 Arduino that has like RF. I know about the RF, do we know you did absolutely nothing with it? I assume it was still in the package. I don't remember kickstarting it. I mean, I've still got two copies of castles of Burgundy, one of which is still in shrink wrap. I bought them. My pile of games that anyone may take away. All right, we're streaming. I think we're good. Nobody watched this. Mono zero. That's the number it should stay. All right, one last thing I forgot. I messed up my audio mapping stick second. Because I started doing the pre-production for the. Some of those other YouTube archive things, but I don't want to actually start doing that until we have a new logo. Yeah. Oh, kitty emailed. She said, oh, she hasn't forgotten about it. OK, and she's like, you meant it when I'm not going to focus. We told her she's like, she's like, right. Well, she said, I just finished my big project at work, whatever. And she's like, you meant it. I hope she's like, you said no rush. I hope you meant it. And I'm like, of course, I meant it. Yeah. I mean, what do we have a deadline? I'm not going to create some art. You know, I yell at people for making artificial deadlines. I'm not going to do one myself. Yep. I guess the only deadline is a real deadline where it's like, I need this done by I will literally die. Well, like, you know, maybe I want to make a Super Bowl ad. I need it done before the Super Bowl, right? It's like, I can't do it for next year's Super Bowl. That's a real deadline. The Super Bowl isn't going to move for you, right? I watched the Super Bowl last year. I'm just saying, like, if you're, you know, if I was hiring, you know, that's a real deadline. Although you were making a video game. You don't have a real deadline. Sometimes you do. Sometimes you're going to run out of money if you don't release by a certain date. Well, that's yeah. All right, I'm just going to start. We're streaming. We got three people watching. We're good. No, three people. Go home. It's Tuesday, July 31st. I'm Rym. I'm Scott. And this is Geek Nights tonight. We're talking about rogue you likes rogue likes as in games that are like the game called rogue. You ever played fucking rogue? What RIT? I've never played actual rogue. I've only played I've only ever played net hack. Just say I'm Scott again really quick. I'm Scott really quick. OK, actually say it. Actually say it. You should have just said it. It didn't work this time. I'm Scott. I don't even I wouldn't even record. I mean, I assume rogue just looks like net hack, right? Yeah, Greg made me play. It's not. I've never played it or seen it. I assume it's the same as net hack on the crap here. Are you going to open a bit? I could just talk about biking on hidden bath. That works. Go for it. I haven't done anything else. I got new furniture. Whatever you're ready. All right. All right. So earlier this year when it was fucking cold and I perhaps foolishly agreed to bike, 10 Saturdays in a row, which was great except for the cold part. Everything else about it was great. There was one ride we went on and on the way home on that ride. We hopped onto this bike path and it went from someplace upstate. I don't know where the hell we were all the way to Terry town. And I was like, where the hell is this path been? I've never seen it before. No one ever told me about it because I've biked up there and I found like these really, really great bike paths. But I never was able to cobble together like our route around. So I, you know, I went online. I found it and on Sunday rim didn't want to come because I don't know why, but I went out stuff to do. I went out to take the path and supposedly according to maps, the path would take me from the Bronx to Brewster, where I would then take the train home. So trying to find the start of the path. I got to the Bronx. Okay. Cause I'd been that down that way before, but trying to find the beginning of the path near Van Cortland Park was not easy because there's a lot of like really nice two lane bike paths up there that start at random points. So I got, I went into the woods in the mud and the various, I saw bike like tracks in the mud. So I was like, huh, I think I'm going the right way. And then I was slightly lost, but I basically just gave up on finding a real start of the path and I just went on the normal roads on like the 87 service road until I got to Tibbets Park, whatever that is. And then from there, I was able to find the South County Trailway, which goes north and then becomes the North County Trailway, which takes you all the way to Brewster. So unrelatedly, I was looking for a map of that bike path and I found something I didn't know about. Apparently the sprain ridge park bike trail, which I've heard of. Yeah, there is another path someone posted about that's further to the east. It's not a bike trail. But it doesn't go as far and it's not as, you know, it's, it's. No, it's not a bike trail. You know what it is? It's a mountain biking park that I didn't know was there. I can go mountain biking. I'm sure Emily. I'm sure it's not very mountainous. I mean, it looks like it's about on the level of Palau Bin. I mean, the climb from the whole entire path was not much. Mountain biking doesn't necessarily mean you're going up and down mountains. Sometimes it just means you're going straight over crazy obstacles. Looks like it's more like that. This is like what I did in Singapore. It was so nice to ride in this path because basically there's no cars. There's nothing in the way. There's, you know, there's people all along it also using the path. The only thing I would do differently as I managed to have good timing and caught the 211 train back. Yeah. Cause those upstate trains do not run that often on Sundays. If I'd missed it, which would have been a close miss based on when I left my house. I would have had to wait. I would have had to wait an hour for the 311. But you know what I would do next time? The only thing I do differently is take the train there and bike back. That way you're not going to get lost trying to find the start of the path. Right. You're not going to have to worry about the train timing of getting there. Right. Yeah. You just wake up, go to Grand Central, take the train there. And once you're at the Brewster train station, it's easy to get to the path. So then just bike home and bike home, whatever. You're not going to get lost in the Bronx. Yup. Cause I do a thing like when I run my half marathons, the route I take is to the top of Manhattan basically from here. I also, you know, I would just bike to Brewster and bike back, but that would take a long time. Yup. But same thing. So I end my run. I would have been home at like eight or nine. And I'm at the top of Manhattan. So my options are either just run home or take the subway home. And it takes like an hour to take the subway from the top of Manhattan back to here. So I decided the last time I did it that I'm going to take the subway there in the morning and just run back that way. I'll end when I'm exhausted and feeling like crap in front of my own apartment. Yup. As opposed to next to the only grocery store in the top of Manhattan. So if you want to, if you want to come, you should come because it's way good. I'm up for it next time. And I since now I now I totally know the way. So you can just follow me. See, that's