 But even after the small ball era, right, pit, you know, batters who were good had the ability to hit to the opposite field only because the ball was moving slower. No, you could. People could have been hitting 90, 100 mile an hour balls if they're good to the opposite. Usually when it's not easy. No, I'm saying that. But you could do it. So it's like that's that's a debatable point. I'm just saying try to fucking do it. They're leaving half the field like undefended. Why not at least try to hit it over there? Well, because fielding is as well. I go if I choose rock and then you choose paper. Even if scissors is hard. If I have a messed up hand and I can't make a scissor with it, I should at least try. Best I can tell the reason why this won't work is statistically like it's kind of shown that you can't hit the ball that way anymore. Find the hard to believe. I think that's just dead. If that's your only job. Yeah. And I won't say that it's dead because there's a handful of teams that are are playing around with a strategy of not going for home runs and basically bunting to the offside. Bunting works to. Yeah. And so far, you got to run fast from best from what I read from the cessation stuff so far. Like no one's made it work. It's really hard. You got to run faster than someone throws. Feelings too good. You try to run faster than I can throw even me throwing weekly. The ball is going to pass you while you're running. Yep. I think baseball does might not survive the modern era. No, I think that it's just a it's just a bad meta. I think they have to change the physicality of the game. It'll change. I think I don't think it will. It changes slow. It just baseball is just the slowest to change. So when it gets stuck, it gets stuck for a while. So yeah, it didn't soccer similarly slow. I'm trying to argue in my head, which one's slower? Oh, but I'm thinking we got to do the pecs West panel. So I'm thinking the competitive versus casual like that idea. I think we can do and you want to do real harm games again. Whatever. Let it be. Whatever. We just got it. Is there a panel you want to do? I want to do the get a free bed. Is there a panel is not paid? The stable of new and recent panels. Is there one you really want to do? Whatever we've done only like one time. All right. And I'll put the new one in the competitive versus casual. Like I think we have a strong I got a new I got a new spin on that. I got a lot of spins on it. We got an hour of the content. So my my you know how I you know my main point is like not about just games, but about community, how you draw the borders around community are drawn poorly. I realized if you people the communities should be defined not by nouns, but by verbs. We've Scott, we've said that exact thing, but not in that exact way. Pretty close to it about using those exact words. Let me find I got to find the Geek Nights episode at when we first went to a PAX and we were like, Wow, anime cons are all garbage. And then we went at length into what it means. Like what the fundamental difference between why someone goes to an anime con in the like mid to late 2000s versus why someone goes to a gaming con because gaming cons are about verbs and anime cons are about us. Not what I'm saying at all. Yeah, I'm saying people who say like Star Wars, Star Wars is a noun. Those people don't necessarily have things in common. People who collect collectors have something in your Star Wars collector and a Star Trek collector have more in common. Right? Star Wars collector. You should have a Star Wars swordfighter. Right. You should look at the verb to figure out when people have a shared interest, not at the noun. Yeah, that's why I think that's part of that panel. Right. We can put that panel together. I got good feelings about that panel. Alright, I'm gonna start the show. The person who collects board games is more in common with the comic book collector than the person who plays board games to win. I'd argue the people who collect board games are very different from the people who play board games. Well, a lot of you know, there's a lot of crossover people collect and play. But I would I have the suspicion I want to figure out a way to prove it that the people who collect board games tend to play the games they own once or twice. I'm sure if you collect board games, you have a lot of them and you have the same amount of time per day as other human beings. So yes, you probably play them much less. Yep, which is why those people if you collect anything that is consumable, probably does not consume much of it unless that's all they do, right? Because collect it's easy to get lots of stuff if you have money in Western society, and it takes time to consume things. You can't get more time somehow. All right, I could buy, you know, more videos uploaded to YouTube in a second than I could watch in my life. Yep. And most of it is just like banana dance 10 hours. Right. I could buy I could order more DVDs on Amazon with the money in my checking account that I can watch if I spent the rest of my waking life watching videos. I can spend the rest of my life just watching the backlog on Netflix. Yeah. It's like, you know, so. All right. The games in my steam library, if I were to play them to completion, I would die first. Let's see my steam library. Most of these games aren't even installed. We'd have to argue about which ones count, right? It's like, do I need to play seven quick two months? Yeah, expansions or whatever. Let's see all the monkey islands. Yeah. Every seven max. Those are all in individual games. All right, Jamestown, I played that game once. There's two Jackbox party packs I don't have. All right, those back to the future games. Well, because we all this, those are from when we be defunct telltale, right? We were at the tax East. And they gave us like every game every telltale game. That was that was a good packs. All right, let's start. No one else doing that shit. It's Tuesday, June 4th, 2019. I'm rim. I'm Scott. And this is Geek Nights tonight. Risk of rain and risk of rain to should have said risks of rain. That was a better title. I ain't going back now. Okay. Back. It's really an opening bit. I have plenty of opening bits for them. We didn't do shows. Yeah. I forgot. I got some overwatchy opening bits. So I've been really doubling down. I've been playing a lot overwatch lately. Okay. It's uh, it's hard to express again how much that game is exactly what I want to have an FPS. But at the same time, I'm finding that I'm getting better. And I think it might be because other people getting worse. I think it's because other people are getting worse or not trying as hard or couple players leaving so you're up against, you know, lesser. Well, I think it's coupled with the fact that they added this whole system where you can queue for the random queue, but you can be like, I only play tank or me and my friend only play better team comps. Yeah. So I just play straight random. I've never used any of that nonsense. I just say put me on a team. So I get put on a team with a bunch of people who are like, I can only play tank and I can only play deep. It would actually be a lot easier for me. I might almost not, I'm not going to, but if they had that for MOBAs, I might almost play one because part of the prep, like the first problem I have, I don't want to learn every character. Well, no, is that when I turn a MOBA on, it's like, I want to pick the character that looks cool, like the awesome wizard or some shit. It's like, and they usually suck or it's like, you know, and you could pick random, but that's no good. It's like, let someone else pick the good thing that fits on this team for me. And then if I just keep doing that over and over again, that takes a huge knowledge, right? So back when I was like platinum overwatch, like when I was actually really good, or at least my rank was really good. It was partly because I was playing in a group with other good people. But the main difference was that those people would do that work. Like they'd be like, rim, play this kind of shield tank