Triple Play: Mewgenics

Fresh off their interview with Mewgenics co-creator Edmund McMillen, the Triple Click gang dives into the hit game itself. They talk about the gross-out humor, the brilliant combat, and that truly spectacular soundtrack. (All of my nights, I'm chasin' rats!)

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

• 0:03Speaker 00

  I've had my two cats for years, so I know all about their special abilities, like shooting bolts of lightning and commanding sentient butt maggots. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week, we talk about Eugenics, a game about breeding cats and sending them into battle in a cruel world. These cats are magic and also gross, but they can probably survive this, unless they don't.

• 0:31Speaker 00

  I'm Maddy Myers.

• 0:32Jason Schreier?

  I'm Jason Schreier.

• 0:33Kirk Hamilton?

  And I'm Kirk Hamilton, and hello.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  Hi, it's us again.

• 0:37Jason Schreier?

  Hi there.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  We all made it back here.

• 0:40Jason Schreier?

  We all made it, chasing rats.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  We chased the rats and, you know, there was, there was a lot of poop to clean up. We'll get to it. We got, we got so, so much to get to, but that won't make sense for now, not until later in the episode. But hey, I love coming back here with you two every week.

• 1:01Jason Schreier?

  Did you guys watch the Dice Awards last week?

• 1:03Speaker 00

  I didn't, and you were there in person, right, Jason?

• 1:06Jason Schreier?

  I was there in person. I was at the Dice Convention in Las Vegas and Mike Drucker, a friend of the show, Mike Drucker, who wrote a great book that everybody should read last year. Mike Drucker comes up to me and he's like, hey, I wrote you a line in, in the awards monologue. I was like, oh.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  A roast?

• 1:27Kirk Hamilton?

  Always ominous.

• 1:28Jason Schreier?

  And people should look it up online. It's like you could watch the stream, I think, on IGN of Greg Miller's monologue at the Dice Awards, but it's quite a, quite a shout out.

• 1:37Speaker 03

  Whether you've been nominated or not, all of you have done such good work and we really do appreciate every single one of you.

• 1:43Speaker 04

  Because no matter where you're from or what your job is in the industry, we all share one thing in common: being afraid of Jason Schreier.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  Oh shoot, I think he's in the room right now, actually.

• 1:56Speaker 04

  If you don't move, he can't see you.

• 1:58Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:59Speaker 04

  Okay? And then after, at the after-party, everybody be quiet.

• 2:05Speaker 00

  Hey, that's a compliment.

• 2:07Jason Schreier?

  I appreciated the shout-out. People came up to me afterwards and they were like, hey, you got a shout-out.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  That's kind of cool. That Greg got to do like a host monologue with bits in it. That's fun.

• 2:18Jason Schreier?

  Greg does that every year. He always does a monologue.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  Shows what I know.

• 2:21Jason Schreier?

  Yeah.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  Well, we should have that.

• 2:22Jason Schreier?

  It's not, the reason people don't watch it is because it doesn't have new Hideo Kojima trailer, so it's just an horror show.

• 2:29Kirk Hamilton?

  It's good. They say it is better to be feared than to be loved, Jason, so you've achieved the better outcome.

• 2:34Jason Schreier?

  Who's "they" in that quote?

• 2:35Speaker 00

  Machiavelli specifically says that, as I recall.

• 2:38Jason Schreier?

  Gotcha.

• 2:39Speaker 00

  That's a...

• 2:39Kirk Hamilton?

  By "they" I mean Machiavelli.

• 2:40Jason Schreier?

  I think that's one of my cat's names in Mewgenics.

• 2:43Speaker 00

  It could be. We'll get to that. So, before we do, though, I think it's worth saying, we really appreciate all of our listeners. We're a listener-supported show, and we say it every week, but it's true every week, and we mean it every week, and I think about it even when we're not recording because of how meaningful it is. And we make special content just for our listeners. We make bonus episodes for them, and you can get them if you go to maximumfun.org/join. And this past month, we did a Beans Cast about Pluribus, a really cool TV show with Ray Sehorn starring in it. Cool sci-fi, post-apocalyptic show,

• 3:22Speaker 00

  very interesting, kind of, uh, brain threats on display in there that we got way into. And this coming month, our bonus episode is gonna be about a documentary called King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters that I watched back in 2007, but I found out the guys haven't ever seen, so I'm excited for the three of us to watch that and talk about it. On our bonus feed, and how would you get that bonus feed? Once again, it's maximumfun.org/join. Become a member, support the show and support us and get those warm, fuzzy feelings and warm, fuzzy bonus episodes. Pretty good.

• 4:02Kirk Hamilton?

  So I am actually going to speak at the career day at the school of a friend of mine's kids, the school that they go to. And I will be talking about making podcasts for a living and also making a video game podcast. I'm sure some of them will ask about playing video games for my job. I made a little like slide deck and one of the slides says, how I do and don't make money. And under do, it says listener donations. And then under don't, it says paid sponsorships, reading ads, brand deals. And then it says, anything that feels off.

• 4:38Kirk Hamilton?

  So our listener support makes it possible for us to avoid doing anything that feels off.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  In quotes, big air quotes.

• 4:45Jason Schreier?

  Can I give you a tip, Kirk, for your, for your talk to them? Just throw in a six, seven and they'll, they'll love you. Just throw it in somewhere.

• 4:53Kirk Hamilton?

  I think they might throw me physically out of the building.

• 4:57Jason Schreier?

  No, you gotta do it.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  It's a good way to make sure the slang term goes away is for older people to start saying it.

• 5:03Jason Schreier?

  Kirk called himself an unc a few weeks ago, remember?

• 5:06Speaker 00

  That's true.

• 5:06Kirk Hamilton?

  Given that, I don't know, anytime I, like I've made references to that kind of thing to my niece, who is granted a little bit older than these students, but like the level of eye roll that I get when I engage in slang, even like discussion of slang on those terms, makes me think that maybe I shouldn't try to pull it off, even though it would be funny and I could report back how it goes if I do.

• 5:29Jason Schreier?

  If they're sub 10, you can get away with it. It's like after like, like 11, 12 is where you start getting into eye roll territory, I would say.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  And you have to really be strong to withstand that level of embarrassment on their part. They're embarrassed of you and you just have to withstand how they feel.

• 5:45Jason Schreier?

  Right. The cringe emanating.

• 5:48Speaker 00

  The cringe emanating. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, we've been teasing it. Jason, what are we talking about today?

• 5:55Jason Schreier?

  Well, speaking of. Cringe. Here is a game full of cringe comedy. So last week, we spoke to Edmund McMillan, the co-creator of a video game called Mewgenics, along with Tyler Glale. And since then, the game has become a massive success. It is now, as of Tuesday, February 17th, it has sold a million copies. It is a smash hit and I believe McMillan's biggest game to date. So you're welcome to triple click for making that happen.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  The triple click bump, all are doing, I'm sure.

• 6:32Jason Schreier?

  Last week, we talked about the development of this game of Mewgenics. So that meant if you haven't listened to it, you should check it out because this week we are going to talk about the game itself. We've all been playing it. I have played a ton of it and it is going to be quite fun to talk about. So Mewgenics is a game that is half cat breeding simulator and half strategy RPG. You operate a house, you're a cat lady in a house where you hoard cats and old furniture. And your cats live there and they breed and they make cats that are, that kind of inherit the traits of their parents. And then as you breed new cats, you send them out on adventures to a whole bunch of different areas,

• 7:13Jason Schreier?

  from sewers and alleys to increasingly bonkers areas that get more and more zany as you go. And they go on these runs that are essentially rogue lights, where there are battles and these battles are turn-based strategy, like grid-based RPG combat. And you can use your cats abilities in increasingly powerful ways to take out enemies, to try to break the game by sending objects hurling around and lighting things on fire and moving things with your mind and doing all sorts of bonkers things. It is so fun. It is so addictive. I've played possibly 85 hours,

• 7:54Jason Schreier?

  something like that, and seen a good, a good chunk of what this game has had to offer. I am curious to hear your thoughts and get into this. Kirk, why don't you start? What do you think of this game and how much have you played?