it. You figured it out. And now I can come and I know the way in the reverse. I still probably get a little lost trying to find it from the bottom. I mean, I remember a couple of times I only went over the RFK one way because I wasn't really sure where the entrance was. I figured out Randall's Island too. I can show you. Yeah, I know. I know Randall's Island and excruciating detail. That's part of that. I figured I had a bike over the bridge to 125th Street because I have another route where I go and I do a loop around Randall's Island. And then I come back over and run down in Queens. Anyway, anyway, and some gaming news. So valve added a temporary fix for this fake item scam. Right. So I don't, I'm not, it's still not a hundred percent sure in all the details. So if I'm wrong about anything, I'm wrong. That's just how it's going to be. Wait, it's geek nights. I should be the disclaimer on literally every episode. I might be wrong. I'm likely wrong. But here's what we've reviewed games based on half a play. This is what it seems to have happened. It seems like there was some indie game called something. I don't even know what it's called. Some indie game called something. And it seems like it changed its name or something to try to trick people. Abstractism. Right. So apparently the game was up to multiple scams at once scam. Number one, it was just mining coins. All the reviews were like, Oh my God, this isn't a game. It's just mining my coins. What the hell? You know, I wouldn't be surprised if battle tech were doing that because battle tech somehow maxes out my 1080 every time I play it. Yet both live streaming to two different streams does not even touch over like over watch can do that. Fine. Well, that's the difference between a indie studio and a blizzard. Yeah. So the other thing is that apparently this is the part I'm probably wrong about right is that there was some sort of fake item scam where basically this game had steam items that you could trade and sell in the steam marketplace that were associated with this game. But they made their items look like valuable items from TF to trick to trick people into trading for this game's items. And thus they scanned people out of their valuable items and got and to get monies. This wreaks very much. This is basically giving people their legit items back. I mean one on one hand, like I don't want to blame the victim, but you could you could have figured this out. It's basically the steam. I don't it's the steam equivalent of going on eBay and buying a picture of a MacBook Pro as opposed to an actual MacBook Pro. Power book. Exactly. Exactly. So I I'm going to say that the statute of limitations ran out on this considering that the MMO is long gone. But you might know I talk about it a lot. I was having a minor minor resurgence right now for some reason. There was actually a news about Wow. First of all, I see people in my, you know, battle net friend list playing Wow, which is strange. I've seen news about Wow recently how like they're basically making everything free except for the new expansion. So like you don't have to go and buy all the old expansions. You can just play Wow and you'll get every old expansion. I think that's what it said. And also there's some bug in the Wow leveling that's happening and they're fixing in or something. There's some news about that. So Wow is having a minor resurgence I think because there haven't been MMOs and I think people. True. It's been so long since MMO people are back on the MMO. So in Sierra's the round. Yeah. The only MMO room can talk about because the only one I played because I knew better, but everybody gets one. But well, no, I played. I really knew better. I played what's it with you at RIT for a while. The Korean grindy one. We played that for like a week. I kept planning for a couple months, which maybe was a mistake. Okay. I bashed. I never got beyond bashing slimes. Sierra's the realm. I had my main character and my brother as character. And I had another character that I leveled up enough to be plausible, who had a fake identity and generated a pretty reliable in game gold income by crafting items that appeared to be very valuable items and trading them or selling them with people who were too dumb to actually right click on the item and look at the stats to see what it really was. And I generated a handsome income with this. That would be like if I had a magic card and at the top it said mox emerald, but at the bottom it didn't say tab get a green mana. It said tab do five damage to yourself. Stop hitting yourself. And I sold it to you for the value of mox emerald. It's just it's interesting. I think the salient point of the story is that if you're going to scam people in the modern era, you can't just run one scam. This game looks like it was multiple interleaved scams Props to the scammers, but also I guess Valve is fixing it. It's just more examples of Valve. You cannot get around this. You need to pay fucking money, all the zillions of dollars you make from steam and whatever to hire people and treat them well and have them human moderate steam and choose which games go in and which games go out just like Apple does with the stupid Apple App Store. Right. Because otherwise steam will be steam is right now sort of in between the Apple App Store and the garbage Google Play Store. I mean, I would never search steam for a genre of game to see what's out there. No, it's like the Apple Store is like almost all human controlled and it's very hard to get crap in there, but not impossible. And the Google Play Store is just a fucking mess. Yep. And steam is in the middle. Right. And steam, you know, the Apple Store, they're legit criticisms of that method as well. But, you know, you steam basically has to do with the Apple Store does, but not the evil parts. Just the good parts. Right. Yep. I mean, if they really wanted to, Valve could have like its default stuff. Google should do that too. But they could have the like, yeah, here's all the garbages. You can buy it if you want, but there'd be dragons there. Yeah. Bad dragons. Not good dragons. Anyway. But not bad dragon. So in some other news that's actually pretty interesting, I did not think this would ever happen. Okay. But you might recall that a long time ago, like I was still working at IBM. I would think it was still. I think we're still. Yeah. Well, I remember I was working at IBM. Are there RIT or just out of our. It was in that era. The mid 2000s. The escapist was a magazine. I remember I got the first escapist ever. It was like a PDF because they tried to make it like a magazine. It was a real magazine. It was long form, fancy looking articles. And you would flip the pages. And I don't remember it was actually PDF, but it felt like a PDF. Yeah. I think it was actually a PDF because I got it. It might have been a fancy website. I remember it getting emailed to me. And I like read it at work. Right. The PC. The point is that they're like, Hey, we're doing highbrow games, journalism, digitally with fancy magazine, looking stuff. It was just the original escapist. People described it as the, you know, the New Yorker of video game journalism. That's what it was for like a month. Yep. And then it just got kind of hacky and bad. And eventually it kind of got taken over by gamer. Eventually it became the