?

• 21:07Jason Schreier?

  Well, if he's, if he's, if they can recreate him today, who said they couldn't recreate him for the 19th century?

• 21:11Speaker 02

  I mean, the monks.

• 21:12Kirk Hamilton?

  Maybe Tupac was always with us.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Had all kinds of technology.

• 21:14Jason Schreier?

  It ends in the 1960s when maybe Tupac was a baby. So maybe we'll see baby Tupac. Anyway, I don't know. I don't want to dwell on that, but it's weird. It's super weird.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  It is weird. It's weird.

• 21:23Kirk Hamilton?

  It is odd. Yes.

• 21:24Jason Schreier?

  Anything else from the Keely showcase that struck you guys?

• 21:29Jason Schreier?

  There was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game from Platinum that was announced?

• 21:32Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, yeah, that was Achilles. That's the last Ronin. That is promising. I'm actually pretty excited about that. So that, there's an interesting story behind that. I have not read the comic series this is based on, but it was written fairly recently by Kevin Eastman, one of the creators of the Ninja Turtles. And it is like, it's a really cool story. I know the setup and some of the basics. I guess I won't get into them because it's kind of revealed to you over the course of the story, and I guess it will be in the game too. And some people probably haven't read the comics and don't know. But there, it's really cool. It's this kind of gritty, alternate Ninja Turtles universe. I think they call it the Ronin-verse. So it's become its own whole thing. And there have been a number of failed adaptations. There was gonna be a game made about it, made by a different studio that got canceled.

• 22:17Kirk Hamilton?

  There was like a cinematic adaptation. So Paramount knows they've got something cool here. This kind of gritty world where only one of the Ninja Turtles survives. And I think it's Shredder's, you know, son or something is in, in charge of all of New York. And it's this like authoritarian thing where like the one turtle has to do like a true kind of ninja uprising to get revenge and has all the weapons of all the Ninja Turtles, which is then really suited to a Platinum game where you can switch between, you know, the swords and the bow and the sai and the nunchucks and like do all the different, all the moves. And so, yeah, but it's dark. It's, you know, dark in the way that's kind of true to the origins of Ninja Turtles, if anyone is familiar with that.

• 22:57Kirk Hamilton?

  I am definitely optimistic about that game, even though they didn't show it at all. So I need to know more about it, but I'm cautiously optimistic.

• 23:04Jason Schreier?

  Sounds like it pretty much just started development, so it'll probably be in it. Yeah, a couple of other announcements that were there. Alien Isolation 2, which I played. Not a fun video game.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  I bet. Fun, not the worst, not the worst.

• 23:20Kirk Hamilton?

  That's not really what they're going for.

• 23:22Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, not the watchery. Stellar Blade sequel. Guild Wars 3, Wolf Among Us 2 got kind of a re-reveal.

• 23:31Kirk Hamilton?

  Did either of you play Wolf Among Us? Am I the only one who's played it?

• 23:34Speaker 02

  I haven't, but I do know that people who love it really love it, so I was excited. Uh, sympathetically for those people that I saw that trailer.

• 23:41Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, so they're also, they also announced a remake or like remaster of the first one. That's going to come out, I think in December. It is.

• 23:48Jason Schreier?

  Which I don't understand, why do you need to remaster that game? Like, didn't it come out on?

• 23:52Kirk Hamilton?

  I don't know, maybe to put it on new platforms. It still looks good.

• 23:56Jason Schreier?

  That's what I mean. Like, what does it need a remaster for? Very strange.

• 23:59Kirk Hamilton?

  I don't know, maybe it like connects it to, actually, maybe it's connected to the like, the Telltale thing where they have servers that keep track of your decisions and they want to just reset all of that so that you're connecting to new servers and you're getting new percentages based on the decisions. I will say that The Wolf Among Us is really cool. It's totally worth checking out, you two would like it. I don't know if either of you have read the comic series. Well, Jason, you probably haven't. Maddie, have you read Fables? Any of those comics?

• 24:24Jason Schreier?

  Fair assumption.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  I haven't. I'm, I'm not in on any of this.

• 24:28Kirk Hamilton?

  So there, it's because it's an adaptation of the Fables comic series, which I've actually read a lot of. They're very cool. It's this kind of, the idea is that all of the fairy tale creatures, the big bad wolf, Cinderella, et cetera, have had to come to New York and are now living incognito. And so they have their own little society with all these different roles. The big bad wolf is kind of the sheriff. He's essentially this like noir detective who's in charge of everything. And he looks like a man most of the time, but then he can transform into a wolf. And it's really this kind of noir gritty storytelling, but with characters from the famous fairy tales. And it's a really cool series, especially the first few years of it. I really liked them a lot.

• 25:10Kirk Hamilton?

  And the game really is very true to the comics and is fantastic. It's one of the best games Telltale made, I think. Great to the end, has a great finale, good storytelling. That and Tales from the Borderlands are probably my two favorites. So it's cool that it's being released and people can play it. And I'm, you know, hopeful about the sequel. I hope it's cool, too.

• 25:26Jason Schreier?

  So then Xbox had their showcase on Sunday. They announced a bunch of new stuff. I think the biggest news was that they announced that after two years of going full, like almost fully multi-platform, they're now going back to Xbox exclusives. And they said that Gears of War E-Day will be console, Xbox console exclusive, as will Clockwork Revolution, which is coming next year. They also announced that they showed a little bit more Fable. They announced a few other things. They gave a release date for the Castlevania game from the Dead Souls people. They announced a new Spyro. They announced Persona 6, as we mentioned earlier. But Gears was definitely the biggest takeaway from that one.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's interesting because although they didn't mention this in the presentation, Gears on its pages still says it's going to be available on Windows, which to me, I mean, it is exclusive.

• 26:22Jason Schreier?

  No, they did say, they did say that on the presentation.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  Okay, I feel like they were really hammering the Xbox up at all.

• 26:28Jason Schreier?

  They said specifically, Gears and Clockwork are both going to be Xbox console exclusives. They're still releasing everything on PC, which again, as we've said on this show several times, means that it's not really an exclusive, which means...

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's kind of what I'm getting at. But that's fine. I get how you're still allowed to say it's a console exclusive, even if it's also on Windows.

• 26:48Jason Schreier?