• 8:08Kirk Hamilton?

  So I actually haven't played a ton and it's because this is a game that I think that I admire more than I love. I've had a little bit of a hard time getting into it largely for aesthetic and narrative reasons. I think it's really impressive what Tyler and Edmund have pulled off. It's clearly a design feat. It's so massive. It's so variable. It's so well-made in a lot of ways, though I do have some gripes about some of the ways that it's made. But it's more that I, being aware of that as I play it, being aware that it is a game that will suck hundreds of hours, that took its own creator 200-plus hours to beat, makes

• 8:49Kirk Hamilton?

  me actually a little bit skittish of it. And also, it's just, you know, it's, there are a lot of things competing for my time. And when I sit down to play it, I do find it somewhat off-putting in its general moment-to-moment, like, experience. And while I can see, like Jason, I can see your smile, like, there is this, like, sort of glee in how nasty and sort of out of time it feels. It feels very much like that Ren and Stimpy 2000s-era gross cartoon aesthetic. That was never my jam. It's still not. And so the fact that the aesthetics of it and the story, like, aren't pulling me in and making me feel enticed and sort of at home or comfortable, and instead sort of push me away and make

• 9:33Kirk Hamilton?

  me feel a little alienated, makes it a little harder for me to super dig into it.

• 9:38Jason Schreier?

  Yeah. So, a little context here. I mean, if the name Mugenix didn't signal this to you, this is a very edgelord-y game. It's full of edgelord humor. It's the type of game where you're just constantly confronted with, like, poop and vomit and other gross-out, gross-out things.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  Cat humping.

• 9:58Jason Schreier?

  Yeah. Well, the cat humping you can turn off. Dead fetuses, yeah, a lot of, what appears to be Edmund McMillen's style of humor. If you played Binding of Isaac, you saw a lot of that stuff, too. It's interesting. I wouldn't say that it feels mean-spirited at all, which is an odd thing to say about a game in which your characters can get traits like autism and Down Syndrome and other kind of...

• 10:23Jason Schreier?

  Mental disease, like diseases and like, I don't know, what's the best word to to describe that? Psychological conditions, disabilities, all sorts of stuff like that. But and it's an odd thing to be like, I don't know, I'm still trying to reconcile with that where it's kind of like, it's a gameplay trait to have Down syndrome. And I believe with that one in particular, your strength is higher, but your intelligence is down and something feels a little bit off about that. But at the same time, it's not doing that in a mean spirited way. It doesn't feel like it's trying to make fun of people with Down syndrome. And in fact, Edmund told us last week that he has two neurodivergent kids and he seems to love them to death and talks about their their traits and qualities and stuff like that. That's one aspect of it.

• 11:06Jason Schreier?

  The other aspect of it, Kirk, to your point, is the aesthetic of it all. And that's definitely not for everyone, although it's clearly for a lot of people. Me personally, I don't like, I don't know, I don't mind it. And I'm OK with it because the gameplay itself is so compelling for me. Matty, what do you think of this game?

• 11:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm somewhere between you two on it in that I think I do have a higher tolerance for some edgelord humor. I feel like there's a certain type of like edgy cartoon that was around a lot when we specifically were growing up and that I think probably influenced Edmund. I'm not sure how old Tyler is, but I think this is like a really specific genre of cartoon that existed and like that I can kind of see the lineage here.

• 11:49Jason Schreier?

  Ren and Stimpy?

• 11:50Speaker 00

  Ren and Stimpy is a great example, although I didn't watch that much of that. But to just kind of like continue off that thought, I I feel like the style of the game is therefore pretty hit or miss for me. Like sometimes the comedy really works for me and I do think it's funny and other times it doesn't, but I kind of like roll with the punches in the sense that I'm like, well, I'm playing a game called Mewgenics. That's sort of an inherent edgy title, but also this is a mean world that the game is set in. I don't know that the game is mean spirited, but I think the world that it takes place in is mean and that you are existing in this sort of like apocalyptic landscape

• 12:33Speaker 00

  of strange places. The cats may have some disabilities that remind us of the ones in the real world, but they also have magical powers and also they, you know, some of the villainous creatures that you fight will like eat cats and some of them look like cats that eat cats and like do things that real cats in the world that we know wouldn't do. And so there's like a lot of supernatural elements that are deeply disturbing, like body horror stuff as well. And then also the various people that you meet in this world are very unsettling and many of them seem unhappy or abused. And that's like an explicit part of what their backstory is and what they'll happily tell you about. And like, that isn't always played for laughs. It's sometimes just like, these people exist

• 13:17Speaker 00

  in a cruel world. And like, that is just a thing. We actually kind of talked about this with Cyberpunk 2077 of all comparisons, but I remember kind of talking about being like, you know, hanging out with Johnny Silverhand, like that guy's a real dick. Like, you kind of have to be willing to put up with somebody who's gonna be shit talking you for the entire experience of playing that game. And that was something that I at times found kind of rough about that game. And like, it's a super different type of roughness here, but that's present in Mugenix. And it's, when it hits, I'm like, I'm down for it, but when it misses, I'm, I'm often just like, ah, whatever. Okay. And then I just keep clicking. I will say, I do agree, Jason, like, the game itself, like, the strategic part of

• 13:59Speaker 00

  the game is very much in line with the kind of thing I enjoy. So that kind of helps some of the medicine go down for me. And we can get into that more, but like, the turn-based strategy and randomization elements, scratch a very specific itch that not many games do. And I really like kind of mid-vaxing my cat teams. So it doesn't mean-

• 14:24Speaker 00

  Like, oh, I forgive all the things about the game I don't like. But it does mean that there's a pretty big chunk of the game that I do like, which is taking my cats into battle and battling with them.

• 14:32Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I'd say it's a very joyful game despite being set in a pretty harsh world. There's a lot of joy in it. It's clearly just, there's a lot of glee in the way that it rolls. And I don't really have a problem with that at all. It's, it's more, you know, that the game design is so clearly great. It's just, there are other strategy games that I could be playing instead. I mean, for me, it's Karen. I'm still playing that game and I, you know, when I'm kind of sitting there looking at these two games to play, one of them has like blown me away and like has pulled me in with its, with everything about it, that being Karen. And like, I'm like, well, I want to keep playing that, you know? And like, I, I've played quite a bit of Mewgenics and I wanted to talk about it on the show.

• 15:14Kirk Hamilton?

  But it's not so much like, ah, Mewgenics, nothing like that. Like, the game is clearly great. Obviously, tons of people like it and I get it. It's just kind of, it's not my vibe and when I'm playing it, I'm a little, I'm like, it keeps me at arm's length. I am curious, I get the sense that playing more and more and more of it, that like the tonal stuff, it just becomes such a rich experience that you leave some of those initial impressions behind and it becomes kind of something that you experience on its own terms. Jason, is that something you've found to be the case?

• 15:44Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I think so. Or you just kind of get used to it or you just kind of ignore it. Kirk, how far are you?

• 15:49Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm in the first act. I'm like six or seven hours in.

• 15:52Jason Schreier?

  But like which part of the first act? I'm just curious. I just want to get a sense of like.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  What areas have you seen this may be a better way to ask this question?

• 15:57Kirk Hamilton?

  The hard mode of the sewers and I've unlocked the junkyard and the, I think the caves.

• 16:02Jason Schreier?

  Okay. Yeah. So not very far. Okay. Yeah. As the loop kind of reveals itself, that's when you start to just kind of get so sucked in that you just want to see how much you can break the game, how far you can push these cats. What are there new things you can discover along the way? The most important thing that happens as you go is you'll unlock more classes. And classes are this game's version of, I don't know, Emma made a lot of Magic the Gathering comparisons last week. They're that, they're this game's version of like colors in Magic the Gathering. Each class has its own set of, I don't know, at least 100 skills that you'll start to randomly get as you build out your team and play around with more classes.