escapist that you know, right? The one that employed, you know, Yahtzee and all those other people. Yeah. But it had a lot of problems that we don't want to get into. It was bad news. And I wasn't... It eventually died, right? I don't even know. All I know is I... I don't know either. Stop reading it. Stop reading it. I'm not telling. I don't know either. Because the news is that Defy Media who owns the escapist and had been just ignoring it, they sold it to, let's see, to Canada's enthusiast gaming. So the escapist is now Canadian. And it's owned by this group called Enthusiast Gaming, which I didn't know anything about. Okay. I don't know either of these groups. So... But their goal is to bring it back and make it as good as what it originally was. So for that one week. And not let like Gomergate bullshit infiltrate it and ruin it. All right. Good luck with that. I would not even talk about this on Gignite's, but for the fact that there is a piece of information that makes me go from very distrustful of this to cautiously optimistic. Right. So the escapist, former editor-in-chief, like way back in the day, Russ Pitz, who you may know is running Take This. Wasn't he also like editor at, was it Gamers with Jobs? Was that what it was called? Russ Pitz is not a ton of stuff. Was that what it was called? I think that, and I think... Because Lara worked with that. Right. Well, I think she wrote at Gamers with Jobs. That's the first place I heard him was actually in the earliest days of podcasting. Yeah. 2006. I never read Gamers with Jobs, but I did listen to the Gamers with Jobs podcast, which I believe was Russ Pitz and another guy I forget. Yeah. So Russ Pitz, I trust. And for a lot of reasons, I know him. He's a good dude. But Take This is a fantastic organization that provides the AFK rooms and conventions and does training for convention staff. Among many other things. Yeah. Just super stand up, dude. The fact that he is involved in this and is basically in charge of the new escapist means that if there's a chance for this to work, this is the chance. Like, I wouldn't trust this. But why buy escapist? Why not just make something completely new? Well, because escapist had a pretty good brand and it actually has a back catalog of a bunch of good long-form journalism that could be brought back or revisited. There's a lot of reasons to bring it back. I guess they bought it, right? So there must be some value in what they've bought, you know, the intellectual properties and contracts or who knows what they've got. Hopefully not debts. Yeah. But Ross also made a good point on Twitter and because a lot of Gomergate types were really invested in the escapist adjacent media and he pretty much said straight up, yeah, political extremists referring to Gamergators are not welcome in this new outlet. So we'll see how this goes. I'm cautiously optimistic. I wonder if that's a good strategy, right? Of buying like buying media outlets. Dude, I would have bought the Gothamist if I could have bought Breitbart and started publishing things that, you know, are anti the audience to then write like imagine if I could buy Breitbart and then suddenly only publish, you know, actually good stuff. Yeah, actually publish. Suddenly publish real news. But I but I right like that. Is that a good idea? Oh, no. Or is that a bad idea? I don't know. Like if I could buy Fox News and put legitimate journalism. Here's the difference though. Would that be a good idea? A bad idea. Fox News and Breitbart were always vile garbage. I mean, I guess it was I guess it can only help right. It can't hurt. Yeah. It would only because at least you'd get rid of the box. Yeah, exactly. Even if you buy it and it fails. But here's a case for the one. Here's a case of the escape was already dead. So if Fox News was already dead and off the air, would it be worth buying it? Yeah, I mean, if I had the money, I would have done anything possible to buy the Gothamist when it went down. So trivia, the person who was my boss two jobs ago is friends, childhood friends, I believe, with Jake Dobkin, the Gothamist guy. And he his startup that he started after he left the company where I was working for him in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Apparently very successful. And he gave mad monies to the new Gothamist. Interesting. That he's a very interesting dude. He was involved with like the FBI rating him for Apple to wears when he was a kid and such. So in some other news, if you are going to be at Gen Con, which which I would not personally recommend. Yeah, do not. Don't go to Gen Con. If you live near Indiana, I still maybe it's where it's OK. We live on the same train lines of the New York Comic Con. We don't go to that nonsense. Yeah, I mean, Gen Con is a little better than New York Comic Con. Yeah, but it's also got like I wouldn't do panels at it. The thing with Gen Con is like has good parts and bad parts. Right. It's actually so you know what? I might get actually good in a socially progressive way. It's just bad in the convention management like Geek Knights would never perform at Gen Con. Right. It's like Gen Con. It's like, you know, the people there are good and the content is good and all that stuff is just the the convention structure is bad. But if you are going to be there and you listen to Geek Knights, then you might be interested that Luke Crane, you know, he goes to Gen Con every year. Yeah. Head of Games at Kickstarter, Burning Wheel Dude, among other things. He has a game that he wants to play test at Gen Con. I'm pretty sure. But if you are hearing this now for the first time, it's too late to get in on that game. It's hard to say, though, because I feel like he's going to be selective about who he brings in. And the things I know about this are that one. He published a Twitter poll that was adjacent to this. And the question was fuck elves or I want to be an elf. Rim wants to choose. I want to both fuck elves and be an elf. I guess there should be a third. I would like to. I would choose fuck elves, but not in the way the rim wants to. And I'm more the way that, like, you know, fuck the Philadelphia Eagles and fuck elves. You know, there is a third way, though, the drow. It's both fuck elves. And I secretly want to be an elf because I kind of am an elf. Anyway, the other thing is Luke said to me specifically, and I quote, you will like this. Yeah, because you want to fuck elves and be an elf. You know that. I hope I hope they're Santa's elves and not. Oh, that would be great. That would be super great. And it wouldn't change the answer to my question, maybe. Anyway, so it should definitely change the answer to the question. You should check this out if you're going to be a Gen Con. There's rumors that we there might be able to something similar might happen at Pax West. So we'll see if it happens. I'm going to do everything I can to be involved in that. But also, if you are a fan of parsley games, the Jared Sorenson variety, like such games as Danger Town, Beat Down, Action Castle with Torchans, they're going to be there. And the parsley hardcover collection is out. The Kickstarter is like done and everything. Yeah. So yeah, I kick started it. So I'm just waiting for my book to come in the mail. But so originally, the parts of the games are published in individual pieces of cardboard, which