on this map because of this reason that you don't understand. And I'd be like, yes, sir. Yeah. And then I would be great. Yeah. But now when I play in like high silver, low gold, everyone else on the team is just dumb as bricks. So I got to be there and be like, look, you don't play Reaper on this map. Play widow. Oh, you can't snipe. Fine. Can anyone snipe? Can anyone snipe? Fine. I will snipe. You do this. You do that. You two are healers. And then we win. The people like to listen though. Actually, they do. Oh, that's good. The community is like, I am continuously shocked at how good the community is in the actual games when I'm actually talking to human beings in the voice chat. Like I'd say one out of 10 games has someone who's a visa shit compared to Counter-Strike where it's one out of point five games because there's two shitheads per game. Like they did everything right and I don't know how to make the game more popular. Maybe it's just that kind of FPS. Like kids want to play Fortnite. Well, I think it's just this is a problem for all games that are all multiplayer, you know, competitive games, games that you can just keep playing and playing and playing with, you know, ladders and all this stuff. They all have this common problem of maintaining player interest. You can only do the same thing over and over again for so long, no matter how intricate it is. And there are some people on earth who can go into that, like people who just play chess and they just play chess forever. They don't get tired of it. People who play Counter-Strike forever. If you still existed, that would have been me or the vast majority of people. I believe at least I think it's clear it's the majority of people are not like that and they need novelty. They need things to get changed and mixed up. That's why, you know, magic needs like expansions and they rotate cards out and they keep shaking things up all the time, you know, character, you know, changing things just for the sake of changing. So you don't get bored and go to sleep and you're, you know, you're done with it, right? So it's a challenge for these games because even if you shake your game up, right, frequently, and I think actually none of them shake things up frequently enough, I see no reason to not shake your game up. Fortnite does. No. I see no reason not to shake your game up daily. Fortnite will sometimes just be like, Oh, we changed this. Why? Then no meta can evolve. Why do you need one? You're not a competitive game. You just want to keep interest. But the point is no amount of changing of your game's meta can compete with brand new game, right? It's like, but it's like, it's like, oh, they mod. There's a new patch out for this game. There's some novelty there. Oh, there's a completely different game that is 100% novel and new in every way, shape and form. Actually, this gets back to the conversation we were having before the show. People play a game until they're done with it and then they play a different game until they're done with it and so on. So look at most of the people are at like a packs playing board games. They pretty much always play the newest board games like once and then they move out like they want to play new games every time they play a game. But then there's people like us where, all right, I've learned this game. Now I want to play it 10 times in a row. But the thing is with an online game, you need it's you can keep the game going as long as the community is above this critical count. And as soon as I mean, all counter strike has been above that count for as long as it's existed. Well, they kept mixing up and releasing new counter strikes. Barely. Yeah. I mean, go counters I go has not had substantial updates in a long time. Counter strikes just that good. Yeah. So I'm saying they added they added that basically fortnight clone into it that sucked. Anyway, we played it a little bit. It was bad. I thought that that was a pubg club. I mean, they're all cloning the same thing. It's just they added a battle right now. Anyway, I feel like the industry is finally realizing that you can't just turn every game into a battle right now. Just let fortnight and pubg have that space and do something different anyway. So in some news, if you didn't notice, isn't this meta? This is news. OK. Packs West badges and hotels went on sale and Liberty Week in 2019. Obviously. Yep. But badges are all available except Saturday sold out within like 30 seconds. Now, you might say it wasn't 30 seconds. Well, here's the thing. You might say no room. It took 10 minutes. But here's the problem. What does it say on the spreadsheet? I didn't check the spreadsheet for this time. But here's the problem. The time to sell out is not the time to sell out that is published when the last badge is sold. And this turns to sold out. The time to sold out is when the last person enters the queue who will buy the last Saturday badge. Debatable because say the queue fills with the people who will buy all the badges within a minute and then. Ten minutes later, that queue gets to the last person who buys the last Saturday badge. If you logged in nine minutes after the announcement, you could not buy a badge. Maybe. That's the problem. But more interestingly, Saturday is sold out, of course. And the four days are sold out, of course. Sunday is run and low. Like Sunday is running low first. Sunday is a day, which is not Monday's a holiday, right? But it's still Monday. It's a short day. And Friday is also the first day. So Friday is a Friday is a Friday is not shorter. It started. People feel like it starts a little later. Doesn't ramp up right away. No, Friday is not shorter in any way. It's just on a day where people are at work. It is a vacation day. Yeah. Sunday is because four days now, Sunday and Saturday are basically equivalent. They are both full days of packs. Yeah. At packs West, at least there is no difference between Saturday and Sunday. I guess Saturday is just like the more free day than Sunday and just society. Yeah. But they're both complete 100% full. Don't have to work full packs hours. So if you are a local person who's planning to go to packs for only one day and not a whole weekend, you would only go Saturday or only go Sunday. So what's interesting, though, is that I got into the queue basically instantly. Yep. All the hotels were already sold out. Well, you know, exhibitors, staff, all kinds of other people get them hotels first. Yeah. But they were already sold out to a degree that I've never seen before for packs West. Well, there's a new thing that's being built. Is it ready yet? No, it didn't look like it. There's some digging going on there last year. But the other thing that's interesting about that is that the hotel registration system was way different and made you put in contact info like email addresses and names for every person. That's how it was for the past few packs. I guess I haven't. But it wasn't for what packs was it where I didn't have to do that. I did it for the past packs or two. I think for packs East, the previous packs East, I did not have to do that. I definitely could do it. But it did not require me. I definitely did it for East and South this year. Yeah. But I remember the previous East. It didn't force me to put in emails for every person. It was just an option so they could check in on their own if they wanted to. Anyway, but it looks like I suspect what they're going to do because they also have a bunch of notes about how you got to have the right names in by July 15th because I think if the same email is in multiple rooms, one of those rooms getting canceled by packs because the hotel sell out so fast. So we'll see how that all goes. Luckily, we got rooms. Well, we got two different rooms book with similar email. Yeah, we're going to have to drop one of them in the next week or two. Let's decide if we want the Hyatt or the share. It's cheaper and the Hyatt's cheaper because the Hyatt ain't cheap. Oh, no, wait, the Sheridan's cheaper. I forget. I don't know how we got that share. Well, someone posted online was