What's The Deal With: Stealth Games?

What makes stealth games appealing? What makes them suck? Kirk, Jason, and Maddy talk about their favorite and least favorite aspects of the sneakiest drama, from 007 First Light to Dishonored and much more.

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

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Okay, so if I just wait long enough, the podcast will loop back around to the start and I can stab it in the back. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week, we talk about stealth games and games with stealth sections in them. Remember when we had to get past the guards in Ocarina of Time? It comes up, plus some more famous sneaky moments.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  I'm Maddy Myers.

• 0:31Jason Schreier?

  I'm Jason Schreier.

• 0:33Kirk Hamilton?

  And I'm Kirk Hamilton, and hello.

• 0:35Jason Schreier?

  Hello, hello, my friends.

• 0:36Speaker 00

  Hello, it's us again.

• 0:38Jason Schreier?

  I've got a fun story for you guys. I was in the parking lot at my grocery store about two days ago, and I heard something familiar. It was a very familiar voice, and it was that voice saying, "Carmine, what's the matter with you?" And it turns out, it was Silvio Dante's voice. And as soon as I heard that, I knew the exact scene that it was from, because I'm a sicko. It was the scene at the end of the episode, House of Rest, where they're all just hanging out in front of the Satrial's butcher shop. And like, someone gets an accident, and then the FBI agent comes over and he's like, "How about that Nets game, huh?" And they're just kind of hanging out there. And it turns out, that there was just a car at 7:00 in the morning, just like playing a Sopranos episode.

• 1:20Jason Schreier?

  I guess he was, someone was in a car watching that episode of The Sopranos so loudly that it reverberated through the entire parking lot at 7:00 in the morning on Monday.

• 1:28Kirk Hamilton?

  I really thought that you were going to say that Steven Van Zandt was in the parking lot.

• 1:32Jason Schreier?

  And he was quoting himself. Yes, he was, he was just reading his online.

• 1:35Kirk Hamilton?

  He just communicates in Silvio lines.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  And he was quoting himself, for some reason, or just, he happened to have someone named Carmine nearby, and he just reenacted the scene by sheer coincidence.

• 1:44Jason Schreier?

  The reason I thought you guys would appreciate that is just that, all it took me was a single, like, two words to know exactly what scene that it was. It's just so, that show is so burned into my brain.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  I'm not surprised by that.

• 1:57Jason Schreier?

  And by the way, if you guys, if you want to hear us talking about that, how would we do that, Maddie? How would people listen to us talking about The Sopranos?

• 2:03Speaker 00

  I know, you gave me a perfect segue, Jason. Thank you so much. If you want to hear Jason being a Sopranos savant. Well, that would be something that you would want to get in our bonus episode feed, which you can get access to by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join. And then you get all of our bonus episodes ever. We have watched the first several seasons of The Sopranos. We're continuing along with those, but we intersperse those eps with all kinds of other types of bonus content, including our most recent one.

• 2:37Kirk Hamilton?

  There's also non-Sopranos content.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's also Sopranos content and not Sopranos content. Those are the two kinds of content.

• 2:44Kirk Hamilton?

  The two buckets.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  And the other bucket is what we we put something into this particular month. Actually, we watched a TV show called Players that is a mockumentary about esports professionals. But mostly in that episode, we just talked about esports as an industry and the esports bubble that got really big circa 2019. And that was really fun to talk about. Players is a really hard television show to find. And so you don't need to have seen that in order to enjoy our esports episode, esports chat, but we do recommend it if you can find it. And this coming month, at the end of this month, we are going to do an episode about 007 First Light.

• 3:24Speaker 00

  We're going to spill the beans about all the plot points and twists and sexy shenanigans that James Bond gets up to in that wonderful video game. Yes, bow tie mini games, flirting with women, not mini games, just something that you do in the game that's fun. And that'll be really cool to talk about. So check that out at maximumfun.com/join. You'll get a ton of bonus eps in there and also our latest ones in our upcoming one. Okay, Kirk, we have a call for our listeners. Why don't you explain to them what we would like from them?

• 3:58Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, a couple of things up top before we get into this week's episode. First of all, so next week, we are going to talk a little bit about affordability and gaming and the ongoing affordability crisis, affordability issues that are only getting worse in the video game world. We, of course, have the Steam machine that has been announced at a much higher price than Valve. Seems to have wanted to release it at. We've got Grand Theft Auto VI being announced with $80 and $100 versions. Everything is getting very expensive. And the backdrop, of course, is the ongoing RAM shortage and other hardware issues. So basically, video gaming has gotten very expensive, and we want to talk about it. But we'd like to hear from you, because the three of us, we get a lot of stuff for free. We get a lot of video games for free.

• 4:43Kirk Hamilton?

  Our perspectives are kind of limited, and we'd love to hear from some of our listeners about this and to include some of your perspectives on video games, affordability, how you think about buying new games or new hardware, how you, basically, how you think about any of that. And we'll share some of our listener emails on the show when we talk about it next week. So if you have anything you'd like to share, any thoughts, just really anything about your perspective that you think would be, in addition to the conversation, send it to us at [email protected]. That's our usual email address, but maybe put in the subject line affordability, so we'll know that that is what you're talking about.

• 5:22Jason Schreier?

  A couple of things about the emails, since I'm the one who reads these. One, please keep them short. Two, any specific numbers that you feel comfortable sharing, and we can keep you anonymous, but if you want to share, like, your salary and your cost of living and like, how you fit games into that, I think that would be very valuable for people to hear about. So anything you want to share on that front, please do. And yeah, that'll be a really interesting episode for us to get into, I think.

• 5:44Kirk Hamilton?

  Also, before we get into the subject for this episode, a quick correction about a Star Trek character.

• 5:51Jason Schreier?

  Can some inside baseball here is that last week Kirk said he had a quick correction, and then it was so long that he edited out the words "quick correction."

• 5:59Kirk Hamilton?

  I actually left the vent, Jason. I thought about editing it.

• 6:01Jason Schreier?

  Oh, you did? Oh, okay. You told me you were editing it out.

• 6:03Kirk Hamilton?

  I didn't wind up getting to it, because I thought it would be funny, and I'd see if anyone other than you noticed.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  That it was eight minutes? All right, well, no further delays, shall we? Tell us your quick correction.

• 6:13Kirk Hamilton?

  I have a feeling that most of our listeners aren't going to complain about us talking about Star Trek.

• 6:17Speaker 00

  Probably not.

• 6:17Kirk Hamilton?

  So last week, I mentioned the Bajoran character on Deep Space Nine, who I called Kira Nares, because I've never watched Deep Space Nine and have never heard her name pronounced. As it turns out, her name is pronounced Kira Nares, and I was wrong. So I think it's very important to issue yet another Star Trek correction to all the fans of Bajoran Kira Nares. I apologize. I've not pronounced her name correctly.

• 6:44Jason Schreier?

  You might say that these Star Trek corrections are a lot like Tribbles.

• 6:48Kirk Hamilton?

  They're just, they just keep replicating and they're slowly overwhelming our show.

• 6:52Speaker 00

  Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Star Trek itself is slowly overwhelming our show, but that's fine.

• 6:56Kirk Hamilton?

  That is the entirety of the correction. Hopefully, I will not have to issue another one next week, but you never know. Star Trek fans are very persnickety about getting things right and making very small mistakes.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  They're precise. They're precise. Okay?

• 7:11Kirk Hamilton?

  That's fair.

• 7:11Speaker 00

  I don't know why I'm saying "they." I would count myself among them.

• 7:14Kirk Hamilton?