  The whole thing is just not, it's almost, it's not a nothing burger, but it's very little. It just means a slight retreat from an initiative that was only just kind of beginning. Like, you know, they've been releasing games on PC for a long time. That will continue. These games are still going to be on Steam. So the only thing that's changed is that they're not going to eventually release stuff on PlayStation, which they'd only kind of just started doing. So it just seems like nowhere near as big of a move as it might have been. I don't know. It seems overblown to me.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they did put out the Gears of War remake on PlayStation 5, pretty famously. And when I was at the Xbox presentation in person last year, they had me play it on a PS5. And that was part of what they were marketing about that remake at that time, was like, wow, you can play Gears, a famous Xbox game, on a PS5. So I guess in light of that, it's a little weird. But you're right, Kirk. It's like, they took one step forward and they're like, okay, now we're back.

• 27:43Jason Schreier?

  But, but it is a big deal because a lot of the studios within the Xbox store have been given all these financial pressures over the last year. Part of the way that they make up for that, or part of the way they hit their goals, is by releasing games to the 90 million plus PlayStation users. A lot of the games that they've released on PlayStation have actually sold pretty well. Indiana Jones did really well on PlayStation. Forza Horizon 5, not this one, but the last one, did really well on PlayStation. So it is a significant deal if you're releasing a game. And in this case, Gears of War, they were preparing a... PlayStation version of that game that they now suddenly have to cut out,

• 28:22Jason Schreier?

  which I imagine is the sort of thing you can only do if you're running the coalition and you are promised by Asha Sharma and Matt Booty that you don't actually have to hit these crazy profit goals for this game because otherwise you are carving out like you are getting rid of millions of people. And then from a developer's perspective, you're also, even if you don't care about like sales, you're still depriving, you're losing a big chunk of your audience, which kind of sucks.

• 28:48Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I don't want to say that it's actually nothing. Like clearly it is, there's something to it. It partly remains to be seen, right? Like is Elder Scrolls 6 really not going to come to PlayStation?

• 28:58Jason Schreier?

  That's a big one. That's a big question.

• 29:00Kirk Hamilton?

  And also, a lot of these games still are coming to PlayStation. So it just, I don't know. Yeah, like two games not coming to PlayStation. It's not nothing. Obviously, it's something and it matters to the developers. Sure. It's just like trumpeting this as like Xbox returns to exclusivity. It's like, I mean, they were already not exclusive. They were already releasing everything on PC.

• 29:19Jason Schreier?

  Yes. I mean, what you're getting at really is that none of this makes any sense. It's not clear.

• 29:24Kirk Hamilton?

  Right.

• 29:24Jason Schreier?

  And also, it's like, I've described it to a few people over the weekend as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic because there's very little that Xbox can do to really get that business to like the growth that they used to have.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. Sad.

• 29:41Jason Schreier?

  It's still a profitable business, but not a growing one as far as I know. Anything else at the Xbox showcase?

• 29:47Speaker 02

  I mean, E-Day looked fun. It looked fun to play. Like the trailer for E-Day looked fun. I'll play it on an Xbox.

• 29:53Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it looked like yours. It looked, it looked, the lights were very pretty. The lighting effects were impressive.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  You got a chainsaw.

• 29:58Jason Schreier?

  Man, there's no series that I'm less interested in, but you guys.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  I know, but I like those.

• 30:04Kirk Hamilton?

  I always start them and then sort of run out of steam, but they're, I liked the first few. I thought that Fable was a little weird. I'm kind of weirded out by that game. I don't know what it is. I mean, I know what Fable is. I really liked the original Fable games, but the trailers for this thing just keep being these, you know, big budget movies, basically. This is Hayley Atwell, an actress I really like, doing a great job. It just felt weird again, like watching a bunch of stuff that looks sort of like a video game, but they've delayed it so many times. I just am not getting a great vibe from it, as impressive and pretty as those trailer videos they show are. Bing, Kirk here, editing the episode, and I just wanted to mention, there is a gameplay

• 30:47Kirk Hamilton?

  demo that Xbox posted to YouTube. I've watched some of it. It looks like a video game, so you can't actually see the game, even if they didn't show it at the press conference. And yeah, I mean, we'll see what this thing is when it comes out. Just wanted to mention that. Bing.

• 30:59Jason Schreier?

  This game started development in 2017. Oh, really? Yeah, there was that one. That's almost 10 years ago. There was that one trailer a while back where they showed off the town, and we're like, you can buy any building in this town. But yeah, I mean, it's been delayed many times. It was supposed to come out last year, slipped, and then slipped again to February of next year as a result of GTA. They didn't want to be in November. Did they let you play it, Jason, or no? No. Okay. I don't believe they had playable demos at the Xbox event.

• 31:29Kirk Hamilton?

  One other game that I liked was Vivarium, which is the Studio Ghibli-looking life sim.

• 31:33Jason Schreier?

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:34Kirk Hamilton?

  I just thought it was a nice change. So many of these streams were just like, the Souls-like set in like, an Asian setting, fighting things with the sword, like where you're wearing that armor with the katana and you're fighting some demon. And they just all look like that. Or a first-person shoot, like, it was just so, so samey. And then seeing this game, this hand-drawn-looking, beautiful life sim that takes place inside of a little domed world, I don't even know what it was. It was just really pretty. It looked like a Studio Ghibli movie, and I thought it looked cool, and I want to know more about it. It was a refreshing change of pace.

• 32:07Jason Schreier?

  That, that art style is so close to Ghibli that it kind of raises a little bit of an eye. One other game that got announced, if you guys remember, is called Bad Magpie. It was like this little indie thing where you play as a bird and you're going around. It was a little thing, you guys might not have noticed it, but I did play that.

• 32:24Kirk Hamilton?

  Like a kind of Untitled Goose thing?

• 32:25Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, it was kind of Untitled Goose. Like, I played it. It's kind of like a less frustrating Untitled Goose. It was really cute. It's like you go around and you just like, cause a ruckus of this little bird.

• 32:36Kirk Hamilton?

  I love Untitled Goose. I didn't think it was frustrating, so that sounds fun.

• 32:39Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I love that game.

• 32:40Kirk Hamilton?

  Play another game like that. Horrible bird games, it's a fun subgenre.

• 32:43Jason Schreier?

  So yeah, you're going around this little playground, and you're just kind of like collecting these gems by like, you pick up a horn at one point and blow some music to shatter glass, and then you go inside. Out of it, you go inside of this like little schoolroom and you're just causing all sorts of ruckus. You're like harassing mice.

• 32:58Kirk Hamilton?

  Man, I'm glad that a goose like really sounds.