like, Sheridan's open. So I'm like, Oh, OK. Yeah, it seems like we both had Hyatt's and I switch from Hyatt to share it. Yep. It seems like part of what happened was that there were a lot of rooms available, but the rooms were all two people only and did not cover Monday for some reason. So apparently, though, if you could, people were saying that if you booked and they didn't have all the days you needed, you could then email them to get the extra days. What? Weird. Yeah. Anyway, I feel like room blocks just the whole idea of room blocks for conventions has broken now that demand has far exceeded supply. Anyway, so in other news, Magfest announced their dates. Now you can't book hotels. Yeah, it's exactly when everyone would be right after fucking New Year's. Yep. So you can go to Magfest. But remember, Magfest does a weird thing. I'm sorry. Super Magfest. Yeah. Magfest does a complicated thing where you have to pre-register for badges first and then there's a thing to get hotels. So if you're a Magfest type of person, just watch the Magfest website because, as you know, the hotel for Magfest sells out faster than packs and Magfest sucks. If you don't stay right next to Magfest. Yep. So we got some other news that's fun about Fortnite. Right. So, you know, we talk, I bring up this point a lot about how the penalties for cheating need to be severe enough. And my favorite thing to always say is how many Tour de France's did Lance Armstrong, the cheater win zero, right? Because the penalty was severe. The penalty was you cheated. Therefore, you did not win. I mean, look at the old days. Right. People would install shit like punk buster on their PCs. They would install third party executables. We didn't know their origin that ostensibly would prevent people from cheating. Right. So in contrast, I always offer the example of, you know, the New England Patriots who supposedly probably cheated in various ways over the years. But the penalties for those cheats were lost draft picks, fine suspensions from a certain number of games. But none of their Super Bowls were evoked. And in fact, during years in which they suffered penalties, they still won the Super Bowl. Therefore, they effectively just paid to win. It's like, sit out two games and get an advantage to win. Right. Pay this fine and we'll let you have an advantage. It's like, right? Yeah, it's just by if you really want to punch this guy in the face, you're going to sit in a box for between two and five minutes difference between you inflated the football, you deflated the footballs. Therefore, you must pay X dollars and pay X dollars and we'll let you deflate the footballs. There is no difference. Yeah. So here we have a case of this exact same thing happening in competitive Fortnite. Xif and Ronaldo. Right. So two apparently very good Fortnite players were found cheating during qualifiers of basically the biggest Fortnite tournament apparently where the prize was just like some enormous amount of money or the prize pool was just huge. They were cheating. They were caught cheating. They were definitely cheating and they were punished for cheating. Their punishment was that they were banned for, I think, like two weeks. Like you can't play any Fortnite for two weeks competitively. You're out. Now, the manner of their cheating was they were getting friends to basically join games with them and feed them so they could get whatever they needed to get to qualify faster and easier. Right. So they were banned for two weeks and after the two weeks were up, they came back in and qualified. Yeah. And it's like, I think your penalty was not severe enough. Also, I assume they didn't cheat when they so it's sort of debatable on this, right? Because on the one hand, the they supposedly did not cheat when they came back from being suspended. So they are really good. Why were they cheating in the first place? Probably out of laziness. Like out of laziness is right. But case in point, overwatch does these seasons or every season I got to do my 10 ranking matches to qualify before I can play again. And I would gladly skip those. Yeah, I wish they didn't even do that. Really, they really need to we need ranking systems that don't have grinding components. But anyway, looking at you, Hearthstone. That's right. Anyway, the point is they they supposedly qualified without cheating, right? Supposedly. I don't know. They are good. Right. They're good enough to qualify. So should they be in because they qualified legitimately or should they be not allowed in and the penalty was not severe enough because they're cheating cheaters and we shouldn't have them around here. And that that delegitimizes the whole competition to have such scoundrelist players involved, scoundrelist. Yes. So I got two opposing views on that. On one hand, that kind of cheating and the message it sends for this light punishment hurts the community and the way to keep the community active, engaged and feeling like the game is fair would be to when a pro is caught doing something like that, they are just banned from professional life. Yes. Full stop. Agreed. On the other side, four died isn't really a competitive game anyway. Also agree. So it doesn't actually matter. Also agree. Like who cares? So I feel like someone cares because how much money is at stake. So they get what if a cheating cheater gets get some of those millions, but they didn't cheat in a way that got them into the World Cup. I mean, Pete Rose bet on games and was banned from baseball forever. But he didn't cheat to win baseball necessarily. We should Black Sox Fortnite. That would be so easy to pull off. Oh, you want to Black Sox eSports? Yeah. We need someone that will let us bet on eSports, though. Yeah. And I and the only problem with Black Soxing. Where can we bet on eSports? Australia, I guess. If anyone knows a place we can legally bet on eSports, we will then illegally bribe e-athletes. Now here's the important thing. It cannot be illegally betting on eSports because you don't try to Black Sox the mob. Right. The mob Black Sox is you. Not the other way around. We need legal betting. Otherwise, you're getting cement socks. I need to place legal wagers on the sport and then rig the sport by bribing the e- athletes. Yeah. Being like, look, you might win this thing. You might lose this thing. If you win, you'll get a million. If you lose, you'll get what? 10,000 is the bottom of the fry pool. 50,000. We'll give you 100,000 no matter what, because we're going to bet for you this to happen. You make it happen. Now, the thing I do and I like about this at least, like kind of an aside, is that the World Cup of Fortnite is at least doing things right and that they're doing it like golf. There is a minimum prize for the last place players. I think the prize pool is large enough that they can do it. Yeah. Fortnite just has to make a money. But eSports needs things like that to avoid some of the exploitative behaviors that happen. There are a lot of, yeah, we can go on and on about the e- athletes who don't make enough money to live because of the, you know, even the pros. We talked about when magic changed. Yeah. eSports could learn a lot from golf and tennis. Yeah. So in some other news, you may remember a game. We never we never talked about it a lot. I never even played it. I just saw it and heard about it. I watched YouTube videos about it. I watched some videos about it also. But the best way to experience that game was to listen to Dave and Joel talk about it. But the game was called Charles Barkley Shut Up and Jam Guy Dan. So this this was a basically RPG maker game. From like 2008. That was just a hilarious joke. JRPG. Take like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6. And Chak Fu. But in a world where Charles Barkley did the ultimate, the Chaos Dunk. Yeah. And it like destroyed a city. And it's a Final Fantasy 6. I'm already laughing. Like it's, it's so good. Magic Johnson is like the basketball is now banned because it's too dangerous. And Magic Johnson is like the basketball cop. And like it's it's a fucking experience. Like watch this game on YouTube if you don't play it. Right. But they did a Kickstarter. They've got play when I go. There was a Kickstarter to make an unofficial sequel to it. Was it made by the people who made the first one? I don't actually know because I didn't care that much. I do remember seeing I think I remember seeing it at least one gaming event or PAX or something where they had a boost. Yeah. PAX Prime 2015. The title of the game was actually the magical realms of Tyr Nenog escaped from the Necron seven revenge of Kwakchulam, the official game of the movie Chapter Two of the Hoops Barkley saga. OK. Otherwise known as Barkley. But anyway, they kickstarted this game. How much money did they raise? So I thought it was a lot more. They only raised 120 grand, which that's a lot of money. And that is enough money to make an RPG maker game. Dude, 120 grand. I mean, it's not my salary. 