  So this week, we are talking about stealth games and what the deal is with them. There have been a lot of great stealth games this year, and we have talked about a ton of great stealth games over the years on TripleClick. And this just seemed like it would be a fun topic to talk about, a kind of timeless thing that, that just keeps coming up in different video games, something that is not tied to the gloom and doom of the video game industry or of our broader world. Just something that might be fun to talk about. So I have written a whole lot of different lists, a lot of different categories, a lot of different ways to think about stealth games.

• 7:54Kirk Hamilton?

  But this is going to be kind of just an open chat. Let's just talk for starters about how we feel about stealth. Maddie, why don't you kick us off?

• 8:01Speaker 00

  Sure. Um, I did not think of myself as somebody who liked stealth games for a very long time. And it wasn't until Assassin's Creed Origins, actually, that I started to really like it. And I think part of that is because that game, somewhat famously, has like a one-hit-kill stealth mechanic that not every Assassin's Creed has, but Bayek has that knife. And if you sneak up on somebody, you can take them out immediately. And I grew to find that very satisfying. But part of my problem with stealth prior to that, and sometimes since then, is that it requires a lot of patience. And while I really endeavor to be a more patient person in my life,

• 8:44Speaker 00

  and, you know, I do meditation, I really, really try to increase that. I see that as a flaw that I have, and I can at times be impatient. I would say that it is a difficulty for me and that sitting there waiting for a character to continue doing a series of animations while I am just hiding behind something is hard for me, but that isn't always what a stealth game is. Sometimes a stealth game is not just hiding and waiting, but when it is, that can be tough for me. We're gonna get into a lot of different kinds of stealth today, but that was one of my big associations with stealth games early on.

• 9:18Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, the waiting game.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  The waiting.

• 9:20Kirk Hamilton?

  I have a thought on that that I will share, but first, Jason, let's hear from you. Stealth games, what do you think?

• 9:26Jason Schreier?

  I have always loved stealth games. I also play them in maybe a unique way. I'm curious to hear if you two play them in the same way in that oftentimes when I'm playing a stealth game and I fail, I get discovered, I will just kill myself and then start again because I want to be playing.

• 9:44Kirk Hamilton?

  That is not unique.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  That is very common.

• 9:47Jason Schreier?

  That's what I thought. That's what I thought. So yeah, I mean, I've always really enjoyed stealth games and I've always really not enjoyed stealth sections in games that are not stealth games because stealth is such a specific type of gameplay that you really need to build the right systems into, including techniques for you to distract enemies and get around enemies. And when a game that should not have, that doesn't actually have any of those built in mechanics is just like, here, now sneak around these guards, most infamously Ocarina of Time and others.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I figured you were talking about that.

• 10:22Jason Schreier?

  That is very frustrating, but I've always loved like Dishonored and Deus Ex games and Switch or Cell and Metal Gear Solid and so on and so forth. And I think when a game kind of transcends that feeling for me of needing to do everything perfectly, then that is also really impressive. I talked about this a little bit when we talked about Double O Seven, because that I think is a really good game at giving you a good suite of stealth tools, but also making it feel like it's not game over when you do get discovered because of that system it has where if you get discovered by one guard and then you knock him out, it'll say situation contained and you won't have to start the level over again because everybody somehow magically knows exactly where you are. But broadly

• 11:06Jason Schreier?

  to answer your question, Kirk, stealth games, pretty good.

• 11:10Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, they're pretty good. So I, of course, love stealth games. I'm always talking about them. I think they're great. I have a lot of thoughts about them, and I'm sure we'll get into some of them on this episode. I think the thing I want to throw out there about them that I have kind of been chewing on as I've been making an outline for this episode is that stealth, it's such a weird thing to have be such a core video game mechanic, right? I mean, shooting, punching, you know, these kind of action, actions that you take in a game, combat actions, okay, those make sense since a lot of games are about fighting. But it's interesting that stealth, especially that word stealth, like sneaking, but it's stealth, is somehow now just has all these connotations in the world of video games.

• 11:54Kirk Hamilton?

  And I think that stealth is actually, by its nature, it is the gameplay mechanic that fundamentally changes a video game in this massive way, that it changes everything about what the game is and what it means to be inside of it. And that's why, kind of, why I love it and why it keeps being such an important part of game design. And that's because in order for stealth to be a game mechanic, that means the enemies have to have some state of awareness outside of just fighting you. And that changes everything because the moment all of the, I say enemies, but all of the characters in the game have this ability to no longer just be like, you know, doom

• 12:39Kirk Hamilton?

  enemies that just fly onto the screen and start shooting at you, then the whole world opens up and it becomes an immersive space because you haven't triggered them, they're just going to be walking around, and then you, the player, suddenly have a lot more options for what to do in the world. So if you think about it, for example, in Grand Theft Auto, you could kind of think of Grand Theft Auto as a stealth game in that the police are constantly like an enemy that are ready to be triggered, and you kind of break stealth if you just start shooting people or crash into a police car or do something like that. And then it becomes, you know, they get activated and their awareness changes. So stealth, you know, can kind of be expanded into this broader Way of thinking of games and stealth is at the heart of what I really love about games.

• 13:24Kirk Hamilton?

  So many of my favorite games are stealth games because of that, because stealth means that the game is just much more reactive and immersive and interesting and flexible and open to, you know, me screwing with it and poking with it and seeing what I can make happen.

• 13:37Jason Schreier?

  It's interesting, Kirk, that you say that it's kind of weird that stealth became such a big thing in games and it is. And thinking about that further, kind of extrapolating that further and trying to answer the question why there's tall glass grass you can hide in in every single video game ever made. Very convenient. I think it's because game designers, they you they stick you in a world, you're usually playing as a solo character in any game that has sort of real time action as opposed to turn based combat, which is more often a party based game. But in in these kind of real time action games, you're usually a single person, a super soldier like Solid Snake or a Samurai or whoever, an assassin. And you're in a world full of hostile enemies that want to kill you.

• 14:20Jason Schreier?

  And if they all knew where you were, then it wouldn't be very interesting encounter design because it would just be you constantly smashing into giant crowds of enemies. And that could work for some games like, I don't know, Arkham or Dynasty Warriors, but even Arkham, even a lot of those games, they want to find ways to allow you to take on these encounters. One bit at a time, one enemy at a time, one group of enemies at a time. And stealth is a pretty natural way to do that. If you're Spider-Man, you could just jump into a crowd and try to beat up 100 enemies or you could pick them off one by one and try to take them out stealthily. So it does make sense as kind of a grand macro idea of game design that, hey, well, you are one person fighting against 100 people.

• 15:04Jason Schreier?

  How do we make it so you're not just overwhelmed by all those 100 people? Well, we have to put you in a world where they don't know where you are and then kind of give you the tools to succeed from there.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, but those tools are also usually pretty far outside of what they would be in a non-stealth section. Like, why associate stealth with having the ability to see through walls? And that often happens in contexts where your character would not necessarily have the ability to see through walls. And there's some sort of either magical or science fiction explanation that's introduced that's like, here's how you're gonna know where every single character on the map is. Because if you don't have that ability, then stealth is not fun. I mean, maybe we could set some parameters here. I don't, maybe you guys don't mind when a stealth game is extraordinarily difficult and where you have to look around every corner and you don't know where everybody is yet, for

• 15:58Speaker 00

  example, and you have to kind of remember in your head. I don't know that I've ever played a game that's that hard. I'm all about those wall hacks in these games.