• 33:00Jason Schreier?

  It really is. It's very, very goose like. It's very cute. I really enjoyed it.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  But you're a magpie, so you're collecting shiny things. I love that. That's, that's very magpie-esque.

• 33:08Jason Schreier?

  Shiny, shiny crystals as a magpie does. Next up, we had Nintendo, um, which had a direct couple of things that I noted there. One was a Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy Resonance, that is like an HD 2D Final Fantasy with turn-based combat. Which is, which is a, a unique one, a new one. And that's based on the mobile game, Final Fantasy Brave XVSS. Kind of like Octopath. Octopath did a similar thing. I think that's like a trend for Square now to take their mobile gacha games and kind of re revise them as console games, which I think is pretty cool. And then of course, Ocarina of Time, a year after we play it for our predictions bet, it gets a remake in true triple. This is like the third time that's happened.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  Not a bad thing, I would say. Also, another example of an announcement trailer for something that had widely been rumored at the very least. And the trailer showed almost nothing.

• 34:06Jason Schreier?

  A hundred percent. And it's like, I think these PR, like NCL, I mean Nintendo, the way they operate is very strange, of course. We all know that, but like, you need to be a little more nimble than that and recognize that if a game has leaked pretty widely, a lot of people know it happened. Then again, I don't know, I could be wrong. It could be just like in hardcore enthusiast circles it leaked. And like a lot of people out there who are Nintendo fans who would tune into this direct or are seeing the news on TikTok or something like that. They had no idea that it leaked and so they're all pretty jazz. I don't know. I could be wrong. To me, it just seems like.

• 34:38Kirk Hamilton?

  And they could just see it. They could see it as you just get people talking about it. It doesn't really matter. You know, then later they're going to show gameplay and then everyone will talk about that. I mean, maybe they see it that way. It is just kind of, it was a sort of frustrating teaser. And so I don't like feeling frustrated. So I kind of wish they had, if it just ended just by showing Hyrule Field or something, like just a little bit of the game.

• 34:58Jason Schreier?

  And it's weird because it's supposed to come out this year. So you would think they would want to show a little more.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was strange to me. I feel like if something's coming out that soon, then they should show us a little more, but maybe they didn't feel like they need to.

• 35:10Kirk Hamilton?

  Presumably they'll do a dedicated direct in a month or two or something.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, they probably will. That's very Nintendo.

• 35:16Jason Schreier?

  Do you guys think they're gonna go head to head with GTA with Ocarina of Time?

• 35:21Speaker 02

  The two open world games of 2026.

• 35:25Jason Schreier?

  The theory is that the original Ocarina of Time for N64 was released on November 21st. So the theory is that it would, they would try to time that date. GTA right now, I believe is planned for November 19th. So that would be quite a, quite a Oppenheimer, Barbenheimer situation.

• 35:43Kirk Hamilton?

  What would we call it?

• 35:44Speaker 02

  Ocaritier?

• 35:46Jason Schreier?

  Yeah.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  That doesn't really throw off the tongue at all.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Ocarina Theft Auto.

• 35:54Kirk Hamilton?

  GT, GT.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  Grand Theft Ocarina. These are all fine. These are all great ideas.

• 35:59Jason Schreier?

  It's interesting. I mean, on one hand, GTA 6, as far as we know, is not coming to Switch 2 on that date. On the other hand, Nintendo presumably wants the media attention and social media attention eyeballs that will be taken by GTA. So I don't know. I don't know. It's interesting to think about. Or maybe Ocarina comes in September or October. Who knows?

• 36:24Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm just very curious what this game is going to be. I mean, this is a remake of one of the most important and beloved video games of all time. Even listening to the music in that trailer, it's going to have a whole new score, re-recorded. All of that amazing music is going to be reinterpreted. There's a lot of room for cool stuff to happen. There's also a lot of room for missteps. We did just play through the original. That was my first time playing all the way through it. And there's something very special about that game. So we'll see, but I'm, I'm at least very curious on how they're actually going to handle it.

• 36:55Jason Schreier?

  Yeah. I mean, what, what is frustrating to your point earlier is that we don't know if this is going to be a remaster that it kind of like Link's Awakening was, where it's just a dedicated recreation, one to one with modern graphics, or a remake that actually changes things about the game. I would prefer the latter because I feel like we can just play the 3DS version if we want the original.

• 37:16Kirk Hamilton?

  They kind of did that already.

• 37:17Jason Schreier?

  But we don't know. We don't know the answer to that yet.

• 37:20Speaker 02

  It'd be wild if they actually changed the dungeons. And I mean, that would blow my mind, honestly. And I feel like it would be such an answer to all the people who are like, Modern Zelda doesn't have dungeons anymore. I miss Ocarina of Time. Like, what if they just put it out and it was Ocarina of Time, but with new dungeons?

• 37:36Kirk Hamilton?

  I mean, imagining a remade Water Temple, that it could be really cool.

• 37:41Jason Schreier?

  Oh, man.

• 37:42Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it's pretty exciting.

• 37:43Jason Schreier?

  Anything else from the direct standout to you guys?

• 37:46Speaker 02

  I mean, Kingdom Hearts. I get why you aren't bringing it up, but you know, they did put out another trailer for that. I will play it.

• 37:52Jason Schreier?

  The reason I'm not bringing it up, Matty, is because they didn't give a release date or even a release window for it. So to me, it was just kind of like more footage that looks like Kingdom Hearts.

• 38:00Speaker 02

  It does. It does.

• 38:01Jason Schreier?

  It looks cool. It looks great.

• 38:02Speaker 02

  It kind of doesn't look like Kingdom Hearts in ways that are weird. Like Sora just has normal sized shoes on. Like, they're not giving him big goofy clown shoes anymore. He's wearing a normal pair of sneakers. What's up with that? That's gonna have lore importance, people. That's gonna be a big part of the story.

• 38:17Jason Schreier?

  Is he like in Tokyo now? Is that the deal?

• 38:19Speaker 02

  I don't know. I don't know where he is.

• 38:23Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm really excited about Fire Emblem Fortunes. We had not internalized that that is coming out in September. That's another one of these September games?

• 38:31Jason Schreier?

  Well, that was just announced, Kirk. You didn't internalize it because it just came out.

• 38:35Kirk Hamilton?