120 grand. I could just like take a year off and make more than one game in RPG maker in that time. That is the that is an annual salary for two indie developers who do not live in New York City. Right. If I didn't live in New York City, I could take at least two or three years off and make several JRPG RPG maker games. It's the same quality level as Barkley shut up and jam. I would just need the creative talent to write such a masterpiece. Yeah. A game like this. The thing is games like this, people seem to keep making this mistake. Like I feel like that homestuck game had the same problem. The game itself does not have to be a good game. The game does not have to have good mechanics. You're not making a game. Right. A lot. This is this is the thing. I make it like Monkey Island. Right. I always complain that people try to make like, you know, they're making a movie. They're Hollywood people working in the game industry. Right. You know, they admit that they like started their careers in film or trying going to film school or something. And it's like, you know, they're making a game and they're focusing on the story and the narrative and all this stuff. And that's perfectly fine. Right. There's plenty of room in the world for software that entertains via story and art and whatever. But it's like, if you're not, if you're just going to have a cookie cutter game, just like generic FPS, generic JRPG. Just why even put the game in there? Just admit that you're a software storytelling mechanism, which many games are now doing like Monkey Island actually like is an example of that kind of thing. There were a lot of menu options and puzzles that were just jokes. Yep. So I feel like Charles Barkley shot of in Jam Guy Dan to Barkley to is just one of those you should have been that. Yep. And you could have made that. Yep. But I also want to point out that to make a real game, a hundred and twenty thousand dollars rounds to zero dollars to make a triple A game to make a single A game is probably 400 grand. Any number of A's you need more money than that. Yeah, you can make you can make an indie game with a couple of people. Our friend Joe just, you know, tweeted a perfect tweet to point out that she wrote and shipped like six games in the time that this Kickstarter game was in development. Oh, just saying. So oh, that's the story is that. So yeah, the story is this is failed. Wait, how is it? It's just they're not going to make it as far as I can tell the team like fell apart. Is going to give the money back? No, of course not. It's Kickstarter. You don't give the money back. OK, the whole point of Kickstarter is that you don't get your money back. That is like the basis of Kickstarter. So how many Kickstarter am I making tomorrow? There was that old red spray for a while. I was doing a thing where they would look at Kickstarter videos and be like, wow, this is fake. This is clearly a scam. So we're the scams raising money, though. Yeah, some will. So they mostly focused on Kickstarter's that were obvious scams that just failed to even get the scam money. Right. That's what I figure would happen if I made one. But basically apparently there was a huge team trying to make this game, which is also how do you have a huge team with that amount of money? Yeah, unless it's all volunteers. But sure, what do you use that money for? Like just buy art assets or something. You don't need. They didn't need money to make the first one. Why would you need money to make the second one? That is an interesting question. There are a lot of questions here to buy everyone to copy our BG maker that doesn't cost 120 grand. So Kotaku reached out to a lot of the people involved who would not reply. The money ran out, which is interesting on what hookers and blow according to the Kickstarter upstate. Rahm, one of the guys intends to finish Barkley to despite his inexperience and only having one part-time coder working on the game with him at the time. Who made the fucking first one? I feel like the moral is don't kickstart small games. Like I don't know what to do about this kind of thing. Who made the first one? Just make another one an RPG maker just like the first one. Only different story. Yeah. I mean, you can read this article to see all the details. How hard is this? I'm sure there's going to be a real expose of how this didn't make it. But I feel like there's two problems here with this kind of game. One, Charles Barkley showed up in Jam Guy Den is a lot like the black dynamite, not the black bastard comic. The concept itself is funny. Nothing else really matters. Don't even need to execute that. Well, just like write something funny. If you're going to make a sequel to something like that, double down on it being a joke. The best example of that ever is Hall, the RPG, human occupied landfill. Yeah, that is an RPG. Perfect analogy right there. Yeah, you kids don't remember Hall. Someone Hall is pretty obscure in 2019. Sure. Hall is an RPG in the sense that it is an RPG book that is intended to be consumed the way most RPG books are. You read it cover to cover by yourself. You imagine running the game. You never actually find a group and you never actually play the game even once. That's right. The hall was just that experience designed to be that experience. I would be shocked if anyone actually played Hall. People have played Hall. I wouldn't be shocked. Yeah, but I would be I would be a little shocked. OK, have you ever actually read Hall? I read. I've read some pages. It's it's a long time ago. Yeah, I read Hall. I read that book in God before I got to 1990. Something. Yeah. But anyway, it's time for things of the day. So speaking of scams and games and all that, when I was a kid, there were real Nintendo games and then there were clearly not real Nintendo games. The action 52 kind of everyone could tell that there even little kids knew there was something up when there was real Tetris and Tangin Tetris. I remember as a kid, very specifically, the Micro Machines NES game. That was the most fake. But I remember being shocked by it because I rented it to see because it was a bootleg game and I knew it was a bootleg game. But it was actually a really good game. It's like the only one. Tangin Tetris and Micro Machines Tetris was, I mean, Tetris. It was an OK Tetris, but it still wasn't as good as NES Tetris. No, it was not as good as NES Tetris. But I remember vaguely like seeing this thing. But as a kid, I saw like I saw so clearly, even as a young child, that this was just a fake as scam to trick parents. It's something called the Aladdin Deck Enhancer. It is Game Genie adjacent for more reasons than you remember. Maybe seeing an ad for it in a video game magazine, but that's about it. But what did it do? So basically, the idea was Nintendo games are expensive like Zelda, too, was 70 bucks when it came out. Sure. Like 70 bucks and 90 dollars. So the idea was they would make a cartridge that you'd stick into the Nintendo and it had all the common components of the cartridge. So every NES cartridge had all these common components and then you'd stick other mini cartridges into this cartridge and add full games on them. But they were cheaper to