I have all of. Yeah. But why not get all the games again in a hardcover book that's much more convenient. And they are running events at Gen Con. And I remembered why I don't like Gen Con. Two of the events are sold out and you can't go to them. Yep. But for $2 on Saturday at 3 or 4 p.m., that's OK. I've put more money into arcade machines before. You could play Spooky Manor or Danger Town Beat Down. And that's why we don't go to Gen Con. Do you think Jared gets those $2? No, I'm pretty sure Gen Con gets those $2. Jared probably has to pay for the table that he's going to have in the room. Fucking Gen Con. You're like so close and yet so far. If you just got rid of your stupid ticketing, I'd be like, well, let's go to Gen Con. Yeah, ticketing will never be a part of Pax Unplugged. That is the hill I will die on. Oh, I could just not go to Pax Unplugged. All right. But anyway, things of the day. So this rim had, for once, a respectable, high quality thing of the day. This is a real good. But he could not compete with my even better thing of the day. So the problem is with Scott's thing of the day, my thing of the day is great. Because, one, my thing of the day is great. Mine is just greater, as usual. My thing of the day. You tried to step up. You came up to my usual level of thing of the day goodness. And then I stepped it up even more. My thing of the day is a mathematical model that you can use to determine when you should leave a Mets game. So I got a lot of stories about this. I've been in some situations. We left a hockey game a little early once because there was a snowstorm. That was a fucking mistake. All right, so I got two stories, right? So first of all, when we were young and we went to a lot of games, especially Mets games, you would go home early because you drove there. And if you didn't leave early, if you're going to lose the game, there's no reason to stay to the end. Then you're going, yeah. It's eighth inning, ninth inning. Why the hell would you stay to watch, right? Anyway, it's not like hockey where something might happen. Nothing's going to happen. All you're going to do is get home way later. You're going to sit in traffic in the parking lot. It's like, whatever. I remember to get out of the Joe Luz Arena, we would sit in the parking garage for almost an hour. Yep, exactly. So you want to leave before, right? And nowadays, though, I go to MSG and everyone else, they start leaving the game. And it's like, man, if I drove here, I'd be leaving too. But I took the train to my stand at the end, no matter what happens. But anyway, so there was two notable incidents. One notable incident, which is actually a Mets game. We went to this Mets game. And I remember Kurt Schilling, piece of shit, douchebag was pitching. And there was a rain delay like partway through the game. And the rain delay went for a long time. And you know it's a long rain delay when they start showing the videos of the two times the Mets won the World Series on the screen, on the little TVs to keep you entertained while you wait. Yep. It went on for quite a while. I think we waited at least maybe an hour or even longer. And then the game didn't resume. And it was still wet. And the tarp was still on the fields that we left. In the car on the way home, we're already in Stanford, Connecticut, dropping people off, I think. And on the radio, the game continued. Oh, you're losing, by the way, when we left. The game continued. And somehow the Mets miraculously came back and won. And was it extra innings? I need to remember. This was late 90s. Maybe 1998 or 1999, something like that. If anyone can figure out exactly which game this was, props to you, great research ability. But this is the thing of based on the number of runs that a team is up by. And what inning it is, what is the confidence interval where you can leave and know the outcome of the game? Like, what are the odds that the team's going to turn around? You should make an app where you tell it what game you're at. And it goes, dang, time to go home. This is so simple that you could do the role yourself. If someone's up by six, just leave after the first inning. Maybe I will make that app. Yeah. You put in what game you're at. The problem is getting the stupid sports data. I have all these great ideas for sports apps. And I don't have access to just the basic sports data. Got to pay. I've looked into getting it. And basically, the only places that offer sports data are offering it for fantasy sports. And they charge a fortune, because that is an incredibly granular amount of data about all these players. It's like, no, I just want to know the scores of all the games in real time. That's it. So not even real time. So read this article. I'm not going to explain to you the details, but it's really good. And this graph that they show is excellent. The other incident, we were at the New England Patriots game against the Saints. And the Saints made a big interception. There was like no time left in this game. And the Saints were ahead. So as soon as he caught the interception, we got up and we walked to the parking lot and got in the car. We're in the parking lot waiting in a line of cars to get out. We're not in Patriots fans, right? So all the Patriots fans had left this game also, right? Before us even. And suddenly, we're just sitting in the car. And people outside the car walking around start like getting crazy. Hooting and hollering. Hooting and hollering. So like you do, whenever you leave a sporting event in a car, you turn on the sports radio. And sure enough, Tom Brady had miraculously somehow come back to win that game. So those are the two times you left early. And it was a mistake. We left early many other times. And those times were not mistakes. So now there's a data model, at least for baseball. I'd love to see this for other sports. It's 538. So maybe they'll do it for the sports. I really want access to data so I can make an app that tells you when to leave. But I would love to see a similar analysis for board games. Oh, yeah. When do you quit the board game? Yeah. At what point should you just flip the table because the game is all my whole motion data? Yep. Oh, I mean, oh, I think of the day that's better than you. So what I'll say to prelude Scott's thing of the day is I clicked on it. It's in French. Doesn't really tell me the deal. I think it's might be Italian. I don't even know. This looks like French. I have no idea. Anyway, it doesn't even matter. It takes three seconds to know how great this is. I think it maybe is French because you click play. And three seconds later, you know exactly why this is so great. So I actually don't have any information about this. It's Le Joutes Provinciales. I can just watch these first three seconds on a loop. Can pour le plaisir, something. I'm pronouncing all this wrong. It must be in Cannes, right? The place where the festival is, the film festival. But basically, it's dudes on boats that look a lot like the boats they use in Venice, only much bigger. And it seems like the boats also have people on them. I don't know what they're doing. Are they rowing? But these dudes are basically standing on the front of the boat fucking jousting. This is so great. And when you lose the joust, you fucking fall in the dirty ass water. How amazing is that? This is incredible. Is this