• 16:07Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I mean, so, speaking of the Arkham games, those games, especially Arkham, what, Arkham Knight, the third one, really reached this amazing synthesis of combat and stealth, because they really clearly delineate between the sneaking sections and the action sections. And they give Batman, of course, a ton of gadgets, because that's Batman's whole thing, as is stealth and, you know, pulling guys away and scaring the shit out of his opponents. But a lot of the abilities that you have, you know, like the little, the like bat-shaped plastic explosive, you know, mines that he'll leave, you can use them in combat as well. And so they do a good job of kind of letting you do both. He has a sort of x-ray vision that he can use, so what you're saying, Maddie. You can use that in combat as well. It like kind of turns on at various points. Like, you drop a smoke grenade, and you turn on

• 16:52Kirk Hamilton?

  your x-ray vision, and you can see everyone and they can't see you. But yeah, awareness is a really important part of stealth, and it kind of, it dictates what kind of stealth game you're playing. Because stealth can be really empowering, right? Like, at its best, you know, when you're Batman, and you have like, total omniscience over the whole room, you're just picking guys off right and left, you know, especially early in those games before they have many countermeasures. You're watching them freak out as their heart rates elevate. You're looking at like, x-rays of every dude, and just like, mercilessly picking them apart.

• 17:23Kirk Hamilton?

  That is one experience. And then on the other end, so what you were saying, Matty, so Alien Isolation, for example, is a game where you don't have very much awareness. And it's designed that way because you're supposed to be terrified. So a lot of the time in that game, you're sneaking around this horrible ship with like really cramped corridors. And you're, you know, backing yourself into a locker. They give you really limited awareness. Like if you just look around, you can't see anything like you're in a locker. You're looking out through the little vents and you can see the freaking alien walk by, which will just kill you if it knows you're there. If you take out your little motion sensor, you know, the famous alien motion sensor, you can kind of see where it might be, but it doesn't totally tell you. And that's all by design.

• 18:07Kirk Hamilton?

  Resident Evil, the later first person Resident Evil games are also that way. Where there's a lot of sneaking, it's really stressful. So they don't give you that awareness, which really kind of fundamentally changes the stealth experience.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's true, but I also think that that that's part of why I don't like those kinds of games. Like, I don't know that there's an amount of money you could pay me to pay play Alien Isolation. We've played some pretty scary Resident Evil games on this show, but like, that sounds so stressful to me. I like being Batman. If I'm going to be a playing a stealth game, because I'm already struggling with patience as it is. I want to be Agent 47, or Batman, or Bayek, or somebody who's like, I have so many tools at my disposal. The world is my playground. All of you are ants under my boot heel and I am simply going to pick each of you off. And like, it'll be like the same as playing like a cleaning simulator game in my mind.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  Where I'm like, I'm literally cleaning up. It's very dark to describe a stealth game that way. But like, for me, that's how I grew to see them as fun, is to almost see them as like other forms of simulation games that I really enjoy, where I'm like, I'm just, I'm just cleaning up here. But when it's like Alien Isolation, or God forbid, Ocarina of Time, where I'm like, I don't know what is triggering this. I have feel like I have no control over the situation. I'm walking around a corner and a guy is seeing me and I'm just dead now.

• 19:35Jason Schreier?

  Matty, I just played the Alien Isolation 2 demo a few weeks at Summer Game Fest and had the exact same experience.

• 19:40Speaker 00

  I was so scared.

• 19:42Kirk Hamilton?

  It's funny, to the cleaning up thing, I can't remember if it was like Jim Rossignol or Kieran Gillan, there's someone who very famously was like, "All video games are fundamentally about tidying up."

• 19:51Speaker 00

  They are, kind of.

• 19:52Kirk Hamilton?

  And it was a British critic, because I believe it was tidying up. But even combat games, you know, you're kind of, you're very violently cleaning up a room until it's all empty and clean and all the monsters are gone. And yeah, stealth games can definitely feel that way.

• 20:03Jason Schreier?

  So, yeah, I think that it's super empowering in a video game when these enemies, you know they're gonna take five to 10 hits to kill, unless you sneak up behind them and then you backstab them and then they'll die in one swing. There's a reason that that's such a popular mechanic and everything from Assassin's Creed to, I don't know, Elden Ring, and that's because it feels super good to pull off, to know you got the drop on one of these bad guys and you're insta-killing them.

• 20:30Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it's funny, you know, you mentioned Assassin's Creed Origins, Matty, I can't remember if that was the one, but somewhere along the line, they did introduce the fact that you can't always one-hit kill people.

• 20:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's after that one at some point.

• 20:42Jason Schreier?

  I think it was Odyssey, because Odyssey became more of an RPG. Origins was like flirting with RPG, but Odyssey went in full-on Witcher mode where you got into these fortresses that would have these big bosses that you couldn't kill in one hit. So I think it was Odyssey.

• 20:59Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, and it, right, the big boss, there's kind of a, well, that's its own mechanic. Like, Arkham games have that as well, where there's a heavy patrolling, and the heavy is impervious to a one-hit kill, so then that kind of forces you to adapt your strategy, and then eventually you unlock the ability to take out the heavy quietly, but in Arkham, at least, it takes a while, like Batman has to kind of beat the guy up quietly for a little bit, so you're exposed. So that's kind of one thing.

• 21:23Jason Schreier?

  I think in, I think in Odyssey, it was that you just took down their health bar, and so, with one of the assassination strikes, instead of insta-killing them. That's how it worked.

• 21:33Kirk Hamilton?

  Right, that was definitely what they added at some point, when they embraced the role-playing game aspect of it. I kind of remember it from Origins. But basically, as you have to level up your abilities and get better gear... Only then can you unlock one-hit kills, which really changes the nature of Assassin's Creed stealth. Because like, we're about to replay Black Flag Assassin's Creed IV. That's one of the earlier AC games. In those games, that hidden blade kills anybody. Except, I think heavies, I think it's that same thing, where there are sometimes big dudes that you have to kind of plan your way around. But pretty much anybody, even the big bosses that you can fight, like you can bypass the whole fight just by pressing the X button, which is a pretty big change. I'm trying to remember, you know, Matty, you were talking about the disempowering thing. How did you play Resident Evil Requiem?

• 22:17Kirk Hamilton?

  Because we talked a lot about that first section as grace.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  I did play it stealthily.

• 22:21Kirk Hamilton?

  Right.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  I did, and I did not play it in first person, somewhat famously, even though the game tells you to do that to get extra scared. I played it in third person, which makes stealth significantly easier. I would say you can watch your own character. But also in Resident Evil Requiem, even though the zombies are pretty smart and faster than some zombies, they're not that fast and they don't all alert everyone. So I don't mind, as far as stealth mechanics go, that's sort of within the realm for me of tidying up, I guess we could call it, where I'm like, I can either get around this guy and come back and kill him later, or eventually, when I have enough ammo, I'll clean up this entire room and then I can just explore it as I see fit.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  Which I don't, I find that pretty satisfying. And also like a way to slowly conquer fear. Whereas in an Alien game, the point is that you can never defeat the Alien and that it will be stalking you the entire time. And there's no tidying up involved, from what I understand. It's very different.

• 23:25Kirk Hamilton?

  The Alien is the one tidying up.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:28Jason Schreier?

  I think the difference between Resident Evil and then the games you were talking about as not having very fun stealth sections, Ocarina and Alien, is that in those two games, if you get caught, it's an instant game over.

• 23:41Speaker 00

  That too, yeah.

• 23:42Jason Schreier?