  Okay, yeah, I missed the stream, so I didn't realize if it had been announced or not. So, man, another September game. One that I'm definitely gonna play because I love Three Houses, and this one looks a lot like Three Houses. But, um, man, one more on the pile of September and a meaty, you know, long tactics role playing game at that. So that's making September seem even more daunting to me.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm definitely gonna play that. I played a pretty significant chunk of Fire Emblem Engage despite not really caring about the story at all, just because it was really fun to play that game. So I feel like even worst case scenario, I'm gonna have a good time with the new Fire Emblem. And best case, it'll be Three Houses level of story and character.

• 39:14Kirk Hamilton?

  I think I saw in a preview that this is like there are four different houses or sort of groups, and you pick a protagonist from one of them. Like, it has that Three Houses setup at the beginning.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  They know what we want.

• 39:23Kirk Hamilton?

  Where there are multiple stories, so you can replay it. And, man, I'm so there for this. I can't wait.

• 39:28Jason Schreier?

  Man, that is gonna be a rough month. Presumably, some of those games are going to slip, but it is going to be.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  But they won't want to slip because of GTA, though, you know? Like, they're gonna be really trying.

• 39:40Jason Schreier?

  All of October is like-

• 39:41Speaker 02

  It's true. They have one month grace period.

• 39:43Jason Schreier?

  Or you slip to December or something. Any other kind of games from like all of the various announcements that you guys saw that stood out to you? Because I have a few games that I played on the show floor that I want to tell you guys about that were cool, but first I want to hear if there's anything you guys saw that really stood out to you.

• 40:00Kirk Hamilton?

  I'll mention a couple more that I liked. I think Threads of Time looks amazing, that Chrono Trigger inspired JRPG style game. Holy cow. It was on my radar. I was aware that there was like a Chrono Trigger inspired game, but that demo that they showed during Day of the Devs was super cool. I think just like it looks beautiful. I really want to know more about it and play it. That looked very cool.

• 40:20Jason Schreier?

  I believe the developer of that listened to our show because he came up to me at Dice-

• 40:25Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, nice. Shoutouts.

• 40:25Jason Schreier?

  He came up to me at Dice in 2025 to just be like, hey, I made this game. You should check it out. And like, I'm a fan, whatever. You should check out this game and showed it to me. And then, yeah, they just like showcased it in Day of the Devs.

• 40:37Kirk Hamilton?

  Tell us a few more. Dreadmore, the first person take on dredge, which is kind of a horror fishing game. Just looked neat, looked like kind of different, looked like something that might break through. That was also on the Day of the Devs stream. I don't know if this was on a stream, but they announced a sequel to El Paso Elsewhere, the Strange Scaffold game. That's a kind of a Max Payne riff, like OG Max Payne 1, that I really liked. I liked that first game. Maybe that and I Am Your Beast, my two favorite Strange Scaffold games. And I'm excited for a sequel to that, like flushing that out and adding some more. The original was kind of bare bones, could be very cool. And it had a pretty cool story, so I want to know what happens next. And then the last one is another Paramount licensed game, Star Trek: Shadow Frontier, that I missed if it was on a stream and then watched the trailer later.

• 41:20Kirk Hamilton?

  This is like made by Team Bloober, who have gotten pretty good at making horror games. It looks like it's another space horror game, but it's starring Ro Laren, and it's set in the Star Trek universe. And I've actually never been wild about Ro as a character, Ensign Ro. I've really only watched Next Generation, so I didn't watch Deep Space Nine where she was more of a character. But she is a little bit of a question mark for me as a character. But a great pick for starring in this kind of game. And just watching the trailer, I was like, okay, I'm at least interested in this. I'll, I'll, I want to learn more about it. So that's another one that caught my eye.

• 41:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm interested in this. I like Deep Space Nine a lot. I will say, I don't know if horror is the genre I would have gone to as a Deep Space Nine fan. I might have just done like a social or like a dating sim. That's kind of more the vibe of that show. It's such a hangout show, but I can, I can put on my big girl pants and play a blooper team Star Trek horror game.

• 42:17Kirk Hamilton?

  They've definitely like Strange New Worlds has leaned more into horror. There's kind of more horror stuff in that show. And they lean into, they're just like trapped on an alien planet or like horrible aliens are taking over the ship. And it becomes a kind of survival horror situation.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they do stuff like that on Next Gen as well. You mentioned it, it's not out of the question.

• 42:34Kirk Hamilton?

  That's certainly what the game looked like, so we'll see.

• 42:36Jason Schreier?

  The Star Trek and the Ninja Turtles game are both under Paramount, which is in an interesting place, having just been bought by David Ellison's Skydance. And will soon presumably be merged with Warner in some way. So that's really interesting and will be interesting to just kind of keep an eye on.

• 42:52Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, they've had a whole press, you know, press initiative or something. There's been a lot of interviews.

• 42:57Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, they just announced their new Paramount Games division, that's why.

• 43:00Kirk Hamilton?

  Right. And the main thing is, it just seems to me inevitable that we're going to start getting games out of the Sheridan verse, the Yellowstone world. Cause it's like the most popular TV series in the world. It's, I think all three of us don't watch those shows and aren't very aware of, like, aren't interested. But it's like, they're massively popular and there are a ton of different kinds of games they could make in that world. So that seems very likely to me now that they're pushing.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  That's a good prediction. It's too bad you didn't put that in your predictions, Matt.

• 43:29Jason Schreier?

  I like that idea, but do you, do you think the demographic of the Sheridan verse plays a lot of games? I guess I don't know, like, who watches those. Is it older people?

• 43:40Kirk Hamilton?

  So many people. Those shows are incredibly popular. It seems like.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  They're huge.

• 43:45Kirk Hamilton?

  They'll at least give it a shot and see what happens.

• 43:47Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 43:48Kirk Hamilton?

  But if you could like manage the Dutton Ranch and like get involved in all of these, whatever, like all the hijinks and the, the sort of intrigue of that. Show like that seems like the kind of game that a large audience would want to play.

• 43:59Jason Schreier?

  Those seem like mobile games. Those seem like they should be mobile games. And that feels like the best fit for Sheridan verse games. Okay, before we wrap this up and get into one more thing, I do want to tell you guys about some of the games I played. I played a shitload of games at Play Days, Summer Games Fest Play Days, which is like the media component of it. I won't list every single one. I'll just give you a few highlights. One is called Slap Out of It, which is a first person puzzler that I feel like all three of us are going to love. Basically, your arms can just like extend and slap things. And it's a very fun mechanic where you pull the triggers to like extend your arm and slap something. And then you just use that to solve like a bunch of kind of escape room style point and click puzzles.