even better than that, basically, that blood sport they have in Italy? The violence football. What was that even called? I don't know. But this is even better than that. This is like, holy shit. This is real good. I would even actually try this because even though, it seems like you'd get hurt and it'd be dangerous. It's not that dangerous. It's like you fall in the water and they have these big fat wooden boards on their chest. I mean, I guess you might get hit in the face. So it's really it's really just a game of pushing, right? It's like push, but you're on a boat. And like the boat is also pushing. So there's like a lot of balance going on. This is looks like way fun and way awesome. Yeah, I would do. It's very telling to this video. Zero dislikes. Zero dislikes. If you just like this, you are not a good person. In the middle of a moment, you may recall that the book club book was Emily Wilson's translation of Homer's Odyssey. It was great. We did the show. It's done. You can listen to the book club episode. There's a Geek Nights book club. Yeah, we've done a bunch of books. Books. If you're an intelligent human being, you should read books. Yeah, the paper kind. If you can read the Braille kind, if you can't see. Yep. Or the audio book, if you need to. Like there's reasons. Yeah, and I don't respect the audio book that much. But anyway, so I tried to have my turn to pick a book club book. And usually I just got a book in mind, right? This time it was a little harder because I didn't have one in mind. So at first, since we had just done this Odyssey and since it had been talked about on the internet recently. You thinking about the Aeneid? No. I was thinking about, so there's this book by, I think it isn't Xenophon, the guy's name. The old, you're talking about, I might have already read this. Right, it's basically this journey of like from Persia to Turkey or something. I've read a lot of that. We had to read it in high school. And apparently one of these is the story that The Warriors was based on, right? So I was like, oh, we should read that. But there's no Emily Wilson translation of that. No, no, no. So then I said, wait a minute, wait a minute. Why don't we just read The Warriors? Because that's a book. I've never read that book. I've never read it either. I've seen the movie like 10 times. I might read it, but then I got an even better idea than that because I don't. All right, it's evolving. Well, because I don't know if I don't really know if The Warriors is a good book. I don't know. I just know that there's a classic movie based on. I like aspects of the movie, but the movie's actually super long. Not that much happens. It's not that good. What? I like the movie. It's not that long. It's kind of pretty short. It's very, I think I like the movie more than it deserves because it's very New York. Yeah, but it's got, it's deeply flawed and not that enjoyable, except for very specific key moments. It's also got some problematic shit. Well, it's an old 70s movie. Anyway, I think it's right for a remake. Hasn't it been a good remake? I don't know. Anyway, the point, it already is a remake. It's a remake of something that's just a Robocop's getting a sequel from the original Robocop. As in they're canceling Robocop two and three every every Robocop since the first Robocop movie is dropped. And this is a direct sequel to the original Robocop. The rest of it's not canon. Fuck it. Well, take that, Frank Miller. So then I had an even better idea. I was like, well, thinking about books based on movies, right? Yeah. This Sunday, actually, it's, you know, this Sunday I'm going, but actually I think it started playing already. There is a a unremastered basically of a very, very famous and excellent movie in 70 millimeter screening at the Museum of the Moving Image, right? I think it started already, but I'm going to see it on Sunday. And that movie is also based on a book that I haven't read and is definitely a good book because it's ultra famous. And I don't know why I haven't read it. So the book club book is 2001, A Space Odyssey. All right. That's a good pick. Have you ever read it? I've never read it. All right. So I don't know if it's good, but you have stayed your execution. This is a good enough book to where I am once again, deferring my selection of some Dumas. It's ultra famous. It's a sci-fi book. It's like one of the best movies ever is based on it. I might as well see what the deal is. Is it as fucked up as the movie? Is Hal 9000 even in it? I don't even know. I've never read it. I literally don't know anything about it. I feel like as a nerd, I probably should, right? Yeah. And you know, I wonder if the same thing will happen. It ain't even long. It's not? It's like 200 and something pages. Oh, this will be quick. All right. But you know, something interesting has happened. My previous book club books that were in series. So we're Wheel of Time. And I have gone on to read the entirety of all of them. And what was the other one? The other Shattered or NK Gem is it? Yeah. Right. That is so fricking good. You need to read the rest of it. I will. It's basically Evangelion culture. I know I will. But you know, I did rim immediately reads the whole series and I make the first volume. So we'll rim go on to read about Europa immediately after reading 2000. I know one real rim go on to 2010 right as soon as even if I know one thing about Europa. I know that I should have no landing there. So yeah, otherwise, if you are going to be at Pax West, we're doing at least one panel. Our panel is on Monday. So yeah, we got a Monday first thing as soon as Pax opens panel, which is not a great time slot and whatever. But it's in the live streaming for the first time ever. They have put us in a theater, which will stream live on a official Pax Twitch channel. Probably Twitch like Pax three or something. Because if you're at Pax, I've never said this before. And I'll never say it again because the reality is we video most of our panels. But if you're at Pax, you should go to this. So we have a loud crowd in the background for the live stream. But if you're not, I think it would be funnier if there was no crowd and I could play it up to the crowd and get in the people who are watching the few people watching on Twitch would be like, what the hell is this? They'd see me being off, you know, doing my panel to nobody. How great that would be. But we're going to live stream. So if you've never been able to see us live out of Pax, you can pretend you're there. It's going to be glorious. You can also watch those Pax channels to see everything else at Pax. Yeah, at least everything that's in the Albatross Theater, the Hydra Theater, or main events. Yeah. So we'll either be Pax two or Pax three. You can watch a Megaton family along with us. Yeah. You'll be slightly delayed, but you won't know that. And you know what, frankly, the last few of Megaton finales haven't been that great. So no, but what else are you going to do on Monday? Yeah. You're going to play one more board game Monday at five o'clock. You're going to go to Ben and Roy or what are you going to do? I mean, the table tops open till seven. Oh, well, we can go there right after and then go to dinner. Yeah. Maybe we should anyway. So let's see. We were talking about rugby likes. Yeah. So we haven't played a new game