  You don't have any sort of kind of ability to react or kind of improvise on the fly. And that's especially annoying in Ocarina of Time, where it's just like, you might have no idea that you were in this guard's. It could just be like a clumsy like camera angle and so you just have no idea you're in this guard's view. Fortunately, it's very short in Ocarina of Time, but still. I think that makes it more frustrating. And in Alien Isolation, it might be by design, but certainly makes that game not for everybody, including Maddy Myers.

• 24:10Kirk Hamilton?

  It makes it a more specific experience, even if it kind of works.

• 24:14Speaker 00

  That feeling of having to restart, I think, or redo everything, I think, requires this emotional commitment almost, or like, just an entire mindset of like, I'm, I'm going to be save scumming, or I'm going to be really trying to do things perfectly, that sometimes I'm just not up for. Like, it's a very intentional, mindful way of playing a video game. I keep speaking in meditative terms, but it's because I actually feel like I have to enter that mindset when I'm playing a self game.

• 24:43Kirk Hamilton?

  I thought you were gonna say it's because I was just meditating right before.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  No, I was not. I wasn't.

• 24:49Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it's funny, you know, Alien Isolation is definitely designed to force you into that kind of a mindset. You know, the way you save in that game, there are these limited save stations that you have to physically go to and like, spend some time activating the save station. You can be killed by the alien immediately after saving in a way that screws you, or at least, I believe this was true in the first game. This never happened to me, but it's very much the lore of the game. But either way, there's the stress of, okay, I've achieved my objective, I've gotten to the next area, the alien is right there, but I haven't saved in like, 20 minutes. And back in our episode where we talked about difficulty, we talked about emotional difficulty. That is emotional difficulty. The feeling

• 25:29Kirk Hamilton?

  of stress, of concern over lost progress, that the game has designed into it. And it wants you to feel that way. That is something some people like. I at least find it very interesting, but also exhausting. Comparing that to Ocarina of Time, the other example we've cited, and actually, I would also throw in there, those shrine challenges in Breath of the Wild, up in the forest. Do the two of you remember those? They were just awful, where you had to sneak your way through the forest, and if you got spotted, you had to start over again. It was very soul crushing. I think that those, those challenges, those are challenging because, like, it's not totally clear how you're doing. Even though Breath of the Wild has a stealth mechanic built in, and there's pretty fun sneaking in that

• 26:11Kirk Hamilton?

  game, it doesn't, like, that, that section just felt very prescribed, and like, you could only go to a few certain places, and it was very frustrating, like, trial and error figuring it out. Ocarina of Time, totally. Wasn't designed for it. And those sections are such a chore. I think we talked about this back when we talked about Ocarina, but in emulated versions of that game, you can just skip the stealth sections.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, people hate it.

• 26:34Kirk Hamilton?

  They're so wretched. Yeah. And it's because it's not clear how you're doing like a stealth. If a game is going to have stealth, it has to be really clear and fair. Like, it has to be very consistent. I would imagine it's much, much harder to make a stealth game than to just make a straightforward action game.

• 26:49Speaker 00

  Also, you two played the original Metal Gear games, right? Like, I haven't. That's one of my blind spots is the Metal Gear Solid games. I haven't played them, but those I think of as kind of old school stealth games. But you're still given a fair amount of tools despite how old those games are and how few tools games used to give you to achieve stealth. Were they pretty fun or really hard?

• 27:13Jason Schreier?

  Well, so those games are really interesting because they actually give you a ton of different mechanics, but you don't really need to engage in all of them to beat the game. It's actually can be pretty easy to just kind of go guns blazing and take out enemies with headshots and get through.

• 27:28Speaker 00

  So that's what I would want to do?

• 27:30Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I mean, unless you're on a super hard difficulty or like in ghost mode or something like that. There are a lot of challenges you can just kind of apply to yourself in the Metal Gear Solid games. But you are the super soldier who can just kind of grab a bunch of guns and barrel on through. So it does give you a lot of options, which I think is is ideal in a game like this is to give you the option of sneaking around. But then if you do get caught, you can go guns blazing. That said, it's a lot more fun to play those games, being sneaky and trying to avoid enemies as much as possible. And they give you a lot of cool tools, including the the iconic cardboard box.

• 28:07Speaker 00

  That's true. I do know about that.

• 28:09Jason Schreier?

  Get away from enemies. But no, those games are not what I would call unforgiving by any means.

• 28:15Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I've always found, you know, I've mostly played the newer ones. I started with four and then went back and I guess I played some of two in college, but don't really remember it. I've always found those games just seem more suited to stealth, especially because once you start shooting, there's all these mechanics for like, you could just hork down health packs forever. Like, they don't feel very elegant as shooters. So yeah, you can plow through everything, but it doesn't feel like you're playing the game. You're playing the game the way it's meant to be played. Interesting. That said, you know, I think like there's also a lot of storytelling and kind of pacing stuff related to stealth, where there are games where you can play it, you know, either as stealth or as action. But if you play it as stealth, you get a much richer experience. Matty, way back at the beginning, you were talking about your patience and how stealth

• 28:59Kirk Hamilton?

  can kind of try your patience. But the best games, you know, they know how to kind of incorporate overheard dialogue, for example, or environmental storytelling into the sneaking in ways that can be really cool. This is actually something that The Last of Us, I remember The Last of Us in particular, the first game, though I know the second game did this as well, did this super effectively. There's a really cool sequence in The Last of Us where Joel and Ellie are sneaking through, I guess it's, I think it's Pittsburgh, it's the beginning of the game, and you're kind of up against cars and like a new squad of dudes comes in and they just go around you. And if you stay hidden, they just leave. You don't even have to fight them. You can fight them. But if you hide, you hear them talking and you kind of get these ambient snippets that just give you a sense of what's

• 29:43Kirk Hamilton?

  going on with these militias that have taken over the city. And it really feels like you're playing through a moment in a movie where you're just hiding and that's how they're delivering exposition.

• 29:52Jason Schreier?

  Ambient snippets is the name of my ska band.

• 29:55Kirk Hamilton?

  We are Ambient Snippets. All your songs are five seconds live.

• 30:01Kirk Hamilton?

  They're played over the PA from another room.

• 30:04Jason Schreier?

  We are Ambient Snippets. Hey, did you see that?

• 30:07Kirk Hamilton?

  All right, thank you.

• 30:10Kirk Hamilton?

  It's the title track on your, on your new record. The, so IO Interactive is fantastic at overheard dialogue. This is something that they excel at. It's so fun to hear all of that stuff in 007, because they've been doing this forever. I, man, when I was writing for Kotaku, I wrote multiple posts just about various people in IO Interactive games. I remember in the Sapienza level of Hitman, of the, whatever, the new Hitman that they made. This is the famous Italy level, I think it was the second or third level, that was the one that really showed the proof of concept, like that IO had really figured this out, these mini sandboxes, these super immersive, amazing little playpens with a million different options that were so fun. At the very beginning, 47, your character.

• 30:55Kirk Hamilton?

  He's like sitting on a bench, just in this beautiful sort of little central part of a villa. And there's this guy on the phone, and you just walk by him, and he's on the phone talking to someone, you know, trying to figure something out. I think he's, you know, it sounds like maybe it's someone that he knows, but you usually just walk right past him. And you're going, you know, to sneak into the villa, or to knock a guy, a delivery guy out and take his costume, or whatever. But if you stop and just listen to the dude, he goes on to have a like, five-minute-long one-sided conversation. I think at one point, he's trying to avoid a late, a late fee on a rental, like a movie rental. At another point, he's having this fight with his wife because he criticized her scones. And so he, I think he said they were kind of soggy. And you just get all of this from his side of the conversation. He talks to all these other people.

• 31:39Kirk Hamilton?