• 16:45Jason Schreier?

  And they, each class like has totally different types of builds that you can get. Like, for example, one of the early classes you unlock is called the Druid. And when I first started playing around with that, I was like, man, this is kind of lame. His only ability is this, or his main ability, instead of an attack, it just kind of buffs your characters and it seems kind of weak. But then you start to play around with them a little bit more and you can do so much cool stuff as you unlock more abilities. And then what happens is as you start to learn how breeding works and get the hang of that, which doesn't, which takes a while, don't get me wrong. But as you do that, you start to realize, oh, I can breed characters with like some class abilities and then equip different classes on them and like multi-class and

• 17:29Jason Schreier?

  play around with combinations and all sorts of crazy ways. One of my favorites, I'll just, just to give you a tangible example, is there's a priest's passive ability where anytime an enemy just like kills something, it will take 10 damage. And if you have that ability in your party, whether it's a priest or some other cat who inherited from a priest, you can combine that with like the Druid's ability to just be constantly summon things, summoning things, or like an item that spawns maggots every time you move in a certain direction or something like that, all sorts of abilities that summon monsters with one health or low health. And then you just have your own guys everywhere getting killed by the enemies and the enemies are just dying because they're killing your guys super fast and taking 10 damage every time.

• 18:14Jason Schreier?

  And it's just this amazing synergy that is just fun to watch unfold. It's like you built this machine of death with your kitties that, that is super powerful. And that is the type of thing that is really appealing to me about this game. I'm still discovering new things. I'm still discovering item sets and combinations and how they work. So yes, Kirk, to your point, I think the more time you give this game, the more you invest in it and understand things like that, the more you'll get out of it.

• 18:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, and like the fact that there's so many items, which you kind of alluded to, those also participate with the different abilities that you unlock. And like, I think Edmund said, like, 750 items, something like that. And that sense of just endlessness becomes part of the charm of it over time as well, is that you just discover more and more absurd items, and they can interlock with existing abilities that you have. Or in my case, like between each battle, you'd be like, okay, like, did that work that well? Do I want to re-equip all my cats with a different permutation? Because you can do that between runs, or rounds essentially. Whereas with skills, you've made your choice and you have to live with that. So you can like,

• 19:25Speaker 00

  continue to iterate as you're going down the line. And also, if you have a really great run, I mean, this is like, something that I think is really effective about the game, is that you kind of get attached to that quad of cats that you have, that just like, end up having like, some really great synergy, and like, take you all the way down a line to like, fight a ton of battles in a row, and like, succeed in some way, whatever you're trying to get past. Then eventually, they will retire. And there's like, this sort of mechanic where, once the cats complete this big battle, you can't take them out again. And like, there's, there's like, one exception to that that I know of, like, there's a boss who you have to use retired

• 20:06Speaker 00

  cats against. But by and large, that's not the mechanic of this game, is that once a cat-

• 20:12Jason Schreier?

  Okay, so what you're describing, just to get a little more clarity on that, is, is another thing, which is, they're called house bosses. And there are a bunch of them throughout the game. And so, yeah, there's incentive to keep your retired cats around, because then you can use them against these house bosses. They're kind of the ultimate challenges.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  Makes sense.

• 20:30Jason Schreier?

  They're tough challenges, basically. And that's part of the gameplay loop, is figuring out which retired cats you want to keep, which you want to donate to the NPCs to start unlocking stuff through them, and getting perks through them. It's all just kind of this, this cycle of, this flywheel of, of gameplay, that, again, just makes it that one more turn thing just irresistible.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And I think that can be- Really rewarding because you feel like you've invested all of your time, but also you, the player, have like discovered these synergies and you're rewarded for it. But also it's kind of bittersweet because you're like, okay, these cats are retired. But I don't know, it's like one of the few things about the game that I feel like has a positive vibe. Where I'm like, yeah, these cats get to rest now. They've gone through all these cruelties and this horrible dismal world that they've been trudging through. But they survived and like now they get to just be grandpas and grandmas in the house.

• 21:25Kirk Hamilton?

  Or they get donated to the weird guy in the sewers to do something.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  Look, it's a cruel world. I'm not going to deny it's a cruel world. It is. It's, it's rough. It's rough for these cats.

• 21:35Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I was struck by something Edmund said when we talked to him that he in testing had a lot of players telling him, I want to keep my cats. I really have become attached to them. And his response was, it is so important that you feel that way and that you can't keep them. Like that you have to move on and adapt. That's something that the game seems to do very well is encourage creative adaptation on the part of the player. That's basically the, the whole gameplay loop is just this constant like feeling of, okay, what have I got? How can I make this work? Uh, how can I, you know, like you were saying, Matty, the fact that you can adjust your items in between rounds means that you're always reacting and adapting to your party.

• 22:18Kirk Hamilton?

  And then, I mean, I can only imagine like Jason, some of the things that you're saying that you've unlocked, you know, or the things Edmund was talking about with how many items and abilities there are. There's an essentially an infinite number of possibilities and no two runs may ever be the same. So you're both having an incredible experience and wish, you want to savor it, right? You want to kind of hold on to it because it is going to end at some point and you'll keep playing and you'll have other cool experiences. You'll just have to trust that. But this one experience that you're having is, is one time only.

• 22:49Jason Schreier?

  It gets bonkers. I mean, you'll start getting these side quests from Dr. Beanie's, who gives you these items that you have to take on different runs, and they just like totally change the gameplay in all sorts of different ways. I just did one ridiculous run where I had, so you can also, from the shop, you can eventually, you'll eventually be able to buy these blank collars, and blank collars will duplicate one of your classes every time you go on a run, and you could potentially like, so you could potentially have four wizards or whatever. And so I just had a run where I had a side quest item that made it so only one of my cats would level, cats would level up. And then at the same time, I had all four

• 23:29Jason Schreier?

  of my cats to the same class, kind of a mid-game class, I won't spoil the name of it. But these four, these four cats were going out, they're all the same class, doing ridiculous damage, only one of them is leveling up, gets up to like level 24 by the time I'm done with the whole thing. It's just a ridiculous, ridiculous run. And yeah, I mean, again, it's very much about breaking the game and the kind of the classic, I don't know, classic systemic emergent nonsense type of mold. Tears of the Kingdom let you do, let you play around with things in all sorts of ways. It's kind of, it's in that same mold, going all the way back to, I don't know, immersive sims and Ultima Underworld. It's very much about just kind of giving you

• 24:11Jason Schreier?

  all sorts of tools to play around with and explore and watch them break things. Occasionally, you'll get into something that might seem like it's actually broken the game, and then it'll find some fail safe. Like, there are a lot of abilities and items and stuff that let you do knockback, which sends characters or enemies flying whenever you do something. And sometimes you'll have knockback between two characters, and so you'll have, you'll watch like, a cat or an enemy just flipping back and forth, bouncing back and forth between two characters, until eventually they run out of steam and like, stop somehow. But yeah, it's, it's, it's one of those games. I'm actually surprised that you're not more into it, Kirk. I think that if you can get over the aesthetic stuff.

• 24:53Jason Schreier?

  I think it's very much your type of game because it's like it's got the grid-based strategy of, I don't know, an XCOM or a Fire Emblem combined with the systemic stuff that I know all of us love in games.