physically manufacture. So it was just basically just ROM chip. They just physically separated the ROM chips from the rest of the cartridge sort of so that you could just buy ROM chips and swap them in and out and those have cheaper games. So the pitch was buy this thing for like 40 bucks. But then all the games you buy for it will play in your Nintendo and those games are between 15 and 20 dollars instead of the 60 70 dollar first party NES games. You know, that really makes you think it's like the NES could have included some chips just fucking in the NES and the less in the cartridge. Yes. But then the NES would have been on extra hundred dollars and the cartridges would have been more importantly than the NES would have probably been more like the Atari 7800 for technical reasons. Yeah. Anyway. So this is a like pretty thorough history of this fucking thing. But the T LDR version is that one of the games for it sucked. Oh yeah. They got 100 percent. But it's the biggest problem. There were a lot of games like this. They were the games that like relatives would buy as gifts. Like your weird uncle would buy it for you as a gift because it was cheaper than the real NES games. Like they were aimed at adults who didn't know better, which is a demographic that has mostly disappeared. Now the kids just buy their own games directly. Like you don't see the fake games except at very, very, very young kids these days. But in the 90s, fake as games like this were a big part of the industry. But the Aladdin Deck enhancer was particularly notable because it came out as the Super Nintendo was coming out. So it couldn't even fulfill that basic purpose of tricking parents because it was already like mega obsolete. Couldn't they have done the same concept for the Super Nintendo? That would have been a lot harder. Sure. I would have. But it would possible. Yeah. Those games like awful. Oh, they are. The scary thing is apparently these dizzy games not really worse than like the average NES game. I mean, that's. But all the other games on this platform are the worst. This Robin Hood game. Holy. These are like Action 52 territory. OK. So what do you got? What do I have? I forget. Oh, yeah. So here's a video of a bunch of people on a people mover being moved and they are singing a song. The song they are singing is to the tune of There's No Limit. No, no, no, no, no. One of my favorite DDR songs. Yes. But they are. They have changed all the lyrics to be. Touring today. Right. Something to write. It is clearly in a. It is in a non-English language. I'm sure if we read the comments you could, you know, under this video, you could understand what's happening here. But basically they're all dressed as elves of some kind with pointy hats. Overalls feel more like no longer than elves. They're red, green, blue and yellow with white shirts underneath. And they're drunk. They're either drunk or acting like they're drunk, but they're not too drunk. Right. So basically the story is that they are, I believe, soccer fans. And I mean that tracks. Yes, that it makes sense. I think they're on their way to a game at the airport or something like that. And by the way, there's a snow white at the end. Dude, the first comment on this video is a plus. Never saw this version of snow white and the hundred dwarves. Yeah. Read the one under it. Pornhub has and then nasty hobbits. Anyway, so basically the deal is these two brothers who play soccer and their last name is today and basically they play together and people created this chant and would sing this chant. Right. When they're right when they're out there. And I think the chant sort of lasted longer than the brothers possibly. I feel like the chant is entering the same room. The chant outlived those two people who had the name and became a thing of its own. Well, like potvin sucks. Exactly. That's largely. This is a potvin sucks of the soccer team props to these for the for the to this flash mob for being so organo like it escalates. They are incredibly. It's a thing of the day because of the level of what's it called? Watch it. Coordination. Watch it all the way to the end because it just escalates in a linear fashion. Right. They're so coordinated in their effort and also like so over the top, like they put way more into this than anyone should. Yeah, like take the most elaborate, like cosplay nonsense crap you've seen at an anime con. This is way more organized than that. I've never seen it. You know, I've seen cosplay groups that anime cons do stuff. Never like this. A hundred dwarves, right? In the moment, the Geek Nights Book Club book was pages of pain. I have consumed all of the painful pages. There are no painful pages left in my future. And the one thing that I remembered about this book that surprised me was that I remembered. Oh, they meet the demon and then it's over pretty much. It actually goes on. There's a lot more after they meet car for me, the demon about seventy five, sixty some percent of the way sixty five, seventy percent of the way through. I remembered as a kid that like the book ends pretty quick after that. But what really happens is the pace of the shit going on just accelerates and gets more and more disturbing. Anyway, but the other thing that I remembered that I remembered accurately, like very accurately, was the ridiculous abruptness with which the situation resolves. It is just like we're going to go to go to go to go to go to go to go and pop. You're done. Pretty much. Good job. Good luck. Have fun with the rest of your fucking life. Those of you who may have survived. So we'll be talking about this on the next Thursday show. I'll talk about the book club. So if you haven't read it, read it because we are not going to explain the plot of this book to you. We're going to react to it, assuming you have read it. I don't know if I can explain the plot of this book to you. I. All I will say is that I feel like I can read a lot into it, but I don't know if Troy Denning intended all of that. I can I can weave a narrative, but like with eco horror and Geo Saito with Utena, like it's clear they intended these things to be read with this. I feel like if I try to read it too deeply, I am putting way more craft into this book than it has anyway. But we read it. It is the first and probably last officially canon Dungeons and Dragons licensed novel. Should I pick in it? There's a lot of officially canon licensed novels at the at the bookstore. I could this is like Battleteck and X-Men. Do not make me read a Battleteck book. Halo has books. I mean, you can do one because I have a whole pile of netrunner licensed books. Oh God, I mean, I made you read this. So I guess I can't complain if you made me read like the netrunner book. But I don't think I haven't read any of the netrunner books. Just have them because they were like a dollar. The one thing I know is that if you only reason to have them, if you make me read one of those books, I will take solace in the fact that you too have to read it. I own it. I know. I know what my next book is going to be. I already decided. OK, I'm going to go in a completely different direction. All right. Like way different direction. Sure. It's a book I doubt you read, too. Probably actually is one of two books. I haven't read most books. I too have not read most books. I almost started when I was skimming through a bunch of novels and stuff and I flipped through a one of the earlier Prince of Nothing books because I wanted to find a quote and I had this urge to just read the darkness that came before again. Go ahead. I got to I got to avoid that. So anyway, let's get into it. Risk of rain was a game that I played like twice at Gojo's House. I played this game when it came out on my PC solo for a few days and then I forgot about it. Yep. And then we try. We played it a bunch. Played it quite a bit because when we opened it up just yesterday, I had like four of the whatever number of characters unlocked and stuff. Yep. I had nothing unlocked despite the fact that I own this game and it said I played it for like an hour. I don't know. Yeah. I