  It just goes on and on and on. It's so funny. And some writer and actor just like wrote and recorded this crazy-long thing. And IO does that all the time. Like, Hitman is loaded with that stuff. It's really, really funny. And 007 has the same thing. So it's like a little reward for people who play patiently. One other example that I'll mention of this is No One Lives Forever, the original No One Lives Forever. A game that if it is ever re-released, I will find a way to get the three of us to play. Because this was one of the first, or at least the best, the first best examples of overheard dialogue. You're kind, this is like a James Bond-type game. You're playing a James Bond-type, you know, super spy lady, and you're sneaking around. And there's a lot of stealth in these games.

• 32:22Kirk Hamilton?

  And there are these hilarious overheard conversations between just enemy goons, where they'll just go on and on and on about like, movies, and the economy, and the world. And they're like, really well-written and really funny. And like, just the dumbest things that they could be talking about, but it's very, very funny, and it's totally meant as a reward for, for sneaky players.

• 32:42Speaker 03

  What's in all those cakes, anyway? Beer. We supply Hans' entire staff with the finest Deutsch brews.

• 32:51Speaker 03

  Really? That must be a lot of beer. Indeed. Our studies show that criminals drink three times as much alcohol as law-abiding citizens. So beer turns people into criminals? A correlation doesn't imply causality. Just because criminals drink a lot of beer-

• 33:08Jason Schreier?

  That doesn't mean that beer causes crime.

• 33:12Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, and I think that like stealth just can be a reward in its own right. I mean, the best stealth games is kind of a trite observation, but it's true. And it's cliche for a reason, which is that the best stealth games feel like you're in this big interlocking puzzle where every encounter has just kind of like different solutions that you can find. Often straightforward ones, like this enemy is standing next to a pool of water and there's like a downed wire next to it. So you can find a way to electrocute the water and take him down that way. And it can be very satisfying. It's not exactly taxing on the brain to figure out the solutions to a lot of these mechanics. But it's really rewarding just to do it. And if you get ambient snippets along the way, even better.

• 33:52Kirk Hamilton?

  That's true. Games incentivize stealth a lot of different ways. Like there are definitely narrative games, you know? There are definitely RPGs where if you can play stealthily and get through a section without triggering combat, it'll actually open new options in the story or like new lines of dialogue. And there's also, you know, playing non-lethally. Like a lot of games, Dishonored comes to mind, but a lot of games do this. There are games where if you want, you can play the whole game without killing anyone. This is something arcane likes to do in particular. But the only way you can play stealthily, well, I don't know if I should say that. That might not be true. There might be a way to play Dishonored like combat and still be non-lethal. But it is much easier to be a stealth character who also plays non-lethally. And that can be a reward.

• 34:35Kirk Hamilton?

  Some people really like playing games non-lethally.

• 34:38Jason Schreier?

  Well, the ending changes based on what you do. There's that whole chaos state in the first Dishonored where the more people you kill, the kind of the more chaos happens in the world.

• 34:48Kirk Hamilton?

  That's a good point.

• 34:48Jason Schreier?

  You get totally different endings.

• 34:50Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I played the first game very non-lethally the first time because of that. Because of that, sort of the game pushing me in that direction. I'm not sure how I feel about that though, actually. It is a cool game. I guess I like that they took that swing.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, playing non-lethally always just seems so extraordinarily hard to me. I've never actually achieved it in a game. I have so much respect for it. And I'm like, oh, it's so cool that games include this option of play non-lethally. But like invariably, I'll end up in some situation where I just have to shoot my way out. And I'm like, I don't want to, I don't want to go back and do that again. I already did all that stuff. I, but it doesn't mean I don't, I mean, even by phrasing it this way, I'm like, I have so much respect for it. I feel like I see stealth as like this pure art form that I'm like, trying to train myself how to do. And when I can do it, I'm very proud of myself because I'm like, wow, I was really patient. I really waited in this grass for a long time. Like,

• 35:45Speaker 00

  I didn't have any, any like, high octane shooting sequences, which are like my favorite thing in a game. I've delayed gratification on all of that. And maybe

• 35:54Jason Schreier?

  Maddie, you should mix your, you should mix your real life meditation with your video games.

• 35:59Speaker 00

  I should, I should be playing video games mindfully.

• 36:01Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, well, play a stealth game and then just sit there and meditate for like 30 seconds while you wait for a guard to walk by and bam.

• 36:08Speaker 00

  I think that would probably work. Yeah, it would be a very unusual way to play a game, but it could work for me.

• 36:15Kirk Hamilton?

  I definitely had that feeling playing 007 where I would sneak my way through one of those optional sneaking or action like levels. And you can sneak for a long time and kind of soften up the enemy defenses before eventually you start shooting. But then if I died or something, I'd start all the way back at the beginning. And I'd be like, okay, no way.

• 36:34Speaker 00

  Like, nevermind, I'm just killing all these guys.

• 36:37Kirk Hamilton?

  Right. I'm gonna have to start shooting. It's, I'm just gonna go live from the beginning.

• 36:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I will say that in that game, at least, I often found I didn't actually like the shooting sequences. I mean, we can get into this more in a Beans Cast if people want to go to maximumfun.com/Choi and check it out. But I do actually think the stealth in that game is quite fun. And I think part of it is because of the dynamic that Jason mentioned earlier, in that it's very friendly towards someone like me who is like, oh, uh, that guy saw me. I didn't realize he was there. Or I got impatient and just wanted to like, do something. Something quickly, but I can still contain the situation or improvise my way out of it. Or maybe I just only have to kill a couple of guys and then I just go to the next room. And the quote, starting over part is shorter and more contained to like several small rooms,

• 37:26Speaker 00

  rather than like a massive open area that you described Kirk. Anytime I was in one of those, I was like pretty frustrated. I was like, this is eventually just gonna end in me having to shoot all 30 of these guys. And I may as well just go ahead and do it now.

• 37:40Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it's definitely something that stealth games run into less now, but it used to be a big issue where the combat just wasn't as fun. Like, cause if a game is gonna take the time to design stealth systems and build up, you know, like make the whole game work as a stealth game, especially back in the 2000s, you know, or even in the 2010s, there just wasn't also time to make it a good shooter as well. Like the older Hitman games, I've played all of those games. They are not fun as shooters. You can play them, it's the same, you know, kind of basic idea, or at least from Hitman 2 onward, where you can sneak through the level and play really stealthy. Or if you wind up shooting your way out, you can do that too. But it's, it's just not as good of a shooter as like an actual third person shooter.

• 38:22Kirk Hamilton?

  And so as a result, you were really incentivized to play stealthy just because the shooting isn't very fun. That's less true now, like Naughty Dog has kind of blown that out. Like The Last of Us in particular is just a game where everything is so well done and it's so seamless. I mean, The Last of Us Part Two, those sequences, especially when you're kind of in Seattle early on as Ellie, and there are infected and kind of militia people that you're fighting, and it's a series of rooms across like a really large area. That is like one of the most incredible combat encounters I've ever played in a game. And it's just because it like, there isn't even a line between stealth and, and shooting.

• 39:01Kirk Hamilton?

  Like you can go back and forth between them and even have them almost like organically just happening according with the enemy AI. Where like some AI are aware of you, some of them aren't. It isn't like, you know, the awareness meters go away and now we're back in stealth mode. And that is like, I mean, that's one of the best game studios and one of the most impressive games like ever. So, okay, that's Very, very high bar. That kind of thing is now possible. Then again, yeah, there's still games like 007, which, you know, I always like doing an impressive Naughty Dog imitation at times. That's, that sounds harsh. That's not exactly how I mean it. They're doing a really good job of the Naughty Dog thing.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  An obage.