• 25:07Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it's helped me understand, I think, that story and setting and aesthetics matter a lot to me. I think that that's, it's sort of helped me see that you can make a game that is very much up my street in terms of mechanics, but if I'm not drawn in by the story and the world and the way that it looks and feels, it actually will, you know, be a little more challenging for me to play it. I mean, a game like Tactical Breach Wizards, I loved that game because it was so brilliantly designed. It was incredibly clever and, you know, you have a lot of really creative synergies with your party. But I also love that game because it's brilliantly written, in my opinion, you know, to my aesthetic. I found it so funny and charming and ultimately moving, and that actually drew me in. A rogue

• 25:52Kirk Hamilton?

  like, like Blue Prince, for me, aesthetically, the feeling of this mysterious house, of this kind of austere mystery buried beneath the surface, the stillness and quiet, the way that the music worked, that was a big part of that experience for me, even though I also really liked the mechanics of it and the puzzles. So this has helped me kind of understand that. You know, it's interesting, comparing this with other tactical role-playing games. An element of a lot of those games, or I suppose tactical games, especially in XCOM, like a kind of isometric tactical game, an element of those games is savescumbing, or the possibility of savescumbing. Have the two of you run into the anti-savescumbing feature in this game?

• 26:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was gonna bring this up because I was curious.

• 26:36Kirk Hamilton?

  Do you want to describe it, Maddie? It's very funny.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it scares me, so I haven't fully experienced it because like, there was one time, I've been playing this game on my Steam Deck a lot. I think Jason and I have both been playing in this way.

• 26:49Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, entirely Steam Deck, yeah, for me.

• 26:50Speaker 00

  And so there was a night where I was like, ah, you know, middle of a run, whatever, it's not that great of a run. I'm just gonna like X out of the game and I'll pick it up tomorrow, wherever I was. And- When I picked it up, there's a character who yells at you. I can't remember this character's name.

• 27:09Jason Schreier?

  Steven.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  Steven, but and he's like, I know what you're trying to do. You're trying to mess with the game file. And I was like, listen, man, I just had to go to bed. I, I was not trying to save scum. I was simply just trying to X out of my game and pick it up where I was. But this game kind of makes it seem like you can do that, like save, save and exit and come right back in the middle of a run. But you can't. And I think that like a game like XCOM, I mean, it's funny. We talked about this a lot in our Blake Manor episode. Like the idea of saves coming in a game like that, but XCOM is a better example of this because it's also a tactical strategy game.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  Turn based. Saves coming is like a big piece of the culture around that game. Like I, especially if you name all the characters after your friends or whatever. You're like, I gotta save all my soldiers. I gotta make sure they're safe. But in this game, it's very clear that a run is a run. And I've gotten used to just putting the game in suspend mode overnight when I go to bed and just picking it up from there. Like I, I've had to just deal with that because you can't save and close it. That's just how it works. You're not supposed to.

• 28:20Jason Schreier?

  Well, you can one time per run. He'll let you do it for free. And then after that he'll punish you.

• 28:25Speaker 00

  Clearly I was, I never wanted to face the punishments, whatever they were.

• 28:28Jason Schreier?

  But I mean, you can still do it one time per run without having to worry about the punishment. So you don't have to worry about. And also if you like screw up in a battle or something, you could do it one time.

• 28:38Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, and if you, if you try to save scum too many times, he eventually just like takes over the run for you and plays the game for you. He says, you can't be trusted with.

• 28:47Jason Schreier?

  So it'll be AI playing as you against the enemy.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  I can't stand that. There's an item in the game that is called AI hat that I like let one of my cats wear. And then I was so mad because I was like, no, it's not letting me play as my cat anymore. It like, it gives you a bunch of stat increases. But like, you don't get to control your cat. I immediately took it off after that run. I was so mad. So like, that would definitely bother me if, if Steven quote unquote took over my.

• 29:12Jason Schreier?

  Don't save them.

• 29:13Speaker 00

  This is why I didn't want to do it. When characters in this game tell me they're gonna punish me, this game is so intense that I figure they really will. I'm like, I don't know what's gonna happen to these poor cats if I don't protect them. I'm the only one who's gonna be there for them.

• 29:26Kirk Hamilton?

  So I generally like this game's approach to permanence. I think that's a cool and different thing. And it's in line with, at least, the philosophy that Edmund articulated on the show, that he wants you to just commit to the playthrough, go through it, get to the next one.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  Cats die, and they really die. I appreciate all that stuff. I think that's really important.

• 29:44Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I do kinda wish there was a way to,

• 29:50Kirk Hamilton?

  I don't know if it's preview and undo, or have a little bit more flexibility with like how I input my commands. So I have some issues with the controls on this game. Like, playing it on Steam Deck. This game is great on Steam Deck. It looks good on Steam Deck. The UI seems designed for Steam Deck. It's so great. I cannot figure out a control scheme that works for me. Like, I've been kind of building one slowly, where I'm using the sort of, the triggers are the mouse buttons, and I'm using the trackpads as the mouse, and then trying to like map keyboard shortcuts to the face buttons. And that's okay, but even then I find it to be kind of imprecise. There is crucially a button that allows you to shift to a tactical view of the battlefield that shows you everything in a simplified way,

• 30:35Kirk Hamilton?

  so you can see enemy pieces, almost like a board game or something. Without that, man, I don't know. There's so much junk all over the screen. There's so much stuff happening everywhere that it can be really hard to even tell. Like, I'll kill every enemy, and then there will be some maggot somewhere that I haven't killed, and I don't even know where it is. So it's nice that it has that option.

• 30:54Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, you could just hold Y if you're playing into control.

• 30:56Speaker 00

  Yes, Y, or the top button, top face button.

• 30:58Kirk Hamilton?

  And having played this game also on PC with a mouse and keyboard, it's way better. Like, it is a much better experience, in my opinion anyways. I found it much smoother. And I wish there were some... Just a better or a different kind of controller setup, in part because with the controller, I am much more likely to accidentally input things, to just waste an attack that I didn't realize I was about to do, send an enemy, you know, or send a cat to a square I didn't mean to send them to. And there's no undo button or failing that like ability to preview. I mean, this is one of Tactical Breach Wizard's great innovations or one of its great ideas is that you're always, you have this time manipulation. So you can play out a turn and see how it plays out and then rewind and try again.

• 31:43Kirk Hamilton?

  And that really appeals to my tactical brain. I really like to try a bunch of different things. And it's one of the reasons why in some of these games I like saves coming. It isn't so much that I want to undo a mistake. It's that I want to just try everything. I really like the feeling of looking at a really impossible situation in XCOM where, man, one of my soldiers is getting killed and then just thinking, okay, how can I, can I figure out a way through this, keeping everybody alive? And I find that really pleasing. Obviously, this game does not have to do that. It's not trying to do that, and that's fine. But I do find that with the accidental inputs, the fact that there's no real way to cancel an accidental input is frustrating for me, at least at the, at the point I'm at in the game.

• 32:23Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, so what's different about this game compared to some of the other tactical RPGs that you mentioned, that we played and that we talked about on the show, from XCOM to Fire Emblem to Final Fantasy Tactics, is that, to Tactical Breach Wizards, of course, is that all of those games have a little bit more at stake in their individual battles and their battles are a little bit longer. With this game, you're doing a lot more battles over the course of the game. I probably played through several hundred battles at this point, probably even upwards of a thousand. Because each run, you're going through like between, I don't know, five and 25 battles. And they're on small maps.

• 33:06Jason Schreier?

  It can be cleared relatively quickly, depending on how good your team is and how powerful the enemies are. Each enemy is unique and has its own unique abilities, but you learn them, you can learn them as you're going pretty quickly. And kind of learn the language of the game to an extent where you don't have to spend that time. And I think that would be a drag on the game if it was encouraging you to do that sort of thing, to be like experimenting and then rewinding and then experimenting again.

• 33:33Kirk Hamilton?

  Right. And I do want to be clear that I don't want the game to do that. I know I said that already, but just to say that again, I'm just saying like, I like that, but not that this game should do that.

• 33:41Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I'm saying the reason that it isn't in here is because it's meant to be a much faster paced sort of thing. And it's also, I think, one of the mentalities that you have to have when you're playing this game is to just like learn to let go. Like, it's always annoying when you lose a good run, especially if you get really far and you lose a good run. And it's like you played an hour and you're like, man, that sucks. I just lost all that progress or something. But it's, the cats are so disposable, you get so many constantly. You're constantly just getting new items and gold and food and all this other stuff. That it's really not a big deal if you lose a run. As opposed to again, some of those other games in XCOM, if you lose a character, it's a much, much bigger deal than if you lose a cat in this game.