• 44:42Jason Schreier?

  And it's very charming and hilarious. The art looks a lot like bug snacks, like they're these people who look like bug snacks people.

• 44:49Kirk Hamilton?

  Is it a first person game?

• 44:50Jason Schreier?

  First person game, yeah.

• 44:51Kirk Hamilton?

  First person. So you got big long floaty arms like in the.

• 44:55Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, and the story behind the developer is really interesting. It's this developer called Turbo Button. And they made these VR games called Floor Plan. And this game is kind of based on those, you know, those, they're like one of the only game developers that made money and was profitable in VR. And that's how they're funding this game.

• 45:12Kirk Hamilton?

  Those games are very highly regarded in a lot of people.

• 45:13Jason Schreier?

  Yes, yes, yes, they make good games. I've known one of the guys behind it Holden. I've known him forever. And yeah, he's, he's always been just like navigating this VR world, which has been really interesting. This is their first non VR game, which will be cool.

• 45:26Kirk Hamilton?

  Nice.

• 45:27Jason Schreier?

  I also, I played some Anemusha. We'll talk about that more when it comes out, but it's cool. I played a game called Valor Mortis, which is a first person souls like game set in like this alternate fiction. Napoleon, like 1800s, it's the War of Napoleon. You play as part of Napoleon's army and everyone's coming back as zombies. It's super cool and it feels really good. That game, we gotta keep an eye on this.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  That's good to hear because I actually thought that trailer looked kind of sick.

• 45:54Kirk Hamilton?

  It did. It looked to me like the first time I'd really seen understandable, just from a viewing perspective, understandable souls combat in first person.

• 46:01Jason Schreier?

  So this is made by a team that made that game Ghost Runner, which is really. Did really well.

• 46:06Kirk Hamilton?

  That's a great, I played the first one, great game.

• 46:08Jason Schreier?

  A lot of parkour, a lot of really cool parkour in that game. This takes that to and adds this like really satisfying crunchy like sword combat and it's it's really brutal and gore filled, but it's got some good stuff in it. I played that demo, really enjoyed it, really enjoyed that.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  Also like a historical fiction time period that I feel like hasn't, the depths haven't yet been plumbed. Like, I feel like I don't really see that much Napoleonic War historical fiction.

• 46:34Jason Schreier?

  Exactly.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  Certainly not in games. So I definitely saw it and was like, oh, this is original and cool.

• 46:37Jason Schreier?

  Exactly. It's not like another friggin like, oh, here's the souls like in China. It's like a unique setting that we haven't seen before, which I think is cool. No, no shade on the China games, but there are, there are a lot of them.

• 46:50Jason Schreier?

  And a couple more games that I mentioned Bad Magpie. I played Tomb Raider Legacy of Atlantis, the remake. Pretty cool. That's gonna be another one that I think we're all gonna like and enjoy playing.

• 47:02Kirk Hamilton?

  Those older Tomb Raider games are great.

• 47:04Speaker 02

  They are fun.

• 47:04Kirk Hamilton?

  The puzzles are very cool. They're mostly just puzzle games and they're really cool. So I'm looking forward to having a more modernized version.

• 47:11Jason Schreier?

  So it's funny you say that because the demo I played had some puzzles and some really cool climbing and fun puzzle, puzzle solving. And Lara didn't just say the answers to the puzzles. And then had a section where like you get chased by dinosaurs and have to shoot them. That part was a little less interesting than the puzzles.

• 47:27Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, that famously happens in the original Tomb Raider.

• 47:30Jason Schreier?

  Looks really good.

• 47:31Kirk Hamilton?

  Also like pretty silly.

• 47:32Jason Schreier?

  Gorgeous looking game. I played Escape Academy 2.

• 47:37Speaker 02

  Oh, that's awesome. I like the first one. I think I made it in One More Thing a while back.

• 47:42Kirk Hamilton?

  Love the first one.

• 47:43Jason Schreier?

  Yes, both of you enjoyed that. I really enjoyed this one. Some really cute, fun puzzles. I sat down and played them in co-op with a friend of the show, Billy Shibley, who is a producer on that game and would love to have come on. I was telling him he should come on the show and talk about it because he was saying some really interesting stuff that I think would bring a lot to the show. We were talking a little bit about some cool stuff.

• 48:05Kirk Hamilton?

  That'd be great. And that's cool. He played it in split screen because that is the way to play the original. It's a really fun split screen game.

• 48:11Jason Schreier?

  Yes, yes, yes. I mentioned Stranger Than Heaven. One more. I didn't get to play a ton of this, but I had seen it last year and was really impressed by it last year. This is a game that is like Sardau Valley with murder mysteries inside of it. And it seems really cool. Keep it on your radars. It's coming later this year. It's essentially just like, like I said, here, it's a farming game where there's a murder every month or so, and you can like pinpoint these clues and figure out who did it. And different playthroughs have different murders, but it's not procedurally generated. It's all handcrafted.

• 48:45Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, this is one of those Blumhouse.

• 48:46Jason Schreier?

  Blumhouse, yes, yes, yes. Looks really cool. I'm really excited about it. The demo I played didn't really tell me much because it's not really an easily demoed game, but I really love the art style and I think it looks pretty damn cool.

• 48:59Kirk Hamilton?

  Nice.

• 49:00Jason Schreier?

  But yeah, some of those, a lot of cool stuff coming, I would say.

• 49:04Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah. Right on. A lot of, a lot of cool games to look forward to.

• 49:07Jason Schreier?

  All right. Why don't we take a break and then we'll be back for one more thing.

• 49:13Speaker 03

  Sunscreen companies calculate SPF by testing it on volunteers' butts.

• 49:18Speaker 04

  There is a can of Spam in the Mariana Trench.

• 49:21Speaker 03

  A Nobel Prize winning physicist from the Manhattan Project invented modern speed bumps.

• 49:26Speaker 04

  Mesoamerican native people invented kidney medicine that glows in the dark.

• 49:31Speaker 03

  On the podcast Secretly Incredibly Fascinating, we explore this kind of amazing stuff.

• 49:36Speaker 04

  Stuff about ordinary topics like sunscreen and Spam and speed bumps.

• 49:40Speaker 03

  Topics you'd never expect to be. The title of the podcast, Secretly Incredibly Fascinating.

• 49:45Speaker 04

  Find us by searching for the word secretly in your podcast app.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  And at MaximumFun.org.