• 39:39Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, they're, they're kind of following in that design, you know, that design ethos. But they can't quite pull off some of that like incredible, you know, incredible polish and, and sort of organic design.

• 39:50Jason Schreier?

  Hmm. Yeah. Man, I'm excited to talk more about 007 because yeah, the shooting, the all-out shooting sections are the worst part of that game by far, and there are way too many of them.

• 39:58Speaker 00

  They really are.

• 39:59Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, the explosions are pretty bad.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  And I'm the one saying that. I'm, I'm the one saying that. I actually think all the stealth in that game is worth it. And the dialogue and improvisation stuff is its own reward, which I think is like the best case scenario for stealth game. For a player like me who's like, oh, this is the difficult part and I want to be rewarded with story or fun over her dialogue, or at least enough stealth tools that I also think are really fun and entertaining. Like James Bond has his like Havana syndrome, like remote detonator thing, or he just makes people want to vomit suddenly. Like, I don't know. He has, he has all these great tools.

• 40:37Kirk Hamilton?

  That is definitely the most fun stuff. I mean, any game that lets you just freely walk around the environment and relax and take your time and overhear things and observe the world that they've designed and then poke at it in different ways. I'm always just going to find that really fun. I'm optimistic for GTA 6, or at least curious what kind of stealth mechanics are going to be in that game. Rockstar has like been slowly adding stealth to their games. Like Red Dead Redemption 2 has stealth in it. GTA V had stealth segments, but they weren't great. Like they hadn't really fleshed out the, all the mechanics around it. There's no like real way of telling if people are aware of you. It doesn't have that kind of fluid, organic feeling, which is like a truth of Rockstar games in general,

• 41:19Kirk Hamilton?

  is that their actual individual mechanics aren't as well made as, you know, their, their sort of quadruple A peers. But I wonder if they can finally get there. Like if GTA 6 could be a game where you can just be Walking around and then poking at the world in different ways, you know? Like the original GTA three or Vice City, those games really gave people that feeling of just driving around, like where you're just in the world and it's not hostile at you. I think that was a big part of what made those games feel so revolutionary. It was definitely something that made me think they were just unlike anything I'd ever played. Like you could just live here. This is like a world, you know, that feeling of like they're all just going about their business, they're driving places. And then as those games have progressed, that's only gotten more pronounced.

• 42:04Kirk Hamilton?

  If you, there are so many NPC like little just vignettes that play out in GTA V. Some of them almost seem like they're just like happening, like the AI is just making them happen. Though I'm sure they've been scripted, you know? A car accident will happen and a fire truck pulls up and they put out a fire and an ambulance comes and takes people away. And you just sit there and kind of watch it all. And the idea of like increase of like adding more and more of these kinds of mechanics we're talking about to the game, where you can just like impact people in different ways, you know? Like, I don't know how you, it's exciting to think about. We're currently in this space where GTA six can be anything.

• 42:40Speaker 00

  And according to Kirk, it could be a stealth game.

• 42:43Kirk Hamilton?

  It could at least have some more of that in it, which I would make me very happy.

• 42:46Jason Schreier?

  It could even be a visual novel. I do think, I appreciate that in the world of video games, some of the games that sell the most copies are also the ones doing some of the weirdest shit imaginable. Baldur's Gate three has sold a kajillion copies and that is a game full of weird stuff. Red Dead Redemption two and GTA, just super weird games, full of weird stuff that you would not expect in a game that costs $2 billion or whatever and is required to sell tens of millions in its first month to bring it to like be a success. Like the fact that these games are so weird is pretty, pretty cool, I think.

• 43:24Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I agree. It's heartening. And man, actually, we didn't talk about Baldur's Gate three, but it, I guess it was in divinity where if you sneak in those games, you transform into some item that's in the room. And it's just a way of them showing that you're hiding.

• 43:36Jason Schreier?

  Yeah.

• 43:38Kirk Hamilton?

  Which is, which is a very funny way to indicate stealth.

• 43:40Jason Schreier?

  Sneaking, yes. Stealth combined with magic can lead to some very fun possibilities. I mean, one of the reasons I love Dishonored so much is because of the blink ability and the possibilities that ensue from that and how it lets you break the game in, in kind of ways that the developers want you to break it or pray with its goo gun and how that lets you do all sorts of wild stuff to try to sneak around enemies and make yourself, get yourself around the spaceship.

• 44:07Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, kind of mobility and changing the environment combined with screwing with the NPCs and, and you're turning them against one another and making them do unexpected things, which is always just fun and makes a game feel much richer to me than, than when everyone just hates me and is shooting at me.

• 44:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:24Kirk Hamilton?

  Nice. Well, yeah, we'll see, I guess. And we'll see what other, what other stealth games come out this year. I'm sure there'll be some interesting ones.

• 44:32Jason Schreier?

  Well, Black Flag, we're gonna talk about Black Flag.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're gonna talk about it soon.

• 44:35Kirk Hamilton?

  That's true. That'll be the next one.

• 44:36Speaker 00

  We're going back to old school Assassin's Creed again.

• 44:37Kirk Hamilton?

  Kind of a throwback to old Assassin's Creed. I think that that will be refreshing. I'm actually really looking forward to playing that game.

• 44:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, me too.

• 44:44Kirk Hamilton?

  And yeah, we'll be talking about it soon on the show. All right. Well, let's take a break and we will stealthily come back for one more thing.

• 44:54Speaker 04

  Hey, it's John Mo and I host Depresh Mode and Sleeping with Celebrities and I'm here with Max Fun Member of the Month, Kara Barnett.

• 45:01Speaker 05

  Hi, John. It's great to talk to you.

• 45:04Speaker 04

  We appreciate your support, Kara. How long have you been listening to the show?

• 45:07Speaker 05

  I've been listening to Depresh Mode since the first promo came out with Patton Oswalt. I've been listening since the very first episode.

• 45:13Speaker 04

  Now Kara, as our Max Fun Member of the Month, you'll be getting some, some prizes here. A $25 gift card to the Maximum Fun store, a special Member of the Month bumper sticker, and get this, a parking spot at Max Fun headquarters in Los Angeles just for you, just for a month or so.

• 45:32Speaker 05

  Well, that's so exciting. If only I lived in Los Angeles, but I got my eye on some stuff in the Max Fun store.

• 45:39Speaker 04

  Kara Barnett, thank you for being a listener and congratulations on being this month's Member of the Month.

• 45:45Speaker 05

  I hear the Member of the Month promos all the time.

• 45:48Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 45:48Speaker 05

  And I can't wait for my friends who listen to Max Fun shows to hear me on the radio because I haven't told any of them.

• 45:56Speaker 06

  Support the shows you love, including this one. Check the show notes for a link or go to maximumfun.org/join.

• 46:04Speaker 04

  Hello, this is Alden Ford.

• 46:05Speaker 07

  And Mujan Zofagari.

• 46:07Speaker 04

  Two of the creators of Mission to Zyx, your favorite improvised obsessively sound-designed sci-fi sitcom here on the Max Fun Network. And the news is

• 46:15Speaker 07

  We're back! With an all-new mini-series set in the Zyx Universe, The Young Old Durf Chronicles.

• 46:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:21Speaker 07

  Will Durf find his own killer before it's too late?

• 46:24Speaker 04

  Ooh.

• 46:24Speaker 07

  To find out how that question could possibly make sense while you just have to tune in.

• 46:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, and as always, it's ambitious and labor-intensive to a frankly absurd degree.