• 34:23Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I think, I think that that's true. And even feels in line with the amount that I, with it, with the amount that I've played, the experience that I've had. However, I just, I do think that if you are losing a cat or just making mistakes due to interface sloppiness, like due to the fact that the interface and the control scheme are just not, they're suboptimal in my experience anyways. It just feels like, like gumming it up, trying to tell the cat to do one thing and it does another. Like, that's just kind of a bad feeling. And you rarely lose a run because of that. But the fact that that's a factor at all is just a little unfortunate, given that with a cleaner interface, it could just be better.

• 35:05Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, you'll get used to it. I also, I think the game isn't on consoles yet. It's coming to consoles eventually. I think they'll have a, they'll do a much better controller interface when that happens. Right now, the controller interface is, yeah, mediocre. It's mostly like you're controlling a mouse with the joystick and trying to press things. And yeah, not ideal.

• 35:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, it doesn't feel like it's meant for that. You know, it's funny, Kirk, I feel like the thing you're describing is actually more my issue in the. Kind of house building part of the game.

• 35:32Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, it's certainly an issue there, too.

• 35:34Speaker 00

  Where that's the part of the game where I would say I do have some issues with the design and the tediousness involved with like, this is kind of like when you're back at your home base, there's sort of a base building mechanic in this game where you have all your cats in the house, you level up the house by getting more rooms, you buy furniture for the house to like, kind of increase the stimulation and fun that the cats have and you have to like, keep an eye on their their emotional wellbeing and also ensure that the right cats are in the right rooms to be breeding with each other, because you're a mewgenicist, folks, just like the title says, and you want your cats to have the right qualities bred into them. So like,

• 36:16Speaker 00

  that stuff, I've played a lot of games that are of that genre, and having those controls be finicky stands out to me so much here as like, a problem for me. And I wish that that stuff was stronger, because like, having to click, like, you have to click on poop to clean it up. But like, as near as I can tell, there's no like, better way to do that, that gets unlocked later. Like, it's just always tedious and it remains so forever. And cleaning up cat poop in real life, I'm not gonna sing its praises, it's quite tedious in real life. But like, usually in a game, at some point, these things become easier. And also, like, the process of like, deciding who

• 36:58Speaker 00

  to donate your cats to. There's just something, there's like, a few too many clicks involved, or something there is, has a bottleneck. And I'm no UI designer, but I can tell just from the player's side, that like, there's, there's just too much clicking involved in order to get from one task to the next, in a way that I, I often was just like, God, I just want to get back to the battle zone. I don't want to deal with this. And I was surprised I felt that way, because I actually kind of like a, a life simulation game, typically.

• 37:27Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it's kind of an issue with surfacing information that the game tends to have. There aren't, it's, this is UX stuff that is way above my ability level, but I can, I know it when I see it. And I, playing with a mouse and a keyboard in the In the house is way better, I found, because you can just really easily click on a cat and drag them around. But even then, it's hard to access the information about a cat, or to just see all of your cats, like to just get an overview, which is something I find in the field as well. There's some UI stuff that could probably be fixed down the road, or could be improved.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  And may be.

• 38:01Kirk Hamilton?

  But sometimes, like, there's a lot of information in this game, and sometimes it can be, it can be hard to find it.

• 38:06Jason Schreier?

  So, a couple of things worth noting. One is that, on the controller at least, if you press X on a cat, you'll see their stats. So that's a helpful shortcut. Two is that, as you give more kittens to Tink, you'll unlock things that are very helpful when it comes to cat breeding, including family trees and little helpful icons that you can assign to cats to keep track of them better. Like, you can put a star over their heads, or a circle over their heads, or all sorts of other icons. Still doesn't make it that great, the overall interface, and it can be tedious, but it gets better and you get more accustomed to it, in general, I would say.

• 38:49Kirk Hamilton?

  That's good to know. Can I shout out the music for this game?

• 38:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, can we? It's so great.

• 38:53Jason Schreier?

  Unbelievable. I cannot wait until the Game Awards and they have to play one of these songs.

• 39:05Kirk Hamilton?

  All of my days, I'm chasing rats.

• 39:07Jason Schreier?

  Or where's that smell coming from? Oh my god, it's so good.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  The songs are incredibly good.

• 39:22Kirk Hamilton?

  So the music in this game is by Ridiculon, which is a duo, John Evans and Mathias Bosse. They also did the music for The Binding of Isaac, which is not a game I really got into, though I know people love the music for that. Man, the music is so good. It's this kinda rockabilly, like, rockabilly, I suppose? Yeah, kinda like 90s swing. It's got that kinda modern sound to it. It's like ironic swing, which is why I say 90s swing and not 30s swing. It's a little like Squirrel that Zippers or Big Bad Voodoo Daddy put through a kind of cat blender. Yeah, yeah, dick cheese. That's a good, that's a good call.

• 40:12Kirk Hamilton?

  It kind of sounds a little like Psychonauts. I think that Peter McConnell's music has a kind of similar tremolo guitars and wacky, wacky sense. It's so fun, and I think the way that they've arranged it is just brilliant, that you play through an area and the music never changes. The stems are essentially the same, but it grows more and more complex as you go. And especially when you're playing through an area for the first time, once you know how it works, you know you're going to get to the boss, and then the singing will begin.

• 40:40Jason Schreier?

  Uh huh.

• 40:40Kirk Hamilton?

  And you're going to get some completely ridiculous song that will play during the boss fight where you will be laughing at the lyrics while trying to stay alive against the boss.

• 40:52Kirk Hamilton?

  So good. It's like, you know, for any complaints I have about other aesthetic properties of this game, the music is just like a total triumph, in my opinion.

• 41:00Jason Schreier?

  I've never seen anything like that before, where it's like you're getting the, the kind of the background music, and it feels like background music, and then it turns into an actual song with lyrics when you get to the end of the run? Like, that's so clever.

• 41:13Kirk Hamilton?

  Actually, Super Giant Games have done that kind of thing.

• 41:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was gonna say, Hades 2, I don't know if you two made it to the sirens ever, but the siren boss level did something similar to that.

• 41:22Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, going all the way back to Bastion.

• 41:24Speaker 00

  Oh, sure, yeah.

• 41:25Kirk Hamilton?

  I mean, when Bastion first did that, and they sang a song, and you realized you'd been hearing the pieces of the song, it was this revelatory moment. So it's been done, but I mean...

• 41:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I could see that being an influence. I think, you know, Super Giant certainly made a really wonderful rogue-like that we talked about quite a bit, so it's entirely possible.

• 41:42Kirk Hamilton?

  It's a great move, and the music is just so fun. I like, it's one of my favorite things about the game.

• 41:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's great. It's, it's wonderful, and I feel like that sense of humor and lightness, I wish, I wish some of the rest of the game were tuned just a little bit lighter, like the dial just was turned up slightly. But, uh, yeah, the music is a big part of like the kind of humor that I really enjoy in the game, where it's like, yeah, this is a cruel world, but we're kind of laughing through it and dancing through it, as it were. It really works for me.

• 42:12Jason Schreier?

  A couple of other things. One is that that first act might be the gnarliest in terms of aesthetics. You're going through an alley and sewers and a cemetery and gross spider caves. Act two gets a little brighter and no less grosser in some ways, but also, I mean, in act two, it starts off with the desert and you go into other areas that are a little bit lusher. There's one area that's like full of trees and stuff. It's a little bit nicer to look at than some of the act one areas. Act three truly goes off the rails in some ways that might be offensive to people. I guess, I don't know. We'll see. I'll let

• 42:54Jason Schreier?

  people be the judge of that. The other thought is that something we haven't really mentioned in terms of the combat that I think makes it really, makes this game really special is the mechanics get so clever and creative, especially as you're fighting bosses. And they really, the designers and Tyler really like eked every possible bit of fun out of the gameplay here. And some of the bosses, just like the tactics that you have to use against them, the techniques and surprises and mechanics that they have are incredible. There's a ghost called a dibbuk at the end of the boneyard. That's the boss of the boneyard.