didn't actually look at Steam to see how many hours I played it. But I did play it quite a bit for a short period of time, maybe a week or maybe two weeks at most. And then that was it. So risk of rain won was an indie game that was made very cheaply by a couple of people. And the concept of the game at the time was basically sort of it was one of the earlier games to combine roguelike nature with other genres. And so it's a shooter platform roguelike. Imagine sort of like Contra, right? But the controls are nothing like Contra. It's still a platform where you have guns and shoot things. You also have four different abilities, sort of like a MOBA, right? Bound to four buttons in a row. I think the four abilities of the main guy are like regular gun, roll, rapid fire gun, and armor piercing like single shot. Yeah. And single shot. That's like powerful or something like that stuns a little bit. Maybe, I don't know. Yep. And you could jump and stuff like that. It's got like a really floaty feel like little guys jumping and floating. The big problem with the game is that everything is really, really tiny, which I like in theory, but in practice. Right. So I think I read about it and it was it was done intentionally, obviously because they wanted to make the to feel, you know, story wise, like you don't belong on this world. You're some human who landed here or human ish thing, I guess, that landed here. You don't belong here. Everything here is enormous. You're tiny, right? And they couldn't really, they didn't have the money or the art assets or anything in the first game to actually make big stuff like say, shout out of the classes. So they just made you really small to get that feel. And they succeeded in getting that feel. They made the game very inaccessible and difficult to play. People who can't don't have amazing vision, cannot play risk of rain. What is just impossible. You know, I played it. I tried it at one several articles online about people like risk of rain one is unplayable. I can't see. Yep. Now I had no problem with it and I played it in one vision I could play. I played it in one X scaling on a 4K monitor. That shit is like one millimeter tall. Right. And that was fine. Right. So basically it's a platforming game. You shoot guys. Everything has health, like HP. So you don't just shoot a guy and they die, like say, Contra, you sort of have to like wiggle guys down. It's more it's more like borderlands in that regard. Yeah, exactly. Right. Where you sort of, you know, remove your stats matter a little also in addition to your skills mattering. Yep. You can get items. They're all kind of random. They all do kind of random stuff. Yep. But it's roguelike. So the way it works is obviously once you die, it's a game over you to start over in the beginning. You spawn in a level. You can go up and down and left and right and all over it. And you it's not directional. You explore the level sort of metroidy, but it's not amazed. It's just like a big open space with platforms and things you have to get over and things like that. And you're looking for the teleporter. When you find the teleporter, you activate it. And as long as you stay close enough to the teleporter, it's sort of like, you know, builds up to 100% after you activate it. Once it hits 100%, you're sort of good and you can leave the level. You also have to kill all the enemies that are that are left. Right. It'll be like, Oh, there's five enemies left. You can't exit the level. And you get to fight like a kind of a boss thing. And before you activate the teleporter, enemies are basically constantly spawning all the time. They actually don't stop spawning until that teleporter hits 100%. Right. Now there's a very important like, and I think this is sort of a point where we'll talk about with both this and risk of rain too. There's a lot of unique or like very interesting mechanics. Oh yeah. But they don't really gel together into a fun game and risk of rain one. But there's one mechanic is that the monsters keep spawning and there's difficulty level as time goes on, you just see this meter and the difficulty just slowly getting higher. The difficulty is always increasing with time. If you just stand still, the game gets harder and harder and harder and harder. So you have this time pressure that's saying go, go, go, find that teleporter, hit it and get to the next level while the game is still easy. You will get further in the game that way if you sit around because it is a stateful roguelike. If you sit around collecting money, collecting items, powering yourself up, getting all sorts of drones to help you out, which are really fun because you don't have to deal with them to just shoot for you, getting really powerful stuff. The more you sit around, the harder the game will be to match your grinding. So you have to sort of it's not, you know, it's sort of grinding, but if you're going to like go out of your way to not look for the teleporter and say collect a bunch of loot and money, you better be collecting loot and money at a rate greater than the difficulty of the game is getting higher. Right? You need to sort of outpace the difficulty meter with your path, with how much you power yourself up so that the game remains easy. Because even if the game gets like middle, medium or hard difficulty, if you manage to collect enough powerful shit, the game will still be basically easy for you. Yeah. But if you rush through the game super fast. OK, great. You got to level three and you're still only on medium difficulty, but you didn't stop to collect any stuff. So now the game actually is medium difficulty. And once it gets to hard, you're just going to die because you didn't get enough stuff. You're weak. You don't have your goods. Now I'm not going to lie like the game is clever and has a lot of really good stuff going for it. Yeah. But I remember it actually find it fun. I remember it being way fun when I played originally, but playing it now, it was less fun than I remember it being. Yeah. Like the accessibility problem did not affect us at all. It's more just the combat is not actually that interesting because the lot of it does a lot of really random and you're kind of random crap. It's mostly passive upgrades like there are some cases where you choose a lot of stores where it's like choose one of these three items. Yeah. But like most of the powers is you do more damage and some like vague capacity. They don't really give you more options. Some of them give you interesting different ways to handle different enemies. Like that like thing I got was cool. Yeah. Some items might make it easier to deal with flying enemies. Some items I make it easy to do with ground enemies, right? You might fight in a different way. If you choose a different character, then you definitely play in a drastically different way. But you start with nothing unlocked. So when I started playing the game again, I only have one dude unlocked. So the game wasn't actually like sort of like F.T.L. Unlocking different ships. Yeah, I used to say when you use everything immediately, right? When you use a different ship in F.T.L. You play the game differently. Yep. Right. But my problem is I don't know if you're the rock boys, you play the game a lot differently than if you're human. Yeah, I I am an adult. I do not have time to wait for a game to mealy dull out like, oh, the here's the fun part of the game. But when you play with different characters and risk of rain, you play the game differently because their abilities are so different. But I would argue not differently enough because the combat just comes down to DPS and the monsters just sort of swarm. Depends on which level you're in. Yeah, but they're all that you are. It feels very samey in a hurry. Oh, you know, also one of the core things about this game that puts it a separate from the other ones is the co-op action, right? You can do local or online multiplayer co-op where you and all your friends are all rogueliking together. You a plus you all spawned at the same time. If someone dies, they're dead permanently. The