• 49:55Speaker 05

  If you like too many podcasts, you'll love Soundheap with John Luke Roberts. It's got clips from all your favorite podcasts, such as Diary of a Tiny CEO,

• 50:03Speaker 06

  Leonard Sprague, tell me how you make your money. I go to the beach and I steal people's towels.

• 50:09Speaker 05

  Remember Armour.

• 50:10Speaker 07

  Don't remember the trend of everyone whacking themselves on the head with hammers and mallets when they wanted to lose weight.

• 50:16Speaker 05

  And Elty John's lobbly songs. I'm here today with Kiki D. Hello, Kiki D. Hello, Elton. There's dozens of episodes to catch up on and brand new episodes going out right now. So if you want far, far, far too many podcasts, then look for Soundheap on Maximum Fun.

• 50:38Jason Schreier?

  And we are back. It's time for one more thing. Maddie, start us off.

• 50:42Speaker 02

  Sure. I watched a movie from 2013 called American Hustle that I had never seen before. Why did I watch it? Because I'm still listening to the Chasing Amy Adams podcast and Amy Adams is in this movie and she is freaking incredible in it. They actually did, they have completed the run. That podcast is done with Amy Adams. They've watched all of her movies up to the present day and they're doing Gwyneth Paltrow next, which is going to be really interesting because she's a much more, she's a much more divisive figure and they're talked about that. So that'll be fun.

• 51:17Jason Schreier?

  Do they change the name of the podcast?

• 51:18Speaker 02

  They changed the name of the podcast. It's called Supporting Actresses now. It's like a pun on the Supporting Actress.

• 51:22Jason Schreier?

  Oh, that's good. That's a great name.

• 51:24Kirk Hamilton?

  That is good. I just had to save that. That's a great name. Good job.

• 51:27Speaker 02

  It's actually, yeah, they're great. I really recommend this podcast. I've talked about it a lot because I really like it. And when they did their American Hustle episode, I had kind of been like watching along with the podcast and I couldn't find it streaming anywhere when they did that app, but it is very briefly on Netflix right now. So if you're listening to this like very soon, it's leaving Netflix at the end of this month. So if you downloaded this right away and you want to watch this movie on Netflix, you can. They weren't so hot on this movie in part because, I don't know if you two remember, but there was like a lot of controversy surrounding this movie because it was directed by David O. Russell and specifically Amy Adams talked after the fact about how his

• 52:07Speaker 02

  treatment of her on set was disturbing. And they talk about that a lot on the podcast and go into full detail about the allegations. And I, I think some people kind of are familiar largely with how Russell has been kind of alleged to be sort of a toxic director and can I, people can look into that on their own time. And the movie I do think is really good though and really worth watching. And if not only for her performance, which I think is haunting and incredible and just so understated at times, but also just because the plot is really cool and weird. It's like a highly fictionalized version. Version of a real life FBI operation that happened in the seventies and eighties.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  So it's a purity period piece, which is fun. Everybody gets their goofy costumes of the time. And the FBI operation was just completely wild and reading about the real operation after the fact was also fun. It was called the AB scam operation. Basically like an FBI handler hired a bunch of con artists to work with him in order to help defraud various politicians into just financial misdealings and how they pull off the con is it's fun. I mean, it's fun to watch con artistry, but also there's like some tragedy involved because the con artists, well, Amy Adams is one of the con artists and she has kind of a tragic story at the heart of this movie.

• 53:33Speaker 02

  So yeah, really recommend it and recommend the accompanying podcast. So you kind of know the bittersweet story of the film. So yeah, that's American Hustle came out in 2013. Still really interesting.

• 53:46Kirk Hamilton?

  Nice. This seems like one I would like more if I rewatched it. I remember I did not care for it when I watched it. I saw it in theaters when it came out and I thought it was a huge mess.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  It's such a mess. It's so weird.

• 53:54Kirk Hamilton?

  I wonder if I saw it again, if I would just think this is a more, this is a plenty interesting movie that was just fun to watch. I could kind of see that.

• 54:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like meandering and weird and mostly just Christian Bale and Bradley Cooper and Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence just like playing unlikable characters for a couple hours.

• 54:11Kirk Hamilton?

  Unbelievable cast, like top of the bottle. There's just so many amazing actors in it.

• 54:15Jason Schreier?

  I remember being interested in it because of the cast, but then hearing what you just said, that was like a mess of a movie.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, a lot of people don't like it, but I kind of enjoyed the ride of it. And I think it helped that I had really low expectations and was like, I know this movie is going to be a mess. But I think the performances are so interesting that it's still worth it. And the con is also interesting. So can't help but have some parts of it be good because of that.

• 54:39Kirk Hamilton?

  Nice.

• 54:40Jason Schreier?

  Okay, Kirk, what's your one more thing?

• 54:42Kirk Hamilton?

  So my one more thing is going to be a very abridged. Recitation of a current event that I only just stumbled into that is like the most insane thing that I'm sure a lot of our listeners are very aware of, or at least tangentially aware of. I was pretty not aware of it, just because I guess it didn't puncture my internet bubbles. But this is the reckless Ben versus bricks and minifigs fiasco. The two of you are smiling. It looks like you're both aware of this.

• 55:10Speaker 02

  I have read some attempts to explain what happened. 404 Media has a really long article that I read that summarized it.

• 55:17Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, tangentially, I want to hear your kind of explanation of this.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:21Kirk Hamilton?

  So I'll tell just my story of experiencing it. I am not going to explain it because it would take forever. Like it really would take like an hour.

• 55:28Jason Schreier?

  Okay.

• 55:28Kirk Hamilton?

  And also it would be exhausting and I would get a ton of stuff wrong because it's so-

• 55:31Jason Schreier?

  Can you put a link in the show notes that like explains-

• 55:33Kirk Hamilton?

  Labyrinthine. That's what I'm gonna do.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  Good idea.

• 55:35Kirk Hamilton?

  Yes. I guess I'll say at the very beginning, Mike Masnick at Tech Dirt has written a terrific 6,000-word breakdown of this. We will link to that.

• 55:45Jason Schreier?

  God.

• 55:46Kirk Hamilton?

  And that is also, I actually found that via the 404 article, which is paywalled. 404 also has a great breakdown of this. And things are happening very quickly in this story. There are current events that I don't know if they're in either of those stories, but there have been like, there are updates happening regularly. I first heard about it due to the like, Jack Conti Patreon element of this story that came up just fairly recently. And that just led, I think my YouTube algorithm just recommended me one of these videos. And I just watched it with no context, other than knowing there was a thing going on.