• 43:36Jason Schreier?

  And dibbuk is like in Jewish mythology, it's like a spirit. It's like a ghost or like, and it brings bad luck. And it dodges all of your attacks and you have to find ways to like trap it in a corner to like take it out or use area effects on it. And then when you kill it, it haunts one of your party members because it's like, hey, if this is a ghost, it's haunting you now. Now you have to take out your own party member to get it. And that's just the tip of the iceberg as far as like surprises and fun, fun kind of boss mechanics that you'll fight. And then on top of that, every enemy has their own unique mechanic and set of abilities that you have to learn how to deal with. Some of them you can only take out from behind. Some of them you couldn't, you can't use

• 44:17Jason Schreier?

  projectiles on them because they'll bounce them back and just slaughter your party. Some of them will spawn. On new enemies that then grow up and turn into more enemies. And if you don't figure out how to crowd control quickly, you're gonna die. It's just really, really good. And I mean, this is the reason that I've played so many hours of this game is that the battles are just so fun and so satisfying and rewarding to finish that.

• 44:44Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I'm just having a blast. Still, still playing. Still was just, was just doing a run before we recorded this. So 80 plus hours and I'm still hooked.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, it does get really hard as well. I feel like that's worth noting. Like I, I definitely in act two, it gets really, really difficult. I may or may not make it to act three.

• 45:03Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, it is. It does. It gets, you know, I hit like a brick wall and I was like, man, this game is getting really friggin hard. And then surpassed it in part by finally getting the hang of breeding because.

• 45:15Speaker 00

  I feel like that's where I'm at is that I need to.

• 45:18Jason Schreier?

  You should try to figure it out and like find, figure out like how breeding works and like isolate two of your best cats into one room and see if you can set up a breeding room and put all the stimulation objects in there. Because once you get that and you start to see the kind of fruits of your labor, for lack of a better phrase, I think you'll find like, oh, okay, now I have a much more powerful group of cats that can actually get through act two a little more easily. But yeah, that desert area, especially in act two, is a real, a real.

• 45:48Speaker 00

  It's a grind.

• 45:49Jason Schreier?

  It's a barrier. Yeah, it's because you can't heal properly. Yeah, that one is annoying.

• 45:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like a desert, you know?

• 45:55Jason Schreier?

  Sure is. All right. That's me, Jen X. Why don't we take a break and go breed some cats? And then we'll be back with one more thing.

• 46:07Speaker 05

  Hi, I am Jordan Kresiola and I host Feeling Seen. I'm here with Maximum Fun Member of the Month, Khalil Goodman. Hi Khalil.

• 46:16Jason Schreier?

  Hi, Jordan. Thank you for having me. So great to see you.

• 46:19Speaker 05

  I gotta know what's made you feel seen if you, I figure you've thought about this if you've listened to the show a bunch.

• 46:25Jason Schreier?

  I read X-Men when I was six. When you're a kid who makes art, which I am, and you're a queer kid. Like, there's this feeling of like, something is different, but you don't know what it is.

• 46:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 46:34Jason Schreier?

  You can be different, but it can be a superpower.

• 46:36Speaker 05

  What would you say to others who might be considering supporting the show? What would be your sales pitch to them?

• 46:42Jason Schreier?

  If you love this thing, if you are getting all of this joy and comfort from this thing, make sure that this thing that you like will continue.

• 46:52Speaker 05

  Thank you so much, Khalil, for taking the time to talk to me today and for listening to the show. My god, it means a lot to just know people are really listening and valuing what they're hearing.

• 47:00Jason Schreier?

  Thank you so much.

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• 47:14Speaker 06

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• 47:28Speaker 05

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• 47:38Speaker 05

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• 47:40Speaker 06

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• 47:49Speaker 05

  New episodes every week on maximumfun.org.

• 47:52Jason Schreier?

  And we are back. Kirk Rennie has time for one more thing. Matty, what is yours?

• 47:58Speaker 00

  So I played the huge update that came to Overwatch, which it's just called Overwatch now, and that's part of the huge update.

• 48:07Jason Schreier?

  Drop the two.

• 48:08Speaker 00

  Is that there's no two anymore.

• 48:10Jason Schreier?

  It's cleaner.

• 48:11Speaker 00

  Exactly. Blizzard dropped the two. I feel like there, maybe it's because it's the Mewgenics episode, but I feel like we could be making a poop joke about that. I don't know. Anyway.

• 48:21Jason Schreier?

  Drop the two. Nice.

• 48:23Speaker 00

  Um, there's also a cat in this game now. I did not intend the synergy to happen, but here it is. There's a jetpack cat in the game and it completely changes everything about how the game works. And I know that even though I haven't played this game in many years, uh, I can still tell that this is a really big change and I've, I've been talking to friends about the cat.

• 48:48Jason Schreier?

  Wait, hold on. Sorry. Your, your one more thing is Overwatch update, but you haven't played the update.

• 48:52Speaker 00

  No, I've played it. Oh, I've played it.

• 48:54Jason Schreier?

  Oh, you're saying now you, this is your first time playing it in many, many years.

• 48:57Speaker 00

  In a while. I'm sure I talked about it on the show the last time I played it, but boy. So my friend Nico Deo actually came on the show and talked about Overwatch and she's been playing it this whole time and along with some other friends of ours. And like luckily I have people in my life who've continued playing Overwatch this whole time, who I can play with. And we did have a five person team of four people who are really good at Overwatch and me. And I think that's probably the ideal way to get back into Overwatch is to have four people who really know the game. But let me talk about the jetpack cat because I do think that this signals kind of a design change, or at least I hope so, because Overwatch, Nico talked about this a lot on the episode that she was on.

• 49:41Speaker 00

  But kind of to really broadly generalize some of the points she was making as somebody who's been playing it this entire time. Uh, Overwatch kind of started out as a game that had like a whole lot of fun splashy super abilities that, you know, intersected with each other and sometimes resulted in surprising plays and combos. And that was what was kind of fun and interesting about it was that every character was super different. And then over time it became much more of an esport and a business proposition for Blizzard and the design of the game changed accordingly. And more and more characters were added that were kind of made with an eye towards competitive viability. And now it's in kind of a weird place, like the Overwatch League is no more essentially.

• 50:22Speaker 00

  And who, who's to say what the competitive esports future of Overwatch is at this time? And that's kind of the context in which this big update is coming out. There's five new characters and you could play an Overwatch team with five players. So you could have an entirely new set of characters on a team, which is an interesting way to put out an update in and of itself to be like, you could have a team that is entirely five brand new characters. And to also introduce this character whose name is Jetpack Cat, that is the character's name. This character is a cat that rides a jetpack and it can just pick anybody up off the battlefield and throw them over the edge. Like, you know how Kirby can like suck people in and Super Smash Brothers and like spit them out over the edge? And that's kind of

• 51:05Speaker 00

  like the energy that Jetpack Cat is bringing to an average match. And Jetpack Cat can also pick up their teammates and drop them somewhere else on the field. And like ideally, you're not playing with strangers and you're playing with your friends, so you can coordinate with whoever's playing as the cat and make sure that you're getting dropped in the right spot. But mostly, I usually play as a tank character. And the tank is going to get targeted by that cat every freaking time. So I got picked up by the enemy cat a lot, and I got dropped off the edge of a cliff a lot. And it is nuts. It makes the game feel like Super Smash Brothers. And it's pretty wild.

• 51:43Jason Schreier?

  This seems way too overpowered.

• 51:45Speaker 00

  So I, I think it's really fascinating. And I'm curious-

• 51:48Jason Schreier?

  Is this an alter? Is this like a regular ability?