recently. So let's just pick a category of game. I played some new games that we just got us and played. Scott has not yet played. You haven't played. If you played San Rio P cross that just came out for three. Yeah, I know the deal with P cross is a San Rio P cross. Very cute. Yeah, the first item was a was a was a ribbon. It's how I know this is a slightly controversial opinion among our fans, but I am. I do not respect P cross. I don't just better. Sudoku. Yeah, you're not selling me with it. Sudoku that doesn't suck. So rogue the original game. The reason I don't know if anyone doesn't know this, but just in case there was a game way back in the day, probably older than most of the listeners called rogue. So the same as the rogue is the D&D class. So the genre rogue like literally means games that are like this one old be like instead of calling games platformers we call them Mario likes. That's what this is. Right. So what qualifies something as a rogue like what was it about rogue that was different than other games really to it's really just two things. Well, it's interesting you bring that up as to the the Scotsman argument about roguelikes because there is a concept that I've been annoyed with for a long time. I'd look and Wikipedia to figure out the name of it. The Berlin interpretation. Whatever. There's really only two concepts that make something a roguelike only to there's like eight listed here. Whatever. The only two that I believe in are number one. The game is different every time you play this. So procedurally, some sort of procedurally generated map some sort of you know something that mixes things up every time is fresh right. So imagine if you played Mario but every time it wasn't just the same world one one every time is like completely new level every time. That's item one and two is that the when you play the game you start at the beginning and you play until you die and then that's GG game over. You have to start again from the beginning with a new game with a new map with a new world and that's what makes a game a roguelike. Yep. Now what else what are six things that they think you need to be so first I would say that that's a good modern distilled definition partly because there's a lot of like games that do these things that definitely feel like they're in the genre that don't do a lot of the other things. Most of the people who have more profound definitions are more specific definitions are really married to the idea that rogue is the one true roguelike and every other game is just interpretation of this one specific experience. Well what what else has to be but I think the two things you brought up what they really mean is that the game is an emergent narrative experience every time you play it and that it's the journey is the goal as opposed to winning and all like that's that you can't usually can't win. I guess that heck you can get to the whatever level they're definitely like you can win like dragon crystal. I guess yeah you can win a lot of them but like even if you win one it's like if you beat Mario one how much value is in there playing it again. Not much right. Yeah but roguelikes like you I've beaten honestly the spire is a million times and I keep playing it like dragon crystal which I never beat as a kid. I didn't even know you could beat it until game facts existed but because this game came out in like 1990 1991 on the game gear but it was a pro like this game is very rogue but I never heard of it before today by the way it's procedurally generated but eventually it runs out of steam. Usually when rim talks about game gear games he talks about Gemfire. Gemfire is not a game your game. I thought what was the one you kept talking about Crystal Warriors I get confused because one's Gem and one's Crystal. Come on. There's Dragon Crystal and Crystal Warriors. Come on. Those are the two game gear games I talk about. Dot star crystal dot star. OK so rim by all you had to do if you wanted to sell a little kid rim a game but there were Dragon or Dragon Crystal Gem on the cover. So fun fact this is actually a total aside when I was a little kid. Crystal is. Yeah. Or Crystal is as most kids. Anyway I didn't know better than so I had Dragon Crystal and Crystal Warriors the game gear and I went to the public library with my family and one day in the science fiction section because there was no fantasy section I saw a novel that was called Crystal Warriors and on the cover to do with it were all these sword dudes and sword ladies decked out in crystals. It looked very much like Crystal Warriors. So I got this book and nothing to do with the game this book was basically an erotic like thriller bullshit garbage novel that to this day haunts me. That means just go to any use bookstore. You'll find that I learned I learned things about the human body reading this book. I don't know if they were accurate. I also learned a lot. I hope you consulted an anatomy book. I learned a lot about crystals and heterochromia and this fucking book. I'll make tell you what if you ever pick a bad book club book that's what I'm bringing back. I'm going to read that book again. No you're going to read it with me. No listeners will read it. Hey you'll also have to read it yourself again. So yeah I remember every goddamn detail of that book. You want to talk about the hot brothers. Anyway. Wow. It's into the hot brother. When the game they they were enemies. But then they became friends sort of. But then they kiss anyway. So they're brothers it's incest. It's complicated. OK it's it's it's it gets into some of that technically anime territory. So Game Gear doesn't have a lot of memory. So Dragon Crystal runs out of steam and eventually it runs out of colors to use for pallet swaps for all the enemies. So in the very end of the game there's just this trophy in a room in the last level if you step on the trophy it literally is just like yep you won. Congratulations. Yep. You get to go back home because I guess you were a kid. You got trapped in this fantasy world. So the Berlin protocol. OK interpretation of something that happened after World War Two from the international roguelike development conference in 2008 that was held in Berlin. Some people care way too much about this. If anyone I'd be very very surprised that there was any attendee who was below the age of 40 and did not have a beard that was good. Oh this is a eunuch Santa convention to be to be clear. They based this set of high value and low value factors for what deter what is a roguelike based on the five canonical roguelike games. Net roguelike net hack net hack. Linley's Dungeon Crawl. Never heard of Angband. I've heard of that. And Adam ADOM. Never heard of I've heard of Adam. I think it's acronym. I'm pretty sure Angband was a mud though. I guess I must be wrong. I don't know. Yep. So anyway the idea is to determine how roguelike a roguelike is. I mean those are all like ASCII text games. I'm pretty sure. Yep. So one the game uses random dungeon generation increased replay abilities. OK. Yeah. Cool. Two permadeath. Yeah. Which true. Those are the two things I said. Yeah. Three turn based as in not real time. If you stop doing things that game stops doing. I don't believe in that because rogue legacy is clearly a roguelike. It's rogue in the name and it is a platforming game. So one could argue