• 46:34Speaker 07

  Indeed.

• 46:34Speaker 04

  So if you are looking for a little break from your own galaxy, we would love for you to check it out.

• 46:39Speaker 07

  That's The Young Old Durf Chronicles. Search Mission to Zyx, Z Y X X, in your podcast app.

• 46:43Speaker 04

  Or on MaximumFun.org.

• 46:45Speaker 07

  Keep it fresh.

• 46:48Kirk Hamilton?

  And we are back for one more thing. Jason, what's your one more thing?

• 46:52Jason Schreier?

  My one more thing is a video game called Gantu Rescue. Have either of you heard of this game?

• 46:56Speaker 00

  Nope.

• 46:57Jason Schreier?

  Gantu is a type of penguin, and this is a puzzle game. It is a sokoban game, meaning that it is kind of a grid perspective. You can move in the four cardinal directions, and you have to push things around. And it involves sliding penguins onto spaces and getting them into their proper positions through increasingly elaborate kind of puzzles and tools and obstacles that you have to overcome. But what's the kind of big twist is that there's recursion in this game. So as you start to get through it, it'll start off pretty simple. You'll just have a penguin. You'll have to move it to its correct spot. You have different colored penguins, and they each have to move to a marker that corresponds with that color. So you have a red penguin. You have to move it to this red spot.

• 47:43Jason Schreier?

  And so that starts off simple, gets a little more complicated. Then the game introduces items. Like, for example, a penguin might get a hammer, which makes them smash through walls or smash through other penguins on their way to getting to the spot. Another penguin might get a spring, which lets them bounce off of walls. And then you have to kind of maneuver them to their correct spots along the way. But then, as things start to get things start to get a little bit off the rails, and you will find that in some of these levels...

• 48:15Jason Schreier?

  You will find that you can actually take penguins out of them and into the levels that came before them. And then you realize that you can take penguins from the the previous level and have them X imported into the next level or exported from that that certain level. And then things get really out of control in this hilarious, devious, amazing way that has made it one of my favorite games of this year. I actually think it came out last year, but I played it this year and it's one of my favorite games of this year because you're playing around with recursion, you're finding levels where the you're in a level and then there's an entrance to the same level within that level and you have to keep going inside of it and just kind of break your brain a little bit along the

• 48:57Jason Schreier?

  way. And this is all in service of sliding penguins around to their proper proper markers. It is fantastic. I really love it. I've completed the game, got a little lovely heartfelt message from the developer being like, wow, you completed this game, which was very fun. That's nice. And I think it's it's really if you were you're into puzzles and Sokoban style puzzles, block pushing, etc. You will really enjoy this game. It is one of those brain breakers that is just a lot of a lot of fun and really challenging, yet satisfying to get through. Nice. Once again, it's called Gento Rescue, G E N T O O, but the name will be in the

• 49:40Jason Schreier?

  show notes. It's worth checking out. I played it on my Steam Deck, which is a good place to play games like this.

• 49:46Kirk Hamilton?

  All right. Well, I'll go second. My one more thing is Rush. And by Rush, I mean the Canadian prog band Rush, which is having a pretty amazing renaissance and has been part of one of the most feel good stories in music that I can think of recently. There's so many feel bad stories in the world of music. It's not just video games, you guys. Music is a disaster. Spotify is a wreck. AI music is horrible. There's just a lot of bad things happening. So it's just this story has been so cool and it's been so fun to watch.

• 50:19Jason Schreier?

  Wasn't there a movie like 10, 15 years ago where they're like obsessed with Rush? Like one of those Apatow comedies or they're It's like bonding over Rush or something.

• 50:26Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it's been an ongoing thing. I mean, like on Freaks and Geeks, Jason Segel's character is obsessed with Neil Peart, the drummer, original drummer for Rush. I did an episode, actually, of Strong Songs about Tom Sawyer, their most famous song, and talked a lot about Neil's drumming. And it's a really interesting story. And actually, that episode of Freaks and Geeks is amazing. There's this whole discussion between Jason Segel's character and the dad character about Buddy Rich versus Neil Peart and like traditional grip and stuff. It kind of gets really technical and it gets into how like they each drummed. It's really fun.

• 51:03Jason Schreier?

  I Love You Man is a movie I'm thinking with Jason Segel and Paul Rudd. They both love Rush.

• 51:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I remember really liking that movie when it came out. It's been a minute, but I think it's funny.

• 51:13Kirk Hamilton?

  I think I've seen it, but I don't remember that. But yeah, I mean, Rush comes up from time to like, actually, a lot. Rush is just, especially in kind of nerdy, nerdy culture. Like, a lot of people just really love Rush. They've been around for a really long time. I mean, they were making albums in the 70s. Geddy Lee, the bassist and lead singer, is 72. Alex Lifeson is also 72. They're like childhood best friends who made a band. And Neil Peart died really tragically. He died, I don't know how many years ago now, but a little while ago. And Rush had really been playing this whole time. And without Neil, you know, it just wasn't the same. They were a trio, and it's just like each member of the band was incredibly important. They were, you know, a third of the band each,

• 51:56Kirk Hamilton?

  and there was no one more important member of the band. So without him, they weren't touring and they weren't playing. And they just announced a new tour with a new drummer. And it's been this like crashing success. It's been so cool. And a lot of that is because the new drummer is so awesome. So she's a German drummer named Annika Niles. And she's around my age. She's like in her, I think, early 40s. She's amazing. She's been around for a long time. She was touring with Jeff Beck before Rush, but she actually does a lot of stuff on YouTube. She just like posts videos of herself playing like freaky, amazing, odd meter, just shredding drum stuff. And they hired- ...her to be their drummer, and it's just become this amazing story.

• 52:39Kirk Hamilton?

  They just launched their new tour fairly recently, so you can watch videos of them playing, you know, Tom Sawyer or their other really famous songs. And we'll link a few in the show notes. I really recommend just checking them out. It's like these massive arenas. They played in LA. There's a video of them playing Tom Sawyer in LA. And so it's these two, like 72-year-old guys who sound great. Like Geddy can still hit all the high notes and like they're playing the songs, which is amazing.

• 53:06Speaker 00

  That's so impressive because usually as you age, your voice, it just becomes significantly harder to hit higher notes.

• 53:12Kirk Hamilton?

  He has really taken care of himself. And I mean, I remember thinking like 10 years ago or something, seeing Rush on The Colbert Report, and they sounded amazing and thinking, wow, Geddy's still got it. Like, he sounds great. And it was impressive then, and now it's like 10 or 15 years later, he's still got it. So those two guys are up front doing the thing. They actually open, Jason, you'll appreciate this, they open with a very funny South Park bit that they project up on the wall because I think Matt Stone and Trey Parker love Rush as well. Rush repeatedly turns up on South Park, and there's a whole thing where Cartman is pretending that he's Geddy Lee, and they do this whole bit before the song begins. So you get to see all that, but then you see Annika Niles like just crushing it, and she plays all of those, you know, of Neil's fills on Tom Sawyer.

• 54:14Kirk Hamilton?

  And as she's playing them, you know, totally destroying, the audience is just going nuts. And it's just this amazing thing of this younger, you know, really great drummer stepping in for a legend and like doing such an awesome job, clearly loving it. They do a big tribute to Neil at all of their shows, you know, he's just, they were all such close friends. And now they get to play the music again and share it with everyone. And it's just really, really cool. There are interviews with her. Rick Beato did a really cool interview with her, talking with her, you know, just about her drumming and her story. She's a really neat person. And like I said, an amazing musician. So I just wanted to share that because I think it's really cool and it just makes me very happy. It's so cool to see this band of guys who have always just seemed like some of the nicest guys in rock and roll, getting to

• 54:58Kirk Hamilton?

  do it again and having such a cool replacement drummer for a legend who can never truly be replaced.