• 51:51Speaker 00

  It's a regular ability. You can just pick people up and drop them off.

• 51:54Kirk Hamilton?

  So people are playing and it's like, cat, the cat, here comes the cat. Is that kind of how it changes?

• 51:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's pretty wild. Um, so I feel like it does signal like a change in how the game works. Like, in the sense that it's goofy again, like Overwatch is goofy fun again. But also like, to kind of counterpoint the cat, it's just a cat. And like, if you can click on heads, you can click on a cat. You can still kill this cat. Like, the cat may be floating around, but that doesn't mean you can't shoot at the cat. So like, that is the way you get out of this. If the cat is picking you up, and you don't want to be picked up, you can shoot at the cat. That is an option. And your teammates can shoot at the cat. Like, there's still ways to get out of this. It's not, it's not insurpassable. But it is such a massive change to gameplay that it's kind of fascinating to me that Blizzard has chosen to do something like this. And I think it's actually a good thing. I like

• 52:43Speaker 00

  games that are a little goofy, and I think it's kind of fun to introduce something that maybe kind of lightly breaks the game and isn't really esports forward and competitive viability forward and is more like in the name of fun. And there will always be people, you know, there's like, kind of a banning system in Overwatch where like in competitive play- People can like vote to ban characters and like I'm sure that people are banning the jetpack cat in those in those echelons of play. I don't exist in those echelons. I'm playing unranked every time. So in an unranked match, I think you can just have fun with this and like enjoy the goofiness of it. That's what I did anyway. And I think it's interesting and cool to see them having a character who's so different.

• 53:24Kirk Hamilton?

  Nice.

• 53:24Jason Schreier?

  Very cool. Seems like Overwatch is in a good place these days.

• 53:27Speaker 00

  I think it could be. I did, I will say I tried like some of the other characters too, and I thought they were pretty fun. So, but this is again, coming from someone who is like coming back to Overwatch after a long time. But I think that's probably a lot of people's experience right now is that they're seeing the cat in, they're like, I want to check out this, this new stuff and see these other four characters that they've added. And it's a good time to go back and see what's up.

• 53:51Jason Schreier?

  Kirk, what's your one more thing?

• 53:53Kirk Hamilton?

  My one more thing is a video essay that I watched. It's, I watched it on YouTube. It's also on Nebula, the creator focused video network. But I think most people will probably see this on YouTube. It is by Adam Neely, who is a musician and kind of one of the sort of preeminent video essayists in the music space. He's a fantastic bass player, really great musician, makes really, really good videos about all kinds of things. This one is called Suno AI Music and the Bad Future. And he just released it, I think like a week ago. And it is really great. And I highly recommend it. I recommend it to the two of you. I think you would both really like it. And I recommend it to listeners as well. If,

• 54:37Kirk Hamilton?

  even if you're not following AI music specifically, if you have just been thinking about AI at all, which is probably pretty much everyone out there, if you are trying to figure out what you think of it, how to approach this age of AI that seems inevitable, I emphasize seems, as I am increasingly resistant to techno determinism in all its forms, but it can feel as though we're being told it is just going to happen. We need to figure out how we feel about it and just for our own sake. But you can figure out how you feel about it and that can lead you to do different things and to live differently. And that's part of what this video is about. So, as I mentioned, Adam is a fantastic musician, also just puts a lot of work into his videos.

• 55:21Kirk Hamilton?

  This is a very well researched video in which he angles it more or less as a direct response/takedown to Mikey Schulman, who is the CEO of Suno AI. Do the two of you know Suno AI, this company?

• 55:35Speaker 00

  I've heard of it, but I don't. Tell me more.

• 55:38Kirk Hamilton?

  Okay. Suno AI. Suno is one of a few different music AI companies. Suno has valued it at a couple billion dollars or something now. They've been out raising money for a long time. They are now beginning to ink deals with the majors, with Sony, UMG, et cetera, Warner, and get licensing deals with the major labels so that all the music that they stole can now legally be used.

• 56:03Speaker 00

  Great.

• 56:04Kirk Hamilton?

  To train their models. And Suno, I would say, is the highest profile. It is pretty remarkable what it can do on a technological level. You can just put in a prompt, "Write me a song about my cat. Make it sound like this and this and this. Put these in as the lyrics." And it'll cranks out a bunch of stuff for you. And it sounds like AI music, but it's at times remarkable how quote unquote believable it sounds, how real it sounds. And this has led to, you know, a lot of discussion and a lot of, I think, really important discussion about what this means, what this means for the art. I'd say of all of the, I mean, I guess it's something similar is happening in the world of visual media, specifically illustrators have seen something very similar.

• 56:49Kirk Hamilton?

  But, you know, video games, movies, these AI generators are not quite to the point where they can create believable, you know, complete art. And Suno really can. So, you know, that's why we're seeing so much AI music on Spotify and everywhere else. Like, it is just becoming rampant and there are so many people who are beginning to work with Suno. There are, you know, established producers, Timbaland is one, Adam talks about him in the video, who are saying, "Well, this is just coming, so you either have to learn how to use this stuff or you're gonna get left behind." So. Adam kind of takes that as a given and mostly is addressing Mikey Schulman, the CEO of Suno, and his general view of music, which I find to be completely whack.

• 57:34Kirk Hamilton?

  That is my unscientific term for how I think Mikey Schulman thinks of music. I think he thinks of music like a tech businessman, which makes sense because that is what he is. In addition to being a musician, I will give him the benefit of the doubt that I think he thinks he is doing a good thing, democratizing music or whatever the hell they tell themselves they're doing. They're not. I think that it's part of a broader, pretty unfortunate movement that does not seem aware of all of the dark undercurrents pushing it forward.

• 58:03Jason Schreier?

  Isn't he the guy who said at some point, like last year, he was like, "It's too hard to make music. People don't enjoy the process of making music."

• 58:11Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh.

• 58:12Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it's really funny. That was what first put him on my radar is that music is too hard and that's why people don't like making it. And I'm like, maybe you, dude.

• 58:21Speaker 00

  I love it. That's what's fun about it, though.

• 58:25Kirk Hamilton?

  Making music is hard, but that's the fun of it. Right. And this is a big thesis that is explored in this video, I think, really well. The question of speed and ease and impatience versus patience. There's a great discussion with a guest who comes on and talks to Adam for a number of very interesting and illuminating conversations, particularly about Aristotle's view of like friendship and flatterers. There's a really great thing about flatterers and collaboration, like how people will say, "Oh, this AI is like, it's like a co-writer and I bounce my ideas off it and then it'll give me some new ideas." And I think, "Oh, that's really interesting. I wouldn't have thought of it that way and it's really helpful." And Adam makes the observation of basically, you know, I have a lot of, he says this, this

• 59:10Kirk Hamilton?

  is true for me too, I suppose, I have musicians that I work with and we have really interesting creative relationships. You know, they're kind of, they're like friends. And they're my friends. He's like, but at the same time, when you have a relationship with a creative partner, there's push and pull, there's conflict, and you have to work out that conflict. And that's a big part of creating with someone, where creating with an AI removes that entirely. And then there's a great discussion with this ethicist about who's, I'm forgetting her name, but she's great. Bing. Her name is Dr. Mariana Nowey. She is a virtue ethicist and a Platonic scholar. So that is Mariana Nowey, who really does add a lot to this video. Bing.

• 59:51Kirk Hamilton?