rest of you keep going. You can sort of share your gold and your items to some extent. And, you know, and there are magical like net hack where someone else is in there with you. That'd be great. Sure, there are roguelikes like that, but I haven't played them. But I guess in the end, like the best thing I can say about it is there's a lot of good ideas and an OK execution. And it's a good, like proof of concept. Yeah, it was definitely, you know, it was big for a reason, right? You know, it means bigger than it was was worth. Yeah, it out it outperformed its development, you know, its development. Now, notably, it was developed by Hopu Games, but it was published by, of all people, Chucklefish, the same company that they were a publisher, but and they I guess they still are a publisher, but they also they independently developed Wargroove. OK. Indie games going on. Yeah. Anyway, so risk of rain 2 is currently in early access, but it's not one of those early access situations where it's like, oh, it's so early. It's like you're playing some alpha garbage game. It's like, no, it's like when Minecraft is beta and everyone was playing it and it's like, yeah, it's out. They're just calling it beta. It's like Gmail was beta. Right. It's one of those situations. And it's basically like it's kind of shocking when you play it, like you look at some menus and you realize it's the exact same game, but in 3D it's yes. Yeah, it's like it's not usually when I see a sequel to a game, take a massive turn like that. It's sort of like, hey, I don't know, you're going in a weird direction, sort of like a Nidhog. Yeah. Right. Even though, yeah, Nidhog. You see Nidhog 2 and you're like, aw, man, I just wanted more Nidhog 1 and you're going to this other direction. God damn it. Right. But Risk of Rain 2. They it's basically Risk of Rain 1 is now Risk of Rain 2. It's just the same game. Third person shooter. Yep. That's it. Otherwise, it's almost exactly the same game, which weird is how much of a same game it is. Like it feels very similar. There's the same. You know, you get money by shooting guys, guys spawn all over the place. You're searching for the teleporter. A boss spawn. It's the same monsters with the same attacks just in three dimensions. Right. It's like it's like the jellyfish in Risk of Rain 1. Oh, look, is jellyfish in 3D coming at you. Right. They made the same exact goddamn game. The same four abilities for the main character. It's like, wow, it's literally, you know, you think Mario 64 is just Mario in 3D. Not really. It's different in a lot of ways. Right. It's like, this is the same goddamn game. And notably, they moved on Gearbox published this instead of Chucklefish. Whoa. Yeah. OK. Yeah. All right. It's going to officially come out in spring of 2020. So next year. All right. The only problem with it is that playing it a bunch. I feel the same things I felt playing Risk of Rain 1, but it's interesting. This is a tech demo. It's not it's fun, but it's not that fun. I think the main problem with it is that the core mechanic is fun. Right. It's like playing a roguelike, shooting, getting stronger, balancing speed versus getting power ups and money. All that stuff is great. The thing is, is that the actual abilities and weapons and the actual combat of the game not that fun is not actually all I do is point towards enemies and hold the thing down. And just don't even matter and watch their health meter go down and hope that it goes down faster. It's just in that regard. It's just worse borderlands. Right. It's like the actual running around jumping and shooting action part of the game is not exciting or fun. It's just sort of like it feels very same. Me like holding down the mouse button and running while hoping guys die fast enough. Like the monsters all kind of swarm you in this generic way. Like the behaviors aren't that interesting and half the game was, wait, what is damaging me? Yeah. Wait, what's damaging me now? Like it's like if you're engaging when you're engaging, say one enemy at a time, they have some behaviors that it's like, OK, that guy shoots a red laser. So I have to dodge at this exact moment. OK, that bad guy like makes a sphere. And if you get stuck in it, if you don't run out of the sphere quickly enough, you get frozen. But then like there's 30 flying skulls individually. The enemies are interesting, but this is just eventually a giant mob of enemies everywhere. So it's like you can't engage, you know, with that interesting mechanic of a single enemy because just you're taking damage from all over the fuck. Yeah. Run, run, run, run, run, run, run, kite and shoot, just kite and shoot. That's the whole game, kite and shoot. Aim at the closest enemy while holding, using your abilities, waiting for the new refresh, using them again immediately as soon as they refresh and hoping that enough guys die and you live until the boss is dead and the teleporter lets you go to the next level. Yeah. Repeat it again. Use all your money on all the shops as much as you can to get stuff and the environment on your way to find the teleporter. But that like the loop of gameplay is the same every level. It's just wander around. Do you find the teleporter? There is no rhyme or reason to like where you might find the teleporter and there is nothing interesting. The levels are some sort of mix between handcrafted and procedurally generated, but they're boring. Yeah. There's not much going on. It's just like, OK, it's some sort of, you know, ruined. Let me run in a spiral until I find the teleporter stuff on it. So and I'm just kind of running around and moving as fast as I can, looking for the, you know, you know, and it's like you walk slow. There's a run fast button for sprinting and sprinting all the time and it's not fast enough either. Nope. I mean, I guess it would be too easy if it was fast because you'd find the teleporter right away, right? I don't know. But the only thing that was actually the bosses were pretty interesting at first. Like they're they're really, I almost wish. It's like, I know it's sort of the point of the game. They're like, OK, the boss spawns and there's still guys swarming everywhere. But it'd be more interesting to just engage the boss alone. Yeah. You know, I don't know. But as a result, like I'll play it a little more because I want to see like how it evolves because it's still early access. And it is still like buggy as shit. There's a lot of like just bugs. I'm sure they'll add way more to it. You know, if they're not like one very thing, I was trying to bind mouse and keyboard and they have a lot of good stuff. Like Invert Mouse is an option. No one else needs it. But they added horizontal Invert Mouse. I don't know why you would have horizontal Invert Mouse as an option. You know what that is? You know who wants that? Warrim. Warrim. Warrim needs horizontal mouse mirroring. OK. Yeah, there are other characters. But like I tried to bind some keys and certain keys, if you bound them to a button, would unbind other unrelated keys. Just use the default fucking keys and get used to it, whatever it is. Well, it's why? Why not change? I have a mouse with a bunch of buttons. I'd like to bind like normal mouse. There's not too many buttons on it. What my mouth says I wanted to bind attack one attack two attack three attack four. Those are the defaults on the mouse. Well, no, they weren't 100 percent anyway. But all I'm saying is that there are bugs where random key combinations, if you try to bind them, would unbind other unrelated key combinations. Also, it's still early access. Send it in. Yeah. I'm sure that they'll make a lot. You know, even though it is a very playable game that is not some, you know, meet, you know, early access, nothing game. I'm sure over the course of the next year, there are going to be patching and adding a lot of content to it. There were a bunch of characters in it, but it's not as many as in risk of rain one. I'm sure more will be added. But I do worry that like I unlocked one character the way that second character worked is their ability