• 55:04Jason Schreier?

  I can't even imagine, just like, not only just singing, but touring at that age has gotta be so grueling. Oh my god.

• 55:11Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, they're doing it. I mean, they've always loved doing it. So I think they're good at it. And I would imagine, based on the size of the crowds that they are attracting, that they tour in quite a lot of comfort at this point.

• 55:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I hope so.

• 55:23Kirk Hamilton?

  It's probably not as rough as it might be for, you know, an indie band starting out.

• 55:27Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, but I mean, being on the road is always rough, even if you're staying in nice hotels and like flying private. It's still pretty rough.

• 55:33Kirk Hamilton?

  I think they just genuinely love it. I think that performing for people is just like their calling and it's the thing they love to do. So yeah, we'll put some links for that down in the show notes and I hope, I hope people will, will check some of them out.

• 55:44Speaker 00

  That's awesome.

• 55:44Kirk Hamilton?

  All right, Maddie, take us home. What's your one more thing?

• 55:47Speaker 00

  Mine is also Canadian, actually, by sheer coincidence. So I'm listening to this five-part podcast series called Broome Gate: A Curling Scandal. And it is-

• 56:00Jason Schreier?

  Love it. Sold.

• 56:00Speaker 00

  Incredible. I was like, I was thinking of you, Jason, because I know you like sports scandals and I really think you'll enjoy this. I think you'll both enjoy this quite a bit. So it's hosted by this guy, John Cullen, who is both a Canadian comedian and also a tier-two curler. And so he himself is very involved in the curling world up there and where it's very popular. But curling's been around for a really long time. Competitive curling is a really big deal in certain countries, including Canada. And so despite that, I don't know anything about curling at all. And this podcast is very friendly to people like me who didn't know about this scandal.

• 56:41Speaker 00

  And so if you're like me and you didn't even know there was a curling scandal, I'll quickly recap it for you. The podcast came out in 2024, but it's covering this thing that happened in the mid 2010s when a broom was invented and sold that was significantly more powerful when it comes to allowing the person pushing the broom to control the rock. So I guess I should say curling is you push a broom, you push a rock with a broom over ice. That's what curling is. And you try to aim it into certain directions. And it's competitive in the sense that like the other team is also trying to achieve the same thing with their own stones, et cetera. So broom developments emerged. Basically, a new type

• 57:26Speaker 00

  of broom was invented by someone. And then there was a sort of arms race, like a broom arms race.

• 57:34Kirk Hamilton?

  Fireball.

• 57:35Speaker 00

  Fireball came out. No, no, not at all. Real brooms. And no turfs involved.

• 57:41Kirk Hamilton?

  Matty question. Is this so in curling, I've only watched a bit of Olympic curling, but is the broom like they push the puck or whatever the ball and then like also the other teammate is like in front and like is like frantically cleaning the surface.

• 57:55Speaker 00

  Okay, so this is part of what's actually different about these new brooms. And I'm probably going to do a bad job explaining this, but essentially there are like these two players who will both be trying to control the direction of the stone. One of them, as Kirk said, will be like sort of aiming and the other one will be pushing the ice in front of the stone or around the stone to sort of mediate the texture of the ice. So the stone will go in a certain direction.

• 58:18Kirk Hamilton?

  Like polishing the ice frantically in real time to try to direct the stone, which is amazing to watch.

• 58:22Speaker 00

  And this new type of broom basically made that second guy irrelevant because it introduced so much control to the stone that you didn't need somebody to polish the ice nearly as much. You could aim the stone, you could make it stop really quickly as opposed to like sliding out of control. I mean, all of this is explained on the podcast and I'm probably doing a bad job of explaining how revolutionary this broom was. But that's one of the pieces of it that was really shocking to people initially was that it was like possibly Going to change the entire sport and make it so that like teams operated in a different way. Anyway, it's really fascinating to hear about sports scandals and like this broom arms race that developed and how it completely changed the sport that's been around for a really, really long time and I didn't know a lot about.

• 59:06Kirk Hamilton?

  Did you say this was like 10 years ago? I'm looking this up.

• 59:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was 10 years ago.

• 59:09Kirk Hamilton?

  2015, 2016.

• 59:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And anybody who knows about it is probably going to be like shouting at their, their, their audio.

• 59:18Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it has a whole Wikipedia page. I'm reading it now.

• 59:20Jason Schreier?

  That sounds fascinating. Is there a documentary or is it just the podcast?

• 59:24Speaker 00

  I can't speak to that. I only know about this podcast, which I recommend. Like I said, it's five episodes. They're all about 30 minutes long.

• 59:31Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, because it seems like, the reason I ask, I love podcasts, obviously, we make a podcast, but it seems like the type of thing where we benefit from watching the sport in action while you're hearing the story.

• 59:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it would, although, I mean, I, there may be a great documentary on it and I, I can't speak to that. But I did really, I was really impressed by how many interviews they got for this. Like, they really got all the major players and like these top curling competitors and the manufacturers of the brooms on the record to discuss all of it. And it's great. It's, it's really entertaining to hear about this hyper-specific sports drama.

• 1:00:07Jason Schreier?

  I literally, I just watched another documentary about another hyper-specific sports drama. Have you guys heard of the chess scandal, the Magnus Carlsen versus Hans Niemann chess cheating?

• 1:00:17Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 1:00:18Kirk Hamilton?

  Wait, is this the like anal?

• 1:00:20Jason Schreier?

  Anal beads.

• 1:00:22Kirk Hamilton?

  I definitely have heard about this.

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  Is there, is there a good documentary about this out?

• 1:00:26Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, it just came out on Netflix. It's called Untold. Untold is the kind of label, the, the sports story label, Untold: Chessmates. I just watched it this weekend. It's short. It's great. It's very entertaining.

• 1:00:38Speaker 00

  I'll check it out. I was reading the articles about it as it went along and it was totally wild. So, yeah, I recommend that too, sight unseen, just because I followed that story and it was fricking nuts.

• 1:00:48Jason Schreier?

  And it's wild because the anal beads thing is like, comes out of nowhere. It's just like someone made it up on Twitter.

• 1:00:53Speaker 00

  Much like anal beads, yeah, sure.

• 1:00:55Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, exactly. That's a perfect place to end.

• 1:01:01Speaker 00

  Good stuff. Anyway, the podcast, just to reiterate, is called Broome Gate: A Curling Scandal. It's five eps. It's really fun.

• 1:01:08Kirk Hamilton?

  Nice. Fascinating. Yeah, that looks awesome. All right. Well, that is another episode of Triple Click. Y'all, we recorded one.

• 1:01:17Speaker 00

  We did it. Did it again.

• 1:01:18Kirk Hamilton?

  Finished an episode.

• 1:01:19Jason Schreier?

  Congratulations.

• 1:01:20Kirk Hamilton?

  Congratulations to us.

• 1:01:21Jason Schreier?

  We did it 311 times.

• 1:01:23Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah. Reminder to listeners, send short emails about affordability in gaming to tripleclickatmaximumfun.org and tell us your stories so we can share them on next week's episode. That will be an interesting conversation. And until then, I'll see the two of you next week.

• 1:01:39Jason Schreier?

  See you next time.

• 1:01:41Speaker 00

  Bye.

• 1:01:45Kirk 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.

• 1:02:43Speaker 06

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