• 56:20Speaker 02

  Oh my gosh.

• 56:21Jason Schreier?

  So you're saying the YouTube algorithm is a great thing for humanity and it's really-

• 56:25Speaker 02

  Sometimes. It's not too bad.

• 56:27Kirk Hamilton?

  So I watched part two, which is a 35-minute video mostly surrounding the police force in this Utah town that this YouTuber gets involved with. And it was like a crazy video. And watching it, I just kept thinking, I can't believe this. What in the world? And I went back and started the video from the beginning and had even, I was even more just like drawn in by it. And it was so weird and wild and-

• 56:49Jason Schreier?

  Can I just say something? There is a Wikipedia page called Bricks and Minifigs: Reckless Ben Controversy that has four- Forty-nine references sources on it.

• 56:58Kirk Hamilton?

  Yes, I have, I have read it. So anyways, to say, I don't want to spend too long without giving a nutshell for people, but I watched these videos and was really drawn in by Reckless Ben's YouTube videos. And then eventually, when I went and read about it, I kind of wished I had started by just reading a big article explaining what was going on. As entertaining as the YouTube videos are, now that I just, I'm glad I have the whole story and a little bit of this. Like, my takeaway from this is kind of, start with the just full, big-picture journalism. Don't start with the really exciting, fun YouTube video that doesn't tell you everything that happened. So that would be my main advice to people, is read Mike Maznick's article and then go watch the videos, because they are very entertaining and kind of crazy, like, that

• 57:40Kirk Hamilton?

  they exist and are still up on the internet. But, okay, let me give the really quick nutshell. Basically, this guy named Brian Mansell, his father is getting pretty old, he's in his 80s, and he owns this massive collection of Star Wars Lego sets. They've described it as the world's biggest collection, who knows? They've said it's valued at, like, $200,000. It's worth a lot of money, and it's this huge collectible, you know, collection that he's had for a really long time. And then they wanted to sell it, and so they give it on consignment. They're selling it through this local store in Salem, Oregon, called Bricks and Mini-Figs, which is a franchise of, like, a big company that has, like, a whole bunch of different franchises in different locations.

• 58:21Kirk Hamilton?

  Then, through a series of events, all of this alleged because it's not totally clear everything that happened, even though there's video evidence of some of this. Basically, like, the franchise closed, corporate came in and repossessed the contents of the store, and it appears as though Mansell and his father were screwed out of some amount of the Lego sets they had consigned, that they had in consignment at the store. And the store is basically not giving them their money or giving them back the Legos. And there was kind of nothing he could do. Like, they said to him, "Well, yeah, you can sue us, but it's just gonna be a huge legal, like, expensive legal headache, and, you know, it'll cost you more than you would even get back from us, so what are you gonna even do?" So this guy goes to YouTubers, and he begins trying to tell people, like, "Look, this

• 59:04Kirk Hamilton?

  happened, this sucks, this is, like, not fair." Some YouTubers, like Star Wars, or, sorry, Lego YouTubers, start posting about it, they start getting takedown notices from bricks and minifigs, or at least saying that they did. And then he reaches out to this YouTuber called Reckless Ben, whose name is Ben Schneider. And Reckless Ben is described in the TechTwerk article as "T-Mu Nathan Fielder," which I thought was a kind of a funny description. Maybe a little harsh. He's a young guy, he does kind of the Nathan Fielder thing of, like, really committing to incredibly elaborate bits that are far more elaborate than they need to be, and then just kind of acting nonplussed when they don't go as expected, even though he's like, "Well, why? I, like, did this whole crazy elaborate thing, what's wrong?"

• 59:47Kirk Hamilton?

  So Ben Schneider gets a hold of it, and he starts going after bricks and minifigs in a number of different ways, and he documents them in this video, that it's like, this is over the course of many years, really. It's this long thing of trying to figure out, "Where are the Legos? Can I get them back? Will you return them to the sky?" And kind of just, like, escalating and constantly, like, re-engaging and coming back again and again and again to bother these people and try to get them to return the Star Wars figures. It goes from there, and I can't, I can't describe any more of it, but, like, at this point, Ben Schneider has gone to Mexico to escape what he says are charges that have been filed in Utah. There's a whole video about this Utah police force that are, like, that he alleges are in the pocket of the two guys who stole the Legos. He gets arrested multiple times.

• 1:00:31Kirk Hamilton?

  There's all this dash cam and body cam footage from the cops that they've gotten through, like, Freedom of Information-

• 1:00:36Jason Schreier?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:00:36Kirk Hamilton?

  -that they're posting in the YouTube video. The videos are all redacted, but then people on Reddit are saying that they've released the real audio. I could go on and on and on. I mean, it's like, a thousand, it's an endless rabbit hole.

• 1:00:47Jason Schreier?

  This is gonna be a great Netflix documentary.

• 1:00:50Kirk Hamilton?

  It's funny, actually, that a bunch of the comments on YouTube are like, this should be a Netflix documentary. And then the responses will be like, whatever, this is the documentary. Which I think points to a very interesting place that we're at right now, where YouTube is kind of the place you go to get this incredibly engaging content. I mean, I'm watching this video, I put it on for Emily, and we're just watching it, like laughing and being like, what are we watching? This is totally wild. But at the same time, it's not a complete picture. As much as it seems likely, a lot of the things that they're alleging about the owners of this store are true, and it does seem really unfair what happened. They at the very least seem really shady in sending takedown notices to everybody. It's also like, I don't know, like, watching the video does not feel like a complete picture, certainly

• 1:01:33Kirk Hamilton?

  not after watching legal experts weigh in on this, reading this TechDirt article where he really breaks down, you know, the ins and outs and all the stuff in different court cases and filings that, you know, aren't included in the video. So, I don't know, it is interesting to think there could be a documentary about this later, that would not be as engaging as the original YouTube videos, but it would include much more information and tell the whole story. And that's kind of the most frustrating part of this, or the least satisfying part, is that there was going to be a third video that Reckless Ben was going to post, that now he can't. He's been served in one of these many lawsuits. And basically, if he posts the video, or says anything else about bricks and minifigs, I think, he'll like lose, they did a GoFundMe, he'll lose all the money from the GoFundMe

• 1:02:18Kirk Hamilton?

  that he raised for this guy, Brian Mansell, he'll like his, they'll lose a lot of stuff. They could go to jail, like, all this bad stuff could happen. So he posted a short video just saying, alright, normally I would just say fuck them and post it, but there's like too much on the line, and I'm not going to post it, so this is the last you're going to hear from me. I do not think this is the last we're going to hear about this story. This has, of course, like ignited the internet, people are obsessed with it. I can totally see why. And if anyone out there has kind of heard about this a little bit, I would recommend the TechDirt article. And then in that article, he also recommends a video by Leonard French, who is a lawyer with a YouTube channel called Lawful Masses, who did a big video where he's just breaking down a lot of the legal aspects of this. And that is also very interesting, like-

• 1:03:00Kirk Hamilton?