was basically homing shots. So he didn't need to aim really. You just needed it. You just couldn't shoot unless an enemy was on screen. And I think it would home in on whatever enemy was like closest to your, you know, center of looking. Yep. At least that's what I get. And then there was a special ability was jumping the air aim at the ground and then it would create a column of arrows hitting that spot on the ground. You know, abilities like that. And I want to like I'd be much more invested if I could try all these different characters without having to grind and unlock them all because the default guy pretty boring. Yeah. Default guy is way boring. All he does is running around and shoot. Yep. But I guess the thing that worries me the most is that there's nothing interesting to find anywhere in the levels except more of the goons, the teleporter, the boss, or a huge variety of items most of which have passive effects. Like some of your shots do double damage. Your DPS model is slightly different. I think that's the thing is that you, you know, when I'm if I'm spending collecting money and grinding to collect stuff. I wanted to get something awesome. I want to get stuff that's interesting stuff. And, you know, it's like getting, it's like one of the things I kept getting was like this banner and it's like whenever you level up, a banner will spawn on your location. And that banner, if you're within its radius, will make you stronger somehow. That was pretty cool. I kept getting things that just like, you're slightly faster now. Right. You do slightly more damage now. There were the wings that let you fly. A little bit. And then they didn't work after that. They were like temporary. There's a double jump you can get. I wanted that more than I wanted life itself. I got it. You know, but it's like, yeah, you do your first shot on an enemy does more damage. Your shots, your shots explode. You know what? Most of the items come down to your attacks, make enemies bleed. The items that were a chance for crits here. Items that were fun flying little rock buddy that follows me around. A rock buddy was a good one. Yeah. Items that were boring. Oh, drones. They just fly around and shoot for you. But most of the boring items, they came down to my main complaints about combat in Dungeons and Dragons third edition. Everything just comes down to a flurry of blows. Do I do X attacks or do I do X plus two attacks at a minus two, like to hit on all the attacks? Like those are not interesting decisions. Yeah, no, it would be. I think, you know, if a similar game that is also a rogue like platformer is Dead Cells, which I played some reason. Oh, yeah. But I wasn't good enough to get very parnit because it is very difficult and skill based. But in that game, there are lots and lots of weapons and equipment to unlock. But all of them were unique and different. There are freeze and freezing enemies, right? Stunning enemies, moving enemies around, teleporting behind enemies, all sorts of crazy different abilities that, you know, you would basically play the game differently and in risk of rain, choosing different characters lets you play the game differently. But the weapons don't really at all, right? The equipment doesn't. So I found myself in risk of rain one. It still had the same problem mostly, but in risk of rain one, I definitely wanted to equip more. In risk of rain two, it was just rushed the teleporter, right? Those didn't feel like there was much incentive to get money and get stuff. So I just, I don't know if the game in one year's time would get to the point where I would play it a lot. Yeah. The aesthetic and the, you know, the story and atmosphere is kind of cool. Yeah. But it's, you know, you see it all right away. Like the world, the differences. There isn't like some terrible secret of space I'm waiting to see. I feel like, you know, two, three levels in, I've seen it all. Yep. Meanwhile, like Slay the Spire, you get a lot of environmental storytelling when you work through that game. Oh yeah. Lots. So the world is not rich. It's, it's sparse. It's the difference between fallout three and breath of the wild. Right. It's like a big sparse, empty space. And the only thing that fills it is just a fuck ton of enemies that spawn more and more rapidly. And a bunch of art assets that in no way interact with you and do nothing other than. Other than the exploding pots. You can shoot. They're just like, Oh yeah. I thought those were items and I walked up to one and I tried to open it. Exploding barrels like in doom. They don't, you know, as far as I can tell. They weren't even useful. I couldn't even like get an enemy to be buy one. Because they were like up high on these platforms. They weren't on the ground. Which looked like they'd be cool, but I went up there and there was nothing up there. Yeah. I don't know. I guess if I were you, do not buy risk of rain too. At least not for the current price of $20. Yes. Right. Maybe this is this is the kind of game. Wait until it comes out for real. Maybe when it comes out in a year, they will have added so much shit to it. That'll be incredible. Or B, you'll wait a year. It'll still be, you know, somewhat better than its current state. But then when there's like a steam sail and it's like one dollar, five dollar, it'll be like, oh yeah, definitely five. Yep. Because the fact that you can just like the co-op just works like they got all right. Risk of rain one, you have to do some bullshit with your IP addresses. Risk of rain two is just invite steam friend play. It totally works. So the co-op aspect really makes this work a lot more, a lot better, a lot more fun than if you just play by yourself. Yeah. Especially if you mix up your characters, you work together a little bit. It needs more like with four people, you can find the teleporter faster. Yeah. But like all the technical aspects, like they got everything right. Usually indie games mess that stuff up. Yep. This game got everything right and has a lot of really fascinating concepts together, but they haven't really turned it into a satisfying repeatedly playable game yet. I think it's definitely for the kind of player who is interested in mastery and going deep and getting good at it. Yeah. Right. That kind of person is going to enjoy it a lot more. Who doesn't mind doing some, you know, same things over and over again. But because it's some of these seeking novelty is not going to have as much fun. But the fighting is so grindy that I hate to say it. I feel like you're a bit you would be better off playing Borderlands one. Yeah. I feel like this game would be more fun if they simply did this one thing. Which is get rid of enemy health and end damage on weapons. Right. Just have all enemies die in like one hit. But have it, you know, the beginning enemies, you just shoot them and they die. But then as the enemies get harder, it's like we shoot them at the right time. Shoot them at the right time. Shoot them in the right spot. Disable their shield and then shoot them. Get behind them and shoot them. Maybe bosses. You got to go down. You're going to hurt these guys with fire. You can only hurt these guys when they're in the air. You can only hurt these guys during this time of their cycle. Right. All that. That would make the game way more interesting. You know, shoot more like Gauntlet where there's like a ton of guys in your hose down. Right. And they all die in one hit. But they just, you know, a mess of guys. Yep. Big money. A more big prize. More like a shmup where it's like, OK, I keep getting different weapons, but all the weapons are interesting and crazy in different ways. A spread shot, the big laser that's only in the middle. Right. That kind of stuff. Yeah. So hold off on buying the game and I'm sure the shmup roguelikes, right? Yeah, let's go find one and play that. But I'm going to revisit this game once it comes out for real and it's definitely a game for revisiting. Like I'm going to keep an eye on it. It's not ruled out, but don't spend 20 bucks on it today. No, unless you have to make a podcast. Yeah.