  About flatterers and how Aristotle warns about flatterers because a flatterer is not a true friend. A flatterer is not someone who will tell you when you've gone too far or when you're making a mistake or when they don't agree with you. They won't push you. They're just kind of trying to ingratiate themselves. Anyway, this is like a very minor part of the video that I just thought was kind of cool. Man, it goes all over the place. And interestingly enough, Schulman has said so many revealing and to me damning things. That quote about music being too hard to make doesn't even turn up in this video, I don't think. There are like a thousand other quotes from him and he didn't even need to use that one, which I thought was really funny because I was expecting it to be the first quote since it was the first time I ever heard of him. So anyways, I could go

• 1:00:33Kirk Hamilton?

  on and on. You should just watch the video, though. I can't summarize it as well as, you know, Adam actually presents it in the first place. Just watch it. And I would make two recommendations in addition to watching it. One is read the Google doc that he has assembled with all of his sources. It's actually really amazing. I mean, he's done a ton of research and you can just look at them all and then go do further reading on some of the things he's talking about because it goes in a ton of different directions, this video. A lot of really interesting philosophy that's worth looking into. Also, there is a talk featuring Tressy McMillan-Cottam, the academic and thinker who is really awesome. And I recommend watching that video. It's linked in the notes of this video and Adam references it in the

• 1:01:16Kirk Hamilton?

  video, but it's really cool and kind of worth watching on its own. So it's, the video is kind of a whole world unto itself. But really, I just, I highly recommend this for anyone out there, even if you're not a musician, if you don't normally watch people like Adam Neely, it's really approachable. You could watch it with your kids if you're like talking to your kids about AI. I know my nieces have been chewing on it at school. There's a lot of people having a lot of conversations about this stuff. It's a really great framework for like how to view this mode of thinking that is driving this push toward AI and how to push back against it, not just practically, but like in your, with your own philosophy, how to come up with what your values are and kind of identify them in contrast to

• 1:01:59Kirk Hamilton?

  the values that some of these AI companies and in particular Suno, those values that they would want to push on to you and tell you are, you know, virtues, even when They definitely are not, and they kind of inarguably are not. So really, just a thought provoking and wonderful video. Again, that is called Suno AI Music and the Bad Future. It's on YouTube and Nebula. It's very easy to find. It's made by the great Adam Neely, and I really recommend it.

• 1:02:26Speaker 00

  Cool. I'll check it out.

• 1:02:28Jason Schreier?

  AI, man. AI.

• 1:02:30Kirk Hamilton?

  Watch this video. I'd love to know what the two of you think of it. It will, it will give you a lot of concrete things to think about.

• 1:02:36Jason Schreier?

  What's funny about the whole, our current climate, I don't know, whatever, like, situation is that AI was controversial enough, and that was before the memory chip crisis started. And when the Switch 2 price goes up and like, all the consoles are impossible to get, just imagine, imagine the backlash and what that's gonna look like. God.

• 1:02:57Speaker 00

  We'll get to find out.

• 1:02:59Kirk Hamilton?

  We will.

• 1:02:59Speaker 00

  We get to live through it.

• 1:03:01Jason Schreier?

  We gotta get more into this. I've been, I like, have been playing around with ChatGPT and trying to use it for things, and it is so wrong so often that it is like, really hard to find. I just don't understand how people use it in their workflows regularly, given how wrong it is.

• 1:03:15Kirk Hamilton?

  Thank you for calling me out on that. I was wrong.

• 1:03:18Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:03:19Kirk Hamilton?

  Let me go find the correct answer.

• 1:03:20Jason Schreier?

  You're right. You're right to call me out. You got it. And then more and more recently, I've been like, opening up LinkedIn, and I see just these giant posts with all of the tells. And I'm just like, why is this here? I'm just blocking people left or right.

• 1:03:33Kirk Hamilton?

  Have you seen the, you know, TLDR? Have you seen AI DR?

• 1:03:37Jason Schreier?

  That's good. That's good.

• 1:03:40Jason Schreier?

  My one more thing is a very human piece of art called Lost Lambs, which is a book by Madeline Cash. Just came out a few weeks ago, very buzzy book in the literary world. And that is for a good reason, which is that it's very funny and very human and heartfelt and meaningful. It is a book about a family in a small town, which I don't think ever is named, but it's in the United States, and it's about the dysfunction surrounding this family. The husband and wife are, their marriage is falling apart, and they've just talked about potentially do, having an open marriage.

• 1:04:19Jason Schreier?

  They have three daughters, the oldest of which is has started dating somebody who is nicknamed War Crimes Wes. The middle is involved in a online like AOL instant message style relationship with someone who may or may not be an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist. And the youngest is too smart for her own good and keeps getting into trouble by doing absurd, preposterous things over the course of the book. And this book is about their lives. It switches between them. It's also about the lives of the other people in the town, including a bizarre

• 1:04:58Jason Schreier?

  tech billionaire who may or may not be trafficking people. And it all comes to a head. The characters all just kind of have these ridiculous convergences. And it ends on a very heartfelt note about family and dysfunction and what it all means. And I really loved it. I think it's a really good book and I highly recommend it. Shades of Long Island Compromise, the other book about a dysfunctional family that I read a couple of years ago and raved about. Not quite as good as that, I would say, but but but up there and definitely plays around with similar themes. Yeah, very high bar. But yeah, I really enjoyed it. Really fun to read. Really breezy read. Really

• 1:05:43Jason Schreier?

  quick, quick and easy read, I would say. And also has a lot of interesting religious themes. The group Lost Lambs refers to this kind of like this church group of of people who are just kind of like a social working group. And yeah, it's a good one. I recommend it. Lost Lambs, Madeline Cash. Good book.

• 1:06:04Kirk Hamilton?

  Nice. Jason, I'm reading King Sorrow right now.

• 1:06:07Jason Schreier?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you are.

• 1:06:09Kirk Hamilton?

  It's really good. I'm up to the part on the plane. I'm wondering if that was the part you were talking about.

• 1:06:14Jason Schreier?

  That's the part I told you. Yeah, the other day is my favorite section.

• 1:06:17Kirk Hamilton?

  It rips really hard.

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  I gotta check it out. Jason, do you think dysfunctional families is like your favorite genre of book?

• 1:06:25Jason Schreier?

  It's good. It's fun. There's something fun about like a group, like a bunch of people who each just have their own kind of crazy anecdotes and flaws and problems.

• 1:06:34Speaker 00

  But they have to spend time together.

• 1:06:36Kirk Hamilton?

  It's also like a genre that is, it's a genre that's maybe overrepresented in American literature.

• 1:06:40Jason Schreier?

  It's true. Well, I think really, I mean-

• 1:06:42Kirk Hamilton?

  It's just a very well-populated genre.

• 1:06:45Speaker 00

  Well, America's a dysfunctional family when you think about it, man.

• 1:06:48Jason Schreier?

  Well, I was gonna say, if you think about it, all books are about dysfunctional families. It's just like, sometimes they're not related by blood, but like-

• 1:06:55Speaker 00

  So true, so true.

• 1:06:56Jason Schreier?

  A lot of, most stories are about dysfunctional families, whether it's family, like related families or found families.

• 1:07:03Speaker 00

  I guess if I'm even going back like to Greek tragedies and Shakespeare, it's like, those are all just dysfunctional families. So I take it back. It's not a genre, it's just the story of the human condition.

• 1:07:13Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it's just everything we do.

• 1:07:15Jason Schreier?

  It is. It's just humans. I was ranting about Circe a few weeks ago, that book about the witch Circe from Greek mythology. And I mean, that entire story is, or sorry, Circe, that entire story is a dysfunctional family. So-

• 1:07:29Speaker 00

  True, yeah. I mean, that's why Hades and Hades 2 are interesting. Dysfunctional families.

• 1:07:34Jason Schreier?

  I mean, Mugenix is all about a dysfunctional family.

• 1:07:36Speaker 00

  That's true.

• 1:07:38Jason Schreier?

  That is sometimes, sometimes inbred, which is a whole mechanic.

• 1:07:42Speaker 00

  Yep, yep, yep. That's true.

• 1:07:45Jason Schreier?

  All right. That is that for this week's episode. Stay tuned and we'll all be back next week.

• 1:07:53Kirk Hamilton?

  I will see both of you next week.

• 1:07:55Speaker 00

  Bye.

• 1:07:58Kirk 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 DJ. 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.

• 1:08:56Speaker 07

  Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network. Of artist-owned shows. Supported. Directly. By you.