that that means that rogue legacy is a roguelike that evolved a core characteristic of the original cannons. The game is nonmodal in that every action is available to the player regardless of where they are in the game. I think that's because like you think of a game like nethack and there's so many things you can do in nethack. You can dig. You can serve and do that at any time. And like in nethack does like this huge list of actions right that you get just from the start and the whole game being good at nethack is basically knowing about all those actions. But it already knows that Angban breaks this because of their shops or you can buy special things later in the game. Right. But yeah I don't believe in that either because you know even rogues are RPGs. Right. Even nethack which has this huge list of actions you can do. You can't just like fireball and nethack from the beginning. You have to get a fireball spell or wander scroll or whatever it is or learn fireball. Right. So even that violates its own idea. And because an RPG in an RPG at least not the kind of RPG you play table top storytelling RPG the JRPG kind that you know the ultimate kind you love have a character that levels up and gains abilities and when you gain abilities you gain new actions. So I'm going to read the whole sentence for this next one because this one's actually a pretty interesting though Grog Nardian statement. You'll hear the Grog Nardian coming out of this. OK. The game has a degree of complexity due to the number of different game systems in place that allow the player to complete certain goals in multiple ways creating emergent gameplay. I mean example to get through a locked door you may attempt to pick the lock kick the door down burn the door down dig under the door. I mean I sort of agree with that and that if you have a game where you're procedurally generating a map and you want to have lots of replayability you need to have a lot of systems that can interact and just let them play out the way they do. Right. And you have a lot of this variance. Right. They actually give a really good example and this is sort of you know having multiple systems to interact in this way is sort of necessary in order to make the read otherwise you would just be it might be a roguelike but if you're really crappy boring you wouldn't want to replay it again. Well it's it makes it it's more this is the door fortress thing. Even Slay the Spire works this way where it's like you're fighting the same bad guys but you already have three different classes you have different cards different figure out different ways to beat the bad guys you know so even Slay the Spire the deck builder has this right. So of course you know but I mean you could really instead of having that huge sentence you could really just say needs to be complex enough to make real play worth it. They do give a really good example though I feel like I'll use this in a panel in the future. Not the door example. So let's see the dev team thinks of everything blah blah blah blah blah. Such as using gloves to protect your character while wielding the corpse of a cockatrice as a weapon that as a result petrifies any enemy that it touches. Yeah. I mean only the door fortress kind gets that complicated. Yeah. But yeah the player must use resource cockatrice. I've always had cockatrice. I've always had cockatrice and I don't know what's right. No Bunga. At least your goals agree on the cocka. The I think the height of this is I knew a kid who called the game the NES game Dr. Chaos Dr. Chaos. I want to I've been thinking about Dr. Chaos actually. Dr. Chaos has come up a couple times in my life recently like in the last year. Let's do a stream of Dr. Chaos because I know a lot of stuff about it. Oh and then let's maybe do a Geek Nights episode about Dr. Chaos because no one knows what your couch will do. Like you play the game and we'll just talk about it. No one knows about this game besides me and the kid I borrowed it from. Yep. I too borrowed it from a kid. I couldn't. I never saw it at a store. The only reason I knew it existed is because our friends had it and I borrowed it from the same fucking kid who traded me Mega Man 3 from a copy of Hydelide and then his mom came and made us trade back because apparently he was crying about it for a week. Hydelide is garbage. Hydelide is one of the worst NES games ever made. Hydelide looks like a roguelike. I saw it in video game magazines and strategy guides when I was young. I bought it from Funko Land for four dollars and it wouldn't buy it back from me. It looked awesome in the in the in the books but I never saw it in any store. I never knew anyone who had it. So I never played it and that was lucky because that means I never wasted money on it. And then when I was older I got emulators and like 96 seven something like that. And I was like oh my God I got every NES game ever. Let's play Hydelide and I played Hydelide and it was fucking garbage. Okay. So not a roguelike but looks like a roguelike. They argue that this is that one actually I've seen in a lot of these games. There are there's multiple sets of limited resources that you must manage to progress. Things like food or stamina. Not just hit points. Um I don't know if it's absolutely necessary. Yeah. But I think it does make a better roguelike. Well like even faster than light has fuel. Right. Exactly. I think that what it is is that these other these other things they've listed this beyond the core to of permadeath and procedural generation is things that make a procedural generation permadeath game good. Right. So it's like yeah you can have a game with proceed you know just the two that I mentioned but if you don't have the multiple ways to solve or resources that run out then it's not going to be very good. Right. Actually so rich Carlson one of the creators of strange adventures like you need those limited resources of some kind be it time or money or food or provide the pressure to push you forward into that permadeath is what makes you know the procedural generated rich Carlson called that the clock. Yes. Some clock that forces the game to progress. Right. So I'm crystal had that. I'll mention. Yeah. I'll mention Slay the Spire again because it's the roguelike I'm playing the most lately. It's real good. You can't refill your HP very easily at all. Yeah. Like you run at you you go into a fight you lose some HP. Good luck healing. Right. It's like you're going down. You know it's even better about that is that the decisions in Slay the Spire because you whenever you whenever you can heal hit points it almost always gives you something you're way more interested in doing as an option instead. It's always like yeah you can get some hit points or I don't want this car because like look because hit losing hit points doesn't matter. This is true for all games and people have a hard time understanding this. I comes up in like every game I play comes up in Netrunner. It comes up in Hearthstone comes up and Slay the Spire comes up in Counter Strike is like hit points don't matter unless you're dead. It doesn't matter if you have one hit point or a thousand hit points as long as you don't have zero. So if you have an ability that's like lose 10 hit points do something fucking awesome. That is amazing as long as you don't die. Right. So like in