  Just the idea that if anybody involved in this had spoken to lawyers much sooner in the process, like, the whole thing wouldn't have happened, the content would not have been as tremendous, but a lot of, the whole disaster of this thing could have maybe been averted.

• 1:03:13Jason Schreier?

  So basically, that Darren Revel tweet where he's like, "I feel bad for America, but this is great content," that's what you're saying.

• 1:03:20Kirk Hamilton?

  It's very, that was my feeling repeatedly watching the video, the YouTube videos. It was like, "Well, my god, this content is incredible, even if I have incredibly conflicted feelings about this."

• 1:03:31Jason Schreier?

  Man.

• 1:03:32Kirk Hamilton?

  And I was very glad I went and read about it. So, yeah, mostly to recommend that tech dirt breakdown, and just to say, this is a wild story. Like, I can totally see why this has caught and become, caught on and become as viral as it is.

• 1:03:44Jason Schreier?

  The balance between, like, a story that is quick but incomplete and a story that is thorough but takes a little longer is something that journalism has had to deal with for as long as it's been around, and it's interesting to see that happening in the YouTube era.

• 1:03:59Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, this is that magnified, right, times, times a million.

• 1:04:02Jason Schreier?

  My one more thing, I'll go quick. My more thing is also YouTube-related, in that it's a book called Yester Year by Carol Clare Burke. Have you, Burke, have you guys heard of this book? It's pretty famous.

• 1:04:12Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  I haven't.

• 1:04:13Kirk Hamilton?

  Heard all about it.

• 1:04:13Jason Schreier?

  It's one of those books that has gone viral because it's, it's like, every once in a while, maybe every year, you get a couple of books that are, like, so buzzy that they get a film adaptation before they even, or a film adaptation greenlit before they even come out.

• 1:04:28Kirk Hamilton?

  That's how I heard about it.

• 1:04:29Jason Schreier?

  In the credits of it, there's like a thanks to Anne Hathaway because she was already working on the film adaptation before the book was even published.

• 1:04:36Kirk Hamilton?

  Wait till you hear the premise, Matt. You're gonna understand why.

• 1:04:39Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, Matty, just wait for it. So, the premise of this book is that it's about a trad wife influencer, based on, let me just make sure I have the name right.

• 1:04:47Kirk Hamilton?

  Isn't it Ballerina Farm?

• 1:04:48Jason Schreier?

  Yes, Ballerina Farm is the name of the real one.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  Which I have heard of, okay.

• 1:04:52Kirk Hamilton?

  Probably best-known trad wife influencer.

• 1:04:54Jason Schreier?

  So, this is a trad wife influencer, this one is called Yester Year, and it's about a woman who lives on a farm, and has five kids, and lives a rustic life, and gets, like, has farm animals, and milks her own cows, yada, yada, yada, sells stuff. Stuff on the internet and has a YouTube channel, Instagram, et cetera, et cetera. She's an awful person that is made very clear from the get go. She has staff who she tries to hide from the internet and they run things behind the scenes. She has a failing marriage. Her kids, one of her kids like clearly doesn't want to be on camera. It's, it's the whole shebang, but the premise is that at a certain point she wakes up and finds that she is in the 1800s, or at least it seems like she is.

• 1:05:38Jason Schreier?

  And she is waking up on an actual version of a farm and has to figure out like to live life that way. So it's like suddenly she doesn't have her, her electricity and cameras and staff and all this stuff.

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  So it's a bit of a like revenge fantasy on the part of all of us who would watch such a thing.

• 1:05:58Kirk Hamilton?

  I mean, it's, and it's so, you remember that novel, the plot where the guy comes into the, you know, fail, the like failed author's office and gives him an idea for a plot that's so good that he steals it. This is like that kind of a plot idea. Like if you hear that idea, you'd be like, oh my God, this is going to get optioned by Anne Hathaway to be made into a movie before I've even finished writing it.

• 1:06:17Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, you can see why it's been so buzzy. And the book is pretty good. I don't know if I love the way it all comes together at the end, but I did love the process of reading it and found it extremely enjoyable to read through. If you don't mind, an extremely unlikable protagonist.

• 1:06:36Jason Schreier?

  And who you definitely, I mean, the, the book does a good job of like helping you empathize with her and relate to her a little bit. And the problem is she went through on her own childhood and like what made her choose this life. There's a lot of good history there, a lot about women and, and just like how they operate in the world and how I have to operate. So there's a lot of good stuff in there. The way it all comes together, I don't know, I have mixed feelings about.

• 1:06:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I can't really think of a good ending based on that plot. It's such a great premise, but it is like, well, how would you end that story satisfyingly?

• 1:07:06Jason Schreier?

  Yeah. I mean, I don't want to spoil what happens, but like, I don't know if I really bought it or enjoyed it. That said, really recommend the book just because it's a great read.

• 1:07:17Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I want to read it just because everyone's talking about it and I'm sure I'll see the movie and it seems like it's a pretty easy read as well.

• 1:07:22Jason Schreier?

  It's going to be a fantastic movie.

• 1:07:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, right on.

• 1:07:26Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, it's really enjoyable. You should both read it. You'll both really enjoy it. Once again, it's called "Yesteryear." You've probably seen it on the bookshelves because it's it's gone everywhere. All right, that is it for this week's episode.

• 1:07:39Kirk Hamilton?

  It is. That'll do it.

• 1:07:41Jason Schreier?

  Kirk and Maddie, I'll see you both next week.

• 1:07:44Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, see you both next week.

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 1:07:48Kirk Hamilton?

  Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddy Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom G. J. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join. Email us at [email protected] and find links to our merch store and our Discord server in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

• 1:08:46Kirk Hamilton?

  Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.