Hearthstone there's a warlock and the warlock's base ability is spend two mana lose two hit points draw a card and that is fucking incredible. No. Just don't die. It doesn't matter. You're you're you're still in the game. Right. So the so the other options here and we'll just go over this quickly to get away from this Berlin thing. Yeah. Because the one thing that really stands out now that I'm looking at this Berlin thing in detail. It reads I want to say like naive game design like people who like roguelikes tried to define basic ideas about game design. But they don't know about game design. They only know about roguelikes. So they described these like over complicated things that a modern designer or reviewer or somebody understands game specialists with a narrow view. Yeah. Exactly. They only know roguelike. Yeah. Kind of like how like train going to the roguelike convention. That's true. True. But like you see a lot of old board games will have like rules that are written similar with similar logic and phrasing. But games are hacking slash where the goal is to kill things and there's no peaceful options. And actually I like this one because Dragon Crystal did this too. The there are unidentified items the purpose of which must be discovered over the course of the game like a bubbly potion like things that have descriptions. I mean that's a fun mechanic but that's not required to be a roguelike at all. And it's not like Dragon Crystal did that in the sense that you'd pick up a red rod red sword. There's a whole set of colors and there'd be books rod swords rings that all have the colors. You didn't know what red did and what red did was randomized every game. It does. Once you used a red thing then the game would translate red into the thing. Right. It is a thing that does add to the replay value of a roguelike game. But it's that's definitely not necessary. Yeah. So forget these stupid semi-formal definitions. I think it's I think basically what all the only real mistake that they made with that list is that they listed things as required to be a roguelike when most of the things except for the two I mentioned at least to my belief are things that are simply things that make a roguelike good if you do them. They listed them as how close to the original roguelikes or rogue are these games. Oh sure. OK. Yeah. So I guess it's doing what it's supposed to do. Which is it's not necessarily a measure of a good. It's almost like it misses the point of why roguelike is a important and interesting genre. Because if like for example in faster than light if I could save state I probably would and the game would be very different because I the decisions I was making would not have the kinds of consequences and the kinds of emergent storytelling that they have. When you also win every time. Yep. When I play FTL and I make a narrative choice and someone dies because of it. It's actually really interesting to continue and roguelikes one of the only game genres where continuing past failure is interesting or possible. Most games failure ends your run or failure just sucks. Like if someone dies in Fire Emblem that just sucks. No one's going to keep playing. Right. Well I mean if you die in a game that is not procedurally generated and you do the penalty is to go back. You have to do the same thing you just did again. Right. Mario you die. It's like we'll do the same fucking thing again. It's like that's not fun. But if you die in a rogue like it sucks that you're not going to see what's beyond there. But you don't have to do the same thing again. You're basically constantly getting fresh gameplay. Whether you're at the beginning or the end it's just always fresh all the time which is what makes it so addicting is keep playing rogue like game constantly without stopping. Right. That's how come I can play to slay the spire every day. And even though I like Super Metroid and Mega Man 2 better. I play them once a year every two years. Yep. Right. You know there's I think there's actually a more interesting point there about these in terms of when you play a game that's procedurally generated you have to explore in this manner and you build this narrative up. I still can't think of other games that do that can achieve this without having people right at all. But you can have crazy things happen or game breaking things or unbalanced things like you might like in slay the spire sometimes you get a combo that's just un fucking beatable. In a normal game people would just use that combo every time now in the games broken and dumb. But in a roguelike because you're only going to get that play through once if something's broken and a player encounters it that's just awesome. Well I think that's the thing that happens in game. Any game not just roguelikes that have both complex enough systems and RNG right is that you get the like if you're playing I'll just keep stick with Mario right is like what can you do in Mario you can post a better speed run you can you know it's like you know there's only so much you can show right. But with if you're playing roguelikes or any game with RNG and complex systems you're going to have things happen in your games that no one else has ever encountered. Yep. And you can suddenly have like a nice community online where everyone posts screenshots of oh my God check out the crazy thing that happened. Right. Oh my God look at this and people you know like look at my look at my run and from slay the spire look at this deck I had holy shit he had like 20 of that ultra powerful card in his deck and managed to eliminate all the weak cards. Yeah. Look it doesn't end up being like well posted like a gift the other day of like playing Thunderstruck but they had echo form so it has Thunderstruck twice and each Thunderstruck did like a bajillion damage and it was quite awesome. It's like I've had close to that happen but not that exact thing. It'd be like beat the final boss by playing one card. Other genres of games can't pull that off because unbalanced broken experiences are just detrimental to the experience. Right. But with a roguelike they are literally the reason a lot of people play because people will tell those stories. Yeah you can't having outliers of crazy weak or crazy strong outcomes in a game that doesn't you know have this sort of perma death thing going on is real bad because those extreme outliers will become the norm. Right. And people are using degenerate strategies constantly. Like if in Street Fighter there's a frame perfect input that makes you invincible. That's what literally everyone in the tournament scene has frame perfect input. But if you have perma death and procedural generation then suddenly it's OK if occasionally a run has some crazy weak or crazy strong outcomes where it's the player gets to do is too weak to even get past level one just because I got bad luck. They just start again big deal or they get so lucky and just get the perfect stars alignment that they can beat the final boss with one card. It's totally awesome because then it even after they beat the final boss guess what you're back to square one. It's not like you can keep that and use it forever. Yep. And as a result also gives you that I lost my turn to talk because I'm really hungry. Might as well just stop because we've gone on for an hour. Oh OK. Sounds good. Boop.